The Chances of Anything Coming from Mars....

When I was in high school, one of my favourite albums was Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds.  So when I opened my new Paperboys Little Wars book, and found this:

the opening of the album came back to me, Richard Burton's voice reciting "No one would have believed, in the last years of the nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space..."

Of course it doesn't look that that in the book. No, the book has two innocent looking sheets:

And then with much cutting, shaping, gluing, substituting scotch tape for glue, adjusting, fussing, fitting, cussing and more, I eventually ended up with this delicate, wobbly, structure.  Looks pretty, as long as you don't look too closely! But this experience has taught me that I'm not much of a paper model builder 8-P

Civilians fleeing before the Martian tripod:

"Bows and arrows against the lightning!"  Soldiers attacking the tripod, to give a sense of the size of the thing.

"The Earth belonged to the Martians..."

Peter Dennis' take on Little Wars

I recently purchased Peter Dennis' latest Paperboys Book, which is a reprint of H.G.Wells' Little Wars, the great-great-granddaddy of wargaming rules (not counting dreary Prussian Kriegsspiel stuff).  

The rules are quite light and fun, and focussed on knocking down toy soldiers with a toy cannon.  And in addition to the rules, which were written with the intention of playing with toy soldiers such as those made by W. Britain.  This being a Peter Dennis book, the bulk of the book consists of paper soldiers to cut out and assemble.

Unlike the soldiers in the previous Paperboys books, these paper soldiers are each individually based, and are much larger.  They are nominally 54 mm, but as I print them out on 8 1/2 x 11" sheets rather than A4, I have photoreduced them to 92%, so I guess these are 50 mm soldiers.

There are two armies, identified as "Red" and "Blue", but of course the Red Army is British, and Blue Army is French, both in presented in the uniforms of the late 19th Century.

Blue:

Red:

There are multiple troop types, including;

Red Grenadier Guards

Blue Regular Infantry

 Red Highlanders

 Red Indian Infantry

 Red Scots Guards

 Blue Zouaves

 Blue Lancers

 Blue Turcos

 Blue Sailors

 Blue Light Cavalry

 "Red" Hussars (despite the coat colours...)

 Red Dragoons

There are many other troop types that I haven't built yet.  In addition, Peter Dennis sells German-inspired troops as a download on his website, as well as paper buildings.  

Little Wars includes a sheet of civilians:

There is also a cannon and even a Martian tripod (inspired by another of H. G. Wells' works, the War of the Worlds).  I haven't yet made them, as they are quite tricky to build.  I've yet to decide if they are worth the bother!

Paper Prestonpans

I'm a big fan of the Helion Paperboys series of paper soldier books, along with their creator, artist Peter Dennis.  The paper soldiers, buildings and ships are fun and easy to assemble and they look great.  And, finally, last night I even managed to get in a game using them!

I took the forces I'd assembled from the Jacobite '45 book, and a scenario based on the Battle of Prestonpans.  All the paper models used were from this book, including the buildings and the trees, with the exception of the running redcoats, which I downloaded from Helion's website (although I just checked the link, and I was not able to access the Jacobite extras, although other files on that page are still available).  

As you can see, I experimented with different levels of detail with these models.  For some, I took some shortcuts, just folding and gluing the sheets, without cutting out all the detail.  These are still serviceable, but don't look as nice as when the full model is properly cut out.

The houses look just fine, they could likely fit on a game table with metal or plastic figures.

Kevin and Colin joined to take on the roles of Sir John Cope and Lord George Murray.  The rules used were Rebels and Patriots, from Osprey's Lion Rampant series of games, by Dan Mersey and Michael Leck.  Doug joined at the start, with a mini-tactical game where each general was asked to choose from a selection of deployment options.  By cross-referencing the selections, the initial deployment was determined.

Kevin, Colin and I have each played several of the Lion Rampant games, including Lion Rampant, Dragon Rampant, The Men Who Would Be Kings and Pikeman's Lament as well as Rebels and Patriots (RaP).  Each game represents an evolution of the game, with some differences being subtle.  We did our best to keep with the RaP version, although we quite deliberately disregarded the role of the officer (even though each army had a suitable chap on a horse to represent the army leadership).  I initially rated the highlanders as 'aggressive natives' and the Government troops as 'green' line, light cav and artillery.

Using Doug's deployment rules, the two armies started out deployed in neat lines facing each other.

The Jacobite strategy was to charge into contact, and the Government forces tried to shoot them down before they made contact.  The idea was that the green Government troops would be hard pressed to lay down enough fire to suppress the charging Jacobites.  The way things turned out was a bit different.

The Jacobite deployment, after taking some fire from the Government forces.  Paper figures don't look quite so fancy from the side!

Government forces rolled quite well for activation.  They quickly formed close order so that they could pour fire on the approaching Jacobites.

Jacobites, on the other hand, were plagued by rolls like this for their activation, leaving them under Government fire for extended periods of fire.

Eventually some of the depleted Jacobites made contact with the Government line.

Even in their reduced state, the Jacobites were able to put a pounding on the Government line, but it turned out to be too little, too late.

As the first game went quickly, we did a quick assessment, and tried again!  Jacobites were given +1 discipline to reflect their enthusiasm to get stuck in, and the Government troops, being poorly trained, were not allowed to form close order. Kevin and Colin changed sides.  This time, Doug's deployment resulted in the Government forces lined up facing west to the expected arrival of the Jacobite army, while the Jacobites (as in the real battle) managed to sneak around Johnnie Cope's flank to launch their attack.

The Jacobites advanced through the marshy ground, while the Cope's army hurried to redeploy.

This time, Cope's Government forces were overwhelmed by the Jacobites.  The cannon, which was so devastating in the first game, barely got off a shot before being overrun.  

A couple of thoughts on Rebels and Patriots:  each iteration of the Lion Rampant engine develops the system a bit further.  I'm quite pleased with the way RaP works, keeps things simple and moving quickly.  It avoids some of the fussiness of TMWWBK.  I like that commands are likely to be followed early in the battle (even though a bit of confusion would have been historically accurate for Cope's green army!), but then things get harder as the battle progresses and units start to get worn down.

Paper soldiers and Paper ships! Helion Paperboys

For the past month or so, I've been slowly constructing paper ships for the French, British and Spanish fleets for The Battle of Trafalgar from Helion and Co., by Peter Dennis and Florian Richter.

I had seen the Paperboys series of books advertised in places such as The Miniatures Page and Wargames Illustrated, and reviewed by gamers like Roly Hernans on his blog.  I thought these would be good for Arthur, if I could find one of the books that aligned with his interests.  As one of his favourite historical figures is Admiral Nelson, the Trafalgar book was an obvious choice.

The book includes more than 70 ships that can be made in profile, one for every ship in the combined navies at the battle, plus a few extras like shipwrecks, a whaler and a few Indiamen to allow for extra scenarios.  The ships are very easy to assemble, just cut them out, fold them and glue them to the base.  I used some cardboard on the first ship (HMS Victory, of course!) to make it stronger, but it really wasn't necessary.  I did however use cardboard stiffening for all the bases.

Sample ship profiles and bases:

The book also comes with a page of flags, so you can jazz up the ships some more!  

The directions included provide instructions about carefully cutting out all the white space, leaving masts of 1 mm width or so, to which appropriate flags can be added.  As I'm handing these over to a 5 year old for play, I went for much simpler construction.

Arthur then started modifying the ships himself.  The Spanish 136-gun Santissima Trinidad has been reflagged to the Russian navy and rechristened Petropavlovsk:

I also purchased another book, the Castle Assault book, as I suspected that Arthur would be interested in the Scottish, English and Welsh armies.  The problem with this one, and I understand with most other books in the series, is that the armies are not intended to be cut directly out of the book.  While it's a nice idea that you can photocopy the armies and make as many of each troop type or building as you like, it means that you need access to a colour photocopier as the sheets are printed on both sides, with different images on each side.  Eventually I stopped by a print shop and copied enough sheets to get started on the armies.  Arthur started with King Edward, King Robert Bruce and with Robin Hood and the Merry Men.  As you can see, building the figures is easy enough that a child can do it!

Buildings on the table are from a previous project, a paper New England Village, assembled by my wife.

All in all, a fun project with my son!