Chalgrove 2022

Here are a few (clickable) images from the games I played yesterday at the Chalgrove "Worlds" - apologies if you've seen some already on Facebook. Above is game 1 vs. Sid Bennett's newly painted and very pretty Samnites. Sid's javelin-chucking Samnites out all too many of my nellies, I think I had just two units left at the end- he was well ahead on points. Always great to play Sid, he's really knowledgeable about the rules.

A quick note on my Classical Indian army- my objective was to maximise the number of elephants on the table, so I picked eight small units and represented each with two models, for a total of 16 pachyderms. I suppose I could have fitted even more elephants in the baggage- perhaps an idea for a future outing!

Here's game two against Kurt from Belgium. Kurt had a splendid army of Teutonic knights, including militant nuns. I began the game supremely confident that my nellies would trample the knights, but it was not to be. Even though my save was excellent (in some cases 3+ vs mounted, on one occasion, when uphill, 2+ !!), on the rare occasions I failed a save, the subsequent rampages often killed several additional units. This army is very much a "glass hammer." Kurt was ahead on points at the end. Below is a shot of the "thin grey line" resisting the charges of the knights.

Here's the last photo I took, of Andy Powell and his Crusaders, mid-game. On the left I managed to squish the mounted Crusader knights. Eventually I took out most of the foot knights in the centre, too, but I lost a fair number of nellies along the way and failed to win outright.

Unfortunately I forgot to photograph my final game against Tony Horobin's (left, photo taken after the end of the game so unfortunately, none of his minis) Middle Imperial Romans, which is a great, pity as it was very a friendly game which I won, with seconds to spare, just before the end of the tournament.

The tournament was won by Peter Ryding (again!) with a Timurid army, very well done to him. He practices very hard for the tournament. I ended up right in the middle of the field. Unfortunately I don't have all the scores but I think Alex and Kurt from Belgium came second and third.

Steve Dover, with help from chums Simon Purchon, Peter Ryding and John (? sorry can't recall surname) did a fantastic job setting up and running the tournament, huge thanks to them. Below is a photo of all those participants who hadn't legged it by the time we got around to taking the group photo.

 Finally, we have two more tournament coming up later this year:

The first is the TtS! Opens, part of the BHGS Historical Teams event at the Lee Valley Leisure Centre in north London on Saturday 15th October. Like Chalgrove, there are four games in one day. You can use any army list from the Ancient Army List eBook. You can book this here. The ticket also gets you entry to SELWG which is in the same venue on the Sunday, a great show where I'll be running a participation game - Second Mantinea - which features Epaminondas and the Theban mega phalanx.

The last tournament will be at Warfare at the Farnborough International Exhibition & Conference Centre on Saturday 12th or Sunday 13th November (we haven't decided which day yet). If you think you'd like to come to this one, please email me and I'll forward to the organiser.

I hope to see you at one event or t'other!

Building Roundway Down out of Really Useful Boxes and Masking Tape

For our refight of Roundway Down, I decided wanted to have a hill 12' long, covering the entire battlefield. Here are the stages involved in assembling it, for the big game on Saturday.

First, we arranged 36 spare (!) Really Useful Boxes on a table. I had thought I'd brought way too many, since they filled the car but in fact I only had just enough. The top of the hill, at the back, is two 9L boxes high, around 12".

Above, next we covered the boxes with 6mm MDF boards

Next (again above) we taped the edges of the boards together, to stop them slipping.

Next we covered the boards with rug gripper. This adds structural strength and stops the top cloths slipping during play.

Finally, we laid a black cloth over it, covering the sides, another layer of rug gripper with a terrain cloth over the top of that, and a light random scattering of trees.  Job done, ready for the troops to be set up in the morning!

Below is the real hill at Roundway Down, looking up towards the Parliamentarian position on the crest, as photographed on a recent research trip with Andrew Brentnall, on the anniversary of the battle, showing the slightly-parched July pasture, which is a pretty good match for our cloth.

I hope to see lots of you at Colours tomorrow! We are on the second floor, near the Bring and Buy.

Roundway Down at Colours

I'm in the process of finishing off the extra elements I have planned for our extended Battle of Roundway Down For King and Parliament game at the Colours show in Newbury on Saturday. Above are the new units- Prince Maurice's horse, Captain ffoulkes' firelocks*, some battalion guns and some extra casualty stands. Below is my forming baggage park, now with three teams of horses. 

Many of the minis were painted by chum Shaun McTague or eBay purchases, although Prince Maurice's are built around a core of minis originally painted by chum George Moraitis. I painted the wagons and highlighted/finished everything, Ian flocked all the bases, which I'm in the process of tufting - they will all be finished by the day. I will take some proper photos, later on, when everything is completely finished.

If you fancy playing on Saturday, drop me an email at simonmiller60 at gmail.com and I'll hopefully be able to fit you in. It should be a relatively short game- around 90 minutes, I expect. If not just drop by and marvel at the size of our hill! I hope to see lots of you there.

* There wasn't an actual ECW unit of this name, although there were a number of small units of firelocks on both sides. Captain ffoulkes is a Welsh officer and entirely a figment of my imagination.