Somewhere in Belgium

As Tony mentioned a while ago I wasn’t able to go with him on his jolly to Stoke Rochford Hall since I was attending the Cavalier show in Tonbridge. So whilst he was tucking into venison and port I was making do with a scotch egg and a sandwich from the local Sainsburys.

Tony had kindly volunteered my services to produce the current Maidstone Wargames Society show game (something to do with it being 2014 and our Belgian range being my idea). I settled on a small encounter between German and Belgian infantry in an un-named town “Somewhere in Belgium” in August 1914. The scenery would all be scratch-built (including a rather spiffy 3D printed bandstand by Tony) with our own Belgian figures taking on Germans from Renegade Miniatures and Great War Miniatures. We used the “Through the Mud and the Blood” rules by the Two Fat Lardies.

So after a lot of late nights and a lot of painting and some very stupid ideas (individual cobbles on the roads being an obvious one) the game was ready (enough) for its first outing.

At the end of the day both sides were claiming a victory. The Germans because they made it to the end of the table and there were only two Belgians left who were not casualties or prisoners. The Belgians because it had taken the Germans all day to get to the end of the table whilst losing around forty-five men and because there were still two of their men left to carry on the fight.

The Germans decided to stop early on and engage in a long range rifle duel which the Belgians amazingly won. As a Belgian player on the day I feel duty bound to show a picture of the mass of German dead on the bridge.

Despite being there all day I managed to take very few decent pictures of the game. Fortunately there are some better ones on Clint Burnett’s blog here.

The game will be getting its next outing at Salute in April (table GM19 if you want to come and have a look). Which gives me around three weeks to finish off the bits that weren’t ready in time for Cavalier (most noteably casualty figures and the Minerva armoured car) and correct the bits I’m not happy with.