The Spanish Civil and Chaco Wars

The entire Chaco collection. There is a soon to be published book from Helion on the naval dimension - gunboats and such like - which I will add but other than some figures from Irregular that should be pretty much it.

The back of the box. This is an old school hex and counter game that is largely the same as the original, just a lot better looking!

I flirted with the Chaco war some years ago but never really did much with it. This proved to be a mistake and I blame Compass Games wholeheartedly for making me revisit it!

Many years ago I played an old GDW board game designed by Frank Chadwick and Marc Miller called, perhaps unsurprisingly, Chaco. At the time I only played the game and did little research into the war as a whole. My last dabble in the period was when Irregular Miniatures released their 15mm range which, although modest, had pretty much everything you needed to raise the opposing Bolivian and Paraguayan armies.

For a variety of what seemed like good reasons at the time, I quietly disposed of the whole lot as it had sat on the shelf of shame with little chance of progressing to the tabletop.

To bring this story up to date I noticed some while ago that Compass Games had taken the original game and brought it up to date in respect of the board and counters (it now has a mounted board with larger counters that are far more attractive than the original version) and so when Second Chance Games included it in their catalogue and then their sale, I snapped a copy up!

Naturally this meant that I would need to reacquaint myself with the period and this coincided with a couple of titles heavily discounted on eBay, along with the withering rump of an Amazon gift card. These additional titles were speedily acquired, along with an updated version of Adrian English’s The Green Hell entitled The Chaco War and published by Partizan Press in hardback. So where is this heading? Well the heart part of me would love to raise a couple of representative forces in 15mm, probably with the Portable Wargame in mind. The head however, is saying to exercise restraint. I will have to think about this as I have W-A-Y too many other things to think about, not to mention the small matter of an editorial deadline. We shall see. In any event there may be a short term occasional solution which I will explain at the end of this post.

The Spanish Civil War afloat. Again, another small project idea and like the Chaco War, something that I have looked at previously.

The naval dimension of the Spanish Civil War is something that I have looked at in the past but again, not in a sustained way. It is something I have in mind to revisit and so the inevitable fleshing out the library prior to looking at models has begun with the acquisition of the above. 1:3000th would be the scale of choice for this and mercifully it would need many models to have a representative set up. Again, one for the project list. The trouble is, there comes a point where all the small projects become a huge big project which usually means that things are either parked on the shelf of shame or disposed of!

Try before you buy….

As luck would have it, my old friend Mr. Nick Huband already has table ready forces for both the Chaco and the Spanish Civil War afloat so I reckon I might be bending his esteemed ear for a cheeky game or two in the not too distant future, purely in the interests of research, naturally….