A Military Gentleman 2017 weekend

This weekend saw the third gathering of past and present members of the AMG forum for a fantastic weekend of wargaming, banter, eating and of course an occasional drink, and it is thanks to the forum set up for those fortunate enough to purchase a copy of John Ray's A Military Gentleman book that we were all drawn together to take part in this and the previous events. Attendees came from far and wide from all corners of the UK and we were also joined by Der Alte Fritz himself in the person of Jim Purkey who flew in from Chicago.

As noted in the previous post, there were four games this weekend, three 18th Century (War of the Spanish Succession, Jacobite Rebellion of 1745 and my Leuthen set during the Seven Years War), as well as a Sands of the Sudan game. Leuthen was run once on each day while the others being smaller managed to run at least a couple of times a day, which meant that most attendees got to play in at least three games over the weekend.

Here are a selection of photos from the weekend's games. I will do a more detailed report of the two Leuthen games in a separate post.

The entire event was organised incredibly well by Stuart Insch and ran like clockwork, and the hotel staff were faultless in their efforts to keep us fed and watered throughout the sweltering weekend, which, given that the hotel was hosting 380 ballroom dancers attending a Dancing with the Stars weekend is pretty remarkable.

Roll on next year!

Heading south....not my waist, but to Kenilworth!

Tomorrow I shall be heading off to the third annual gathering of members of the 'A Military Gentleman' forum for a weekend of (mainly) 18thC wargaming. Not everyone going is a current member of the forum but everyone is united by the fact that they purchased the aforesaid book and were, for a time at least in some cases, active members of the forum as well as being avid 18thC wargamers.

There are four games being hosted this year. A Jacobite Rebellion game (Graham Cummings), a War of the Spanish Succession game (Paul Robinson), a 19thC Sudan game (Martin Gane) which isn't 18th C obviously but is using the old Peter Gilder rules, and a Seven Years War battle put on by my good self, with my lovely assistant Robbie.

The game is a refight of the iconic battle of Leuthen (5 December 1757) using the Honours of War rules, and based on the scenario for the battle published by Charles S. Grant in one of his 'Wargaming in History' volumes.

I've played Leuthen a few times over the years at home; here are some pictures from those earlier games.

This time I've made a few minor adjustments to the forces involved and there are roughly 15 Austro/Imperial battalions and 10 Prussian battalions, each of 36 figures and 19 Austro/Imperial and 15 Prussian cavalry regiments each of 12 figures. In total with gunners etc a little shy of 1500 figures, all from my own collection! I thought there would have been more. The Prussians have much more artillery and the benefit of battalion guns while the Austrian and Reichsarmee infantry have either abandoned them in their retreat or abandoned them in their haste to redeploy to face the Prussian flanking attack. Of course in terms of troop quality, the Prussian infantry are superior to their enemy, and the Reichsarmee battalions (with one exception) are pretty rubbish.

I'm looking forward to the game and hope to run it at twice on Saturday and once on Sunday. The only downside is that I won't get to play in any of the other games, but I will get a great deal of enjoyment out of seeing the players in my game puzzling over the tactical problems that the scenario presents.

A quick update. Durham Wargames Group show and other stuff.

I wasn't planning on going to the DWG show this year. I'm just back from a couple of days away and haven't really got the energy, but I had arranged to collect a new piece scratch built by my mate Stuart so Katherine offered to drive me and we nipped down for half an hour or so.

If I had to be absolutely honest, in my view the show needs a refresh, is tired and doesn't promote for me what is most important, the actual GAMING aspect of the hobbey, i.e. the whole point of it surely? There were plenty of traders (Eagle, Dave Thomas, Irregular, Pendraken, Colonel Bills, Northumbria Games to name but a few), but only four games! One of those was the Club game, which was in the bowling pavilion, and another was as 40mm Wars of the Roses game by Andy of Old Glory with his mates from the Tantobie group, both of which were sizeable games with good'ish terrain. The other two games were small rather cluttered skirmish games which I think were participation games. I didn't like them.

That said, the show appeared to be quite well attended, and I got to catch up for a chat with a good number of wargaming friends, which is always one of the highlights of any Wargames show for me at  least.

 Above are two pictures of Andy's 40mm Wars of the Roses game. The figures were great and the terrain looked good too. There seemed to be lots of action. I think they were using Lion Rampant.

 These three are the Durham club's ACW refight of Front Royal in May 1862. The game was still developing and would no doubt hot up later as the Confederates tried to overwhelm the Union defenders. Again nice figures and terrain although apparently it wasn't quite finished.

I didn't take photos of the other two games as there didn't appear to much going on. We were in a rush so may have missed the action.

Now to something completely different. I recently purchased a Trent Duke of York figure for my Flanders 1794 and 1799 Helder campaigns British. I thought he needed a hill so here he atop one, about to lead his men back down again!

Finally, I collected this scratch built French telegraph station off my mate Stuart, which will be figuring in a forthcoming French Revolution game.

I have some sorting out to for a game on Tuesday with Robbie, and then on Friday I'm off to the AMG Forum weekend game in sunny Kenilworth.