Irregular Wars Wargaming

Kapitän Johan Fuchs looked again at the map scrawled on the tattered paper in front of him. This should be the place - a small hamlet nestled between hills with a dilapidated stone church. The Hapsburg payroll was supposed to be inside the ruinous building, but the place was quiet. There were certainly no white-coated Austrians wandering around the place. Indeed, there didn't appear to be anybody wandering around at all. Maybe it was too quiet.  To the left, the ruined church which functioned as the Austrian deployment point and the objective for Fuch's Prussians. To the right, the Prussian deployment point in the woods. Playing Sharp Practice 2 ,  you never quite know who is going to activate first. The anonymous Austrians commanded by Brett kept having officer chits drawn out, but not deploying. Eventually I got an officer chit to, for Unteroffizier Shultz, my status I jäger seargent. who led his group straight up the right flank, through the woods. On the ...

Many, many , months after applying the first paint to them, I have finally finished my first, and I can assure you dear reader, my only, unit of 15mm Napoleonic cavalry - a single group of Prussian dragoons for Sharp Practice 2 . These are beautifully sculpted AB Prussians from their 1806 range and like all AB figures, it is hard to do them justice. That said, these just took me so  long, and I got dispirited along the way, heralding further delays. I have come to the conclusion that life is too short for me to paint Napoleonic cavalry at this scale. 6mm, perhaps, but not 15mm. And these aren't even fancy lads like hussars! This small patrol is led by Cornette von der Burg and will, hopefully, provide some interesting support to my otherwise skirmisher-heavy Prussians led by  Kapitän Fuchs . The illegitimate scion of a noble house of the Rhineland, Fredrick Wilhem von der Burg was raised by a distant cousin in Magdeburg and seeks, someday, to establish his own pla...

After a bit of a hiatus in my Sharp Practice 2 1806 Prussian project, mostly caused by my dislike of paining 15mm Napoleonic cavalry (almost there...), I am back on the wagon. To start with, here is my deployment point. Not as fancy as many DPs I have seen, and not overly accurate, but still better than the plain plastic counter I have been using! Above, Lucky Kapitän Fuchs and Der kleine Husar shown for scale. The signs are just cut up business card with multiple layers of paint and my attempt at a traditional (if generic) Germanic script. In our gaming circle we have Prussians, Austrians, Frenchies and Russians, hence the signage.

I finally managed to get Kapitän Fuchs and his Prussian jäger on the table last night for a rather apocryphal game which saw my Prussians team up with some Austrians to try to destroy a wagon of gun powder protected by a column of Russians.  Thanks in great part to the way the turn order was determined - in Sharp Practice , the order in which officers are allowed to activate is drawn randomly - Fuchs had a great deal of success, killing the artillery crew to a man and decimating a formation of musketeers before their rifle barrels were fouled. My Austrian colleague, Lt Battenburg also had the better of it, exchanging fire with some skirmishing Russians and chasing off some Cossack's who were a tab bold for their own good. However, just as the second Russian formation changed into line and made ready to fire on my Prussian skirmishers, we ran out of time and had to finish up. Such a shame, but the truth of it is that none of us had played in a while and each step invol...

Although officially denied, it is not unusual to find the spirited young wife of a certain senior hussar officer in the company of Lucky Fuchs . So much has her presence become common place, that Fuch’s jäger have come to embrace her as something of a mascot. Sabine is an old Old Glory USA figure from one of the French Marshals packs - no longer available from Old Glory (USA or UK). She is supposed to be a mistress for one of the officers. Happily, Mark in Perth (WA, not Scotland) has a spare one on his lead pile and, several emails later, here she is. I know her shako is very French looking, but I figured a lady hussar could wear what she liked. I did a little research into 1806 hussar regiments and it looks like one of the only (the only) Prussian hussars in shakos at that stage were Gettkandt's regiment. Dark green pelisse, light green jacket, white or buff trousers with green overalls. Lots of silver lace.  In our games, I will be using Sabine as a support option, tr...

Although these particular lads have yet to see any (tabletop) action, they have already bee reinforced with more 15mm AB Prussians! The force now stands as follows. Kapitän Johan Fuchs (Status III Leader), 9 points Unteroffizier Shultz (Status I Leader), 3 points Hornist Schwartz , 2 points Sharpshooter Schnaps , 2 points 3x Jäger groups, 30 points Total 46 points Sgt. Schultz is always going to be a bit hard to spot on the table because AB do not produce any unique NCO sculpts for their Prussians. However, as it seems the only rank insignia for Jäger NCOs was gold trim on their collar and cuffs, I suppose there is no real call for separate sculpts. Schultz has the gold trim, but it's not really obvious at a distance.

The task given to Lieutenant James FitzJames (of the Cherrymount FitzJames') was a simple one. As Captain Hotspur had put it, "Get that bloody wagon moving!" Those parts of the trackway that were not riven with small gullies by the recent rains, had collected the water in broad stretches of sticky mud. Hotspur had taken most of the company on to Fort Heretostay, leaving the bookish FitzJames with a small detachment of men and impeded by a bogged wagon - not to mention the tiresome company of 'Mr' Thomas Hawks and his self entitled clutch of colonials. At least sergeants Maguire and Hamill had elected to stay behind to add a little practical experience to FitzJames' more theoretical learning. Rev. Cornelius Goodyeare had also decided to stay behind with the wagon to continue an ongoing discussion he had been having with FitzJames on the weight of angels relative to the density of clouds... FitzJames started off proceedings by suggesting the wagon would ge...

My Sharp Practice 2 French and Indian Wars British force is more or less complete at a half company of Inniskillings plus some Indian scouts. However, almost enjoying painting 15mm again, I decided I wanted to add a touch more colonial flavour to Hotspur's expedition. I decided that a group of frontiersmen would fit with my theme, but I was going to be damned before I'd buy 30 Blue Moon colonials to field a single unit of six skirmishers so I cast my eye around for a cheaper and more sensible alternative.  Enter the Freicorp range from QRF/Total System Scenics. They sell their infantry in the customary bag of eight for a pittance (if not a pittance, at £2.70, they are only a fraction of the £13 Blue Moon bags). I ordered one pack not knowing what to expect really. At worst, I'd lost a fiver (including post). At best, I'd have a new flavour-filled unit. I hope you'll agree from the top photo, the sculpts are actually quite nice and paint up to a suitable standa...

"At Jena, the Prussian army performed the finest and most spectacular maneuvers, but I soon put a stop to this tomfoolery ..."   Napoleon My dear reader, allow me to introduce the sly, yet charming, Kapitän Johan Fuchs of the 1st Jäger Battalion, Prussian army. Known among his men as 'Lucky' Fuchs, the kapitän springs from an old and highly regarded military family. However, as the second son of a second son, he sadly has little money or influence himself. Physically of average stamp, his fairness of face and charm have won him the hostility of many an older husband to a younger wife. While his subsequent evasion of said husbands has proved fruitful training for his own military career, his not-undeserving reputation as a cad has been hard to shift. Fuchs' reputation for der ring-do, and his ability to slip away from his enemies with alacrity have seen him often dispatched on wide ranging missions with men of his Jäger company, far from the main Pru...

This week, we returned to the semi-wild woodlands of 1750s eastern North America for my second game of  Sharp Practice 2 , the large scale skirmish game for the black powder period from Too Fat Lardies. The game saw a mixed force of French regulars, Canadian militia and allied Indians (Huron probably, but they never got close enough for me to ask) on the warpath. Their immediate target was a British homestead, part of the fragile network of settlements seeded across the woodlands to start the  exploitation of  civilising of the New World. As the photo above shows (taken from the east, looking west), the roguish Captain Hotspur heard of the French threat and hot footed it towards the homestead from the south, leading a column of Inniskilling fusiliers with Indian scouts, while his bookish 2iC, Lt Fitzjames (of the Cherrymount Fitzjames') approached from the east with a second force the same size. While the French regulars slowly approached the farmstead across ...