Reviewing New Recruits (5): One More Heave..

Regular readers will know what this post is about (and possibly be bored rigid, I admit!);  I am continuing to review my recently acquired vintage Minifigs 25mm 7YW/AWI figures.  If you have only just stumbled on this, the background to it all is described here ).   We are in the home straight now,  just one more box of infantry, a box of artillery pieces and gunners, and a small box of a few more cavalry and wagons.  So let's push on and get them finished. I will then have a 'mugshot' on here for every unit in the collection, and a good idea of what they comprise and how they can be used.  OK, let's crack on.

Box no. 9  was described by the seller as 'Prussian' and 'German' infantry, and included the following: 

A unit of 'Prussian musketeers'. The blue waistcoat and breeches are interesting, and from a quick look at reference books such as Duffy's The Army of Frederick the Great, these would appear to indicate a Garrison regiment. That's a nice variation from the usual line infantry, which will be useful for any game involving a garrisoned town or fortification of some sort.    The Minifigs code number of the rank and file figures is PSW 9 - Prussian Line Musketeer Marching, which makes entire sense. 

Next, a couple of units (18 figures each) of 'German' grenadiers. Blue coats, white breeches, yellow facings. 

 They're not Prussians - the grenadier cap looks wrong for them. The Minifigs  reference number is, interestingly enough, AWI 38, British 38th Grenadier Coy. So, an interesting paint conversion by the original owner.  I'll welcome any suggestions as to what (if any) real-life unit is being represented!  There is of course always room for an entirely fictitious Germanic Duchy, hiring out their troops for the duration to boost the coffers or expand the art collection of their Duke..   

More 'German' infantry - 3 units, each of 18 figures. Blue coats and red, yellow or white facings. Each unit has  6 grenadier figures - quite a strong 'company' of the big guys. 

 

I have no further information on these, and the heavy 'polyfilla' on the bases has covered the code numbers, so no help there. But they may be good as 'generic' Germanic troops - I think they could probably sneak in at the back of the parade of the Prussian army, for example. 

 And finally, that's it for infantry! Over four posts, I think I have covered over 50 different 'units' (of various sizes)  of infantry, which is fantastic, I am ridiculously pleased to have them. 

And finally for Box. no.9, a nice bonus of a selection of  officer figures : quite nicely painted, these will be very useful! 

  Box number 10 contains guns and gunners, and some uncertain identities. First of all, this large group of artillerymen: 

 I confess the uniform colours are a bit of mystery to me! Browsing around Kronoskaf 7YW has not produced any results yet - except to rule out Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Bavaria, Hesse-Cassel, Brunswick and Sweden! The code numbers on the bases ( e.g PSW 24, PSW 25 ) indicate Prussian Horse Artillery, but Kronoskaf shows a more conventional Prussian Blue coat and buff leather breeches for that unit.  I wonder if these are the gunners of an 'imagi-nation'? Oh well , onwards and upwards. The next lot look a bit more obvious: 

It seems fairly safe to say the yellow guns cariages and the red/brown coats of their crews mark them out as Austrians. 

The next batch are in three  groups, and I think are most likely French (left and centre ) with red breeches,  and Prussian.  All  have flock etc on the bases, so no clear code numbers to be seen. 

 

Next, I suspect more Prussians (left and centre), and can those be Americans on the right? Unless they are Hessians ?  Surely not British?  There are quite a few rather similarly attired possibles, with blue coats, white waistcoat and red facings. . Perhaps that's an advantage - they can represent whomsoever I wish.. Agian, no visible code numbers, buried under thick layers of filler. 

 These, I assume, are jolly jack tars who have brought their naval guns to the shore:

   

Next a selection of 'odds and ends' that don't quite match other groups, and seem to include some officers  - I am assuming the two on the right are supposed to be Austrian, at least. 

The two gents in grey coats and red breeches have visible code numbers - AWI95, Hesse-Cassel Artillryman,  and PSW18,  Prussian Foot Artilleryman.  But both Hesse-Kassel and Prussia's artillerymen had blue coats..  

A battery of guns on distinctive blue carriages - perhaps Prussian?  I notice the mystery blue uniformed-gunners in the first picture are 24 strong, which would give 6 crews of 4 each  for these 6 guns..

 and three on more neutral grey carriages: 

 and finally two one in a sort of olive green (left) and one grey,  of which the latter one looks  to be  a howitzer.. 

That makes a total of 14 guns - and over 100 gunners!  

Box no.11 contained a quantity of cavalry, and I've shown them in an earlier post. So we just have one more, Box no.12 with  a some more cavalry and some wagons.  First up, this small unit of cavalry 

 

Well, this has me stumped rather. The headgear might be some sort of Dragoon or Light Dragoon - perhaps AWI Continentals?  Interesting brown coat, green facings with some yellow trimmings. Any guesses welcome.. 

Another rather Dragoon-ish looking unit with green coats and red facings: 

 Could it perhaps be the American Continental 4th Light Dragoons ?  Again, opinions welcome! 

Last of the cavalry, this small group of red-uniformed horsemen:

Hmmm.. the uniform ( all red, blue saddlecloth ) could be Russian Hussars such as Moldavskiy (Moldavian) Hussars - but the model troopers have their right hands 'drilled out' to hold a lance. I finally thought of looking at the current Minifigs (sold by Matchlock Figurines, in turn under Caliver Books, it seems) catalogue - it has very few photos of the figures, but one of them is the (Prussian) Bosniak Lancer, code PSWC12 which looks about right. Eventually I remembered to  look at my Osprey book on Frederick the Great's Cavalry, and there of course is a lovely Prussian Bosniak Lancer, dressed in red just like these figures are - bingo! Rather a curious little unit, though - an officer, two trumpeters, and just two troopers, both of whom have mislaid their lances! All this has involved quite a lot of searching the internet, for the sake of a couple of dozen figures - the words 'rabbit hole' spring to mind..

And finally, finally - plodding along at the rear of the parade comes the supply column, of three wagons.   

Wagons are always useful.  I already have a few (plus a couple of plastic kits waiting to be built), so I think there's plenty of scope for 'supply convoy ambush' scenarios. One of them needs some running repairs as the wagon body has come loose from the chassis, but that's easily enough done. 

And that, at last, is pretty much all I have.  Over a thousand figures, all but a very few painted. As stated above, about 50 infantry units of various sizes, plus 11 units of cavalry,  14 guns ( with a surplus of gunners ) , a nice selection of senior officers and three wagons.   Not a bad collection!  Having  had a look at them all and made some attempt at identification (with very valuable help from several commentors on this blog - thanks everyone!),  the next step is to look at how they can be assigned to various armies for Seven Years War and/or AWI, and see what strength those armies can have, when combined with my existing small   'Portable 7YW Wargame' forces. I also need to work out a decent storage system, in place of the motley collection of carboard boxes and biscuit tins they arrived in! And of course, let's not forget actually gaming with them. At the moment I am thinking of small AWI actions  using Rebels and Patriots rules,  plus possible larger 7YW battles, for which several candidate rule sets are available - Keith Flint's Honours of War and Warlord Games Black Powder spring to mind.  In true 'old school' style, it would be fun to set up as big a game as possible and play it with Young and Lawford's Charge! rules, just for the hell of it! 

I reckon the next step is to put units together into potential contingents/armies, in which case I will show the resulting 'parades' here.  Then maybe we can think about some games.. I hope you've been interested and/or amused to see all these nice vintage figures in all their variety of styles - I have certainly enjoyed sorting through them and seeing what I've got.  Now let's get them into 'action'... Look out for that in future posts. Until then, keep well, everyone. 

The Other Partizan - part the second

Welcome to  the second and concluding part of my report on visiting The Other Partizan show at Newark last Sunday.  In the first part, I showed pictures and commented on about half of the games I managed to see, so in this post I  will cover the remainder and make some general comments and draw some conclusions - which may be boiled down to  'too much to see!'  I hope you are interested to see the games and enjoy the pictures - there were some really great tables!  Without further ado..

Chesterfield Old Boys presented a 28mm ACW game   The Battle of Richmond 30th August 1862  - Richmond, Kentucky that is, as Confederate forces tried to capture the Commonwealth of Kentucky.  A large table of course, but straightforward - nice unfussy terrain, lots of well-painted figures. In what became a common theme of the day, I omitted to find out what rules they were using.. 

Now possibly my favourite game of the day -  Messrs Metheringham and Miller's   "Rascals, would you live forever?” Kolin 1757    40mm Seven Years War battle.

 Loads of just beautiful  Prince August home-cast figures, lovely old-school style, it looked great! The 'Miller' in question was Simon Miller (in pale blue shirt, above) of To The Strongest renown, and it seems this was a giant playtest of a new set of rules for he is working on for horse and musket 'big battles', which he hopes to publish next year. Having just acquired quite a lot of 25mm Minifigs 7YW figures,  that sounds an interesting idea. Meanwhile, here's some rather lovely toy soldiers! 

 

..and note well-used casting tools

The Boondock Sayntes group can be relied upon to stage an impressive-looking game; this time they moved from their usual setting of India to Sudan, and presented a 28mm game, Gordon or Bust  :

 

 

the British are coming..

my compadre Dave spotted an intrepid boy reporter (from Belgium?) and his faithful dog, doing some eyewitness journalism from the Sudanese stronghold.. 

As you will have seen, 28mm scale seemed pretty dominant especially in the Demonstration Game zone,  but there were some honourable exceptions, including that of the Forest Outlaws and Kallistra's 6mm Napoleonic game Battle of Salamanca 1812  

The hexed terrain looked great, lucky they were being sponsored by Kallistra! And it looked like a 'proper battle' - I suspect that from the Napoleonic period onward, you really need 6mm to do that on a single table (albeit quite a big table still needed!).  I was impressed, and inspired to press on with my 6mm 1859 Risorgimento project..

    

 

 

Like a Stone Wall wargames group showed their Black Hawk Down  28mm 'Back of Beyond' game, Action at Badama Post, Afghanistan, 30 July 1919 as British forces try to rescue the crew of a crashed Bristol Fighter in rebel territory 

it's somewhere out there..

 

the cause of all the fuss.. 

hmm.. 'Keema' sounds a female name? 

Seven Years War fans like me were doing well, as the League of Extraordinary Kriegspielers put on The Battle of Leuthen 1757 in 28mm.

I liked the snowy scenery especially, and the figures were very nice indeed, rather slender and elegant  - not sure what make they are?  Splendid stuff, anyway.

 

Skirmish Wargames Collective brought us their 54mm Great Turkish War Siege of Vienna Skirmish featuring the famous Polish Winged Hussars  ( memories of the cover of the George Gush WRG rules, anyone? ) . The figures were quite spectacular. 

 

lovely figures, lovely painting 

Steve Jones  ( Steve's Painting Shed )  presented  an  AWI game of Breeds Hill   ( aka Bunker Hill ? ), using 28mm Perry figures and his home-brewed Bloodybacks rules, which are available on his blog page , if you're interested  ( btw from the blog I see Steve presented the impressive 6mm Wagram 1809  game at Partizan in May this year ). Anyway, another good-looking game:

and an eye-catching flotilla of ships in the harbour... 
 

                           

After spending (possibly too much?) time in the Demonstration Games zone, and stopping for a lunch break in the cafe, we finally reached the Participation Zone : but we were already running out of time, and some of the games were already starting to be packed away! So, a rather abbrieviated selection of games from this zone follows.. 

Nick Hindley presented 'Giant European Risk', which looked frankly rather eccentric, in a good way! 

general view..

Italy contested

Nick's QRS/rules 

Doncaster Gentlemen Gamers scored the second best game title ( runner-up to Orc's Drift ) with Dad's Army : The Seagull Has Landed  28mm WW2 1940 game

 

Caseshot Publishing can be relied upon to present a nice looking table, and on a manageable scale - this time 15mm  War of the First Coalition game,   Wellington at Leems Kuyle, Boxtel 1794  (billed as the 'Sepoy General's first command in Europe) , which I think was another scenario from Garry David Willis'  excellent Throwing Thunderbolts book. 

 

Doncaster Wargames Society  put on  Snoopy vs the Red Baron   WW1 Air Combat game - I really liked those ( printed MDF? ) aircraft, not sure who makes them and the guys were busy teaching the game to a very young girl 'pilot', so I didn't want to interrupt! 

 

Wargame Developments  brought their 'Alexander The Brief'  20mm Ancients game using Dominion Of The Spear rules ( or at least, one of the Dominion stable )  - having played the Pike and Shot and Bismarck versions, I wish there had been time to have a go at this! We did chat for a minute or two anyway - I think it was John Armatys ( left ) and is that Martin Rapier ?  I like his The Games We Play blog.  It was a nice presentation of these very simple but quite subtle rules, and I should give the ancients version a try, since I have DBA-size armies for Alexander and his Persian opponents. Also interesting to see the 'Lulu' printed versions of the booklets, which looked very nice, and probably worth investigating.   And they gave me a free copy of The Nugget.. 

 

Next door to the WD guys we had Northamptonshire Battlefields Society,  and member Chris Kemp running an Invasion of Crete 1941  operational level game with  his Not Quite Mechanised rules - the link being that the Northants Regiment was involved in the campaign.  Again, I really wished we'd had any time at all to join in with the game, but it was getting very late by now! 

Having previosuly seen (and rolled a few dice in) Chris' version of Monte Cassino at Partizan in May, I have a bit of an itch to maybe try these rules out, to play something in the Sicily 1943 area, perhaps? 
 

 And the very last gasp,  Blitzkrieg Miniatures  60mm scale Ancient Battles game Mighty Empires - Alexander again ( or his Successors ) vs Indians.  My picture probably doesn't do them justice, but Elephants in 60mm are very impressive!  

 

And that was all the games we saw!  Phew.  By this time there was about 15 minutes left to look at traders as they packed up, and as a result I bought nothing - I admit I had not made a shopping list in particular, but I probably would have bought something given a bit more time! I did try looking for an Osprey or similar book on the Hessians in the AWI ( thanks to  Dave Lanchester for some helpful hints, at least ), but had no luck.  We left the show on the very stroke of the 4pm closing time - by which time most games and traders where well-advanced in packing up  to leave. 

My thoughts on the day? Well, that could be summarised as 'it's great, but a bit too much to take in!'  There are a LOT of games, and really there are too many to see them all, if you want to devote a reasonable amount of time, chat to players and presenters etc.  We didn't see all the games by any means ( really only skimmed the Participation Zone and didn't even make it to the TooFatLardies 'LardZone'. Thinking about it, was it a mistake to try to see ALL the Demo games first? I do wonder if I should have spent some time before the show making a list of 'highlights' to see, or maybe done a very fast walk-round on first arriving, then going back to games that looked interesting? Maybe starting with the Participation Zone would be a good idea - the big Demo games look amazing, but I wonder of the 'Parti' games can actually be more inspiring, in that they tend to be a bit more like the sort of game you might manage to achieve at home?   On a more prosaic level, I should have got up earlier and arrived at 10:00 am  rather than 11:00 !  But it's more than 2 hours' drive, and it's a Sunday.. I know Postie's Rejects drive from even further away and get up about 4am, that's dedication!

Speaking of them, it was great to meet several gaming friends - Postie's Rejects (Ray, Big Lee, Richard, Postie and Steve ),  old friend Tony from Whitstable ( another long journey!),  and Neil Patterson  (who introduced us to Andy McMaster and Dillon Browne, nice to meet you in person, gents!).  However, the 'time pressure' thing applied there too.  I'm afriad I was all too aware of how many games I hadn't seen yet, and as result I didn't stick around for a longer chat with people - I feel rather bad about that. Hmmm.. some re-thinking required before attending the next large show like this?  Or just an attitude adjustment, don't worry about what you might be missing, stop for a chat, and just enjoy what you do see - there will never be enough time to see it all!   

I should say it was of course a really good day, anyway!  Thanks to 'the other Dave' for joining me too, and for putting me up that night at his place, where we had a good old chinwag over food and wine!  Also a big thank-you to 'Postie's Reject'  Richard ( see his excellent blog My Wargaming Habit ) who most generously gifted me a copy of  the 1st Edition Black Powder rulebook - many thanks indeed, Richard, that will be very useful indeed ( another option for the Minifigs 7YW/AWI collection, I think!).  So I didn't buy anything, but didn't come away empty handed. 

                                                 

Having not seen all the games, I can thoroughly recommend (as usual ) the brilliant reports by Ray 'Don't Throw a One' ( in two parts )  and Lee   'Big Lee's Miniature Adventures' - both with more games and more and much better pictures than mine - not sure how they do it, though I suppose the 4am start must help! 

Next Partizan is scheduled for May 2026 - I will hope to be there. Next show for me perhaps 'Warfare' at Farnborough next month?  Meanwhile, with some inspiration from this show, back to the gaming/painting/reading etc.   Next time, I think we still have some more vintage Minifigs to show.. Until then, keep well, everyone.