Terrain for Bloody Big Battles!

Vimeiro from Matt Bradley's draft scenario in the Groups.io B3 group.
Armies are 18mm WoFun Peninsular War Napoleonics.

It's about ten years since I last played Chris Pringle's Bloody Big Battles! which is a shame. So returning to it is a voyage of rediscovery. Happily I was able to recruit a crack team of players to get to grips with the navigation. The rules are not long or complicated but my comrades collectively described them as "very nuanced". BBB/B3 is excellent fun as a multiplayer game, and I am grateful that having provided and set the game up, Ian, Kim, Simon and Bob took the lead.

My main part was providing the scenery and that's what I'm going to write about first. Recreating the topography in the scenario maps is foundational to B3. When playing the game the first time round, I used Hexon II to recreate the complex and 'continuous' terrain. This rendered the maps accurately and was quite magnificent once you got used to the aesthetic of hexification. 

But the battles using Hexon were played at home with unlimited set-up time, and it is totally unrealistic for me to transport and construct terrain of that sort for a club night game. After some initial attempts to revisit my original options a scan of the B3 group on Groups.io brought me to a video by Konstantinos Travlos.

Konstantinos (author of Bloody Big Balkan Battles!) simply puts down variously-sized felt shapes to build up the hilly areas. This approach also allows great accuracy. Combined with a gridded mat, I thought it would be very straightforward to recreate any scenario map, and everything is reusable. But in the heat of the moment it actually took the best part of an hour to set up, and that is just too long to keep players waiting. The felt hills worked well enough but the felt roads and rivers were too flimsy and easy to displace.

My next plan is to draw each map onto a disposable tablecloth so most of the work can be prepared in advance and the battlefield can simply be unrolled on the night. This doesn't require or preclude the addition of 3D elements - BUAs and woods on top and a token indication of elevations underneath. Feature edges like contour lines will be drawn and precisely demarcated so there won't be any ambiguity. Roads and waterways will be indicated with masking tape. These are all solutions I've seen other users apply.

As an interim measure, if I don't get time to prepare a cloth, I will simply use a paper printout of the map. I discovered that my veteran version of CorelDraw is nonetheless capable of printing an image to tiles, so it's possible to blow the maps up to 4' x 6' and then print them as a set of A3 pages which can be taped together. I know from previous experience that paper is unappealing and has its problems, but it's a quick and easy solution.

My WoFun plans

WoFun Bavarian Foot

It will take time to sell off the armies I've decided to let go, and completing what remains of the lead mountain is even more uncertain, but as readers and fellow compulsive collectors will appreciate, I can't let that stand in the way of my accumulation of new WoFun armies! 

I've now got enough English Civil War standees for the Montgomery scenario in For King And Parliament, and can move on to collecting something else, at least for now. 

 

The areas that interest me most are the War of Spanish Succession, the '45 Rebellion and the Peninsular War, all in 18mm. Since posting my first impressions of WoFun I have settled on the 18mm ranges which I now think are the best balance between aesthetics and versatility. I have also been in contact with Vali Dumitru at WoFun and they are happy to supply half-sprues, removing the duplication problem with 18mm. I also asked about their plans for metal standees, but these aren't for now. WoFun are great communicators and couldn't be more helpful. 

 

Renewal of interest in the WoSS was originally inspired by Simon Miller's forthcoming Lust for Glory rules, but I can also use Maurice, and, at grand-tactical level, Bloody Big Battles, games I play already. 

 

The '45 has been a very long-standing interest. I've planned to do it several times, but never committed, partly due to the prospect of the mass painting of tartans! WoFun changes all that. 

 

I already play Blucher with unit cards at grand-tactical level, but Napoleonics at tactical level is another thing. There's a huge choice of rules for this, but I'm leaning towards General d'Armee 2 despite its complexity, and looking at the Peninsular War because it's a rich area and, for me, a fresh subject to study. The same armies could once again be used with Bloody Big Battles at grand tactical level. With 30mm wide bases, the 18mm WoFun standees are close enough to the 25mm BBB standard. 

 

The story doesn't end there as there are lots of other ranges that may become available such as the Monmouth Rebellion. The armies for that are on the small side but might work with FK&P.

WoFun standees: first impressions

A Bluecoat regiment

Modellers, painters and figure collectors should look away now! These aren't for you!

I received my first WoFun standees order - 18mm English Civil War Royalist and Parliamentary forces. The good people at WoFun also threw in a complimentary sprue of Scottish cavalry. Cunning!

On first sight the figures were very vibrant (in a good way) if a little smaller than I had imagined. I rocked the first set of figures backwards and forwards to remove it. This was a mistake as I did a tiny bit of damage. It's better just to push the cut-outs forward. Once I got used to it, it was simple and fast to remove the figures and push them into the supplied MDF stands.

Other than playing with counters or blocks, this is the first time I’ll be able to put armies on the table without condemning myself to months or even years of painting and the common prospect of losing interest in a project long before it’s completed. At my age and with little time for painting, this has become a pressing consideration. Reducing the hobby to a pure wargaming experience is liberating. Of course, I will still be doing little bits of modelling and painting for fun, but it won't be the treadmill on which most previous gaming has been dependent.

Personally, I wouldn't choose WoFun flats for a skirmish game, and I don’t think 2D tanks would be very convincing, but for linear warfare with the players generally facing the front or back of the playing pieces, I think they will be quite convincing.

WoFun armies raise a few questions: duplication, storage and whether to 'pimp' them.

The 18mm sprues typically contain two sets of the featured product which is OK for line infantry but may not be appropriate for rarer units. Unwanted duplicates need to be swapped or sold. 28mm sprues provide a single set of figures so are not affected by this.

I normally base figures on steel so they can be stored and transported safely in plastic boxes lined with magnetic sheet. I'm not sure what to do with these figures. I've yet to find out how brittle/resilient they are, and whether they need to be glued into the stands. They are extremely light - virtually weightless - so it will be quite easy to carry a large number of them and a pity to change this. If I utilise some bubble wrap and am careful, it should be possible to keep them as they are.

It's common to run a black marker around the rim of the figures, though this may reduce the vibrancy. Flocking the bases is also popular. The most extreme thing is to paint the edges to match the faces. I'm not currently planning to do any of these things myself. The last two steps do transform the look fantastically, but they contradict the whole 'ready out of the box' concept.

I'm happy with having chosen 18mm for this particular project, but I'm not entirely convinced this is the best choice in every respect. Although the detail is there when viewed close to and at eye-level, once on the table they tend to look like dark blocks. This is even more characteristic of the 10mm ranges. 

Smaller is darker because a smaller surface reflects less light and is more difficult to see. When painting smaller figures, you compensate by using brighter paint. In this case, I guess Peter Dennis's ink and wash illustrations have simply been digitally reduced which appears to give more emphasis to the ink, and less to the wash.

This does not seem to bother other gamers. 18mm is apparently a lot more popular than 28 mm, and there is huge enthusiasm for 10mm Napoleonics.

Even in full, natural, daylight the stands seem
to present with a lot of 'black ink'.

For my War of Spanish Succession project I'm now inclining towards 28mm. The aesthetic appeal of the Baroque period is an important aspect for me, and the larger scale will show Peter Dennis's brilliant artwork to better advantage.

The 28mm sprues contain half the figures which means that armies will cost twice as much, but the increase in footprint is minimal. A 4-figure 28mm base is about 40mm wide as opposed to about 30mm for the 18s. If playing the envisaged grid game (Simon Miller's Lust for Glory!) this will mean using 6" rather than 4" squares. For Sam Mustafa's Maurice, which I play already, I don't think it will make much difference.

For the WoSS there are two areas where I might intervene, albeit minimally. One is repainting facings and stockings where required to produce specific regiments and to utilise any spare stands. The other is adding 3D paper flags. I'll explain more if/when the time comes.

Whatever the downsides or challenges, I won't have to paint hundreds of figures or risk a further increase in the lead mountain.

Lust for Glory! and WoFun

I saw two things at Salute that lodged in my brain and have been festering ever since. One was Simon Miller's forthcoming horse and musket variation on To The Strongest! provisionally entitled Lust for Glory! The other were the WoFun plexiglass flats.

After some intense soul searching over the last few days I've fully resolved to invest in the WoFun  War of Spanish Succession and English Civil War standees. Both of these will be used primarily for Simon's grid games - LfG! and For King & Parliament!

Although intrigued by WoFun, I wasn't initially convinced, but the more I thought about it, the more I was attracted to the style of the 'figures' and the straightforwardness of the pre-printed approach. They will be ready-to-play after a couple of hours' assembly and light to carry.

It has also helped me to come to terms with the obvious: I will never complete more than a tiny fraction of my accumulated lead mountain and might as well start disposing of it. 

An initial ECW order is in and a WoSS order will follow. The disposal side will take longer and be more difficult. This is undoubtedly the most revolutionary development in the history of my adult wargaming career.

It took some time to decide on the scale. The beauty of the artwork shows best with the larger figures,  especially 28mm, but the ECW rules require some flexibility in unit representation (e.g. small, large, pike-heavy, shot-heavy etc) and this was best offered by the 18mm stands. I'm not attracted to the 10mm flats as it's quick and easy to paint 3D figures in that scale, but my attitude may change if I decide to invest in Napoleonics. And maybe I'll also look at the '45, another period I've always wanted to do.