Great War Great Reads: #1 – German Assault Troops of World War I

First, many apologies for my absence from the blog.  October has been a bit of an up and down month to say the least.  I was very busy at the end of September at work, and as soon as I finished the project I was working on I caught ‘flu. 

I’ve only had it once before, and I hadn’t remembered how awful it can be.  It’s taken a good two weeks to get over the worst of it, and in the process I’ve had to miss a great weekend of gaming in Burton with a couple of very good friends, Simon Gaudin and Craig Ambler.  Best laid plans and so forth – but all the same, I was deeply sorry I had to miss the weekend. 

Laid up in bed, there’ve been few high spots of the last couple of weeks in wargaming terms.  There’s not much you can do with the ‘flu other than lie in bed, as I am sure many of you know through similarly wretched experiences.  However, over the last week things have been getting back to normal and I’ve been working (very slowly) on my pictish warband.  More of that in the weeks to come.

 

I also finally managed to concentrate on a couple of books I’ve been saving for a while.  One of them is Thomas Wictor’s “German Assault Troops of World War I”.  This is a very lavish reference work, written by a very prominent contributor to various Great War online forums and follows his very well received first book on “German Flamethrower Pioneers of World War I”.  I thought I'd take the oportunity to review it here.

Painting Great War German Infantry – Part 3

There’s not actually much painting in the third, and final, part of my series on painting Great War German Infantry.  As you’ll remember from last time, the Stellungsbattalionkämpfer figures were at least 95% finished at the middle of last week.

I did, however, get the chance to add a German command group, and finish some casualty figures which have been on the painting table for a while.

 

So, what changes did I actually make to the Stellungsbattalionkämpfer?

Painting Great War German Infantry - Part 2

You wait for three months, and then two blog posts come around at once! Fired with renewed enthusiasm following yesterday's post, I finished the highlighting on the German troops I've been painting for what seems like months (actually, less than three weeks). As I mentioned yesterday, there wasn't much to do on the highlighting front.

The main job was painting the German feldgrau uniform.

Painting Great War German Infantry - Part 1

It’s taken a while to get round to this blog post, so thank you for bearing with me.  Sometimes it should be very simple to paint a handful of wargames figures, and just sometimes life conspires to do everything to prevent you doing just that.  Weekends away, swamped with work projects, friends' birthdays, sorting out the garden – the list goes on, and at each one of them the couple of dozen figures you’d planned the month before are still there, looking at you from the painting table, accusingly.  I’m sure you’ve all being there, at least at some point.

Anyway, as promised in the last post, here’s part 1 of a quick walk through on painting Great War German infantry.  It is not, I hasten to add, a tutorial or instruction!  There are hundreds of ways of getting a decent tabletop result for a 28mm.  And many, many better painters than me.  You really don’t have to go far to find people all over the internet giving helpful advice on how to paint figures, units and armies.  (And these are people who are far better organised than me as well and manage to post blogs less than almost three weeks apart!)

But with those caveats in mind, this is my way of getting a group of figures painted.  Hopefully it sits reasonably well alongside the companion posts I did last year on paintingGreat War British infantry.

Great War German Casualty Bases

You might remember that earlier this year I prepared a pair of British stretcher bearers and a handful of British casualties for use in our games of “Through the Mud and theBlood”.   It’s taken a while to do the same for the German forces, but in this post I’ve blogged the matching German casualty bases.

On each of the bases I tried to make a small impression to place a micro-dice into,  This serves to denote “shock” in the wargame, a feature which generally inhibits or restricts the actions of the unit suffering the “shock”.  We found in a lot of games that the micro-dice can get knocked over, hence the need for an impression in the base in which the micro-dice could be stored.  Kudos again to Curt from Analogue Hobbies for coming up with this fantastic idea.

Like grasping at smoke

Chasing them was like grasping at smoke.  We had followed their tracks for three days now.   Although we knew the paths and hillsides of the Grey Moors, all we could see of them was black figures barely-seen, darting in the half-light.  Sometimes we caught a glimpse of their spears, or heard the sharp cry of our cattle, stolen by them.  But more often, we heard nothing but the sound of the wind and the shriek of the ravens.

Only on the fourth day did we trap them, near the fell-side where my grandfather told me the Enemy had fallen long ago.  

They were nearer now.  We could hear their snarls and shouts in the heavy air.  They sounded more like animals in pain than men.  In the sharp shafts of seldom-sunlight, we could see their painted faces, stretched and twisted in anger and rage. 

Their horsemen goaded us, spears stretching in the fierce wind towards our braced shields.  Their children and young-bloods darted in the heather, snapping darts from strange bows, their javelins darkening the sky. 

A Few Loose Ends…

Just a quick note to say that I’ve now (rather belatedly) updated the scenario for “Breaking the D-Q Line” which we played at Bovington 2012.  I’ve added the German and British briefings, orders of battle, card information and special rules for those of you who would like to know all the secrets of the game!  The full scenario is available as a download from Google Docs on the on the right hand side of this blog under the heading  “Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries and Play-Aids”.

I’ve also up-loaded a pdf of my homemade card decks for “Through the Mud and the Blood” onto the blog.  I’m not sure how much use they will be to people.  The Big Men in the cards are all quite specific to the characters who have appeared in our games.  However, I know I very much enjoy looking through things like this when they get posted by other folk.  They were fun to prepare and pretty easy to produce.

So in the spirit of sharing, you can find mine in the section headed “Playtesting Scenarios, Campaign Diaries and Play-Aids”, again to be found on the right hand side of the blog.  The PDF file for the cards is quite large (they’re in colour), but if you keep clicking “download” in Google docs, you can hopefully get access.  Please let me know if there’s any difficulties accessing them.