An Irregular Wargaming Blog

  My New Year's resolution this year (and that seems a VERY long time ago now!) was to 'Finish Things', and by inference not get distracted by new and shiny projects. Those of you who know me well will be laughing already, as my list of projects is long, and largely unfinished, hence the resolution... And I had been doing quite well, despite various temptations along the way. When I first heard of 'Never Mind the Billhooks' a few months ago I consoled myself that I already had a lot of 'Wars of the Roses' stuff form way back when, and the worst that could happen would be that I needed to rebase them. NMTB does use an unusual basing system, so when the rules were published I got out my old, largely Foundry, army and started having a look. And I even got some spare castings and painted them up - these are partly Foundry and partly Citadel IIRC... But times have moved on, and the quality of sculpting has moved on, and more importantly I've got a bit better...

 My fascination with the Swedish Napoleonic army goes back to the early 80's with the publication of WJ Rawkin's book on the subject. At the time I thought it was the most obscure thing I had ever come across, but I was also fascinated by how different the illustrations looked from the other uniforms of the time, and I soon determined that eventually I would have a wargames army to represent this proud group of men. I also got the Rawkins book on the Neapolitan army, but although that was also pretty fascinating, they were pretty much chocolate box soldiers and a Prince's plaything, whilst the Swedes has actually fought an entire war against the Russians during this period that I'd also never heard of.  The Swedish - Russian War 1808-9 Actually this is only really obscure to those of us who have been brought up in the English education system, which continues to pretty much ignore the rest of the world, unless we were invading or colonising it. I suppose this is true of...

Still smarting from my defeat at the hands of the sneaky Numidians in game one of our alfresco adventure we met a couple of weeks later, this time increasing our forces to 1500pts. Time for the Romans to seek revenge. Increasing the points put us up to a more typical WAB type list, the first game, at 1000 points had been designed to get us back into the rules, so was deliberately restrictive as it didn't allow us too much variety, and therefore we could concentrate on the core rules. So technically I could have had the Scorpio bolt throwers and some cavalry in the 1000pt list, but I was definitely having them in this enlarged force. If anything is calculated to scare Elephants it is bolt throwers, because there's no save once they're hit! To make up the army I also added some auxiliary cavalry and another unit of archers. Chris added in more cavalry and warband units to his Numidians and we were good to go. Slightly more open terrain on my 6x4 table to allow for a bit more ...

My family commitments make it difficult for me to game at a club regularly at the moment, but I am lucky enough to have a rather nice garden, which includes this rather substantial gazebo. So, when my good friend Chris Kirk insisted that we ought to find a way to have a game, despite the current unpleasantness, it did occur to me to wonder whether we could actually fit a 6x4 table in the gazebo and still allow ourselves room to move around without falling into the goldfish pond. A brief survey with the trusty steel rule suggested that there was, and my friends at Amazon.co.uk were able to supply me with a couple of picnic tables of the right size. Chris, being a mental health nurse like myself, was very happy to consider the alfresco option as being a good way for us to still be able to meet up over the summer of 2020 whilst still maintaining a good degree of social distancing. Although both of us have now retired from our time together in the NHS we have remained active in healthcare...