Fort Pickens walkaround

 

       Located in the far western reaches of the Florida panhandle Fort Pickens was one of the most important of the forts built to guard Pensacola Bay against naval intrusion by a foreign power. It is ironic that it never fired a shot at a foreign enemy but was held against a hostile rebel force throughout the entire American Civil War. It is also ironic that it achieved its ruinous state at the hands of the Federal military through a combination of underfunded budgets, neglect, poor engineering and a fire that culminated in a magazine explosion (during peacetime!). A further irony is that the one assault against the fort by land forces was conducted by none other than Col. William Henry Chase of the Florida rebel militia; Col. Chase had designed and constructed Fort Pickens in his previous job as a Captain in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

 Fort Wiki has a nice potted history here
National Park Service has a less-than-impressive site here
Starforts has a delightfully tongue-in-cheek entry here

Photo report on Spartacon 2020; the Return of the Storm-God

        Somebody made Thor angry. To celebrate the thirtieth year of Spartacon the weather decided to return to its historic model of dropping a massive storm on the convention-goers. A bitter combination of freezing rain, sleet, howling winds and snow hammered western Michigan the day of the event. This being Michigan a good-sized crowd still showed up for the convention. I helped run a big Hail Caesar game in the first period and ran my Thirty Years War scenario in the second, both games were fully booked and we all had a jolly good time. Photos of the second half of the convention were limited due my GM responsibilities. But enough of that, on to the photos!

More Spartacon Prep

the armies align for battle

       Tom and I are also running a 28mm Romans vs Macedonians game for Spartacon using Hail Caesar rules. Just to be sure of the scenario (and to freshen up a bit on the rules) we ran a test game at my place this last weekend. It was jolly fun and I do love the sight of hundreds of 28mm figures battling it out on the table! Most of the usual suspects were there (except Joe.....where were you Joe?) so it was great to start the year off with a full house.

Getting Ready for Spartacon 2020

 

the armies laid out on a 6 x 4 foot table,

 at the convention I will be using a 5 x 8 foot table and rather more terrain

     I have finished the set-up of the armies that will be involved in my Thirty Years War game for Spartacon. These forces are organized for the Liber Militum Tercio rules. The battle with feature a conflict between Tercios of the Spanish Empire  and the Reformed Battalions of the Dutch Republic. I have designed the game to accommodate between four and eight players. It is scheduled to run in the second session. It is a very nearly balanced battle in terms of points, thus the outcome will be decided by a combination of skill and luck. If you are planning on playing please check out the basic rules for FREE right here.

2019 By The Numbers

      Following hot on the heels of my Quarterly Review I crunched the numbers for the year. It has been a surprisingly productive year for me despite a number of "alarums and excursions"; I managed to set an all-time record for 190 Posts, 604 Comments (a good few of them were even encouraging) and 103,438 pageviews.

       Breakdown on my posts were as follows;

              How To......................................25
              Self-published Rules...................3
              Book Reviews...........................12
              Kit Reviews................................9
              After Action Reports................10
              Fort Walkarounds......................11
              Convention Reports....................4
              Rules Reviews............................3
              Figure Reviews.........................21
                    The balance were on miscellaneous subjects


       Along the way I managed to;

              Start yet another Campaign blog this one of the Great Epicurean War
              Attend four conventions
              Rebase about 1600 15mm Thirty Years Wars Minis
              Give away 1000+ 1/300 scale minis, 400+ 15mm minis, one 1/1200 scale fort
              Play ninety-one wargames (in one glorious week I managed five!)
              Paint twenty-four 28mm minis and one-hundred-twenty-two 15mm figures, two 1/700 scale ships and three 1/72 scale aircraft
              Scratchbuild a ruined city and a cartoonish Brandenburger gate
              Scratchbuild four stone bridges, a base for a Playmobil Gladatorial Arena, a half-dozen Saharan buildings, and a 28mm Dark Ages tower (complete with a shingled roof)

        In keeping with my objective of "rational/attainable/desirable/affordable" I have added very few new minis to the Project Pile and unloaded most of the stuff in smaller scales that I know I will never get around to painting. As the scales get larger the decision to part with the minis gets tougher (as I can at least pretend that I will eventually get around to putting brush to lead) but I will keep banging away at it until at least a modicum of sanity prevails.

        I hope everybody had as much fun as I did this last year and has more in the coming year!

        Keep rolling sixes!

Quarterly Review

     For a second time in a row I have managed to get my Quarterly Review done on time!  This past quarter has seen a slackening in games as my (and most other people's) schedule has interfered with gaming but I still managed to get 21 games in. I wrote forty-six posts in all of these I completed six minis reviews and four book reviews while  publishing four more fort walkarounds. I wrote After Action Reports on five games and painted an even dozen 28mm figures and ninety 15mm figures as well as two 1/700 scale ship models complete with rigging. Along the way I seem to have thrown together a 1/72 scale I-16. I added six "How-to" posts and got through giving away all of the rest of my 1/300 scale minis and all of the 15mm ancients (I will return to the Great Minis Giveaway in 2020 starting with the rest of the redundant 15mm stuff). I assembled and primed sixty 28mm Greeks to donate to Flintcon 2020 for their painting bench. The most overwhelming project for this quarter was completing the rebasing of 1600 15mm Thirty Years War minis (that sort of thing just sucks the soul out of me). All things considered a productive three months.

       Lets see what sort of pace I can keep up in 2020.

Literary Loot!

       What do you buy for a guy that has been collecting stuff (miniatures/rules/guns/woodworking tools, etc. etc)  for over forty years?  BOOKS!  Books of course; each new book is a package filled with hours of entertainment that fits into far less space than a 28mm Macedonian Phalanx or another M-88 Commission Rifle  (and it makes me look so danged ERUDITE to have a library packed with serious historical books). My family was kind enough to bless me with a mountain of reading material this holiday season and I can hardly wait to dig and fill the few remaining nooks and crannies in my brain with obscure facts (what was the facing color of the First Pomeranian Guards Regiment in 1688?......let's ask Anton!). I hope that everyone else was so lucky. And you best be prepared for more of my opinionated reviews coming down the pike!

 

in addition there is this mass of books and pamphlets 

that I collected from my trip to Florida in November

San Marcos de Apalache, walkaround

       Perhaps the most confusing site that I have ever visited, San Marcos de Apalache has been the site of many forts over the centuries. Other locations benefit from having a careful reconstruction or a complete fort still standing to provide a visual clue as to the location and history. In this location we find that the early forts have been utterly destroyed by hurricanes and later (partially completed) forts were built one atop the other. The physical structures extant are puzzling at first glance. I have tried to gather as many drawings and maps of the location to provide an idea of what the structures looked like before they fell into their current ruinous state. The park has an excellent little museum with an informative video and a good many informative panels supported by artifacts and models to illustrate  the long history of the St. Marks area.

the inevitable historical marker, packed with tantalizing bits of niformation

An Incident in Tunisia

       It being Pearl Harbor Day I thought that it would be appropriate if we did something WW2. Pearl harbor being a bit lop-sided as a battle I decided that I would present a game based on the first significant strategic invasion n that the US undertook in response; the invasion of North Africa.

 

a small airfield in the Tunisian back-country just after dawn

viewed from the West

Book Review Osprey Men At Arms MAA522 The Khazars

The Khazars
A Judeo-Turkish Empire on the Steppes, 7th-11th Centuries AD
Osprey Publishing

Men At Arms MAA522

Authors Mikhail Zhihorov and David Nicolle

Illustrator  Christa Hook

ISBN 978-1-4728-3013-5

        I found this to be an informative and interesting book. Previously the Khazars had just been a name on an army list that involved painting too many horses for my taste, I knew nothing of where they were and cared little of their appearance. This data-packed little volume has enlightened me about who they were and where they rules (I'm still unlikely to build an army reflecting them as I'm even slower at painting now than I was twenty years ago).
        This book follows standard Osprey format with a brief introduction as to who the Khazars were and then follows the expansion and eventual collapse of their empire. There is a delightful lack of the usual horrible Osprey maps, instead we are treated to a series of information dense black and white line maps that,paired with the time-line, give a clear idea of the rise and fall of the Khazar Khaganate. Scattered throughout the text a nice clear photos and very precise line drawings of recovered artifacts that illustrate recovered item. In this aspect it looks like the very best sort of archeological dig report. From this the reader can gain an understanding of what the armor and weapons of these warriors looked like and how they evolved over time. Excellent work indeed!
       What really brings to life the intensely detailed archeological details is the atmospheric artwork of Christa Hook. I do confess that I started buying Osprey Men at Arms before they had numbers due largely to the artwork. Christa Hook builds on that sterling reputation and adds to its repute with her energetic, evocative and precisely detailed drawings.

     Very highly Recommended!

All About That Base......

       Having agreed to run a Thirty Years War game at Spartacon on 11Jan20 I thought that I had best get off my backside and finish re-basing the rest of my figures. By "the rest of my figures" I mean most of the infantry which is something on the order of 400 minis! I have probably mentioned this before but I find rebasing particularly irksome; undoing work just to re-do it!

       But there was nothing left but to get started so off to the workshop I went.

 

the first step was to tear all of the figures off of their bases

this was tedious but uneventful until I got to the ones that had been painted by Trunkmonkey, 

he had gone to great lengths when he did these figures back in the early 90s 

and had cut plywood bases and superglued the figures to them 

the entire bases were glued to the larger Tercio bases

Fort Barrancas/Spanish Water Battery walkaround

 

barely still in Florida, 

Pensacola was "La Floridas" westward extremity for quite some time

 

a current aerial shot of the two forts, courtesy Google Earth

notice that North is in the upper left of this picture

     

       The most complete of the forts that I visited in my whirlwind tour of western Florida Fort Barrancas in on the Pensacola Naval Air Station. Like most coastal fortifications in the area it began as a Spanish effort and changed hands several times during the 1750-1820 period. The current fortifications consist of a late-period Spanish Water Battery and a U.S. Third System fort protecting the back of the Water Battery. Both are in excellent condition and are a nice contrast between the styles and thinking of the different systems of defense.These forts were built on the on the site of several previous fortifications dating back to 1698 which had been occupied by Spanish, English, and French forces in turn, for a delightfully tongue in cheek explanation of the convoluted military history of the forts around Pensacola check this post over at Starforts.com.