"The time has come...."

"The time has come,' the Walrus said,

     To talk of many things:

     Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —

     Of cabbages — and kings —

And why the sea is boiling hot —

     And whether pigs have wings."

Whilst I am not comparing myself to a Walrus and my wood working skills would never qualify me as a carpenter, I am becoming increasingly conscious of the fact that I need to start walking the walk rather than just talking the talk in respect of my wargames project list. I have wittered on about various ideas and schemes for months now and in truth for the most part progress has been minimal.

This in itself is not unusual for me as my enthusiasm and attention span can be notoriously short-winded. I need an injection of inspiration to push on with something, anything even and so I shall be attacking a project that has been mentioned before albeit slightly out of sequence with my long term plan.

I am of course referring to the 20^th century 1/600^th collection. There, I have said it.

There are a number of reasons for this with the main one being that I reckon I can turn this around relatively quickly. I have a rather cunning plan I want to try in that the infantry component will be used initially for the Great War – the Tumbling Dice artillery are WW1 vintage in any event – with WW2 featuring later with the addition of period and nationality specific equipment - tanks etc. The infantry will look fine for either war in this scale. Ironically I have some WW1 vehicles that will feature for the 1918 period but obviously not as significantly as for WW2.

I have more or less settled on the basing I shall be using for these models and so either a 40mm square or a 40 x 30mm base with a dice frame for recording hits is currently the preferred choice. As I intend making use of Heroscape tiles (which are around 45mm across the flats) I will need to think carefully about terrain as the model base will in effect take up more or less the whole hex. I have seen some great examples of Memoir 44 hexed terrain tiles on the net where the terrain is confined to the edges of two or three sides and so leaving enough room to place a base of models on it. This is a neat idea and I have seen similar for use with Hexon. An alternative will be to use the Memoir ’44 board with hexes being 54mm across the flats. I am rather taken with this idea – perhaps getting the map boards copied and mounted flat and into something more of a permanent fixture rather than folding away. One could even make a home grown hex board if required and again, this is an option I am considering simply because I can get the hexes the size I want.

Bases will be made up as follows. I will be using four pairs, each of two figures on the infantry base – this is a single strip of Tumbling Dice loose order infantry cut in half -, three vehicles on the armour base and two guns and crews on the artillery base. This follows the 4, 3, 2 Command and Colours/Portable Wargame standard and I see little reason to do anything different. The dice frame will be used to indicate the current strength of the unit using a small d6 or similar.

For rules I fully intend using Bob Cordery’s Portable Wargame or possibly even his Memoir of Modern Battle (MoMBAT) which are an older set he drew up. It would not be beyond the realms of possibility that using these models for a conventional Memoir ’44 game will feature as well. There is also Rommel – a set that I am really excited about.

I have plenty of bases to start this project with and an order for the 7mm dice frames (they are pretty cheap) is being put together. I have sufficient hexed playing surfaces to use initially so this will not be a priority just yet as the models must come first - and will be dealt with in tandem with the WW2 warships..