Sahel Conflicts: Terrain

I've been painting figures for a bit now, so decided it was time to prepare some terrain that was appropriate for Mail and the western Sahel.  

From the photos I've seen, a lot of the soil has an orange or pink undertone, so I am using Deep-Cut Studio's badlands mat as my base. As fighting over mostly open terrain would be rather dull, I decided a village was really needed to keep things interesting on the table. Most adobe buildings currently in production have a Middle Eastern style and aren't really quite right for the styles seen in western Africa. I spent a lot of time searching for options and thought I'd have to scratch build, but was lucky enough to finally stumble upon Fogou Models in the UK. Their line was perfect for what I wanted. 

The prices weren't cheap and shipping to the US was expensive (the resin is heavy; my village came in at 4kg), but the products were wonderful and they threw in a few extras, which was great.  Casting was top notch with minimal bubbles and clean up. There was no release compound residue, so they took primer and paint well (didn't even need to wash them). I was also highly impressed with the surface details in the stucco.  Doors came separately, and there were also lots of add ons available, so you can get fair amount of visual variety from the kits. The kits also had lift off roofs with interior detailing. If there was one downside to the line, it would be that it runs on the smaller side.  Standard 28mm miniatures on thin bases have their heads right at the top of the door frames, so heroic 28mm and the newer 32mm figures will look over-sized, particularly on a thick base.

Large Adobe 1C runs 13x9cm and will hold 6 miniatures on 25mm round bases.

Large Adobes 1B and 1E are actually Medium Adobes 2A and 2B with Small Adobes 4E and 4F on the roofs. It's cheaper to buy them as the sets rather than the individual buildings.  For my buildings, I bought an add on frontage for one and some external staircases. The base buildings run 11.5x8.5cm and will also hold 6 figures.

The upper levels/small adobes run 7x5cm and will hold 2 figures.

Medium Adobe 3C is 10x7.5cm  and can hold 4 figures.

The Adobe Bakehouse has the same 7x5cm footprint seen in the small buildings for the rectangular section and a 5cm diameter tower. There is no internal floor, and you can fit 3 figures if you use the tower.

The granaries in the Medium Adobe 2A set are comprised of the same buildings in the Small Adobe section (again, cheaper to buy as a group) and are all around 5cm in diameter, with space inside for a single figure. My kits did not include the small doors or roof posts, so I'm not sure if that was an oversight or if it's how they are sold.  Regardless, it was easy to create them out of balsa wood and bamboo grilling skewers.

The kits themselves only came with flat roofs, but the village photos often depicted granaries with thatch roofs, so I decided to make some from scratch. These were made from stacked cones of heavy card with the aforementioned bamboo skewers used to reinforce the points.

These were then covered with strips of teddy bear fur, with the tops scalloped to help them fit around the cones. To hold the fur down before the next steps, they were given a coating of Woodland Scenics' scenic cement.

The thatch tie downs were made from braided thread and glued down with super glue, before the entire assembly was painted with various shaded of brown and gray.

Fogou wall segments run about 8.5cm long, and this gate height gives you a good impression of the clearance for 28mm figures. Realistically, you'll need 2 or more sets to really do anything with them.

A bit of scatter terrain for the village. I'll also throw in some of my old Ainsty Castings bits and will look for some additional elements in the future.

In addition to the village, I also made some rock and tree elements using bits from Woodland Scenics and Gamers Grass.

Living in a small space, I generally have to transport my terrain to play elsewhere, and I've always had problems with my trees starting to fall apart over time. As such, I tried a new tree technique this time in hopes they will last longer . Previously, I had use the large foliage clumps glued directly to the tree armature, but for this build, I first glued down large clumps of their light green polyfiber, coated it with a generous amount of Scotch Super 77 spray adhesive, and then used the finer underbrush light green clumps.  It seems to have formed a stronger bond, but the annoying bit is the glue dried a milky color rather than the promised clear. As such, you can see webs of white between the leaves.  There's not much I can do at this stage, but my hope is they will look like fine branches in the top of the trees.

Lastly, since this is a farming village, I needed something for them to farm. Looking online, cotton is a major export crop for Mali, and corn is a food staple, so I thought those were good places to start. Both crops were produced by JTT Scenery Products.  The local shop only had HO scale cotton in stock, but I think the size looks ok (I have them mounted on thin  plasticard, so I don't think they sit a deep as intended).

I was able to find the corn in O scale, but did end up trimming some of the bottoms off the stocks to keep them from looking too big.

I might still pick up a few additional odds and ends, but I think this will give me a good skirmish table for my modern games, and I could also see it being pressed into service for my 19th century African games as well.

North Star Rug Ruga

Outside of Bolt Action, my local hobby shop doesn't usually carry much in the way of historicals these days, so I was pleasantly surprised when some packs of North Star's Africa line showed up on the racks. In hopes of encouraging more of this, I bought several packs of the Ruga Ruga to create a raiding party who could support my German forces.  This was made up of two packs of extreme musketmen, and one each of packs 1 and 2 of the musketmen.

The figures are full of character and and the sculpting quality is quite good. The castings had minimal levels of flash, though I found some of the details on the guns to be soft and one figure had a strap that wasn't cast properly (fixed with some green stuff).  However, these are minor complaints that can be hidden in the paint jobs.

Since I had two packs of the extreme musketmen (masked troops), I did my best to come up with varied paint schemes to hide the duplicates. 

I didn't catch it at the time of purchase, but it turns out musketmen packs 1 and 2 are actually the same body dollies with different head variants (and the same running dolly is used by the extreme pack). I would have preferred more varied poses in my squad, but at this stage there was nothing to do but again try to vary the paint schemes.

I don't have any of the Foundry Ruga Ruga to do a size comparison, but here is one of the figures up against a Foundry Masai, Copplestone Azande, and Warlord plastic Natal Native. The bases vary a few millimeters in thickness, but I think the figure sizes are comparable, along with the sculpt styles.

I'm quite happy with the final unit and hope I'll get a chance to get them on the table sometime in the near future.

Death in the Dark Continent: First Game and Impressions

My gaming group has been regular users of Chris Peers' "In The Heart of Africa" and "Contemptible Little Armies" rules for our Africa games, and we've found them to be quite enjoyable for our casual get togethers. With North Star releasing his new "Death in the Dark Continent" rule set, we wanted to see if it brought anything new to the table.

For our first trial game, Steve and I tried a clash of two European forces: British and French.  We went with the basic "Pitched Battle" scenario to be fought over a jungle outpost. The scenario description says that bases can be placed anywhere up to 6" of the opposing table edge, so we both decided to deploy around the middle of the table.

Steve won the dice role for initiative, and placed his French in the village while I did my best to surround them.

 The British askari charged the French tirailleurs holding the trading outpost, but were pushed back and received 2 disorder markers.

Meanwhile, the British soldiers moved in on the left to threaten the French baggage, while Sikhs moved in on the right behind the outpost.

The askari and Sikhs opened fire on the tirailleurs and failed to eliminate any bases, but managed to cause some disorder. The 1st legionnaire squad began firing at the Sikhs, while the 2nd legionnaire squad moved to protect their baggage from the advancing British.

The askari and tirailleurs continued their exchange of gunfire at the trading outpost, with neither side managing to dislodge one another. Meanwhile, the Sikhs changed targets and charged the 1st squad of legionnaires.  Their action was unsuccessful and they were forced to retreat. 

On the other side of the village, the 2nd legionnaire squad and the British unleashed a hail of bullets at each other.

Shooting continued for another round and though no bases were lost, the disorder markers continued to pile up.

 The 1st legionnaire squad finally launched a counter-charge against the Sikhs, but after a short stalemate they were pushed back.

The 2nd legionnaire squad and the British exchanged another round of fire, with the British eventually deciding to take cover behind the huts and move into position to support the asakri advance towards the tirailleurs.

The Sikhs eventually managed to eliminate a base of  legionnaires while the askari overran and slaughtered the tirailleurs.

At this stage we decided to call it a British victory and end the game.

So our thoughts on the rules:

• The production value is top notch, with beautiful pics, extensive army lists, and a lot of historical reference.  And it's well indexed with quick reference sheets to boot!
• It generally plays similarly to his previous rules, with the major difference being the use of multi-figure bases instead of individual figures. We didn't want to rebase out figures, so used 2x1 movement trays from Warbases. The larger bases did cause us some confusion in determining how to draw line of sight for shooting, but we later got some clarity from the Facebook group (2 corners of a base need to be visible to the attacking unit).
• Our impression is that morale breaks are what is going to win or lose combats much more so that base loss. In our game, only 2 bases were lost to critical hits.
• There are a lot of dice modifiers for the shooting and melee (16 each, both additive and subtractive!) that really slowed the attacks as we tried to work out the math. I think this is the weakest part of the new rules and it would have been better if they had fewer modifiers and and had stuck with either additive or subtractive instead of mixing in both.  Or perhaps they could better organize them to help with improving the processing speed.
• For close combat, the unit sizes don't actually play a role in any of the above modifiers, which we found rather odd. It will be interesting to play again with natives to see if this confers any advantages to to either side.

Final verdict: While solid, we weren't really sold that the rules are a significant improvement over Chris Peers' other rule sets. It seemed more like a variation on a theme, with some things working better and some less so. If you've already invested in the other rules and army books, I'm not sure this would be worth picking up.  However, if you're just starting out in African gaming, this would be a good purchase, as the rules include all the army lists and histories, plus a bonus big game hunting set of rules.

Zulu War Artillery and Officers

I've been moving slower on this project than I would like, but I've finally gotten a few more items off the painting table.  First up is a 7pdr gun from Empress Miniatures. 

The cannon included no instructions, so it took some investigative work to figure out how to assemble it. Overall, I found the assembly to be a bit fiddly and I ended up damaging one of the axle ends during the build.  However, I think it still looks reasonably good in the end (though not sure I'd want to assemble another one).

As with my infantry uniforms, I struggled trying to find the right blue among all the variations seen in images online. I opted to continue on with the Dark Sea Blue I had used previously. It ended up looking a bit grayer than I planned on, but I think it will still get the job done.

The officers are also from Empress and and in my opinion look like proper toffs, in particular the one with the monocle. While I like the sculpts overall, the helmets appear to have four panels rather than the correct six (same with the artillery crew). As a result, I've done my best to file the seams down and paint them to better match my plastic Warlord figures.

I've now reached the halfway point on this project, and my aim is to try to have it complete by the Christmas holidays.  Fingers crossed!

Zulu War Natal Native Contingent

My British army continues with a group of Natal native warriors.  As with the European soldiers, these are plastic figures from Warlord Games. The figure frames appear to based on the Zulu plastics, but with changes in the heads and some of the arm detailing. 

The frames have four body types in total, just like their British counterparts, but the variety of head and arm options are much better.  All the figures in the below photos are built off the same bodies, but as you can see, the resulting variability is pretty good.  For this particular unit, I've opted just to use melee weapons and forgo the firearms.

As is often the case with plastics, there are areas of soft details and some of the poses look a bit wooden or awkward, but en mass I think the overall effect is going to look good on the table. And at around $1 US per figure, you get a lot of bang for your buck. So while these will never be your star figures, I would not hesitate to recommend them.