Thirtieth Year of a Private Wargames Event - The Tarawera Weekend

Thirty years ago, on a cold wet night in July 1985, six wargaming friends drove to Lake Tarawera three hours south of Auckland for a weekend of gaming. The goal was to reinvigourate our group after we had become somewhat fractured. 

We arrived on the Friday night, played an English Civil War game on the Saturday and half of Sunday, then drove home again. It was a fantastic weekend of gaming and friendship. It achieved its goal of reinvigourating us all and started a tradition that saw the Tarawera weekend run every year since. The event has extended to beyond a weekend and now we go down on the Tuesday and back on the Sunday. The attendees have changed a little over the  years; two have passed away some have moved and others have joined. Of the original six four remain.

While the weekend is now almost a week, the format remains the same. Each full day is a full day of gaming, usually organised and umpired by one of the group. Over the years scenarios have ranged from the Crusades, to English Civil War, Border Reiver's Cattle Wars, American Revolution, the campaign of the Revolutionary French in the Vendée, Napoleonics, American Civil War, Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Russo-Japanese War, WWI, WWII and the Falklands War. The Sunday half day game has a tradition of its own, it is always a naval game - Napoleonic, American Civil War ironclads or ancient galleys.

This year's event, the thirtieth successive year will be this week. We head off tomorrow, Tuesday 2 September. I will post some reports of the event after we return.

Crimean War Project

With the WWI project all but finished, although I suspect that the WWI armies will be added to over the coming years - especially after seeing the lastest British and German offerings from Mutton Chop Miniatures - I have begun work in ernest on the next project, the Crimean War.

This project is long over due and has a bit of history behind it. In 1966 my partents took me along to Carlaw Park in Auckland to see the band of the Scots Guards. The programme for the event contained this picture of the Scots Fusilier Guards at Inkerman.

 When my English aunt sent me some Britain's 54mm Guards figures for Christmas, I was hooked on model soldiers and the desire to recreate that dramatic painting on the wargames table has been in the back of my mind throughout my life. So finally I am going to do it. 

In an earlier post I included an image of the Coldstream Guards. Well now I have finished the Guards Brigade, all three battalions. Below is the brigade in line of battle, with the 1/Scots Fusiliers on the right, the 3/Grenadier Guards in the centre and the 1/ Coldstream Guards on the left.

Below is the Brigade in column of battalions

Things will slow down a little now as I make the final preparations for our annual wargames weekend away in early September (where the WWI figures will have their major outing). I still have a reasonable amout of scenery to finish off for that weekend, but after that I will place then next order for Crimean figures - the Highland Brigade from the Alma and the guns for the division.

The Town Finished

Before Christmas 2013 I commenced a rather ambitious project - the creation of a complete town in 28mm, both intact and in ruins. On the weekend just gone I finished the last of those buildings, being sixteen intact and sixteen ruined equivalents.

Because the buildings are built to be reversible, with a different face front and back, there are many possible configurations. The town, in the configuration it will be used in its first game in early September, is built around a central square and is shown in its intact version below.

And then the ruined versions.

The Year to Date - A Review

I sat down the other day and put together a tally of what I had painted and created in the first seven months of the year. 

I was astounded by the results:  218 foot figures, 32 cavalry figures, 11 guns and HMG models, 32 buildings, 14 scratch built vehicles, 28 1:600 scale ships and nearly thirty assorted pieces of terrain! It didn't seem that much at the time.

In detail these are:

Buildings and other terrain items

16 x 28mm intact town buildings primarily for use in WWI games

16 x 28mm ruined town buildings, mirroring those above.

25 x bases of destroyed woods for WWI games

1 x woods base 

1 x street barricade

Scratch Built Vehicles

4 x French WWI artillery caissons

4 x German WWI artillery limbers

1 x German HMG carriage, plus limber and horses

1 x French HMG carraige, plus four horses

1 x British HMG cart and horses

1 x Paris Taxi

2 x Belgian refugee wagons and horses

Figures Painted (all 28mm)

78 x German WWI infantry figures

12 x German WWI Jäger infantry figures

8 x German WWI Uhlan cavalry figures

12 x German WWI dismounted Uhlan figures

1 x German WWI Jäger HMG team

8 x German WWI Jäger cyclist figures

1 x German WWI 77mm gun and crew

8 x French WWI Dragoon cavalry figures

2 x French WWI 75mm guns and 10 crew

6 x French WWI High Command figures

6 x French WWI infantry command  figures

2 x French WWI artillery observers

56 x British WWI infantry figures

1 x British WWI HMG team

1 x British WWI Cavalry HMG team

2 x British WWI 13pdr guns, 10 crew and caissons

2 x British WWI artillery observers

42 x Belgian WWI infantry figures

1 x Belgian WWI HMG team

8 x Belgian WWI Guides cavalry figures

10 x Belgian WWI dismounted Guides figures

10 x Belgian WWI civilian refugees

3 x Belgian WWI dog carts

18 x British Crimean Coldstream Guards

1:600 scale Ships

7 x Austrian ironclads for 1866

6 x Austrian wooden ships of the line for 1866

1 x Austrian gunboat for 1866

14 x Italian ironclads for 1866

2 x Italian wooden ships of the line for 1866

Then there is the still in progress work (either in construction or on order awaiting delivery)...

Ten bases of woods, around 4 metres of hedges, a large farm house, 36 x British Crimean guardsmen, 2 x Crimean mounted officers.

I Have Been Thinking About Woods

 That's wargames woods of course.

Terrain has always been important to me in a wargame. It probably has something to do with my interest in model railways in my youth. But I have always struggled with how to portray woods on the games table and have long wanted to come up with some sort of practical solution in a wargame.

For years we have used blocks of woods, defensive zones we called them, where each block is about 200mm x 150mm. Each defensive zone could be occupied by a pre-defined sized unit, usually a battalion. The unit was free to move about within the zone, firing in any strength from any direction it chose.  This method worked really well for horse and musket type games, but when we began to play games from the Russo-Japanese and Great War periods where artillery is fired using templates, these blocks of woods became difficult to use, because determining the actual positions of individual stands became difficult. 

One option was to use a piece of felt of a different colour to the main table baise cloth and distribute the trees loosely on that. This clearly defines the area of the wood, but the trees always fall over and the edge of the woods just doesn't look right to me. I needed to find some middle ground between the inflexible defensive zone concept and the flexible but messy felt edge concept. Here is what I came up with.

Trees are on bases with a depth of between 50 and 70 mm. Trees are spaced so that a single stand of 50mm width can fit between them, with each base measuring between 120mm and 200mm wide with between two and three trees each.  These bases are used to form the outer edge of the wood. In the inner area is scattered some forest floor ground cover. I got this idea from photos of Bruce Weigle's beautiful 1:300 scale terrain, but again there was a flaw. The open space in the middle, although it allows models to be moved freely within the woods, it is just not aesthetically pleasing.

So my answer was to create small clumps of trees that could be placed in the middle of the outline to bulk out the wood. These clumps could be moved around to permit troops to move within the wood without disturbing the outline of the wood. So with this in mind I set out to make some woods and I decided to make some burnt out woods for WWI.

I decided to use some Woodland Scenics fir trees. 

I had around 40 of these but they were generally too tall for the shattered trees of an artillery ravaged woods of WWI France. So kept about one third of them at full height and cut some if them into two, three in some cases which had the dual purposes of creating more trees and getting them to a realistic height. I then cut the card bases and mounted the trees and coated the base with a course sand and left it to dry.

I then glued on some stones and when these were dry I painted the bases black. 

Then I drybrushed the whole base in a terra cotta tone and then two or three lighter tones. The next step was to paint the stones several tones of grey and then add some long tufts of grass from sisal twine.

I have completed one section with foliage, for other than the  WWI artillery devastated woods, and twelve sections of the devastated pieces. Another twenty pieces to go...then there are the hedges, but that is another time.

1914 WWI Game

Today we played a WWI game with the chief objective of getting comfortable with the rules.

The allied forces conisted of:

British:

1 x Infantry company (4 platoons)

1 x HMG

2 x 13 pounder field guns

1 x troop of cavalry

1 x cavalry HMG

1 battery 13 pounder guns (in support off table) 

Belgian:

1 x infantry company (3 platoons)

1 x HMG

1 x troop of cavalry

1 x Minerva armoured car

The German forces were:

3 x infantry companies (3 platoons each)

4 x HMG

2 x field guns

1 x platoon Jägers

1 x Jäger HMG

1 x platoon uhlans

1 x battery field guns (in support off table) 

The terrain was a simple rolling country with hedged fields. In the centre was a village of three buildings and one one flank was a walled farm.

The table from the farm end.

The Anglo-Belgian force deployed with the British on the right, deploying either side and through the village, with the cavalry covering the extreme right. The Belgians took the left, extending the line through some woods to the farm with the armoured car and the cavalry behind the line on the extreme left. Almost all of the Anglo-Belgians were hastily dug in.

The Germans deployed across the entire front with two companies facing the Belgians and the third, plus the cavalry and jägers, facing the British. On the Geman right the infantry attempted to advance against the farm, but were held in check by the Belgian HMG. When the armoured car and the cavalry moved to flank the Germans, one German platoon dispersed under fire. 

The armoured car continued to harass the Germans and eventually knocked out a German HMG, but the car bogged and could not be moved for the rest of the game.  The Belgian cavalry in the meantime continued to work around the German right, forcing the Germans to turn back the remaining two platoons of the flank company. Caught in column the Belgian troopers were cut down by Geman rifle fire and soon dispersed.

At the opposite end of the table the Germans were having an equally difficult task. The uhlans and the Jägers came under artillery fire and retired. In fact the jägers reacted so badly that they dispersed. The rest of the infantry and the MGs managed to knock out a British MG and forced one platoon to retire. But the British line stabilised and they dug in on the reverse slope of the hill to the right of the village.

The final British position in the hollow to right of the village

In the centre the Germans advanced strongly towards the British left behind the orchard. The initial attack was halted by British rifle fire, with some support by the Belgians in the wood. 

The Belgian infantry holding the edge of the wood.

But a second attack drove off the now suppressed British platoon. The Germans, however, now found themselves in an exposed position, with out support, and when a Belgian platoon counterattacked they were driven back and dispersed.

When the German infantry on the right were hit by a storm of British shells they were driven back. Although these Germans rallied, the Germans decided that they could not continue the fight and the action ended.

It was a good game and the rules held up, with just a few tweaks required to resolve around close combats. Perhaps the greatest learing is that frontal attacks are not going to work.

Work progresses...

OK so I haven't posted for a while. This doesn't mean I haven't been busy...quite the opposite in fact.

I have finished the British WWI infantry company, the heavy machine gun team, two 13-pounder guns, crews and ammuntion carts, the command sets and a cavalry machine gun team. I have also painted the Belgian Guide cavalry, both mounted and dismounted sets, completed another ruin in my town set, marked out the forms for the last two ruins that I need, made 1000mm of barbed wire sections and started the work on some scretch built French ammunition wagons for a friend. 

Apart from the two ruined buildings, I have only one outstanding item for the WWI project now and that is the carts for the British cavalry machine gun team. That will be based on this image

What I haven't had time to do is take any photos of my work.

I have started a new project, the Crimean War. This, I suspect will be a long term project, adding a unit here and there as I feel like it. I have completed a battalion of the Colstream Guards. I have used the Great War Miniatures range and they have come up a treat. Here is the proof of that work.