New games, old games and refreshed games

With a gap between campaigns for Chain of Command, I've filled the last few weeks playing a range of different rulesets - some old, some new and some with a refreshed look after rebasing. 

As always, our weekly club is something of a gaming laboratory for me - a chance to try different periods and rule sets. Often those don't go beyond an initial trial game, nonetheless I feel it's well worth keeping abreast of what's happening in the hobby. It's a lesson I learned many years ago after allowing myself to become totally absorbed in playing Advanced Squad Leader. I invested so much in learning and playing that system I ignored what else was happening in game mechanics and system for the Second World War. When I finally surfaced for air it was to discover I had let a number of great new innovations and developments pass me by. While I don't look on those as wasted years, I don't intend blinkering my gaming like that again.

I have a collection of 28mm Hundred Years War figures that don't see as much game time as I would like. Initially I put them together for Lion Rampant, as that was a popular club rule set. I don't mind the system for a quick pick up game on a club night, but it doesn't really scratch my itch for either larger battles or the more lower level skirmishes that were very common in the period.

To play larger HYW battles I decided to try Midgard. I'd played it once before as part of a multiplayer game on a huge 18' table set during the Trojan War. It goes without saying, that was enough to convince me the rules worked for large battles.

While I had no intention of stretching my HYW collection to anywhere near the number of figures in that game, I still didn't have enough painted figures to run something much smaller. Fortunately, the lead pile had the additional numbers I needed. That called for a bit of painting and the creation of sabot bases that conformed to the standard base size for Midgard. 

With those completed we tested the rules by running a couple of games with an Agincourt theme. For the first we tried to create something close to the historical conditions of the battle itself. It was intended to trial how well the rules could replicate the period, in this case one where we know a fair bit about the battle. 

It goes without saying the scenario was unbalanced, with a strong English bias. The French were channelled into a narrow area, having to cross muddy ground to reach the English positions. Historical? Yes. Fun? Well, surprisingly, despite a predictable outcome, it proved an enjoyable game that was not entirely one-sided. I certainly liked the emphasis on heroic leadership and the importance of reputation, that seemed most appropriate to the age.

Staying with larger battles, we also tried a set of rules by medieval historian Rob Jones, entitled Blood & Horse Droppings. This worked with similar basing to Midgard, which proved very convenient. However, unlike Midgard, these rules confine themselves to a fairly specific historical period, reflecting the author's area of study. No surprise then, it has a strong feel for the 14th and 15th century. Like Midgard, much emphasis is placed on the importance of leadership, but in the case of Blood & Horse Droppings this has a very specific focus on melee, where the player is making the decisions of individual commanders in the lead up to contact and during the fight itself. An opposed play of secret melee action cards introduces a nice fog of war - how will your opponent greet your charge? With a step back to absorb the impact or will their leader risk all in an aggressive push forward?  

Having enjoyed the rules I decided to back the publication of Ecorcheurs, a set of medieval skirmish rules, also written by Rob Jones and published by Gripping Beast. As opposed to a large battle, this set of narrative based, scenario rules focuses very much on the small fights between raiding retinues and uses individually based figures.

It incorporates much that I like in skirmish rules using a very interactive sequence of play with no determined turns. It's a mechanic that gives the play some of the feel of Crossfire, where initiative passes frequently between opposing players. 

Movement is variable, without being random and leadership plays a key role in the effectiveness of a retinue.

I enjoyed the system and will certainly play it again, but that sets up a dilemma. As readers of the blog will know, I've only recently moved away from single figure basing and sabot bases to multi-basing. Now I have a strong urge to do this with my Hundred Years War figures, which of course would mean they won't be suitable for a system like Ecorcheurs. Well, never say never, there may yet be a solution, although right now I have no idea what that might be. Whatever it is, I have a feeling it probably entails painting more figures.

Jumping ahead a few centuries, I've managed to get around to painting some of the plastic Perry Afghan irregulars for the late Victorian era. Originally I bought two boxes when I was putting together figures for my Sudan project. There was a logic to the purchase at the time. I already have Afghan buildings in 28mm that I created for more modern games.

Not only that, the British for Sudan will also work for the North West Frontier/Afghanistan.

In that sense, it wasn't such a stretch to consider creating a force of Afghans. Sadly, the figures languished unpainted for more time than I intended. No longer. I have to say this has fast become one of my favourite Perry plastic sets. The sculpting is very good and the options for poses creates some very atmospheric sets of figures.

As I've done for my Mahdist and other irregular type units, I've opted for 3,2,1 basing to avoid that more uniform look of regular troops.

There is more painting still to do (sheesh, I bet no wargamer has ever said that before), but at least the project is a work in progress.

I have a few Perry plastic British left over from the Sudan project and so I decided to paint those as the 72nd Foot during the Second Anglo Afghan War. I really liked the combination of tartan trousers and khaki jackets. There is something anachronistic in the combination, one that looks to the future while keeping an eye on the past. I also based them more as skirmishers in open order than in rigid lines, something more appropriate for some of the actions in this period.

I'm still considering a few different sets of rules, but a couple of people at the club are inclined to explore what options there are to further modify Sharp Practice, drawing inspiration from John Savage's Sudan variant that took the rules into the breech loading period. However, there are several other sets out there, so I'm keeping my mind open.

Talking of Sharp Practice, I've managed to play several games set within its more traditional horse and musket period. In my case, that's the American War of Independence. The scenarios have all been set during the early stages of the war, inspired by accounts from the battles to capture New York.

This has been an opportunity to use my rebased figures and the new cards I've created (see my last two posts here on the blog for more on those).

The one issue that needs addressing with multi basing is how to handle casualties. I have a few ideas that I'm trialling and the games have been a good opportunity to assess what works best. While all of those ideas work, I'm not convinced I've found the answer yet. 

That's not a problem with the skirmishers and light infantry, as I've based those using 3,2,1. That helps handle casualty removal, but also allows them to fit more naturally into the terrain they are most likely to occupy during a game.

The issue of marking casualties aside, I'm really preferring the look of the multi based units, there's a compactness to the figures that gives a much more atmospheric appearance to the table.

I've yet to be convinced Muskets & Tomahawks is a rule set that gives me the same sort of game for this period as Sharp Practice. I wrote a long blog post three years ago where I compared the two. Once again the club allowed me to give M&T another try, this time with a French & Indian War setting.

I think my biggest issue with this game was the relatively short movement distances. I never felt any sense of jeopardy from enemy movement. Even with a few consecutive card plays they were never going to move far enough or fast enough to really throw me off balance. Rather than a game of manoeuvre this became a game about firefights. There was a definite shortage of drama as each player had enough time to counter the other's moves. The rules aren't broken, but they just don't deliver the sort of historical game I like.

Another club game used a draft set of Napoleonic rules for brigade level battles that were condensed into two pages (and no, it wasn't Valour & Fortitude). These were written by a local gamer and were simple, yet elegant. Proof that it's not quantity, but quality that makes a good rule set. 

They also allowed us to play a good size encounter in an evening. The game was fun and historical, probably more fun than historical, but not so wide of the mark to make us dismiss them out of hand. As someone at the club said, 'Napoleonic rules tend to be either fun or historical'. They may have a point and while these weren't the panacea there was enough to commend them.

I don't know whether it was because the figures had an old school look, or whether the rules had an old school feel, but there was something about the game that harked back to an earlier time in the hobby.

All that has kept me busy, but it doesn't mean I have totally neglected Chain of Command. While I still have to work out how Dave and I will continue the campaigns I record here on the blog, particularly solving the lighting for photography, that doesn't mean I can't play games in the meantime. In this case my current opponent is not Dave, but a friend I introduced to CoC a couple of years ago. He lives nearby and we often plan a game for a Saturday morning.

At the moment we are playing the Bazooka Town campaign from one of the Lard Magazines. A late war campaign set in Germany (as in very late war - April 1945), with US armoured infantry pushing into the Fatherland.

So far, my panzer grenadiers are hard pressed. Their platoon is brittle and the US armoured platoon packs a mighty punch.

Even when the Americans present a bunched target this close to a river crossing, they returned all German fire with a vengeance. It's early days in the campaign and we will soon reach a point where the panzer grenadiers dig in their heels and make a stand.

Perhaps what makes the campaign so attractive for the German player is the option to mount a counter attack with a force supported by two Tiger IIs. Now, that doesn't occur very often in Chain of Command but, as it happens, I have a couple of models ready to hit the table.....

2025 - a gaming year in review

Well, it seems 2025 was a particularly productive year, something I hadn't quite realised until I started putting a retrospective together. Followers of the blog will know it was only a week ago that I posted a review of my Chain of Command related activities, but looking back at other rules and periods it dawned on me that there was more than enough to warrant a second post. Excuse the indulgence! 

The biggest new painting project for the year was undoubtedly the German tribes for Infamy, Infamy. I didn't buy the figures during the year, which is partly why they became a 2025 project, they were long overdue painting. The vast bulk are from the Victrix plastic range, with shield transfers from Little Big Men Studios.

The few metal figures in the collection are from Wargames Foundry, like this group of wailing women.

As mentioned, the spur to paint the figures was to play games using Infamy, Infamy. My regular opponent Dave has quite a Roman collection and they were just awaiting suitable opponents. I wrote up a detailed report of one of our first games, which you can find in this post. 

The figures also featured in a number of games at the club.

I needed to add a small group of slingers to the German force and adapted those from a set of Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors that I had lying around. Little did I know, but that decision would then lead me down a completely different rabbit hole. One thing led to another and within very little time I had a Saxon warband. A long story, but one you can follow in more detail in this post. 

This was inspired in part by our Dux Britanniarum campaign Warriors of the Old North. We played the first game at the tail end of 2024 and it continued into the first half of 2025 with another three games. 

All the figures came from Dave's collection, so there has never been a need for me to create an additional warband for this campaign. Well there you go, sometimes this hobby can lead you down all sorts of unexpected paths. 

When it came to basing those Saxons I did it with a number of rule sets in mind. That started me thinking about how I could use some of my existing figures for other periods for different rule sets. 

I have a number of Hundred Years War figures that were created with Lion Rampant in mind. While those rules were fine for a casual game at the club, I was keen to do something on a grander scale. I'd played my first game using Midgard in April. That was a big, multiplayer scenario set during the Trojan War and was very enjoyable. 

When I saw that James Morris had compiled lists for the Hundred Years War I looked to see if I had enough figures to put together a French and English force. I was close, but not quite close enough. What I did have, were a number of Perry plastic sprues that would provide me with enough figures. For a reasonably small investment of time I could add the various crossbow men, archers and men-at-arms to make up the numbers needed. 

The only other additional work was to make up a handful of suitably based figures to represent both French and English heroic leaders.

All that remained was to create suitably sized sabot bases of the standard 120mm Midgard width that would hold up to eight figures per unit.

Our first game used the lists for Agincourt. We decided to see how the rules would play out if we created a scenario that tried to mirror the actual battle. Anyone familiar with Agincourt will know that is likely to create a game with a decidedly English bias. Nonetheless, we thought it might be a good way to test out how well the rules replicated the historical situation. True to that narrative, the French struggled across the muddy ground to confront the English. Those that did make it across came to grief in front of the stakes set up by the archers. French courage was not lacking and their heroic leaders racked up a significant number of reputation points leading charges. While few fell in combat, the same cannot be said for the men they were leading, which ultimately assured English victory. 

That was a satisfying result, in so much as we felt the rules were able to give a plausible historical outcome. That inspired a second game, using the 'defend the hill' scenario in the Midgard rulebook. That delivered a more satisfying game, where the opportunities for victory were more evenly balanced and with the outcome only decided toward the very end. 

As it happens, the sabot bases also work for another set of medieval rules Blood and Horse Droppings by Rob Jones. I've played these before and as Rob is a medieval historian there's no surprise that these do a good job of focussing on the challenges of command in the period. Given I had the figures and bases it made sense to give the rules a run out again at the club.

Much comes down to decisions made by commanders as they enter or continue to fight in melee. As always with the period (and in common with Midgard), leadership and heroic deeds count for much. By the way, the rules are free and available as a pdf download from Rob's website Historian in Harness.

Having played a giant Trojan War game using the Midgard rules, our host also wanted to try doing something similar, but this time using Hail Caesar (or, as the detractors at the club like to call it 'Fail Caesar'). These were my first games using those rules and I have to say, they didn't grab me. Despite the game looking quite spectacular with hundreds of 28mm figures, I found the rules rather vanilla and the games not as engaging as Midgard.

O Group was a rule set that consumed many of my evenings at the club. We managed to play through both the France 1940 and the 1941-43 Eastern Front supplements. For these we used my opponent's large 15mm collection and terrain, most of which was amassed for Flames of War, but has since been repurposed for O Group. 

It's not a complex set of rules, but it does have a lot of nuances. We found it really benefited from repeat play and without keeping too long a gap between games.

We like the system, but we do have one gripe. That's with the scenarios and in particular the victory conditions. Despite setting objectives that can be captured, any game can also be won by inflicting a number of casualties on your opponent. As a result, we've often found the game coming down to our ability to pick off low hanging fruit to rack up those casualties, rather than a focus on capturing key objectives.

More recently we started playing the scenarios from the Normandy supplement, which was an opportunity to use my 12mm collection which I had created with O Group in mind. 

The 12mm collection also saw use at the club playing Crossfire, where I introduced the rules to a gamer I have known since my Advanced Squad Leader days.  

Despite the disparity in the size of their respective rule books, he found much to like about Crossfire's elegant simplicity. Talking of which, I've been using the elegantly simple 2'x2' introductory scenarios designed by friend of the blog Dick Bryant. It's been a very useful tool for taking people through the rules, whether they be new players, or those just inquisitive to discover how the rules play out. For those games I've been using my 20mm terrain and the multi-based figures I still have in 20mm for playing Crossfire (more about those here).

Playing games set during the American War of Independence using the Sharp Practice rules is of particular interest, but 2025 saw very little of that. Sadly, there's only so much game time available each year. However, that period was not entirely neglected. I was able to paint up three groups of ragged Continentals, a lovely set from Eureka Miniatures.

There was only a solitary game using Sharp Practice and that was set during the Peninsular War, not in the rebellious American colonies. However, there were no complaints from me. Once again, our host supplied a magnificent table and an equally magnificent selection of figures.

John Savage, the author of What A Cowboy, very kindly shared a draft version of his modern variant of those rules entitled What a Cartel (these have since been published in the 2025 Lard Magazine). It was an opportunity to dig out my rarely used figures and terrain for Afghanistan and we ran a simple extraction scenario, where a team of private military contractors attempt to save a downed helicopter crew.

Whilst not miniatures, I also played through the whole of an Undaunted: Stalingrad campaign with a good friend. He's an avid historian of the war and an equally enthusiastic player of board games, but any attempt I've made to entice him over to playing miniatures has failed. I've long since given up hope of bringing him over to the dark side, but that doesn't mean we don't continue enjoying gaming together.

So, another full year of gaming. It's funny really, because that's not how I felt about the year when I was first reflecting back. For some reason my mind focussed on the lost opportunities and disruptions. In hindsight these now seem minor and while a year with even more gaming would have been great, it would be churlish to complain. Huzzah for 2025.