Lurking in the Loft - continued

I was sure I would get on with painting and/or gaming this past week or two, but those have rather fallen by the wayside - apart from a great evening in the (remote)  company of Jon Freitag and fellow bloggers Tony MS Foy, Mark  Jolly Broom Man and Chris Nundanket,  playing Jon's Third Battle of Trasimene - many thanks, all! 

One of the things that has taken up some time has been finally getting round to looking at a whole bunch of hobby-related stuff that was still lurking in the loft, some for several decades!  These really need sorting through, and reducing (in terms of  volume occupied, at the very least), and some stuff probably needs to go to a more caring home. 

The largest task has been going through many and various boxes of old (mainly) Airfix figures. As a first tranche, I found this selection of random boxes : 

 

what lies within..?

Gotta love the random selection of boxes and tins that must have been all that came to hand years ago (the box from the Japanese fighter plane kit has a price label marked 33p!) .  I wasn't a smoker as a child, I hasten to add(!), but an elderly 'aunt'  ( do kids still have 'aunts' that are not really aunts? ) rolled her own and was a good source of those nice tobacco tins. And yes, that's a classic Hinchcliffe box, too - pocket money never stretched to them, so where did that come from?! 

But enough about the boxes - you can see how  sorting through this stuff can be a slow process.. On to the actual figures themselves. Let's start with the real vintage ones : 

The 'classic' 1960s Airfix Germans

 

and rather fewer British, of similar vintage 

I'm quite glad to have about 80 of those vintage Germans, they are the figures my gaming started with as a kid, and there will be enough to raise a few more Wehrmacht units for my 'D-Day Dodgers' to fight.  The British 'Combat Group' is more tricky as there are not many of them - and I don't think I ever liked them that much. My first  British infantry battalion (in Rapid Fire order of battle)  has been built around some 1970s Matchbox figures which I liked, but there are only a few more of those, and the Airfix 1970s update to British infantry are a bit rubbish, tbh! So I may have to find an alternative which may involve much more modern figures. I suppose I will just have to put up with the much better quality sculpts(!).  

Having said that, the following couple of sets may come in handy: .

old-school (1960s) British 8th Army..

      

..and German Afrika Korps

I think these two sets could be quite useful when  running games that purport to be set in the Italian summertime, such as Sicily in July/August  1943.  After all, it was pretty much the 8th Army making up the British  contingent, and they would have surely continued wearing their tropical uniforms - and I assume  the Germans would have worn 'hot weather'  gear too. So there is scope for a judicious mixture on both sides - and the various 'early Airfix' will go together OK, so I think I can use these. Yes, I am really going to try to use some of these -  I should say I am entirely aware that more modern figures are much 'better', i.e more detailed, dynamically posed  and well-proportioned, but this is at least partly an exercise in nostalgia for me, I have had these figures a very long time and it will be lovely to make use of them - and to finally get them painted!  

I'll spare you too many   more of these pictures, but so far I have also found Airfix British paratroops (terrible poses and blobby physiques ),  Commandos ( men holding up anchors!), a few WW1 British,  WW2 Russians, Japanese and US Marines, plus the later (1970s) Germans,  and 1980s Esci British and German WW2 - which have an old-fashioned look which may just fit in.  

 

the famous 'Michelin Man' Paratroopers

Switching periods, a couple more random aircraft kit boxes revealed a small collection of (badly-painted)  Airfix Ancient Britains - ancient indeed,  probably at least 40 years old! I think based for WRG 6th Edition:

yet another US Cavalry conversion

 

I had just been reading Alan Gruber's  Duchy of Tradgardland blog featuring lovely conversions of old Airfix figures, in which it was mentioned just how versatile the US Cavalry figures were - and guess what?  Yes, very clearly they are the basis for these Ancient British horsemen - you can see the dark blue plastic where the paint has flaked off saddles etc. The US cavalrymen have had their body rather brutally cut off at the waist, and the top half of a British foot warrior glued in place - and as if to prove it, one of them has suffered a catastrophic glue failure and separated into its consituent parts. I'm afraid the conversion wasn't terribly well thought-out,  as the shields get in the way and prevent the man sitting securely on the horse - but at least the younger me had a try!

There's plenty more in the loft, which means a lot more sorting required, I suspect, and perhaps one or two more blog posts.  Meanwhile, if anyone out there is desperate to add to their collections of say, those blobby British Paratroopers or slightly bizarre Commandos, do drop me a line via the comments and we'll see what we can do - just cover the postage, maybe?  I can't quite bring myself to actually throw them in the bin. 

To end on a positive note, this Sunday is the Cavalier wargames show run by Tunbridge Wells Wargames Society,  and I will be going along, I have never been before, so it will be interesting. Given the quotation on my blog page header, I really should pay homage to the club that George Gush founded. The website lists about 20 traders and 17 games, so a nice medium-size show, which I hope makes  everything a bit more relaxed than the big shows like Salute, and allows visitors to spend a bit more  time looking at each game or stand. I'm glad to say I have arranged a couple of meet-ups with friends old and new, too, and it will be great to have a bit of a chat.  Hopefully a nice start to the 'show season' for 2024.  

Right, now back to the boxes, let's see what else there is... Until next time, keep well, everyone.

Lurking in the Loft

Every now and again, real life impinges on 'hobby life' : this week's real life event is the need for a de-clutter and re-organise at home. That required a bit of a review of what lurks in the loft - which is where real life and hobby life cross each other's paths.  I pulled out some quite interesting stuff, which will be spared from the de-cluttering. Such as this: 

Cry Havoc  from Standard Games, c. 1982.  Skirmishes in the 13th Century. Lovely graphics (I think Peter Dennis was involved), three quite large hex-based terrain maps (which could be used for other games/rules, I'm sure) and pretty simple rules - though I seem to remember the bowmen (firing twice each turn) tended to just shoot up all the other characters?   On BoardgameGeek, user HiTracey comments  Time waster for really bright little boys who have lived in a time warp since 1981.  Hmm, I wouldn't claim to be especially bright..

Of a similar vintage, but slightly more obscure, we have Raiders and Traders from The Chaosium, 1979

 

Quite unusual in that it is set not in Classical Greece but the Bronze Age. I seem to remember this got a few plays back in the day, and I love the map - again, surely could be used for other purposes, would make a nice campaign map. The rules may not be quite so elegant, though! 

Which is all well and good, but I do need to de-clutter after all, and the biggest challenge may be this: 

magazines sah - thousands of 'em!

 

I bought Wargames Illustrated from issue 1 in 1987, and managed to keep buying every issue up to early 2004 - I think I have 196 of them! Mostly in binders, as you see. Now they've been in the loft for 10 years, which is not ideal as they are very heavy - I have a slight worry they may come crashing down through the ceiling one day! I need to decide what to do with them - are they actually worth keeping? Nowadays I don't tend to keep hobby magazines, I just keep cuttings of any particularly interesting articles, but in my mind these have been  a sort of totemic 'resource' which I have held on to.  However, they do take a lot of space, and they do weigh a lot - are they worth it? I am going to try to go through them, to see just how much of their contents are still of interest. I am reasonably confident that there will be quite a lot of good stuff - to my mind Duncan MacFarlane did a great job in publishing articles that reflected and encouraged original  thinking about the hobby. (only recently I was describing an AWI game using Loose Files and American Scramble by Andy Callan, which were published in  WI's first issue).  I do suspect that by the early 2000s, things had shifted towards the domination of articles giving 'a scenario for XYZ rules',  but we'll see. This could be my coffee-break reading needs sorted for many months ( or even years!) into the future.  Just for good measure, by the way, I also have nearly all of Duncan's issues of Miniature Wargames - which I think is another 50-odd magazines! 

You may have noticed that considering this is a post about de-cluttering, I haven't actually got rid of anything yet... a good point.  I do really need to reduce the number of books in the house - at some time in recent years  ( probably related to my discovery of the delights of charity shops ) the ratio of books bought to books actually read has increased way beyond where it should be. So, time for a clear-out. I wonder if anyone is interested in any of these : 

Western Desert trio

and 1914-1918

and some 'Horse and Musket'

Specifically they are : 

Campaign Series :  Operation Compass 1940  and Tobruk 1941 by Jon Latimer 

                                Jena 1806  by David G. Chandler 

Battle Orders Series: Desert Rats ( British 8th Army, North Africa 1941-43 )  by Tim Moreman

                                British Expeditionary Force 1914-15 by Bruce Gudmundsson  SOLD 

Elite Series :         World War I Trench Warfare (1) and (2) by Dr. Stephen Bull SOLD

Men at Arms Series:   Louis XIV's Army by Rene Chartrand

How about £5 each including postage  ( £4 for Louis XIV, it's slimmer ) - UK only, I'm afraid, if overseas you are probably better off buying from a proper business. It may be a bit cheaper overall if you want more than one.   Leave a comment on this post with your email address, I won't publish it but will get in touch.  

Or if you are going to be at Salute on April 22nd,  £1 less  for 'cash in hand' and the chance to put a face to the name? 

That's enough for now, coffee time, now where are those old issues of Wargames Illustrated? Keep well, everyone.