Welcome

Welcome to my wargaming blog,
I'm Dave and live in Morpeth, Northumberland in the UK.
This may or may not be a regular thing, we'll just have to see how it goes.

I am a painter/collector of figures first and a wargamer second. My thrill in this great hobby of ours is to place that final well researched & painted unit into the cabinet. The actual gaming with the figures is an important but secondary experience, we all like to win, but it isn't the be all and end all of it, being with good friends and having fun is.
Hope you will enjoy reading this blog as much as I will writing in it.
Just to remind the visitor to scroll down the various pages and click on 'older posts' to see more.
Dave.

Saturday 24 February 2024

Old school 40mm SYW

 You know when you have a bucket list and the chance of ticking one off comes along, well here’s a chance for me to do just that.

My first book relating to wargaming was Brigadier Peter Young’s The Wargame. What an eye opener, the photos of the various battles were inspirational and set me on the path of this fantastic hobby that we are all addicted to. The Spencer Smith figures used in the SYW game were in particular eye catching and I vowed even then to own some someday. Well it’s only taken fifty years!

Having gotten round to it I decided instead to go for Prince August moulds and cast my own rather than Spencer Smith as I, like so many of us have lots of lead figures lying around which will never get painted and can be put to better use.

So for the first time here are a couple of photos of the figures, in this case painted up as the Kaiser Rgt 1757.

Kaiser Rgt 1757

Prince August 40mm castings

The book that inspired it all.

Plenty of old lead left, artillery and Prussians maybe.

Dave.

Sunday 28 January 2024

10mm War of Spanish Succession re-basing.

Been a while since I have posted, I find it somewhat unproductive and time consuming but as I've said many times before I do it to keep a record of what I do in the hobby to look back on in my rapidly advancing senile years!

So yep that old chestnut, re-basing. The 10mm WSS collection has been around for quite a few years as can be seen if you look at previous posts in that particular section of the blog. However I tried Black Powder and hated it, I even tried adapting General de Armee with limited success and the large bases I had them on large bases which limits what I can do with them. Add to that is that my 10mm basing for every period is now the same to enable me to game on a 7' x 4' table at a decent scale means that I had to bite the bullet with the WSS figures.

In a practical sense this meant stripping them off the bases they were on, cutting new ones 3cm x 2.5cm, gluing two dice holders and one pin on the three battalion stands. Because large battalions were being split up into smaller 30 figure battalions this of course required a great many more command strips and as 90% are Old Glory this meant painting the flags onto the castings, a pain but worth it in the end.

So here are the allied foot for Blenheim, horse still to do and then the French. No way was I going to photograph each and every battalion but there's a picture of the whole lot at the end.

Ferguson 26th foot



Derby 16th foot


Marlborough 1st Foot Guard

Orkney 2nd Foot

Hamilton 18th Royal Irish

Hess Kassel, Prinz Wilhelm

Hess Kassel, Leibregiment

Hess Kassel, Erbprinz

Hess Kassel, Grenadier batt

Hess Kassel, Watensleben

Combined Grenadier batt

Thirty three battalions artillery and command.

I'm about half way through the French infantry so a bit to go yet.

Dave.

Wednesday 27 September 2023

1/1,200 Dutch 76 gun Eendracht (Unity)

I like to keep this Anglo Dutch wars project ticking over or else it will get left behind and forgotten so two more 1,200 scale Langton ships done to oppose the two English finished already. In this case the Eendracht and the Zeelandia.

Eeendracht was built from 1665 to 1666 for the Maas Admiralty, one of the five naval forces of the Dutch Republic, as a replacement for the earlier ship of the same name that had been sunk in June 1665 at the Battle of Lowestoft. The new ship was the flagship of Lieutenant-Admiraal Aert van Nes at the Four Days' Battle of 1666 and at the subsequent St James' Day Battle.





Zeelandia was a fourth rate 58 gun warship built in 1683 and captured in 1690 by the French.




Again both ships painted to a wargames standard as anything more is really too much for my limited skills but they look fine. Oh by the way I have added the small pins set into the base of all of the models so that any markers may be added while gaming with them, no idea what but I will decide when I find a set of rules I like.

Need to assemble and paint the ships first of course!

Dave.

Saturday 9 September 2023

Napoleonic/French Rev naval longboat 28mm

 Always fancied a couple of these naval long boats to enable a shore or river landing, probably with Sharp Practice but any French Revolution or Napoleonic game using a river will do so I bought two (though I have only photographed one) British Longboats and crew from Britannia Miniatures. It is a great set and though they both took a lot of cleaning to remove substantial amounts of flash it was worth it.

Now of course I have to buy a sailor and Marine landing party, it never ends!






Having looked at the pictures a little touching up is required after painting in the river.

Dave.

Saturday 12 August 2023

Otterburn additions.

 As our club Boarder Reiver Wargames Society is putting on a display game at the Elsdon Fete in Northumberland later this month the collection I had to contribute never had any civilian figures to show in particular the two Scottish camps present during the encounter in 1388, (scroll down from this post for further info on the battle).

So here are a very nice collection of 1st Corps 28mm figures that will do perfectly.








The village is within a few miles of the site of the battle and in itself is worth a visit, very pretty.

Dave.