Inspirational Amsterdam

I spent the last days of 2018 in Amsterdam. As someone who is interested in old buildings and shipping, the city has a lot to offer in terms of sight-seeing and museums. Thus, the visit was my first inspirational boost for hobbying in 2019.

Buildings

The most obvious and probably most famous thing about Amsterdam (marijuana consumption aside) is the grachten and the houses with their decorative gables.

British Unrated Cutter from Games of War

The British Unrated Cutter "Fly" 1763 from Games of War is the latest addition to my shipyard. In this blog post I describe the painting and building process of the vessel, its sails and other accessories.

Review: More Wargame Terrain by Tony Harwood

Recently my copy of "More Wargame Terrain" arrived in the post. Let's take a look!

After the excellent first volume "Building Wargame Terrain" Tony Harwood has released the follow-up book: "More Wargame Terrain" with more articles on how to create top quality terrain for the tabletop.

From the Outside: Production Value

This perfect bound, full colour soft-cover book has a total of 118 pages from front to back. The layout and production is pretty much the same as the first book so nothing new to explain here.

Reading Tip: Blackbeard's Last Fight

While browsing the Osprey Publishing website recently I stumbled across the newly published pirate book: Blackbeard's Last Fight. As a long time pirate gamer I obviously had to get it immediately.

Like other issues from Osprey's Raid series the book focuses on a specific battle and describes it in great detail - in this case the eponymous last fight of infamous pirate captain Edward Teach known as Blackbeard. However, the book goes further and explains the rise of Blackbeard and the events leading to the battle along with plenty of historical context. In fact, the book is chock-full of useful information from inspiring descriptions of the pirate way of life to the exact bounties that were set on the various pirate crew members' ranks. All this information is directly relevant not only for those merely curious about the Golden Age of Piracy in general but also for us tabletop wargamers who are particularly interested in as much details as possible. It is astounding how the author manages to squeeze so much into 80 pages. Speaking of it, the book is written by pirate expert Angus Konstam, who has written many books on the matter and whose book "Scourge of the Seas" I recommended a few years ago.

Blackbeard's Last Fight - Pirate Hunting in North Carolina 1718 is currently available for £5.98 as an ebook (or £11.99 as a printed version) from Osprey. The Kindle version from Amazon is even cheaper. If you're interested in piratical settings it is definately worth it.

Review: Building Wargame Terrain by Tony Harwood

My copy of Building Wargame Terrain by Tony Harwood arrived the other day, so now let's take a closer look at it!

Building Wargame Terrain
by Tony Harwood

There are a couple talented hobbyists out there who create stunning fantasy/medieval wargaming terrain, such as Wolfgang Jädtke, Trull, Rob Hawkins, theomar pius or Thibo and X-Tine of CT-Scenery - to name just a few*. But when it comes to high quality resin terrain manufacturers the number shrinks drastically. The products from Tabletop World, Stronghold Terrain and GrandManner being my favourites**. With "Building Wargame Terrain", Tony Harwood, one of the top terrain model makers, has now published a book in which he describes his techniques and shows off some of his fine work. Some of his creations are available as resin models from GrandManner. Incidentally, one of them - the Wachau Meeting House from the 28mm Napoleonic Europe range - is currently sitting on my workbench. So naturally I was especially curious to take a look "behind the scenes" and learn about the making-of for these beautifully crafted pieces.

The Wachau Meeting House (WIP)
sculpted by Tony Harwood, produced by GrandManner

From the Outside: Production Value

BWT is a full-colour softcover book that counts 100 pages from front to back. The pages are thick and glossy and feel good in the hand. The book is chock-full of good quality photos showing the different projects in their various work-in-progress stages up to the finished product. The layout has a strong "Microsoft Word" look to me, though, especially with the black "double border" frames around some of the photos. A less common typeface would have also gone a long way in giving the layout a more professional appearance. This is where you realize that this is not some company's representative publication, like a Warhammer Historical rulebook or similar, but a self-published and -produced book by a fellow hobbyist. Considering this the quality is still surprisingly high and the book will feel right at home on my shelf, next to Legends of the High Seas and the Foundry Compendium.

Inner Values: The Articles and Tutorials

The table of contents page

The book starts with a "Tools and Materials" section which, while mandatory, will probably be most interesting only to novice model makers. The first tutorial "28mm Wall and Fence" picks up the beginner level, with each following tutorial introducing new materials and techniques. The overall order of the articles is very sensible, gradually increasing the difficulty level: While you're scratch-building stones from foam and building fences from balsawood in the beginning, you're creating more complex wooden structures from plastic card beams and building detailed roofings in the final massive 18-page article "28mm Raised Market Hall" in the end.

The book concludes with a 3,5-page gallery of earlier work and a list of published articles for further reading.

Verdict

The book covers a wide range of techniques and materials. Depending on your experience and previous internet researches on the topic some of them will be familiar, such has how to apply a structured surface to foam. Still I think it is safe to say that there will be something for everyone in BWT. For those new to terrain making the book will be the ultimate guide on how to get involved in the hobby. For those with a bit of experience to them - I'll include myself here - they will get to learn from a professional how to bring their expertise to the next level. From the styrofoam level of terrain, which can look awesome on photos, to the perfect detail suitable (and neccessary) for recreation as resin casts - the book covers it all.

Personally, I am most interested in the high-end level of creating timber-framed buildings such as the ones available from GrandManner. The book goes by the subtitle of "Dampfpanzerwagon Guide No. 1" and Tony does mention it in his closing words: If the book proves to be a success he will do a follow-up. Now I very much hope that No. 2 will eventually see the light of day. For that one I hope to see a bigger gallery of his greatest creations, such as the medieval and Napoleonic buildings that you can find at GrandManner. I would love to see even more detailed tutorials on how to sculpt surfaces, accompanied with drawings and notes on timber-framed architecture and photos of the real-world models, considering some of his creations are inspired by real buildings.

If you have any interest in scratch-building terrain, this book is £16.00 well spent, and I recommend you head over to Tony's blog and order your copy right now.


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*, **: Obviously these lists are highly subjective without any claim to comprehensiveness. My focus is on fantasy and medieval to napoleonic wargaming terrain. Your mileage may vary.

Building Wargame Terrain by Tony Harwood

The release of the "Building Wargame Terrain" book by Tony Harwood of Dampf's Modelling Page is coming closer. In his book the creator of beautiful Grand Manner houses descibes his techniques for building and painting wargames terrain.
Over at his blog Tony is trying to find out how many interested wargamers and modelers are out there. So if you are seriously considering to buy a copy of the book upon release I suggest you head over there and say so in the comments.

CMON Annual 2009 out now

The CoolMiniOrNot Annual 2009 is out now and I got my copy today. Like its predecessor, the 2008 annual, this is a beautiful hard-cover book featuring the most stunning works from the CMON website of the respective year. Since I did not get the 2008 one before I took the chance to buy both annuals as a bundle.

As the icing on the cake a piece painted by yours truly somehow found its way into the book.

 Top right: The Blue Wolf Inn in the scenery section of the 2009 Annual

These books are pretty cool sources of eye candy and I definately recommend them to any miniatures enthusiast. However, I was disappointed with some of the layout and composition decisions. There a near identical photos of some miniatures, which are just unnecessarily taking up space, along with a few photos which are too dark to make good sense of them, and then there are some mind-blowing pieces I saw on CMON before, which are squeezed in there as very small pictures when they really deserved to fill entire pages. I know that filling the pages comes with a lot of tough decisions regarding what to include and which photos, what size, etc. etc. And then there's also personal preference. But I do wish that some works were represented better than they are. Still, these are very fine tomes so let's see what 2010 will bring.

Foundry Compendium

As my current wargaming endeavours are all pirate themed I am looking for as many resources I can find. I already mentioned Foundry's Scourge of the Seas book some months ago. But I am not only interested in background material but also in existing game rules. It all started with Legends of the High Seas and one book that caught my attention and that I really wanted to check out ever since its release was the Foundry Compendium. The subtitle reads: "Pirates to Darkest Africa - Rules, Campaigns, Painting Guides and Terrain-making". As promising as that sounds, it sure is a lot of stuff for a 96 page book. The articles are taken from previous publications but as I never had a subscribtion to any of the Wargaming Magazines (such as Battlegames or Wargames Illustrated) I could be sure that all the contents would be new to me. Now somewhat recently Foundry had their books on offer so I took the chance and bought the book at a nice discount price. Although I always enjoy having a gander at other periods, genres and games, my prime interest was the cutthroats parts so let's see what aspiring captains can find in this book.

These are the piratical articles from the Foundry Compendium:
Pirates in West Africa (5 pages) - A simple but full set of rules for playing a pirate game.
Any Port in a Storm (7 pages) - A Guide to creating a waterfront wargaming board.
It's Cutlasses Now, Men! (6 pages) - A Guide to scratch-building 28mm pirate ships
Pirate Personalities (2 pages) - Some tips on converting piratey miniatures.


The pirate "game" is of no use really, at least not to me as I don't enjoy this kind of superficial game rules. I understand this rules set was created for quick participation game purposes, but then why put it in a wargames book? I would rather play the free Island Mayhem pirate rules.

The next articles are by Foundry terrain guru Gary Chalk. I really enjoyed the waterfront tutorial - lots of eye candy and useful information. I like to see articles that encourage gamers to create their own terrain and scenery. Of course, I am already doing so myself coming from a skirmish game background, but I have rarely seen it done in my gaming groups and I think it's good to keep encouraging gamers.

The tutorial for scratch-building 28mm pirate ships can probably considered a classic. On various forums I have seen gamers using his plans to create their own ships. This is probably due to the fact that Foundry used to host a PDF file of the article (in its original publication form) on their website, then took it down for the release of the Compendium. I already mentioned the plans in my list of Pirate Ship Manufacturers along with links to example works. Although it is great to have the article in printed form, a PDF version of the plans would be much better when actually applying the knowledge to use. I am sure you can still find the PDFs somewhere floating around the web.

The last article deals with converting piratey themed miniatures (as if Foundry's Pirates and Swashbucklers miniatures range wasn't huge enough already). But it's not too bad as it does give some inspiration for unusual poses and it is always nice to have one's own personalised figures.

So, the conclusion? If you are only in for the pirate stuff you probably want to give this one a miss. The pirate material in this book is not really worth the money. However, if your interest is more widespread so that you enjoy the rest of the covered themes and periods, then you might want to give the book a chance. Personally, I enjoyed some of the other articles, especially as I had never concerned myself with those periods before (Romans, Aztecs) so I learned quite a bit. At the very least it is definately nice for the eye candy. If you can get it a reduced price, I would recommend it IF you are open-minded with regards to periods and themes.

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Update: By request here is a breakdown of the rest of the book:

Today will Decide! (11 pages) - Skirmish gaming with Romans by Chris Peers
The Land of El Dorado (22 pages) - by Chris Peers
The Colours of War (4 pages) - Painting Guide for Aztec miniatures
Burned with Fire and Killed With Steel (8 pages) - "Quickfire rules for Roman gladiatoral combat" by Chris Peers
In Darkest Africa (5 pages) - Full rules for Dark Africa games by Chris -well-guess-who
Painting Darkest Africa (4 pages) - Painting Guide by Mark Copplestone
In Darkest Africa (6 pages) - continued
The World of the Greeks (8 pages) - A History lesson on Greek warfare by Adrian Garbett
Painting Spartan and Athenian Armies (2 pages) - by Steve Saleh


In "Today Will Decide" Peers presents rules for playing skirmish games with Roman Centurions vs small warbands of Gauls. It's one of those "fast-paced" games I am not too interested in personally, however, I did enjoy the somewhat lenthy discussion on why skirmish gaming - playing Heroic actions of individuals - does make sense with Romans despite the widely spread idea of the Roman discipline.

The "El Dorado" article is massive and actually presents what I consider a full rules set: Army lists, point values, campaign rules - all the good stuff I expect from a full rules set. Of course, if you enjoy the "fast paced" games, then you will consider those full games too and you might even prefer those simpler sets. I just don't. I expect a minimum of depth from any rules set. Together with the cool painting guide by Ian Heath this is a very good starting point for people looking to get into wargaming in central america.

I haven't read through the Gladiator article in full but it look promising to me. It contains presents rules for proper Gladiator fighting with rules for parrying, dodging as well as "dirty tricks" such as 'stomach throw' or 'sand in the face'. And you check for "appealing to the crowd (or not...)". I have tried gladiator rules in my old group before and I am very interested in alternative gladiatoral rules sets so I hope to try these out in the not too distant future.

The Darkest Africa rules are again more in-depth feature army lists and campaing rules (including a nifty map). Not really my cup of tea but definately a good starting point, or possibly additional material, for gamers interested in the setting.

The last two articles deal with the Greeks. The first is a history lesson on Greek warfare followed by a 2-page article on painting suitable miniatures. The space for these two articles should have been used to add more substance to the pirates part (for my liking) or the Roman part (for overall balance of themes). The way it is now, it appears somewhat random and only broadens the range of topics at the price of depth of the other themes.

I would have liked to see more weight on fewer topics than touching this many and only providing only few articles. Of course, the book is meant to appeal to many gamers, but this way does it appeal to people who are, say, interested in wargaming with Greeks? Does it appeal to people who are interested in Romans? I don't think so. If you are interested in those setting you probably have the material already and the stuff provided in the book is not sufficient to do as a starting point. In my mind it is for the Aztecs however and probably also for Darkest Africa. So the problem is that you don't know what to expect when buying the book - is it supplemental material for players who know their stuff or is it a good starting point for players who want to get into a new period? Unfortunately the answer varies from theme to theme, increasing the chance of disappointing the reader.

Reading Tip: The Authentic Tudor & Stuart Dolls' House

I recently found this book on amazon: The Authentic Tudor & Stuart Dolls' House by Brian Long. It is an awesome resource for miniaturists wishing to create authentic historical doll houses of the Tudor & Stuart era, focussing on 1603-1625. The book is aimed at 1/12 scale doll houses but it is an equally great resource to scratch-builders of tabletop scenery. Covering all relevant aspects such as timber frames, roofing and interior, and giving illustrations and colour photos this book provides all the info you need to build an authentic half-timbered house.

Once I finish my batch of Tabletop World houses and have some free time I look forward to scratch-building a house with this book as a guideline.

Reading Tip: Scourge of the Seas

Recently I bought Osprey's "Scourge of the Seas" by Angus Konstam. This 240-page hardcover book compiles the contents of the previously released books "Elite 67: Pirates 1660-1730", "Elite 69: Buccaneers 1620-1700", "Elite 74: Privateers & Pirates 1730-1830" and "New Vanguard 70: The Pirate Ship 1660-1730", and thus provides an excellent overview from the rise of the bucaneers to the golden age of piracy. Highly recommended to anyone wishing to get into piratey wargaming and interested in knowing what it is they're recreating - beyond the Hollywood clichés.