Gunfight In Dodge City!

As promised, here is the second post on my Wild West gaming using the Dracula's America ruleset. While I had the whole town set up on the table, I took the opportunity to play a couple of games with different friends. The second game with John was played out with a view to using the action to briefly illustrate how the rules work and why I find them enjoyable. 

The rules are based around three different sets of dice, rolled when a character is required to take a test such as when shooting or fighting hand to hand. These 'Grit' dice reflect the effectiveness of each character, i.e. a novice uses D6 dice, a veteran uses D8 dice and the hero uses D10 dice. As all of the game tests are looking for dice rolls of 5 or higher to be successful, it is obviously easier for a hero to succeed than a novice.

Unlike most rule sets, dice modifiers such as for range, or cover in shooting, are not applied to the result that needs to be achieved. Instead they reduce or increase the number of dice rolled to achieve the 5's in the test. All tests start with 3 dice, but long range firing for instance will reduce it to 2 dice, whereas backshooting or elevated shooting will increase the number of dice by 1 each. 5 or above is still required for a successful damage roll, obviously easier to achieve the more dice a character rolls. 

By using the 3 different dice levels in this way you have a simple reflection of skill and experience, that is then modified for circumstances during an action such as shooting, but in a simple way that is easy to remember in the heat of a game. 5 and above is the magic number and circumstances and skill levels dictate to determine how easy that is to achieve. 

To determine the order of play, each player draws a hand of cards at the start of each round of play. A posse of 6 characters will for example, draw 4 cards. During the round, each player chooses one card and turns it face up. Whoever plays the better card gets to activate 2 characters with 1 action or 1 character with 2 actions. Being able to move and shoot, or shoot two different weapons , is obviously advantageous. There are however, never enough cards in the hand for one for each character, so if you want all of your characters to perform an action each turn, you need to restrict some to one action only.

The card play thus brings a number of dynamics into play. Choosing a card to try to win the chance to activate your character before your opponents is sometimes vital, as is deciding which characters to activate, in which order and how many actions to give to each. 

Johns Posse of lawmen

When a character is shot or attacked in hand to hand combat and the requisite 5's are thrown, the target gets a saving throw depending on how many 5's the attacker has rolled. A failed save means damage taken leaving the character shaken, down on the ground or dead! Characters shaken or downed can recover in the end phase of each turn, although its not easy to achieve in my experience. 

My Gang of outlaws

John and I played a straightforward scenario, with 2 posses of 6 characters facing off in the town. John had the lawmen defending the good people of Dodge whilst I had a gang of outlaws intent on putting the law out of action. We each had 3 novices, 2 veterans and 1 hero. The novices were armed with rifles and a pistol and everyone else had 2 pistols. I advanced up either side of the main street taking cover where I could and giving one of my riflemen an elevated position on a rooftop. Johns lawmen patiently waited for me to close, all in positions of cover. 

First blood went to me when 1 of my novices downed 1 of Johns veterans, but he soon evened up the score by downing one of my gang. Sporadic shooting broke out until everyone was shooting as the distances between them lessened. By turn 6 ,John had 3 men down to my 2, but much to my disappointment managed to down my gang leader in a close range exchange!

My gang leader eats lead!

So at the end of turn 6, we both had 50% of our posses' on the ground, not dead but incapacitated. This meant we both had to take a 'bottle test' and roll for the required '5'! As John still had his shaken hero still in play he could roll on a D8. I only had 3 novices in play so had to roll on a D6. John rolled successfully and I failed my roll, meaning my posse had to retreat licking their wounds. Victory to John.

Curses!

It was a fun game which we both enjoyed and we intend to play again in the not too distant future. We both felt the rules played well and couldn't really fault them. 

Since the game I have been thinking how relatively easy it would be to transpose these rules to some different eras of warfare. Sharpe's men against French Voltigeurs perhaps? A skirmish between a cavalry patrol and a local unit in the English Civil War? Something to think about anyway!

Conclusion - a great rule set! If skirmish games appeal to you and you want an elegant, not overly complex set of rules, give them a try. You may even find yourself fighting Vampires in the Wild West!

Tara a bit!

Toy Fair Plunder - A Sunday Morning Diversion

Every couple of months or so there is a large (300 stalls) toy fair held at the Stafford County showground, which is about 45 minutes by car. I have got into the habit of going to this show plus another one held 3 times a year, at Malvern Three County Showground. They are both general toy fairs, but toy soldiers are present at both. I thought I would quickly share the spoils of todays visit and also touch upon my buying strategies, if you can call them that!

I always buy an 'early bird' entry ticket. Why wouldn't you? Yes its generally twice the normal entry fee. At Stafford for instance, its £10 instead of £5, but you can get in 2 and half hours before everyone else. The advantages of this are twofold. First of all you can walk round leisurely and see every stall without crowds of people jostling you and getting in the way and more importantly, you get to buy before the majority of the attendees. I am primarily looking for cheap hollow cast figures and accessories and they are not in abundance. So getting an opportunity to buy before anyone else is valuable. These two factors are worth an extra £5 to me every time. 

As I have previously made clear, I am primarily a wargamer and my main focus is 54mm traditional toy soldiers. I enjoy buying unloved, battered, hollow cast figures and repairing and repainting them. I am also happy to buy figures in good condition, so that I don't have to strip and repaint them , but they have to be at the right price point. Todays purchases are fairly typical for me and cover both of these categories. 

The restored Horseguards, awaiting a coat of green paint on the bases

A few months back I bought some Britains Horseguards at a toy fair and didn't notice until I got them home that they were showing signs of lead rot. Unhappy, I gave them to my very good friend John to melt down and reuse for some of his Prince August castings. Not unusually for John, he decided that they were still too good to be melted down and he carefully restored them and freshly repainted, presented them back to me as an unexpected gift. As there were only 4 including the Farrier I needed to add another 2 or 3 to make a minimum of 6 for a unit. I have some unpainted castings which I can use for this purpose but today found a better solution. Three mint condition original figures which the dealer kindly sold to me for a total of £8. So at under £3 each I have completed the unit and can use the other castings elsewhere at a later date. I just need to base them .

The new recruits

Other 'good' figures I found today, included a nice Scots Grey Officer for £5. I already have some poor condition castings awaiting their turn for refurbishment and it will be nice to match them up to this Officer in a unit. 

From the same dealer, I picked up a mint Arab on horse with Jezail rifle. I already have a refurbished unit of these but for another £5 I thought I would start recruiting another unit. 

For a 60 plus year old mounted figure in extremely good, almost mint condition, I consider £5 a very fair price. I prefer to pay under £3 for examples that need work on them. It is worth bearing in mind that modern recasts and similar can cost £8 to £10 each for a bare metal casting. As for Infantry, I will try to pay £1 to £3, possibly a pound or two more for special figures like Officers etc. Again modern castings are £4 or £5 each.

All of the above figures came from a box of 'everything a pound'! I love to see such boxes as these give me the figures to convert, refurbish etc. Missing arms are the biggest issue, but John casts me some from his Prince August moulds which are sometimes just right and its possible to buy recast Britains arms as well. Nothing rare here but all good fodder!

From the same box. Animals are the easiest castings to pick up cheap and generally speaking I have enough and avoid them. Dogs are however useful additions for commanders etc and I want more Britains Highland Cattle. The others were just odd figures that took my eye.

Again from the same £1 box! Can't have too many wells (Taylor and Barret I think), or dog kennels?

The two Britains lying logs are fantastic pieces of scatter terrain and Sniper cover! I must have 5 of these now. The corn stacks by Charbens are again lovely scatter pieces to enhance my rural battlefields. The trunk will be useful and the feed trough a nice little piece. All told I bought 24 pieces from the £1 box and was charged £20. 

My two favourite finds were the Britains pre war village girl and the Johilco Bulldog, both of which I have wanted for a while now. The Bulldog normally sells for anywhere between £5 and £10, so to find it in my £1 box was great. I actually paid £2 for the village girl but again she is normally more than that. Both need stripping and repainting but that will be a pleasure!

So there we have it, another collection of lead waifs and strays bought home to Apperley Towers, for new adventures. I still buy from E-bay, but its not as much fun as searching the tables of the toy fairs. You just don't know what will turn up and very often, very cheaply. I may make this a regular series of posts if there is interest? 

 

Tara a bit!

Just Another Day In Dodge City.............

One of my earliest memories, is of Friday morning shopping trips with my mother to the local village shops. These were in Roseville, a small village in Coseley, here in the heart of the Black Country. I was 4 years old and not yet at school. I was toy soldier mad even then, and had a large collection of soldiers which I played with most days. 

Toy Soldiers were sold everywhere in those halcyon days, from the Timpo counter packs in the post office, to Lone Star, Crescent and others in the newsagents and of course B.J. Flavell's bicycle and toyshop (of which more another day!). But best of all, was 'the pram shop' ,which sold everything for babies and very young children, including for some unknown reason, Britain's Swoppets! 

Roseville in the early 1960's with Flavell's toyshop to the right of the picture

Swoppets were expensive (2 or 3 other makers figures for the same price) and my parents struggled to make ends meet, but on several joyous occasions my mother did buy me a Swoppet. I always chose a Cowboy with the removeable pistols and thought they were just the best toy soldiers that could be bought. I pride myself on being a discerning toy soldier enthusiast even at that early age! 

60 years later, I have a modest collection of these figures, plus the glorious Stagecoach and a couple of other wagons. I also have a wild west town that I have collected over the years, utilising all of the fantastic Britain's Swoppet buildings, plus some made by Timpo and others. 

n addition I have a wooden street of Wild West buildings made by a company called 'ELF'. As a child I had this exact same item and was extremely pleased when I stumbled across this one in an antiques centre in the late 1990's. For ten pounds I was able to bring it back home to Apperley Towers for my Swoppet Cowboys to fight over again! 

My Swoppets are bolstered with a few refurbished hollowcasts and a lot of the excellent Replicant figures from the talented Peter Cole. I love the movement that Peter puts into his models and his figures are a mix of civilians and gunslingers which fit in so well. To round off the collection I do of course have the excellent Timpo 'Prairie Rocket' train. Just so the new Marshall, or the outlaw gang, can arrive on the mid-day train!

As with all of my toys, I do still like to play games with them and not just leave them languishing in cabinets or boxes. I am a gamer at heart, so all that was missing now to bring this collection to life, was a decent set of rules. These presented themselves to me in 2017, when Osprey published 'Dracula's America , Shadows Of The West'. 

These rules are for a Gothic Horror skirmish game set in the Old West which sounded interesting. To paraphrase from the rear jacket of the book.......

'It is 1875, and Count Dracula is president of the USA. President Lincoln has been assassinated along with his administration and in the chaos that follows, dominating the Senate, Dracula declares himself president for life!'

This is of course total fantasy, as the Whitehouse could never be inhabited by a malign character with ambitions to become President for life. Nonetheless, my curiosity was piqued and I bought the book.

In my next post, I will talk about the rules mechanics in the context of an actual game, which I will be playing with my very good friend and longtime fellow gamer, John C. So until then...

Tara a bit!

Floor Games......An Inspirational Tale

 I have recently added a nice first edition copy of  'Floor Games' by H.G.Wells, to the library here at Apperley Towers. This is a book which has both inspired me and influenced my thinking about what I want from my toy soldier games. It speaks to the child in me who still wants to push toy soldiers around in a make believe world, where the combatants can all be heroes who live to fight another day. A far remove from the horrors of the real world and a welcome reprieve from the pressures of the need for historical accuracy. H.G. Wells wrote it with a warmth and sense of whimsy, that draws the reader in and this is reinforced by the delightfully comic marginal illustrations of J.R Sinclair.

Floor Games was published in December 1911, some 18 months or so before its more well known sequel, 'Little Wars'. Floor Games is not a book about wargaming per se, but a book about children's imagination, world building and a father encouraging his two sons to explore the worlds they create together on the nursery floor. Wells brings those worlds to life as he explains to the reader the conventions that rule their imaginary countries. He paints a picture, with the help of Sinclair's cartoons and some photographs, of the architecture and terrain where these adventures take place.

It is this combination of English humour, and the rich and inventive landscapes inhabited by the toy soldiers of his children, that chime with my own ambitions. In particular, the world building that they so enjoy, is something that I have come to enjoy more and more. Creating a visually stimulating background and 'country' for my armies to struggle over, is a source of huge pleasure to me. I get just as much satisfaction from acquiring or creating a new building or civilian character, as I do painting a new unit of troops. Yes, toy soldiers and the wargame are the core of my ambitions, but the scenery against which they are set, is the icing on the cake.

I suspect I am in a minority in the small community of people who like to game with traditional scale toy soldiers, but I am sure there are others who feel the same way. If anything I have said chimes with you, then don't hesitate to track down a copy and read it. Its a book which I have enjoyed for many years, having stumbled across a special library reprint from 1966, which I think was only available to university and public libraries. At the time, in the late 1980's, it was a struggle to find a copy at all, but it has since been reprinted and is now widely available. 

I wanted to read it, as its successor volume Little Wars had been a favourite book since my teenage years. I frequently borrowed a 1973 reprint from Dudley library  and was curious about the other book. It was 20 years before I found the abovementioned copy for £4.50 in a little second hand bookshop in Halesowen.

I later acquired a first edition of Little Wars, but unfortunately it was stolen at an event I attended in the early 2000's, where I had taken it to show friends. It was a nice copy that had belonged to the son of the publisher. The Christian in me hopes whoever stole it needed it very badly, but I also hope their 4.7" Naval cannons never fire true and that lead rot visits their toy soldiers! 

I have missed that book, and always wanted to source a decent replacement copy and eventually the stars aligned in spectacular fashion, when nice affordable copies of both books came up at  virtually the same time!

Both books were published by Frank Palmer and when seen together are obviously companion volumes which the publisher felt would appeal to the same readership. Whether they were planned as such originally, I am not sure. I suspect 'Little Wars' was an opportunity that the publisher seized upon, following the publication of two articles by Wells on his wargames, in the Windsor magazine. The decision to then make the books similar in  style and appearance would however make good commercial sense. In fact there is an advert for Floor Games in the frontispiece of the first edition of Little Wars, mentioning it as 'uniform with this volume'.

As I reflect upon these two books, I realise that they encapsulate the two sides to my current wargaming experience. The first, my desire to 'create worlds' and the second, my yearning to fire fine artillery pieces at those iconic toy soldiers, even if only in dice form!

I am not a dedicated Bibliophile, but these two first editions give me a sense of time and place which modern reprints would not. I am fortunate enough to have in my artillery park, an original first version of the iconic 4.7" Naval gun (with the closed trail). It gives me pleasure, to imagine that the great man himself may have fired this exact same gun during a game with his friend Jerome K. Jerome. 

Both volumes will now reside safely here in the library at Apperley Towers, until such time as I am called upon to roll some dice on the large wargames table in the sky! 

As a postscript to this tale, the copy of Floor Games in question has a bookplate in it for an 'Oliver Brett'. Curiosity and a quick Google search quickly established that the bookplate is that of Oliver Sylvain Baliol Brett, 3rd Viscount Esher. As he did not succeed to the title until 1930, the bookplate must have been placed no earlier. He was then approaching 50 years old. Was he too a toy soldier enthusiast? We shall never know, but it gives the book an interesting provenance. Maybe its time I had my own book plates printed!

When I started this Blog, I promised there would always be toy soldiers.......so I will sign off this very bookish post with pictures of things to come........

Tara a bit!