I Guess This Civil War Thing Is Gonna Happen....

No, this is NOT a post on the current state of U.S. Politics.  Instead, it's about another naval project that is slowly starting to pick up steam (yes, pun intended).

Back in March, I did a post entitled, "Getting My Hands Dirty?" that talked about the 1/1200 scale ironclads I had bought from Thoroughbred Miniatures.  Since then, I've bought quite a few ships from Pithead Miniatures in England and just made another order from Thoroughbred a few days ago.  Instead of taking a scattershot approach like I did with the sailing ships, I've decided to concentrate on the Mississippi River campaign.  The main reason for this is that I have the Anaconda campaign rules by Ray Garbee that focus on the Mississippi River.  That, combined with the fact that our gaming group thought that an ACW river campaign would be fun made my decision in that regard pretty easy.

There have been a couple of changes from the March post.  Now, rivers are going to be dark blue.  As I also haven't really found a river mat I like (or that looks like the Mississippi River), using my blue mats will save some money.  Also, my idea for clear bases won't work because there's no way to apply magnets to the base for storage without them being visible.

The Anaconda rules themselves are available from Wargame Vault, and give the players/gamemaster plenty of room for tinkering.  As they say on the cover (see below), they are a campaign rules set.  That means you will have to provide your own ships and rules for resolving combat.

When it comes to providing your own ships, there are several options out there for 1/1200 scale.  Thoroughbred Miniatures has a small but growing line in 1/1200 that is every bit as nice as their 1/600 products.  Navwar and Red Eagle (formerly Skytrex) have ACW lines, but tend to focus mostly on ironclads.  Stone Mountain here in the US has the old Houston's Ships line, but they are probably closer to 1/1000 than 1/1200.  It seems that if you want the full panoply of oddball vessels turned into warships, then you need to take a look at Pithead Miniatures.  They do a number of different ships organized by area, so if you want something like the Confederate ships that defended Island No. 10, then Phil at Pithead can set you up.  The ships are cast in resin with metal parts and some of them can be quite small, so I would suggest basing them.  I think the Pithead masters are all carved by hand, so if you like miniatures with all perfectly straight lines, then you may not like them.  To me, though, the Pithead models wonderfully depict the sort of ramshackle, make-do character of both sides' navies during the Civil War.  In fact, every time I look at them compared to my sailing ships, I keep thinking, "what grubby little vessels!"  Don't just take my word for it though; here's a picture of the different types of ships side by side.

Another thing about the ACW naval miniatures is that they don't require much, if any rigging.  That, combined with the generally simple paint jobs means you can pick up quite a few and (hopefully) finish them quickly.  Otherwise, you wind up with a traffic jam in the shipyard that looks like this:

There are a couple of others I haven't put together yet.

I'm thinking that as I start getting these painted, I might start a separate page on the blog with just the ACW stuff.  I will also add some info about the ship combat rules I want to use in another post.

Ironclad Interlude

After a few weeks of travel and being away, I'm back at the blog.  In this post are some photos of the ironclads I showed off in the "Getting My Hands Dirty?" post back in March.

After thinking about it, and some discussion over at TMP, I've decided that I am going to have to base these ships as well.  Compared to the sailing ships, these ironclads are mere slips of metal and I think that bases will be much easier in moving them.   Also, some of the gunboats are easily under 100 feet long, so less than 1 inch in 1/1200 scale.  In a way, it's the opposite of the sailing ship problem; instead of being top heavy, they are so small that a sneeze might blow them away (or at least the resin ones).

Unlike the sailing ships though, these are going to be on clear bases.  Given that Civil War ship operations go back and forth between rivers and deep water, I don't want to own one set of ships on ocean bases and one set on river bases.  While I realize that I could use my ocean mats for riverine scenarios, this is an area where traveling has convinced me otherwise.  After looking at various rivers during my trip to Virginia, one thing I can say is that rivers aren't blue!  Brown, green or some mixture of the two, but not blue.  I'm thinking about going with this mat for my rivers: http://cigarboxbattlestore.bigcartel.com/product/full-river-4x6-plus-230 as it would let me place land on top of it while still having a very wide river if that were to be needed for a scenario.

Below are some photos of the ironclads after they've been painted.  While I'm happy enough with how the two Monitors came out, I'm not as happy with the CSS Atlanta.  I just don't think that I did justice to all the fine details that Thoroughbred put into the model.  For the moment I'm consoling myself with the fact that the pictures show the ship at much larger than full size, thereby magnifying my sloppy brushwork.

USS Weehawken

Obligatory shot with US quarter

USS Nahant. You can see why the different markings are necessary.

Their opponent, CSS Atlanta. The flagpole is removable so she can be the
USS Atlanta as needed.

Even this ship is not particularly tall, as the quarter shot shows.

Toby Barrett at Thoroughbred was nice enough to send me a little extra with the order, which was a 2 gun earthen battery.  So, those pictures are below.

It actually looks a lot better in person.  This photo makes the color look
like dog poop brown.

I tried to make the mud around the guns a slightly different color,
to show it being stirred up by people moving around.
I think it worked pretty well.

The detail is very nice.  This flagpole is also removable.

So all that remains now is to get in a game, and see what we think of the rules I've chosen.  Right now, I am going with Sail and Steam Navies, which appears to be well thought out, while still having as much detail as the old Ironclads game by Yaquinto.

Getting My Hands Dirty?

My normal gaming group knows what my naval prejudices are.  I'll play a WWII game, but don't particularly care for them.  Airplanes foul up an otherwise perfectly good sea battle.  I do like WWI, but zeppelins get almost as much side-eye as airplanes do.  And don't EVEN get me started on submarines.  Torpedo boats and destroyers I can respect, but in gaming terms submarines are more like hooligans waiting to mug someone than they are a fighting ship.  Ironclads get a small amount of side-eye too.  Skulking behind armor and polluting the sky with clouds of coal smoke don't seem like a gentlemanly way to fight a battle.  My gaming friends just laugh at me, and say I'm a reactionary where naval games with technology are concerned.  My retort is that I'm a traditionalist.

Now, given the above rant I'm at a bit of a loss to explain why these turned up in the mail on Monday:

Actually, I'm not at a loss.  We played Yaquinto's Ironclads for a couple of months, and I became convinced that they could be fun after all.  So, I picked up a set of rules, and these three little beauties from Thoroughbred Miniatures.  Although they are best known for 1/600 scale models, they also do a line of 1/1200 scale ironclads as well.  As you can see, they are beautiful sculpts, with no flash and very dainty detailing.  The two monitors are Passaic class ships, which were the first ones built after the original Monitor.  The Confederate ironclad is the CSS Atlanta, so my test scenario for rules is going to be Atlanta versus Weehawken and Nahant.  I don't know if it is a "fair" scenario, but it will be more interesting than the usual Monitor/Virginia scenario and allow 2 other players to sit in on the first playtest instead of just one.

Full disclosure: I had some ironclad minis in the past, but got rid of them.  One of the things I had forgotten was just how small the ironclads are in comparison to my ships of the line.  The picture below shows these ships with the usual quarter.  As you can see, they barely come past the slotta-base holding the coin:

The 74 gunner is on a base, but I think you get the idea.

Because of their small size and low profile, I'm not sure about how to handle these.  I'm thinking about doing away with a base altogether and just putting magnetic material on the bottoms of the hulls.  Then again, putting them on a base would give the players some way to handle them other than the smokestacks.  I suspect that a base will win out in the end.

Right now, I'm in Virginia enjoying what can only be called a Civil Wargasm, and so will take more pictures of sailing ships when we get back home.  Oh, and of course the rant in the first paragraph is all in good fun.