I have been slowly building up armies of the main nations using old 30mm plastic Spencer Smith miniatures with a view to using GDW's Volley & Bayonet rules.
I have decided to try to log my slow progress here.
The look of the thing
Rather than add more pages, I thought it would be more economic to add to an existing one.
When I started this project, I had a few ideas of what I wanted, but what has been really interesting is the way it has grown "organically" from some happy bits of synchronicity.
It took a while to decide on the figures to use; the discovery of a copy of "The Wargame" by Charles Grant at a reasonable price fixed me on using Spencer Smiths. I had of course seen the book in my school library (sadly defaced with drawings of a phallus or other graffiti on the photos by some inadequate moron) and had purchased some Spencer Smiths (from Ronald Spencer Smith - advert in the back of Military Modelling) so was aware of their limitations, daubed with enamel paint without shading or anything other than a flat colour they are.......underwhelming.
Looking in "The Wargame" I was struck by the black lining and realised with a flash of inspiration that block colours on a black undercoat would give the same "toy soldier" look if black was left between each colour, without the effort of black lining (as an aside I was once informed by no less than Bryan Ansell that my attempt at a Foundry / Dallymore 3-tone on black undercoat was a "typical 1980s wargamer black lining" but that as they say is another story).
A few trial pieces convinced me this was the way to go. The discovery of "Volley & Bayonet" fixed the unit sizes and bases along the lines I had already been thinking. After some internal debate around plain or textured bases, I settled on a plain green "old school" style. Having decided this, it followed that a plain green felt cloth with step type hills would be in keeping with the theme. It was a small step from this to deciding the unit bases would be thick balsa wood, painted green (Wilcos test pot emulsion) with coloured labels.
But what of the rest of the terrain? It was a very small step to acquiring Merit and Britain's trees, hedges and other items as well as old Bellona and new Amera vac-formed plastic bridges and river sections. Houses were a puzzle until on a visit to "The Keep" in Devizes (when the Bailey's still had a physical shop - a real Alladin's Cave) when synchronicity struck again. They were selling off some old Schreiber card buildings for a pound each, most in 1/90th scale of C18th German half-timbered houses and various castles in different scales (I recall seeing these advertised by Stratagem in old copies of Miniature Wargames) which perfectly matched the style and "old school" look of the rest of the terrain. Among them were some Czech card kits of larger buildings / castles which I realised could represent specific places from the map as a background should a battle occur outside a given city. Little did I know that all this would lead to scouring eBay for plastic Spencer Smiths, Merit and Britain's trees as well as various Schreiber and East European card building kits!
Once all the bits fell into place, I found I had stumbled into a distinct look and theme to the project. A few years later it seems everyone else in the wargames world, briefly adopted the same idea when the "Old School Imagi-Nations" fad was all the rage.
Sadly it meant prices went silly for a while, but I've noticed as people have moved on to other things as the current trend, it's gone back to a more reasonable economic prospect to buy such things for those of us still plugging away at our projects.
Inspiration
I've mentioned Charles Grant and his ideas, such as the VFS, are a strong influence.
"Charge or how to play wargames" was a later additional source of inspiration, especially the Britain's trees and the theme of Elector v Emperor.
Another strong influence, although not as well known is Neil Cogswell. I was very inspired by an article he wrote in Wargamer's Newsletter "Oheims supreme moment" and later, when I was able to read them, his series of articles on "the war of the Bombar Succession" (Donald Featherstone quoted this as his favourite ever article he published).
Neil used Spencer Smiths in very small units (1 figure = 100 men) with his own rules. While he formed his armies based on historical ones, they were mostly the smaller nations or States, such as Bavaria, Wurtembourg, Hesse and Brunswick for example, and the campaigns and battles were imaginary. His Wurtembourgers were clothed in yellow which they wore for a brief period (1752).
Wow! Thanks for sharing this - I had no idea the board game existed, or that it could be adapted as a set of campaign rules for V&B! I have spent several hours as a result looking for related resources on the internet and seeing if I could build similar forces using Airfix figures.
ReplyDeleteBrian,
ReplyDeleteI stumbled across "Soldier King" some 30 odd years ago (!) in an independent games shop. I was very much into the SYW and bought it on a whim. At the time I wasn't impressed, being more influenced by historical themes, such as AH's "Frederick the Great" .
I do remember playing SK and realising what a great game it was. Playing Arcadia, I had an army of elite HC and veteran foot and recall charging across a defended river and smashing the enemy army (presumably Bravance). Hrvatska had lots of LC to grab territory quickly.
At some stage I played in a campaign using the map, set in the TYW.
The desire to create Imagi-Nations lay dormant for many years until I started pulling the strands together and that's when SK re-emerged as the basis.
Copies still appear on eBay regularly.
Neil