Hellana 2017

After some years I was back to Hellana, the biggest Wargame Convention of Italy, organized by the friends of the GLA (Gruppo Ludico Aglianese). 

The convention was crowded by people looking at the many wargame tables, browsing within the stands or searching at the bring&buy.

A closer look at some war-game tables. First of all my personal favorite: the battle of Luzzara, 15 August 1702, by the “Giuseppe Garibaldi” Wargame group of Genova, 28mm lead miniatures, rules Baroque from Dadi & Piombo.

The first day at Gettysburg, display game by “Associazione Ludica Apuana”,

15mm lead. Rules Fire & Fury, with a beautiful scenery.

Tank battle at Juvelize, Lorraine 22 September 1944, display game by “Associazione Ludica Apuana”, rules Rapid Fire WWII.

The stand of Impetus, with a battle between French and Bourgognons with the rules Basic Impetus 2, hosted by the rules author Lorenzo Sartori.

From Faenza the friend Aldo Ghetti of the GMBS
 with his new napoleonic rules “N-Su la testa!” (from the famous Baron Lepic phrase at Eylau: “Haut les têtes, la mitraille n'est pas de la merde!”), played with some beutiful plastic 28mm miniatures.

At the Castle Art stand some delightful japanese houses and castle and “Teological fight” a multiplayer scenario with the rules DAISHO.


A Far West display game “La Morte ci sfida”, rules “Hell Creek” by Ganesha Games in 28mm.

The mighty stand of Flame of War.

A WW1 game, a rare bird indeed, the Battle of Montello, June 1918, by the WASP group from La Spezia rules Rapid Fire 2 adapted to WW1, 20mm (1/72) 
miniatures.

The battle of Quebec, 13 September 1759, from Miles Gloriosus Club of Roma, a partecipation game with the rules Drum of War along the Mohawk, in 15mm.

The gabions are made with pasta....

Again it was a very fine day, in company of friends, games and miniatures.

The Russians are coming

The painting line for the next weeks: 

on the left the “augmentation” of the existing Russian cavalry which shall be put on the standard of two bases for each regiment. On the right the infantry regiments which are necessary to complete the Poltava OoB, the existing regiments being based on the Holowczin OoB. One of the regiment is a Streltsi one mustered from the “Streltsi bonus figures” which I collected between my Strelets boxes.

To complete the OoB however I need further 7 two-bases regiment which I plan to represent by using both Strelets and Zvedza miniatures.

In the first line you can see the five yet unfinished redoubts whose building I showed in a previous post. I am going to use the same techniques to represent the Russian Army camp which is a serious affair like we can see in these near-contemporary prints:

Swedish cavalry for Poltava completed

With these regiments I completed the swedish cavalry for Poltava: now I have 24 bases which can be used as 6 V&B 3”x3” Brigade stands or 6 four-bases units for Maurice or Black-Powder.

The first regiment is the Karelska (Viborgs och Nyslotts län): at Poltava its outfit was the standard blue coat with hat; however I decided to represent it in the 1702 uniform with grey coat and karpus. To do this I converted the Strelets figures by cutting away the tricorne and putting on its place some spare karpus from the worst figures of the Swedish infantry box:

This is the result:

The Adelsfana i Sverige och Finland is indeed an “augmentation” because one base was already done before. I added a second base with the flag-bearer: the 1686 model flag was captured at Poltava. The regiment was with the King main army since 1702.

The following are Dragoon regiments which, at this stage I decided to represent with only one base (maybe one day I shall “augment” also them to two bases each). These three regiments are a selection of the many understrenght dragoon regiments which were present at Poltava, namely the Heilm ( former Stenbock, yellow facings), Gyllenstierna (red facings) and Meyerfeldt (orange facings) regiments.

The Heilm kettledrummer came from the Swedish cavalry box with a tricorne head in place of the helmet. The Meyerfeldt regiment didn’t partecipated at the battle, being in guard duty at the swedish camp in Pushkarjova: however the orange facing are so tempting…

Finally, after having done all the swedish cavalry with Strelets miniatures, I decided to paint the last two regiments with the Zvedza “Swedish Dragoons” figures. They are a real pleasure to paint indeed, a very different style form Strelets. However, to be fair, the Strelets have a definite “character” and is a real satisfaction to get the best from them, because at a glance they didn’t look so inspiring. The Zvedza are indeed on an another planet. Anyway they mix well enough (not in the same base, clearly) and to have some units in a “smarter outfit” gives variety to my army.

In detail they represent respectively the Norra Skanska regiment

and the Sodra Skanska regiment, this one with the coat in a lighter blue shade:

The Sodra Skanska trumpeter livery is a result of an educated guesswork, since no informations on the uniform are available. Both the regiments belonged to the King’s Army from 1702: captured after Poltava were reraised but used as garrison troops because of  lack of horses and equipment.

As far as the flag is concerned, Zvedza gives a dragoon flag with the tails and with a cross engraved (strangely enough, since such a flag can’t be found in the Hoglund book), which is probably the only drawback of an otherwise perfect kit. I cut the tail to have a squarish standard and overpainted the Norra Skanska flag with two heavy coats of the Mordian Blue GW “base color”, finishing the flag at hand.

Finally, the complete cavalry lot:

Together with the 32 infantry battalions (which I will show soon) these figurese represents the equivalent of 96 squadrons which with the complement of guns and general officier allows to represent the Swedish Army in all the GNW battles. In the future however I plan to add some bases of the elusive “Valaker” (I’ll probably will depict them as cossacks with a swedish officier since they were indeed polish cossacks) and a base with a cart, useful to represent objective or camp for the rules which require such an item, an example of which is given in this 1711 print representing the swedish trophies captured at Poltava entering in Moscow:

More swedish Infantry for Poltava

Two more swedish infantry regiments (indeed finnish), both present at Poltava. First the Nylands regiment (one battalion with Lewenhaupt at Lesnaja, placed in the Vastamalands regiments at Poltava: the other battalion at Riga and captured there in 1710).

The miniatures are Mars, all form the Swedish Infantry box but the fifer, which cames from the Saxon infantry box. I like the fifer for his blue/white/crimson lace. The flag was scanned from the Hoglund book.

The other regiment is the Osterbotten, a solely muskeeter regiment with the same story of the previous: at Poltava it was merged with the Närke-Värmlands. The kneeling figure is again from Mars, the others are Strelets. I changed my mind with respect the original plan (see previous posts) and added a grenadier figure since there were 100 grenadiers out of 1200 soldiers. Also in this case the flag was scanned from the Hoglund book.

To command the infantry I did a base representing the General Adam Ludwig Lewenhaupt (1659-1719) His name in swedish should sound Leijonhufvud (In italian the swedish pronunce of such a name sound awkward as a norse spell…). His defeat at Lesnaja put a shadow on a previoulsly good career: indeed he was able to defend the Baltic provinces when is King was dealing with Saxon and Polish. His care of his soldiers is reflected in the final surrender of the beaten army at Perevolochna. He was despised by Rehnskjold and treated with some comptent by the King (He called him the “Latin general” because he mastered such a language: intellectuals are ever misplaced in any army, as far as I known…).

Both figures are Mars, the officier from the Saxon and the grenadier orderly from the Swedish boxes.

With these last two regiments I finished the swedish infantry for Poltava which now is represented by 32 bases (indeed 32 battalions) which are equivalent to 16 V&B regimental stands or 8 four-bases units in either Maurice or Black Powder. In a next post I’ll show all the infantry parading in front of the injuried King.

Poltava: the redoubts, part 1.

Any decent replay of Poltava can’t  be done without the famed redoubts. As we all remember, the Russians built 10 redoubts straight on the swedish advance line just the night before the battle (some of them were indeed unfinished at the beginning of the swedish attack). In my scenarios I reduced the number to 5 and started to think how represent them.

An idea of how they should be is given in this painting I found on DeviantArt:

however, given the scale of my scenarios (a 40x30mm base represents a battalion and a 40x40 base represents 4-5 squadrons), rather than a “real” redoubt capable to receive a real garrison, I decided to represent the redoubts as terrain items with specific combat capabilities (more or less like the DBHx “Strongpoint”). A token miniature then will represent the presence of a garrison whose values and capabilities are given by the scenario rules.

It follows that my redoubts size will be 65x55 mm with an empty space more or less of 40x30 mm inside to host the token miniatures (one or two, I have not yet decided).

Here I’ll show the steps I followed to build my redoubts.

First of all a cut a rectangular thick cardboard 65x55 mm and a “rod” taken from an HD polystirene insulating board, of an approximatively square cross-section  about 20 mm.

Then the redoubt "walls" are glued with white glue to the cardboard; at this stage the rod overlaps the cardboard base:

To give a certain uniformity to the scarp I made a template to draw the contours of the parapet: then by using an hot-wire saw I cut the polystirene to create the scarp.

The embrasures and the redoubt access are roughly drawn and then cut with the hot-wire saw. 

The outer faces of the redoubt and the parapet are then plastered with the Vallejo Brown Earth paste 26.219.

The redouts interiors are lined with cardboard stripes and toothpicks to represents the wooden planks.

Finally I did the redoubt access: I decided to give different accesses to each redoubt to add variety: in this case with toothpicks and cardboard I realized a tilting drawer.

At this point the redoubts are ready to be painted. More on a next post.

Swedish Cavalry "Augmentation"

When I started to paint GNW Swedish, the idea was to use them to refight Holowczin with V&B at the battalion level, half-scale. Accordingly, each regiment of infantry was represented by a 40x30 mm scale, roughly half of a standard V&B 3x1.5 inches base. With such a basing two bases represented a regiment, full-scale (80x30 mm being close to 3x1.5 inches). 

As far as the cavalry was concerned, a single 40x40 mm base represented (at battalion level and half-scale) a single regiment: clearly, at the full-scale a 3x3 inches brigade should be represented by an 80x80 mm square base which could be represented by putting two bases on a sabot. 

Later I turned to the full regimental scale and thus I realized that every cavalry regiment I painted must be doubled. In such a way 4 bases could be used to represent a V&B cavalry brigade or a Maurice four bases "unit" or also a Black Powder 4 bases "normal unit". 

So I crossed the Rubicon and started to double the existing Swedish cavalry regiments (Russian and Danish will follow, sooner or later): for manifold reasons I decided instead to represent Dragoons with only one base, in such a way that a 4 bases unit will be formed by four different regiments.

This is the result, up to now:

Ostogota Cavalry Regiment

Vastgota Cavalry Regiment

Smalands Cavalry Regiment

Nylands och Tavahustas Cavalry Regiment

LivGardet Cavalry Regiment

to which must be added a base of Dragoon and a base of the Sverige Adelsfana (yet to be doubled).

To refight Poltava I need 6 V&B brigades, hence 24 bases (which by the way are also 6 Maurice or Black Powder units) and accordingly I must paint 10 more bases of Swedish Cavalry: 3 Dragoons and 7 Horses.