Back From the ‘Land of the Vandals’

Your truly, complete with a glass of the local speciality

Virtually the same view but without me in it!

Another view from the dining area terrace….

….and another….

….and another!

A view from the pool area.

In the wee small hours of this morning - around 1:15am -  Laurel and I arrived home from our two week sojourn in the hills and mountains of Andalusia. It was our third visit to the same place and we have already booked to visit again next year. The reasons for this are very simple. 

1. We can fly from out local airport (20 minutes away)

2. The location (near Alcaucin, around fifty minutes from Malaga airport) is ideally suited to explore the area - around 90 minutes from Granada and the Alhambra Palace and two hours from Cordoba with much else besides closer to home.

3. The hotel is specifically designed to cater for guests with health and or mobility issues and only has five rooms, so it is very quiet.

4. The views across the valley where the hotel is located are simply stunning.

5. The owners, Adrian and Hannah, have been running the place for some twenty years and are outstanding hosts. Adrian is a walking ‘Google’ when it comes to local history and Hannah’s culinary expertise makes everyday an edible adventure!

6. Laurel is able to navigate the entire place very easily and is able to make extensive use of the pool!

We spent most of the time by the pool although did venture out on three days. We visited a local market, spent a lovely day wandering about in Malaga itself and wrapped the holiday up with a scenic tour of the immediate area with a stop for a wonderful lunch at a hotel.

Malaga cathedral….

….and again….

….and again….

….and again….

….and again!

The Roman amphitheatre and the Moorish fort above.

I have a feeling this may be the answer but I am still unsure about the question!

As a result of Laurel’s mobility issues following her spinal surgery in 2022, she currently has two hydrotherapy session a week that we pay for. Having access to a pool for two weeks meant that she was able to tackle her aquatic exercises twice a day which, whilst it will not improve her situation, does give her a much needed ‘lift’ as well as maintaining her current level of mobility. 

The pool - note the ‘Roman’ style steps and two handrails.

The old, run down place overlooking the pool area is also owned by Adrian and Hannah and is due to be renovated by their son in due course.

For my own part using the pool was a lot of fun and so our daily routine in the temperatures encountered of two sessions, one in the morning and one late in the afternoon, was hugely refreshing.

I took with me a fully loaded Kindle and a copy of Hugh Thomas’s The Spanish Civil War to read. Sadly the latter, whilst interesting, was not really conducive to reading around the pool in 34 degree plus heat - it does require careful reading to capture the full picture - and so was parked for a more temperate climate! The titles on the Kindle that I did read were as follows:

The Gun and Death to the French! By C.S. Forester and Tales of the Alhambra by Washington Irving. I thoroughly enjoyed all three, so much so, that I am now looking at Spanish Guerillas during the Peninsular War and am now reading Wellington’s Eastern Front by Nick Lipscombe which covers the campaigns on the East Coast of Spain from 1810 to 1814. 

The whole area from Alcaucin to the coast was a hotbed of banditry and smuggling - Contrabandistas they were known as - and although I am looking into any Napoleonic potential via Lipscombe’s book, Washington Irving, writing around 1832, has lots to tell about gangs of outlaws and smugglers in the region. This is very much in black powder skirmish territory and as luck would have it the Perrys have produced a box of 28mm Guerillas which would very much fit the bill. Something to think about BUT - on with the serious business of the new book and a deadline to meet!

The Jutland Enigma

Something from Google Jutland related!

It just goes to show that you are never too old to learn something new! Way back in 2016, I spent a significant amount of time on planning a refight of the Battle of Jutland using 1:2400th scale models. The plan at the time was to use a version of the Avalon Hill game of the same name and it was there, along with the huge amount of destroyers and cruisers required, that I came to an ignominious grinding halt.

Try as I might, I was unable to unlock how the ship specs from the game were arrived at. I tried all manner of calculations in an attempt to reverse engineer the numbers involved - gunnery and flotation factors being the main offenders - but for some reason was never able to 'crack the code'. 

Until now.

There is a substantial amount of fan made material for the game available from back issues of the Avalon Hill General and the Boardgamer magazine and it was whilst trawling through all this lot that several things just seemed to click into place. 

This is going to sound a little strange but this news will mean that I will need to check over and amend where needed the ships specifications quoted in the original game. Some obvious production errors had already been identified - incorrect counter images, wrong flotation values and similar - but armed with the aforementioned additional fan made stuff I will be able to make the game into the version I really wanted it to be. It will also mean that expanding the system beyond the North Sea - there are already Baltic and Mediterranean variants available - to a common system will be a straightforward process. 

And before anybody asks this ‘mini project of sorts’ does have a degree of relevance for the Great War portion of the new book so it is time well spent but you will have to wait to see why!

In Praise of Joy and Forgetfulness….

An oldie but definitely a goodie!

In many ways I have that well known Bon vivant, wit and raconteur Conrad Kinch of Joy and Forgetfulness fame to thank for the inspiration for this post and so it is in his honour this is dedicated to.

It is June once again, and so inevitably the looming spectre of the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo taps me on the shoulder and reminds me of games and Napoleonic projects of years gone by. I have mentioned ad nauseam of my fondness and long term interest in the 1815 campaign, beginning with my first painted army of Airfix figures and Bruce Quarrie’s rules - the orange Airfix magazine guide version - and followed by a 15mm collection and a set of rules called Le Petit Empereur and more recently the 28mm Del Prado collection. All of these have sadly gone and so my Napoleonic adventures are now limited to boardgames. I flirted with the Command and Colours system but for a variety of reasons it never really pressed all the buttons for me. There is however, one game that most emphatically does - Napoleon by Columbia Games.

The map “Charleroi. By God that man does war Honour!”

The game itself was originally produced by Jedko in the early 1970s and was then picked up by Avalon Hill. From them it went to Columbia Games and was launched in the early 1990s as a 3rd edition. Subsequently to that a 4th edition appeared and currently a 5th edition is under development. 

The game uses blocks for the units and as is customary with Columbia games, the blocks are set up so that your opponent can only see the back and not the side with the current strength or indeed, the types of unit itself, infantry, cavalry or artillery. The units use step reduction to record combat losses and this is shown by rotating the block so that the correct strength point is at the top of the unit. Strengths range from 4 to 2 steps, depending on the formation type. Movement is on a point to point basis - the points being villages - and if both sides descend on the same village the units involved are deployed on a battle board for the tactical phase. I have played this many times and it is a wonderful game with the fog of war and with both sides operating under asymmetric pressure - the French needing to get to Brussels whilst keeping the allies apart, the allies needing to join together to defeat the Corsican ogre.

The tactical battle board

I owned the 3rd edition but disposed of it when the 4th came out. This was a mistake as far as I was concerned as the 4th edition reduced the units in the game by merging some formations so as not to crowd the map. I could never get as enthusiastic with the 4th edition and so when the chance can me up to get a copy of the 3rd I leapt at it! 

The respective orders of battle featuring unit strength points. Note that the units are nominally divisional sized.

Some years ago, before the Portable Napoleonic Wargame came out, I had it in mind to refight the battle using the block armies and based on the order of battle used in the 3rd edition. I drew up the order of battle and recorded the number of hit boxes per division sized unit based on the strength points from the game. The idea was to use the game as the scenario generator and then fight the resulting battles using my block armies on the tabletop. It was with this in mind I commissioned Warbases to make some movement trays for the block armies.

As an aside I fought the battle itself using the long departed Del Prado collection and a square grid based version of Waterloo A La Carte! The original version used an 8 hex by 6 grid whilst my squared version used a chessboard. It was huge fun despite being rather cramped as the figures were a little on the large size for a 60mm square.

Thanks to the reminder about Waterloo from the esteemed Mr Kinch, I have added the whole Waterloo with blocks project back into the pile of things to do at some point. Certainly using the block armies with movement trays (these will have the appropriate formation names on them for identification purposes) and 3D terrain will certainly look rather splendid in a Kriegspiel kind of way.

Yes I know there are far better books on the subject than these venerable stalwarts, but to a callow youth of twelve years old they were the gateway into a lifelong hobby. I would never part with either!

It also means that I will have to watch Waterloo again, as well as rereading a couple of my favourite books on the subject. How we suffer for our hobby eh?

The Waterloo campaign has given me much joy over the years - admittedly probably longer ago than I would like - and so it would be easy to overlook or even forget the fun to be had attempting to outdo Napoleon or Wellington. One thing is certain though, I am grateful to Mr Kinch for putting me back in touch with roots so to speak.

He really is a super fellow.

From Across the Pond….

A brace of Wildcats, a Typhoon and a Sturmovik

Some more additions to the Axis and Allies: Angels 20/Bandits High collection. Delighted to have scored these for a very reasonable price - these days if the items are below the cost of the shipping it is a good result - and it means that I now one Wildcat away from having the four destined to be repainted into Fleet Air Arm colours as the Martlet. 

I am on the lookout for another Typhoon - along with a pair of Spitfire Mk 9s - but at this stage am unsure about what to do with the Sturmovik. I do not possess a single native Russian fighter although I have four Hurricanes that are destined for the Red Air Force with a repaint. More trawling through eBay is in order methinks, in order to bolster the forces of the Rodina.

The Pain in Painting

Something I enjoyed painting from way back in 2016. The model is from Panzerschiffe - 1:2400th scale cast in resin - and the splash markers are from Litko. The ‘sea’ is of course Hexon. I have a soft spot for S.M.S. Seydlitz and the paint technique employed was ahem, borrowed from Tim Gow. Basically a black undercoat with the grey dry brushed on and highlighted. The decks and ship’s boats were then blocked in. The base is card with the name label prepared in Word and the ensign courtesy of Brigade Models. 

I have mentioned on numerous occasions that I am a reluctant painter. More specifically, I am a reluctant figure painter. I am quite happy applying the brushwork to anything that is non-organic so ships, tanks, spaceships, aircraft, power armoured infantry and mechs are all fair game but I really struggle with figures. In fact, the last complete army I painted was a DBA Numidian force made from Essex 15mm figures and sporting all the options. I was quite pleased with how it turned out and the army saw a modest amount of action when the club was going through a DBA phase some years and several locations ago.

Recently I have been thinking long and hard about painting and of figures in general. I doubt very much if I shall ever paint armies again, at least in the traditional ‘24 figure infantry units, 12 figure cavalry and guns with 4 crew’ sense, mainly because I would definitely lack the staying power to see it through. I am at a loss to explain why this is and the only thing I can think of is the idea of painting umpteen similarly posed and uniformed figures requires a level of discipline and commitment that frankly, I am not sure if I could be bothered with. DBA/HOTT or the various Portable Wargame versions would probably be about my limit. Having said that, I rather like the idea of skirmish level set ups because the variety would be there and the numbers involved would be modest. 

My figure painting technique has not evolved greatly since the 1970s - white undercoat, enamel topcoat and a varnish with a small drop of black in it is about as artistically sophisticated as I can get. I have used acrylics but never speed or contrast paints. Shading and highlighting I have never really bothered with overmuch - the black in the varnish helps with that although care should be taken as to the amount of black involved. Whilst thinking about this post I tried to recall the last figures I painted and it actually was the 15mm DBA Numidians and near as I can recall that would have been at least twenty years ago! The funny thing is it has not stopped me from buying figures with the best of intentions about painting them - except I never seem to do so. I could not bring myself to use unpainted figures though - Memoir ‘44 and Battle Cry excepted but even then I have occasional bouts of wanting to paint them!

One of the best things I ever achieved in my wargaming journey was producing the copious amount of block armies from the ‘not Jenga, Jenga blocks’. Using these gave me the opportunity to fight battles from many periods without the need to paint umpteen figure based armies. They are an excellent substitute and as I have shown time and time again, work very nicely with 3D terrain for a real Kriegspiel type feel. The block armies themselves could use a modest revamp - I was never completely satisfied with the mechanised version - and I also have in mind a naval version, prompted in part, by the recent flirtation with the Jutland blocks.

Whilst my planned figure painting is currently limited to the 15mm Mike’s Models Colonial collection I would not be averse to tackling something in a larger scale and skirmish based but as yet I have nothing definite in mind. That is David Crook speak for ‘that is a rabbit hole I am trying desperately to avoid as I have far more pressing things to tackle!’ 

To those that collect armies of figures and enjoy the artistic aspect of producing wonderfully painted forces from whatever period of history takes their fancy I have every admiration for. It is just not for me though but having said that, it does not make me any less of a wargamer!

A Little Part of Jutland

The printed Jutland counters mounted on 3/4 sized Jenga Blocks. 

Tomorrow is the 110th anniversary of the Battle of Jutland. Back in 2016 I had planned to tackle a refight using 1:2400th scale models and indeed, I managed to get the capital ships from both sides completed using a combination of Stonewall Miniatures cast in metal and Panzerschiffe cast in resin, but was unable to push on to complete the cruisers and destroyers. The collection has long since moved on. Ken Reilly, of Yarkshire Gamer fame, did manage to fight the battle using GHQ 1:2400th models and very impressive it looked as well. As an aside is a great advocate for the humongous, Cecil B. DeMille style wargame and everything he does is in the grandest of manners!

British dreadnoughts from Panzerschiffe apart from H.M.S. Revenge and Marlborough which are Stonewall Miniatures

More British dreadnoughts - this time a mixture of Stonewall and Panzerschiffe

Panzerschiffe British battlecruisers

H.M.S. Tiger and the the three ‘splendid cats’ are from Stonewall whilst H.M.S. New Zealand and Indefatigable are from Panzerschiffe

5th Battle Squadron courtesy of Stonewall Miniatures

The first batch of German Dreadnoughts - all of these are Stonewall Miniatures

The earlier German dreadnoughts

The German pre-dreadnoughts - sadly I cannot remember where these came from. I have a feeling they may well have been Panzerschiffe. 

The German battlecruisers. The two Derfflinger class are metal whilst the remainder are resin.

Anyways, I was determined not to miss out marking the occasion this time and so have persuaded the two amigos, Messrs Fox and Huband to tackle an old favourite of mine - Avalon Hill’s Jutland or as I like to think of it, a board game without a board.

It would be nice to tackle the full Jutland operation - perhaps that will one for another day - but due to time restraints we are looking to tackle the opening phase of the battle involving the battlecruisers. The rules will be as written in the Jutland rule book but with a minor change. I do not have a physical copy of the game but I do have a series of PDFs that contain just about everything written about the game in the old Avalon Hill General magazine, along with scans of all the game components from each of the two editions of the game that were produced. The minor change I mentioned is that I have substituted inches for all the movement and firing ranges as the associated devices used in the game are unavailable.

Aside from playing the game itself, there is another reason I am keen to do this. I want to remind myself about the gunnery and damage system used and how this may help with the rules for the new book. So the game will be a bit of a test bed to an extent. 

I settled on the battlecruiser action as it is fairly compact in terms of the number of ships with the added bonus, at least for the Royal Navy that is, of the arrival of the 5th Battle squadron at some point….

Sabre Rattling Migs

I think that the technical term for this is “KABOOM!!” Or “Read ‘em and weep!” The D6 rolls above equal 7 successes which equals the target Vital Armour meaning an instant kill. 

Yesterday evening saw your truly taking to the skies against Mr Fox, using Mr Huband’s quite lovely looking Warlord Games Blood Red Skies 1:200th scale Sabres and Mig15s. We were also using Mr Huband’s Korean War variant for Axis and Allies: Angels 20 - so he was wearing his umpiring hat for the occasion - along with Mr Fox’s rather lovely gaming mat.

We each had a pair of aircraft - Mr Fox was driving the Migs while I took the Sabres. We rolled for pilot quality with the result that Mr Fox had a veteran and a rookie whilst my two were both plain vanilla, beige and average. As is usual for this type of action - the aerial equivalent of a ‘meeting engagment’, it was, after all, a bit of a try out - we set up on opposite sides of the board, rolled for altitude (Migs at 6 and the Sabres at 5), rolled for initiative and set about the serious business of trying to shoot each out of the sky.

I am unable to give a turn by turn account of the action but suffice to say it was at high speed and largely fought more or less ‘on the flat’ - no great ‘boom and zoom’ climbing and diving - so plenty of turning was the order of the day. One of the Sabres took a point of damage, as did the veteran Mig but the rookie Mig pilot’s day was ended in no uncertain terms by virtue of a pretty emphatic set of dice rolls. To be honest, Mr Fox was singularly unfortunate throughout the action - he maintains that his dice hate him - in that aside from the point of damage he inflicted on one of the Sabres, he was on the wrong end of the initiative rolls throughout. In any type of aerial game having the initiative can be a crucial advantage - ever was it thus as far as the Sabres were concerned! 

At the end of the action the remaining Mig ‘bugged out’, leaving the skies to the Sabres.

It was great fun to play and the scale of the models used seemed more appropriate for the jets rather than the larger 1:100th models from the Angels 20 base game. It is certainly a period I would be keen to revisit but for now I cannot see myself building up a Korean War collection - too many other aerial things on the go! Mention of which leads me nicely into one of the aerial projects I am looking to tackle - the Battle of Britain.

A new book for the collection, courtesy of the fantastic Mr. Fox and with my grateful thanks! 

Mr Fox was having a sort out at Maison Renaud when he came across a duplicate copy of the title you see above. He very generously passed this over to me and as this is my first Osprey Air Campaign title I was delighted to welcome it to the library. It has opened a bit of a rabbit hole as a quick look at the other titles in the series (how on earth did I miss these?) has thrown up several that would be of interest….

The Nakajima Ki-44 “Tojo” fighter/interceptor. 

It was no all one way traffic in that I presented Mr Fox with a Japanese ‘Tojo’ fighter - if you recall he passed over a surplus P51B/C so it was the least I could do to return the favour. He now has a brace of these and I am quite sure we may be seeing them in action at some point. I also confidently predict that Mr Fox will gain a measure of revenge in due course, when we next take to the air!

My thanks to Mr Fox for his generosity and for supplying the mat and a cheeky beer (to be repaid soonest) and to Mr Huband for his inspired set up and those rather lovely aircraft - methinks that other models may well follow into his collection for this period but of course, he couldn’t possibly comment….