Good morning everyone, hope all is well. While I have been slaving away the past few months with rebasing entire units of French and redoing every single officer, and painting WAY too much gold braiding, I have also taken some time to make up a few characters for Sharp Practice. Sharp practice is a semi skirmish ruleset for a variety of time periods, but is in the adventurous vein of Sharpe’s Rifles, the excellent show where the good guys always lose (the French)
In Sharp Practice, in addition to the usual infantry, horse and skirmishers that anyone with a Black Powder army already has, there are also leaders and heroes as well as some other characters on single bases. There are a great many charts to roll up for them and see what special abilities they had, and a LOT of them under the Cad section has them chasing after women.. I mean, this IS AFTER ALL based on Sharpe !
A common discussion on various online groups for Flames of War is the unpopularity of Late-War Soviet forces. The Soviet lists do have their weakness, yet players have had success with them here in New Zealand. We have seen tournaments won by Hero Motor Rifle Battalions and Engineer-Sapper Battalions, so there are definitely ways to make them work.
The release of Berlin: Soviet provided me with a good excuse to try them for myself. The challenge I set myself was to build a competitive Soviet force and run it at our club’s 2023 Late-War tournament.
The Late-War period of Flames of War was completed last year with the release of the Berlin books. With no new releases over the last 12 months, the meta of the competitive scene is probably the most stable it has ever been.
A meta can be defined as “the game around the game”. In Flames of War this includes all of the things that go on up until you start deployment, such as the options that go into list building and your choice of Battle Plan. There’s always been a meta: those lists that appear, dominate the competitive scene for a while, become super popular, and then fade as players work out how to counter them and new books create new competitive opportunities.
Local metas are often created by the way that the most successful players in a particular region or gaming group approach the game. To find out more about the Late-War meta in our local region of Wellington, New Zealand, I recently spoke with four players who have for many years been among the top FOW players in New Zealand: Bede, Chris, and Simon from Wellington, and Sofia from Auckland, to hear their views of the state of the Late-War game in our corner of the world.
Before Battlefront decided to include Denmark in Team Yankee with the Nordic Forces book, I was fiddling around modifying the West Germans into the Danish army, by modifying the BF models to resemble units that were available to Denmark during the 1985-1995 timeline that BF is using for TY.
After the release of Nordic Forces, I continued modifying models and adding some 3D printed ones to either better represent the models in the Danish army or proxy units BF did not include in their list.
I recently stumbled across Father and Son Gaming’s Organic Shapes MDF Terrain Base Set and thought about the improvement they could offer my current terrain set-ups. For years I’ve collected trees, a couple at a time, from various conventions.
I’ve used those same trees on nearly every table I’ve thrown together. From time to time I’ve had a minor hiccup where my opponent or I would need to reposition a tree or two to accommodate units moving through the clusters of trees and in doing so would lose track of the intended outline of the trees. For the most part these are friendly club games and we’ve been able to work through it for the spirit of the game.
I’ve left the granddaddy of all London museums to the end, the Imperial War Museum (IWM)London. There are actually five Imperial War Museums. This one in London, HMS Belfast and the Churchill War Rooms also in London, Duxford for all things aircraft and IWM North in Manchester.
“When you have attained the way of strategy there will be nothing that you cannot understand. You will see the way in everything.” – Miyamoto Musashi
By Patrick S. Baker
Small Beginnings
In November 2023, Ranker.com named the Total War game series: “The Greatest Strategy Game Franchises of All Time”, even better than the much-vaunted Civilization franchise. Hard to believe it all started as an idea for a “B-Title” Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game.
In 1997, Command & Control(C&C) dominated the RTS game market. A whole slew of cheap knockoffs had been released and were doing brisk sales, one “pile of crap” C&C-clone called Krush, Kill ‘N’ Destroy had done some 600,000 units in sales.
Enter Tim Ansell, founder, owner and Chief Executive Officer of The Creative Assembly game company. Creative Assembly (CA) had been grinding away, porting sports games for gaming giant Electronic Arts (EA) and selling about 100,000 units per game. Ansell heard about the success of Krush, Kill ‘N’ Destroy and decided Creative Assembly would to do its own “upmarket clone” of C&C.
Thanks to Great Escape Games I finally worked up the courage to take a crack at painting horses with their Romanian cavalry. Fortunately for me, I have a former equestrian a shout away to lend her expertise. A goal I had for my mounted Romanians was to have an eye-catching amount of variety with the different mounts.
Of course with my partner passing my painting desk every so often to quality control my progress I was able to work with her to incorporate some authentic colorings. Below are some of the different colorings I ended up with and the corresponding colors. All paints used below are from Vallejo.
Native forces have been in Blood & Plunder since its inception and recent books from Firelock Games such as Fire on the Frontier and Raise the Black have expanded their footprint in the game and their presence is now being seen on more game tables.
As many who frequent this site know, wargaming is used by many modern militaries as a means to train and develop their leaders. There are semi-professional organizations, and there are military colleges and organizations that use wargames as an educational and development tool. One of the latest armies to dip its toes into wargaming as a professional development tool is the Canadian Army. Active since 2018, many of the wargames promoted are computer or PC based. In an effort to further the use of wargames as a tool for professional development, I recently suggested to my commander that I host a symposium based on this very idea. I have yet to deliver this symposium; this is set for April. That said, my method has been in development for a month or so no, and there are no trade secrets, so the aim of this short article is to whet the appetites of those who may be considering something similar. That said, I’m not going to be advocating computer or PC-based games; I will instead focus entirely on board wargames.
Board Wargames for Developing officers of today
My aim is to first show how wargames have been used by professional militaries throughout the ages, and especially since the Prussians developed Kriegsspielin the 1800’s. My aim in so doing is to demonstrate that the use of games is not a new concept and one that how shown its worth in history. As but one example, I intend to show how the commercially available board game, Advanced Squad Leader was used by US Marines prior to the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 to develop tactics to assault Iraqi positions. This is a specific example of a specific game used to develop a specific plan for a specific situation. I of course intend to go beyond that, even advocating that certain games with absolutely no bearing on military history are of great use. My one example? None other than Starship Troopers by Avalon Hill.
Bug Hunt in progress! Man vs Monster in the 22nd Century!
Even though the game is based entirely on a science fiction novel, the game has merit for use for professional development. All factions in the game have certain characteristics, and it is in the players’ best interests to know these factors and to develop conclusions based on these. What weapons do I have? How far can they reach? What about my enemies? How will I deal with them? What Starship Troopers does is force the player (or, in this case, the army officer) to look at the situation in hand and to throw away any pre-conceived notions, which is a real problem when dealing with real-life situations. One relevant example of this causing some hardship for army leadership happened in the early 1990s in the former Yugoslavia. 4th Canadian Mechanized Brigade Group, which had as its focus the defence (sic) of West Germany, deployed units to Bosnia as part of the United Nations Protection Force (UNPROFOR). No longer were the units focused on setting up reverse-slope defenses with interlocking arcs of fire; its leaders had to contend with up to three warring factions, refugees, war crimes and more. In short, the situation was entirely new and unknown.
Soldier of 4 CMBG in an unfamiliar setting: Former Yugoslavia
Another aim of the symposium will be to illustrate three general aims of professional wargaming: education, experiential and experimental. I aim to show the many uses of gaming, from the lowest level up to strategic planning, but my focus will be on the tactical and operational. Not only will I show that games can be used to teach how to Take that Hill, but also to plan even logistical support to operations. The main lesson is that when playing wargames, the aim isn’t to beat the game itself, but rather to analyze a situation, make a decision and then watch the consequences of that decision, vis-a-vis an opponent who is doing the same thing but with competing objectives. A characteristic of this lesson is that it is safe-to-fail. If you make a wrong decision and your force ends up wiped out or you fail to properly support that platoon with commodities; it’s okay! Nobody died and as long as a proper after-action review (AAR) is completed so that lessons-learned are emphasized, then the wargame has been a success.
Oh, look. All my guys died. I win!
So, that’s it. I have another month and a bit to prepare for the symposium, and at the very end, I intend on presenting the participants with a problem to solve using a wargame. Based on a scenario from Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit #1 (ASL SK 1), I will have them develop a plan for one side in the scenario. I will not try to teach them how to play the game, but I will use various characteristics from the game (terrain, firepower of units, objectives, etc) with just enough information for them to develop a plan. They will then brief back and then at the end, I will seek feedback from the participants on the symposium. As an added bonus, I will give away by raffle an in-shrink copy of ASL SK 1! With luck, I’ll be asked to teach the winner how to play the game! Keep watching this site to see how it goes!
David Garvin is an active-duty Canadian Army Officer who has formerly been an instructor at the Combat Training Centre in Gagetown, NB, Canada.
“When you have attained the way of strategy there will be nothing that you cannot understand. You will see the way in everything.” – Miyamoto Musashi
By Mitch Reed
