My Wargaming Theory

I wanted to take a little bit of time up front here and explain the type of game and the look and feel of the game I am striving to create.  I am most comfortable in a very structured world so it therefore follows that I prefer using a hex-gridded wargame board.  My current board uses 1.5" hexes and is a felt game board I purchased from Hotzmats (http://www.hotzmats.com/).  I have two versions of hex mats:  one with a flat side up and the other with a corner up).  I picked 1.5" hexes because a 1-inch square stand fits perfectly inside it.

I also wanted to be able to use a sort of modular terrain capability.  So I purchased from Litko (http://www.litkoaero.com/) a hole bunch of 3mm thick wooden hex bases.  Now, 3mm doesn't do much even for 10mm figures, so I glued two of them together which gives me some perfect 6mm hex-shaped elevations also in a 1.5" hex!  They also have paper-thin material (I think it is 0.8mm) and I spray painted some blue (for rivers) and some I painted tan (for roads).  I made up a hundred elevation hexes (spraypainted green) and I use the small 2'x3' hex mat so I have more than enough terrain hexes.  This lets me fight some pretty terrain-challebged battles or use a lot of elevations.  With this system I have total flexibility in setting up any battlefield I wish.  It also lets me set up a battlefield repeatedly if I ever wish to.

So there is my hex mat and my terrain pieces.  The third piece was to settle on miniatures to use.  The use of such a small board pretty much precludes using 20mm or larger figures.  That was my ow decision and certainly others may think different.  You will find that the figure actually used is totally irrelevant anyway as the game rules define the unit and not the figures.  Inistially I decided to go wi th 15mm figures and I shopped around and settles on Old Glory 15's.  They make some nice figures an I raised a whole bunch of jakhi-clad British soldiers.  The problem was that kakhi British did not really excite me as much as I had hoped.  The movie "Zulu" kept haunting meso I knew I had to do something else.

Then I happened upon the 10mm figures and put out a couple orders to see what they looked like.  The first figures I saw were from Perrin Miniatures that I bought through Strange Cargo Miniatures (http://www.strangecargogames.com/) and I fell in love with them!  They are the perfect British colonial soldier regardless of scale.  On a 1-inch square stand, which is a company, I can put 8 figures and for me that looks like a company.  Cavlry is mounted 3 to a stand and artillery is one gun per stand.  Remember that I only have one stand size, a 1-inch stand.  Again, structure and consistency are big things to me.

So now I had a hex mat, terrain, and figures to gith with.  But I had no place to fight!  My good friend, Larry Casey with whom I have been wargaming with since 1968, was also looking around for a good map to use.  It was right at that time that we noticed on the new Jack Scruby miniatures site Historifigs (http://historifigs.com/), another fantastic miniatures provider, had just reprinted Jack Scruby's old map of Mafrica upon which he had fought most of his vaunted colonial campaigns back in the 1960.s and 1970's.  So of course our decision was now made!  We both purchased the map and yet another piece was in place!

I had decided to do my campaigning in the southeastern part of Mafrica and launched my campaign by assaulting the mighty fortress city of Kismet.  Instantly though I had another problem.  My setup has made Kismet and the surrounding areas of the Debara River to be much like Mahdist territory but the only natives made by Perrin were Zulus.  So I started to look around for a solution.  And I found Panedraken Miniatures which solved all my problems.  And the beautiful thing is that they fit in rather nicely with my Perrin figures!  The height is right though they tend to be a little more robust than Perrin but on the field they work just fine.  To get the hoped for native mob look I found I could not mount 8 natives to a stand so I settles on 6 figures.  They are mounted in a mob and look pretty good (I will soon post some pictures).  I also decided to mount teh inevitable askari troops 6 to a stand only to distinguish them from the British.  I will talk about my Kismeti army in a later entry as they are my favorite troops of my whole collection.

I also wanted to put together a legations force in Kismet for something to do later so I have scrapped together a force of Perrin french sailors, Royal Navy sailors, and this led me to quite a collection of troops including a full force of Americans I haven't yet decided what to do with but I have them.  And if you ever look at the Mafrica map you will see all sorts of possibilities.  I will be posting a lot of documentation about the Mafrican continent in the days to come.

Here is a picture of a test battle just to give you a startying picture of what things look like:

Well, I will continue this in a later entry.  I hope this helps lay things out!