Friday 18 July 2014

WW1 in the Middle East

When I recently acquired the WW1 Middle Eastern collection the first thing that struck me was that whilst some two thirds of the collection had been professionally painted the remainder had not - and the style was very different. I decided on one or two courses of action - either pickling the figures down and replicating the professional technique as far as possible (time consuming for sure) or offloading them to replace if required. For a variety of reasons I have opted for the latter option and so around some 200 painted foot figures are being disposed of - with the proceeds being used for the next phase of my Hexon collection.

What is left is still far more than I would readily use for my gaming needs but I certainly feel better knowing that the disposed surplus will enable me to (at last) finalise my Hexon to include the desert set up.

My WW1 armies are based around infantry units consisting of 4 bases each of two figures (40 by 20mm); the cavalry are based on units of three bases again with two figures on each (40mm square) and the machine guns and command being based on a 40mm square. Artillery I have not finalised yet but reckon that a 40 by 60mm would be about right. These are the Command and Colours standard unit sizes which will suit my set up nicely.

Each side will have 12 infantry units, around 6 cavalry units and machine guns and artillery to taste. These armies are compact but as I do not expect to fight on anything other than a 13 x 9 Hexon playing area will be just the ticket.

Experience using the block armies has shown that for my set up the average action usually only features around a dozen, perhaps up to 15 or 16 infantry units in total so there is an inbuilt degree of redundancy.

It works for me anyway.

5 comments:

Kaptain Kobold said...

What scale are the figures please?

David Crook said...

Hi Kaptain,

The entire collection is 20mm. There is a lot of Tumbling Dice but a large number I have no idea of.

All the best,

DC

Kaptain Kobold said...

Thanks. A bit too large for us then :)

(We may be starting a club project for WW1 Palestine, but in 15mm)

David Crook said...

Hi Kaptain,

Probably just as well as shipping from the UK would cost a small fortune! I will be intersted to follow your progress with this project though once it gets off the ground. Any thoughts on rules etc?

All the best,

DC

Kaptain Kobold said...

It's a possible demo game for a local convention next year. Not really my era (except in the air), but I think the proposal at present is to use Blitzkrieg Commander.