Saturday, December 25, 2010

Train of thoughts about ww1 and interwar period

I'm currently rewatching the second season of Young Indiana Jones, the WW1 years episodes.

This has given me the urge to start up either a WW1 project or a Polish-Soviet war project. There are a few things however. This entire post is just me thinking aloud (typing my thoughts). If you have any suggestions I will gladly hear them :-)

WW1: Thoughts
Western Front, this would suck balls unless the game revolved around "trench raiding" with small units rather then regular trench warfare. I've seen some pretty cool late war German miniatures for this purpose but think it would be too static in the end and with little variation.


Eastern front, nothing interesting really - doing Polish-Soviet war would be more fun.


Middle
east, Artizan makes good Lawrance of Arabia miniatures (arabs and even a Lawrance character). Not sure about this though.


Africa, this is probably the WW1 area with most promise for skirmish games with lots of flavor and character. Germans, British, Belgians and French fighting each other supported by natives.
Would be great to have Germans led by von Lettow-Vorbeck conducting guerilla war against an overwhelming but outwitted British expeditionary corp. Question is if there are good enough models for both sides, - natives included - to support this project?

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Polish-Bolshievik war: Thoughts

Now this would be very exciting for me personally, just like my Werid WW2/WW2 Polish platoon.
Main problem would be getting models to represent the Poles. True enough that armament, uniforms and pretty much everything in the army of the fledgling 2nd Republic was pretty much leftovers from Germany, Austria and Russia. It would be great to have a representation of Haller's "blue army". The charm of this period lies in the diversity in uniforms and looks of the units of the Polish army. It would be great fun to paint.


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Terrain:

Always playing on a trench table would get boring, but such terrain would find it's use for my Secrets of the Third Reich games as well, meaning it could be worthwhile to build something like that.  My main problem at the moment however is the complete lack of space - I don't even have any room for models anymore as my shelves are overcrowded already.

It would become more problematic with a Africa themed gametable since no other game I play would get use of such terrain, making the collecting of a WW1 force located in Africa consume a lot of time and effort.

Rules?

I've been glancing at the Back of Beyond stuff, I can't really decide whether to buy it or not. Guess I will have to read up on these rules before I make up my mind. Checked out the Back of Beyond book at Agis Neugenbauer's shop but it said it required the Battlefield Evolution book as well... hm...


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Alternative:

I have a platoon of early war Polish WW2 miniatures, the Bolt Action Miniatures range. They would work as anything dating back to 1936, making an opening at the Spanish civil war and the Dabrowski Battalion. That unit however were pro-Stalinist so I would rather eat a spoon of salt and throw up then even tconsidering it. Other alternatives would be border skirmishes with the Soviet union and Polish KOP units, or "alternate history" scenarios with interwar Polish and Germans fighting skirmish battles around the Prussian border. This would save time, money and terrain troubles since I already have everything needed. Rules could even be the "stripped of everything weird" Berlin or Bust rules - the WW2 spinoff of Secrets of the Third Reich by John Bailey which can be downloaded in a beta state for free off the SoTR forum.

Still very curious about the Back of Beyond rules and how they work. I know the SoTR core mechanics are solid and tactical. But will they work and be exciting in games were almost everyone is armed with Bolt Action Rifles only?

I also have a load of 6mm(?) WW2 early war Polish army miniatures which I received as a gift earlier this month. Don't really have a clue how to use them and for what purpose. Includes infantry, machine guns, mortar teams, cavalry, tankettes and 7TP tanks. They are too tiny to make a diorama, don't really have any single person to play 6mm with beside my buddy Calle but we decided upon doing tanks, artillery and planes exclusively for this scale so he doesn't have any infantry at all. This scale would also require the making of lots of terrain to make up for the lackluster paintjobs models like these end up with.

It's almost as if I would like to mount them on some flat bases and use them for a hex-based boardgame like Memoir44 but with more clever rules obviously.





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