Age of Sail for me in 2024

I have had an interest in Age of Sail battles since playing in a few games with a friend of mine who ran Wooden Ships and Iron Men with 1:1200 ships back in the day.  I tried my hand at painting up 1:1200 ships, for War of 1812, from Langton Miniatures, but did not enjoy the rigging.  I bailed on this scale and more recently have had success with 1:2400 ships from Tumbling Dice.

Rules wise, I have struggled to find a good set for large battles that move along at a good pace and finish in less than four hours.  Below are the rulesets I've tried out.

• Wooden Ships and Iron Men
• Flying Colors
• Far Distant Ships
• Grand Fleet Actions in the Age of Sail
• It is Warm Work

Rather than review each ruleset, I will say all the rulesets are good.  As mentioned I have been looking for a ruleset that runs faster that four people can command about six ships each.  I am currently going to move forward with It is Warm Work.  It has simplified the rules both firing and moving more compared to the other rules I've listed.  The firing has the most simplification, but still gets the same expected results.

The 1:2400 ships are easy to put together and paint.  Right now my ships are painted up pretty generically, and I hope to paint up some more unique colored ships.  I recently put together a YouTube video on how to paint the miniatures (see link below).

Homemade 28mm Corn Stalks

I was inspired by a blog post on John Bond's Wargaming Stuff blog on how to make your own cornfields for 28mm wargaming.  I have been hesitant to spend more on model railroad cornstalks (JTT 2" O scale).  They certainly look great but can get pricey for the amount of corn stalks I want to have on the table.  I have also not been very successful creating cornfields using other techniques, so I am giving John's technique a go.

I was surprised that John spotted a fake IKEA plant (FEJKA) that can be easily used as corn stalks.  I have an IKEA close by, so popped in there, bought the plant and have been trying out John's technique.  I tried to follow the process exactly, but ended up changing it up slightly.  I explain my process in the video below.  I bet there are more improvements other people will come up, but it is pretty easy and fast to go through this process.  Basing wise, I'm probably going to try out using rubber floor mat material.  I first saw it in action on Black Magic Craft YouTube channel: Link.

My video below on how to make these corn stalks.

I will post an update once I finish a cornfield terrain piece.

Link to John's blog post: John Bond's Wargaming Stuff

Battle of Spion Kop, a Bloody Big Battles scenario

I was inspired to run a Boer War scenario from a wargaming friend who had been reading a book about the Boer War.  I have not run a Boer War battle in a long time so figured I'd give it a go again.  This time using the Bloody Big Battle rules.  It turned out the Spion Kop scenario would work out good because I had all the miniatures for the scenario painted up and based already.  This would also be my first foray into the Bloody Big Battles rules.  I played in a Franco-Prussian War game awhile back, but really couldn't get into the rules as a player.

In all the Bloody Big Battles scenarios, you will notice a lot of terrain.  They are not simple throw down a few terrain elements, these can be elaborate winding rivers to expansive hills.  I wanted to see if I could come with a way to simply create these features for this game and future games.  I don't want to spend a lot of time building fancy terrain when I will only use the setup for a couple sessions and then I'm onto the next battle with a different layout.  I also really don't have the room to store the terrain.

I have a lot of future Bloody Big Battles scenario options that I want to do in the future in periods I already have a lot of 15mm miniatures for: Crimean War, 1859 Franco-Austrian War, and Boer War.

The Spion Kop, Boer War scenario by Anton van Dellen is a good one.  I would drop the British artillery can not fire at a Boer target if a British unit is within 9", British artillery suffers a left shift because of Boer camouflage, and British artillery suffers low ammo if they roll a 10 or more.

It is certainly a challenge to figure out visibility between units when you have hills in the battle.  I need to build a diagram to explain when units can see each other and when they are blocked by contours.

In the playtest and at the club, the British has it hard.  I was able to get to a draw in the playtest.  The club game we only made it through half the scenario turns and the British were struggling to take any of the objectives.

Video on the terrain and setup of the Spion Kop scenario.

Video showing the results from each of the 8 turn playtest.