Mid-18th Century Update - Austria

Here are my Austrian forces

Front row (left to right) are battalions of Baden-Baden and Prinz von Sachsen-Hildburghausen foot, a 12pdr gun, a howitzer, Grenzer, a battalion of Prié-Turinetti foot and a half-battalion of Deutschmeister grenadiers.
In the second row are two battalions of von Lothringen foot, a combined battalion of Lothringen-Los Rios grenadiers, and battalions of Los Rios and Deutschmeister foot.
The third row has Hohen-Ems kürassiere, Liechtenstein dragoons, two squadrons of Modena kürassiere supported by a further half-squadron, Csáky de Keresztszegh hussars (temporarily missing their commander) and Eugen von Savoy dragoons.
At the rear are Nagy-Károly hussars, von Cordova kürassiere, Sachsen-Gotha dragoons, Fürst Batthyányi dragoons and four generals: von Kornberg, von Neipperg, Prinz Karl von Lothringen (aka Prince Charles of Lorraine) and Fürst von Lobkowitz.
In all, the Austrians have 8.5 battalions of foot, one unit of light infantry, four squadrons of kürassiere, four squadrons of dragoons, two squadrons of hussars, a gun, a howitzer and four generals.

Mid-18th Century Update - Prussia

I HAVE been gradually expanding my collection of mid-18th century armies.

Frederick the Great and his Prussians in five rows

At the front (left-to-right) are a combined battalion of Glasenapp-Lehwaldt grenadiers, three 9pdr guns, von Leps grenadiers and Jäger von Noble.
The second row has single battalions of von Grävenitz and von Röder foot and, to the right, two battalions of von Glasenapp foot.
The third row has von Lehwaldt, von Leps and Markgraf von Brandenburg-Schwedt foot.
In the fourth row are King's hussars, Garde du Corps (kürassiere), Markgraf von Bayreuth dragoons, von Platen dragoons, Markgraf von Brandenburg-Schwedt kürassiere, Red hussars, von Buddenbrock kürassiere and Porzellan dragoons.
At the rear, either side of Frederick the Great, are the yellow-coated Prinz von Preussen kürassiere and the blue-coated Württemberg dragoons.
In all, the Prussians have one general, 8.5 battalions of foot, one unit of jäger, four squadrons of kürassiere, four squadrons of dragoons, two squadrons of hussars and three guns.

Review: Table Top Battles - Grid Wargaming With Miniatures

THIS is officially the second edition of a set of rules that first came out in 2004 as Table Top Armies, but was republished with amendments as Table Top Battles in 2007.
Although it has only 58 pages of A4 paper within flexi covers, the booklet, which I got for £15-plus-postage from Caliver Books, has much in it despite using fairly large print.
Photos accompanying the text are excellent, showing just how attractive miniatures can look on a surface of gridded squares.
Quite a bit of thought seems to have gone into designing the cover and, naturally, the rules, which generically cover ancients through horse-and-musket with many supplements, including ones for naval warfare, air combat, fantasy and solo gaming.

Well-designed cover

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the wording of the rules, which contains some really appalling and baffling English.
It starts with the Forward (sic): "Table Top Battles has sold around the world albeit in small numbers and has had a good reaction from the Public when staging Participation games. Admission granted by the Newbury And Reading Wargames Association at their annual warfare event named Warfare."
Again: "After Table Top Battles appeared, other rule sets based on the square grid have been published. Written by some big names in the war game hobby industry."
This carelessness with basic English is perhaps not of great importance in a foreword, but it creates doubt in the rules themselves.
For example, page 18 covers "Hand to Hand Combat (Using a 12 sided die)".
Before getting to the combat mechanics, we are told: "(b) Some types of stands have a chance to avoid combat."
The stands are listed, and then comes: "(c) Throw a die for the stand trying to avoid combat. The score must be a '4' or more. If this is attained the stand can be moved back 1 square minimum, 4 square maximum, facing the enemy."
Apart from the poor grammar, the question arises: do the authors, Michael and Joyce Smith, mean a 4 on a 12-sided or six-sided die? The former gives a 75% chance of success, the latter a 50% chance. Perhaps the answer is obvious to you; it isn't to me.
Issues like this might have been cleared up by including what every set of rules should have, in my opinion: a detailed play-through of a battle.
Enough criticism; what do I like about Table Top Battles?
As I have already stated, the booklet is generally well-presented and a lot of eventualities are covered in the rules.
These are not, and do not pretend to be, suitable for tournaments at wargame conventions - there are too many possible bones of contention and the rules are not period-specific enough for most tastes.
What they are very much suitable for, as I hoped when buying, is simple battles that emphasise the toy-soldier aspect of the hobby rather than model-soldier realism.
The rules could certainly be used for refighting famous battles from history. Indeed it is quite possible I will be using some of the Smiths' ideas in an upcoming project I have for refighting the Franco-Prussian War in 54mm-scale.
The great advantage of using a gridded table-top is it almost completely eliminates one of the biggest time consumers in wargaming - measuring movement and firing distances.
The Smiths recommend using a grid of 16x12 2in squares. That is a total of 192 squares, which may sound a lot but only requires a table 3ft by 2ft 6in.
You would not need to rebase figures, provided they are on bases which fit inside the squares, eg the popular base-width of 40mm would be more-or-less ideal.
To sum up: despite its easily avoidable faults, I regard Table Top Battles as a pleasing addition to my wargaming library.

Review: The Portable Napoleonic Wargame

THE Portable Napoleonic Wargame is the third in a series of Portable Wargame books by veteran wargamer Bob Cordery.
I have the previous two books, The Portable Wargame and Developing The Portable Wargame, and have gone through the latest offering twice.
I bought it direct from the publisher, Lulu, in paperback format for £10.98, which includes £2.99 shipping.

Attractive cover

The book has some 170 pages and contains FOUR sets of rules, although one set is more of historic interest, being a modification of Joseph Morschauser III's rules from his pioneering 1962 book How To Play War Games In Miniature.
Morschauser fought his battles on a gridded table-top using figures and scenery that emphasised the toy aspect of the hobby.
Cordery follows very much in this tradition, although he has greatly developed the concept, adding layers of realism without overly complicating what are genuinely quickplay rules.
The great advantage of using a grid is it massively speeds movement and firing calculations. The price for this is a reduction in flexibility, and the obtrusiveness of the grid markings.
Cordery gets around the latter problem to a large extent by using hexagonal terrain produced by Nottinghamshire-based Kallistra. The terrain looks fabulous and, while the hexagonal lines are clear, they are not so "in your face" as you might expect.
Hex terrain works really well for 20th-century and later wargames, but I am a lot less keen on it for games set in earlier times when straight lines were usually such an important feature of how armies formed. A square grid, as used by Morschauser, works better, in my view.
Cordery goes into some depth on the pros and cons of hexes and squares in his original The Portable Wargame book. He does not repeat that discussion but you can get a clear picture of the issues by studying the three battles reported in great detail in The Portable Napoleonic Wargame.
Why three battles? Well, in addition to the modified Morschauser rules, Cordery includes three sets of his rules to cover Brigade, Division and Big Battle engagements. The differences between the three sets are not mere tinkering but reflect the very real differences in the scales depicted.
Each set comes with its own battle report - Division on a squares battlefield, the other two on hexes. The battles include numerous black-and-white photos and a complete turn-by-turn account of what happened.
These reports get repetitive at times, especially as the language used is somewhat long-winded, eg there are far too many sentences like: "The 2nd US Light Dragoons rolled a D6 to resolve what happened and a D6 die roll score of 4 meant that the unit lost a further 1SP [strength point]."
This could easily be reduced to: "The 2nd US Light Dragoons rolled a 4 to resolve what happened, losing a further SP."
Cordery is also addicted to endnotes. The book has 178 of these, all of which could have been incorporated into the text without any interruption to the flow of the narrative.
But to an extent these criticisms could be seen as nit-picking as there is so much to commend.
Even if you are not particularly interested in the Napoleonic period you might find the book worthwhile just for its appendix on two command-and-control systems using playing cards. These are in a way stripped-down versions of Bob Jones' famous - infamous to some people - Piquet family of rules.
Cordery's original playing-card system was detailed in The Portable Wargame. I used it in my refights of the Battle of Chotusitz http://timspanton.blogspot.com/2017/05/the-battle-of-chotusitz.html and the Battle of Sahay http://timspanton.blogspot.com/2017/06/the-battle-of-sahay.html with mixed results.

Looking from behind the French lines at the Battle of Sahay

He now calls this The Random Method and has added a similar, but much less random, Turn-By-Turn Method, which he uses in the book for his Division battle. It seems to work well for engagements using a small number of units, but then so does the system of orders he adds to his Big Battle rules.
None of the three sets of rules is meant to be sacrosanct, and I can well imagine a user wanting to add flavouring, one way being by adding so-called national characteristics (for example, the rules make no difference between the musketry of a two-deep British line and a three-deep French one).
Will there be more Portable Wargame books? I certainly hope so, and the obvious next step would be The Portable Ancient Wargame.
If so, I hope Cordery takes a leaf out of Neil Thomas's marvellous Ancient & Medieval Wargaming book by showing how Portable Wargame rules can be used to refight historical battles.
But that is for the future - for now I heartily recommend The Portable Napoleonic Wargame and feel sure it will make for pleasant browsing for many years to come.

My Toy Bonus

THE February/March 2019 edition of Toy Soldier Collector was waiting for me when I got home on Sunday from a trip to the Czech Republic.

Issue 86 of Toy Soldier Collector

There is the usual big selection of eye-candy but also an above-average number of articles that I found interesting to read including Keith Nairn-Munro on Britain's 17th/21st Lancers, Gary Emery on the Crusades and Robert Welham on early Catholic priests in North America.
I am also pleased to report this issue sees the publication of an article I submitted about an earlier trip to the Czech Republic in which I came across a cheap and cheerful cowboy-and-Indian set.

My colourful page

Telling About Telamon

THE January/February edition of Slingshot arrived yesterday and is dedicated to the Society of Ancients' 2019 battle day.

Slingshot issue 322 has a model of a Gaulish warrior on the cover

Much of the magazine therefore covers what is known about Rome's defeat of Gaulish tribes at Telamon in 225BC.
Duncan Head's article is especially interesting, and the only disappointment for me is no real discussion of whether the Gauls really mustered 50,000 foot and 20,000 horse/chariots (Ancient generals and their admirers seems to have been particularly prone to exaggerating enemy numbers).
Of the other articles, the one that intrigued me most is Steven Neate's on fighting DBA with 54mm figures.

Double Delight

I BOUGHT the Jan/Feb issue of Medieval Warfare and the Dec/Jan issue of Ancient Warfare on the same day early last month.

Two of the best

My late-posting has nothing to do with disappointment at the magazines' qualities - indeed these are two of the best issues of these magazines I have read in a long while.
Medieval Warfare (vol VIII, issue 6) concentrates on France's Louis IX and the Seventh Crusade. Since I knew little about the king or the crusade, I found just about every article fascinating.
Ancient Warfare (vol XII, issue 4) is themed around naval warfare, particularly that of the Macedonian Successor kingdoms. I cannot say this is a subject that normally grips me, but again I found the articles to be very readable.

Refusing To Take It On The Chin

I TOLD yesterday how the magazine Toy Soldier Collector alerted me to the newly issued Chintoys' Conquistadors and Mesoamericans.
Today I took the Tube north to Colindale and visited the London branch of Hannants to discover more.

Hannants … unprepossessing from the outside but full of military modelling kits and packs, especially 1:35 and 1:72

I was partly hoping to find scenery that could be used for 10mm-scale bridges in my much-delayed upcoming 275th anniversary refight of the Battle of Dettingen.
That proved fruitless, but Hannants did have the new Chintoys toy soldiers: Conquistadors, Mixtec & Zapotec and Aztec.
Each bag - they do not come in boxes - is priced at £19.99 and contains, as far as I could tell, 10 dismounted figures.
In other words, buying a pack of Spaniards with Allies and, say, three packs of Aztecs to give a minimal historical balance of when Cortés invaded Mexico in 1519, would cost the very best part of £100, and you still would not have any mounted Spaniards.
I passed on that, but I was still pleased I went as Hannants is simply nice to walk around - particularly recommended if you are into 1:72 plastic model soldiers or 1:35/32 aircraft.
My visit also gave me the chance to pop into the nearby RAF Museum. Entry is free, which is about right, and the museum cafe sells a decent double-espresso for £2 (the espresso could have done with less water, but otherwise was reasonably strong).

Christmas tree at the RAF Museum

Double Up

TWO magazines arrived yesterday - the December/January issue of Toy Soldier Collector and the November/December issue of Slingshot.

Great pair

TSC has its usual fine collection of eye candy, but the most interesting piece for me was news of the release of plastic 1:32 Mesoamerican warriors and Conquistadors, nicely timed for next year's 500th anniversary of the start of Cortés's invasion of Mexico.
Slingshot has excellent Guardroom commentaries on ancient Egypt, the hitting power of horses and Hussite war wagons, while also of great interest is Roy Boss's summing up of warfare under the Roman Emperor Justinian.

Ancient Warfare: Sep/Oct 2018

AN issue devoted to "armour in the ancient world," although most of the armour discussed is Roman related.

Striking cover … fascinating contents

I have rather delayed blogging about this issue of Ancient Warfare, and the contents are not as fresh in my mind as they might be, but I am fairly sure I enjoyed every article - not something I can often say about any magazine.