Off to Dave’s for a game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum versus a couple of novice players, Peter and Si. It’s May 1940 and I would play the French defending against a strong German advance.
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Another beautiful game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum from Phil Turner, with help from Dee VonDoom, Steve Blease and Jenny Turner.
Highly recommended.
Great to get my early war French back onto the table again as Bevan and I played a scenario based on one element of the battle of Hannut: the assault on Crehen.
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Here’s an AAR that dates back to last year: Steve from the excellent Bleaseworld blog playing one of Phil and Jenny’s amazing early war IABSM games down at Bristol Independent Gamers.
Some lovely eye candy, so I recommend clicking on the picture below to see all:
A great game of IABSM at the Gert Lush Lard 2021 event at Bristol Independent Gaming yesterday.
Phil Turner and Jenny Owens put on their quite magnificent 1940 Defence of Stonne game.
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Clotted Lard is the annual TFL Games Day run by the Devon Wargames Group. After a COVID-induced hiatus, the event was back with a bang in 2021.
One of the great games on show was Phil & Jenny’s fantastic rendition of The Battle for Stonne played using I Ain’t Been Shot Mum.
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Superb pictorial after action report of a recent Defence of Calais game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum by Phil Turner and Andy Crow, taken from the IABSM Facebook page.
A really stunning set up: click on the picture below to see all:
With no sign of any real-life games on the horizon, I decided to bite the bullet and ask to join a virtual game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum run by my friend Bevan.
My previous reluctance to try anything virtual was mainly down to the fact that I spend a lot of the day working via Zoom now, and although it is truly a marvelous communication tool, it’s also quite draining to use. Nevertheless, with the Beardless King (daughter #2) busy with schoolwork and Kavan (daughter #1’s boyfriend) back at Uni, it was Zoom or nowt!
The scenario was a simple one set in France 1940. I would play the Germans, and would start the game in situ defending a bridge against an anticipated attack by a French armoured column. At my disposal I had three Big Men, a platoon of infantry, a platoon of anti-tank guns, and a support platoon consisting of a couple of MMG teams.
Click on the picture below to see what happened:
Still on lockdown, but it’s bank holiday Monday so it must be time for another game of I Ain’t Been Shot Mum against K, Daughter #1’s boyfriend, trapped with us for the duration, but rapidly becoming a regular wargamer with, now, eight games under his belt.
The premise for today’s game is simple: it’s France 1940, and Rommel’s Germans are advancing rapidly on Lille, aiming for the village of Lomme, whose capture will seal off the escape route of all English and French forces in the area. The Allies have realised what the Germans are up to, and have dispatched a small force to hold Lomme for as long as possible. The scene is set for an epic clash!
Click on the picture below to see what happened:
Friend Dave and company have been playing a mini I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum campaign, Chasseur, and invited me to take part in game three. The campaign is set during the invasion of France in May/June 1940, and I would play a column of German Panzers as it motors towards the Seine.
The AAR contains all you need to play the scenario for yourselves, so click on the pic below to see what happens:
Lovely little battle report from Iain Fuller from his excellent Tracks and Threads blog.
Here, a German reconnaissance force bump up against a French position and wreak havoc with their armoured cars and Kradschutzen troops…until, that is, the Somua’s arrive.
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One of the ‘toys’ I got for Christmas was a new digital camera. I’d had the old one for some seventeen years, and it had really started to give up the ghost. Batteries were drained with one shot, it hated anything but the brightest of sunlight, and the cover to the compartment for the batteries had developed the annoying habit of popping open at the slightest touch.
The new one came from the post-Christmas sale from John Lewis. This was another first from me, as I actually stood and queued outside for half an hour, and then rushed in with the tsunami of other shoppers to try and get a bargain: not something I have done before, as I usually avoid the whole “Sales” madness. It seems to have been worth it, however, as once I had actually worked out where the sale items were (in their own special area) I picked up the camera I wanted for £30 less than the sale price on Amazon.
New camera means an excuse to photograph some figures, so I re-shot all my 1940’s French. Still haven’t got exactly the results I was looking for, but they look a lot better than my previous gallery.
Some rather colourful R-35’s from a supporting GBC (Groupe de Bataillons de Chars)
You can see the whole lot either here (a rifle infantry company) or here (the motorised version).
I’ve got a lot more figures, especially Somua and Char B1 tanks, and some of the more esoteric portee vehicles that Battlefront was pushing during their Blitzkrieg phase, but I’ve tried to avoid cheese and stick to the official OB’s from the TFL Blitzkrieg in the West: the French handbook.
Reading the lists and building the gallery is a great way of seeing where the gaps are in my collection.
Must be time to get some more French: I wonder if I can find any of them on sale anywhere…
Time for another game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! with John and Dave…but what to play? Dave has requested an early war encounter, so a quick look back through my library of scenarios and I settle on one of Richard Clarke’s games: Lille.
The premise is simple: Rommel’s Germans are advancing rapidly on Lille, aiming for the village of Lomme, whose capture will seal off the escape route of all English and French forces in the area. The Allies have realised what the Germans are up to, and have dispatched a small force to hold Lomme for as long as possible. The scene is set for an epic clash!
Click on the picture below to see all:
A quick trip to Edinburgh to visit daughter #1 at university gave me the chance to catch up with old friend Mr Hodge down at the South East Scotland Wargames Club.
Derek put on a game if IABSM set in France in May 1940, using his excellent 10mm figures.
That's not me with Derek btw but my opponent!
I played the French: commanding seven H-39 tanks (good armour, but armed with a pop gun), two 25mm anti tank guns (good panzer killers!) and a platoon of infantry.
Facing me were five Panzer 38(t) tanks (excellent at this time of the war), two Panzer IVs, a platoon of motorcyclists, and some other infantry that never arrived or got off their Blinds.
I deployed my tanks along the treeline and waited for Rommel's boys to attack. This they did, their motorcyclists appearing first: dumping their metal steeds as soon as I hit them with some HE, and then rushing forward towards a nearby field.
Meanwhile his P-38(t) tanks had appeared and advanced towards my line over open ground. My tanks engaged, and a firefight broke out: his five Panzers versus five of my tanks and, soon, my two anti tank guns.
His tanks were considerably better than mine, but stationary and out in the open. Mine were carefully concealed in the edge of the wood, and some lucky dice rolling meant that soon three of his were abandoned for the loss of two of mine.
When one of his Panzer IVs also succumbed to anti tank gun fire, the Germans decided that they'd had enough and retreated. Victory to the French!
All in all it was a good, if quick, game. My tanks performed much better than I was expecting (one of them proved almost indestructible despite being hit many times) and the tactics chosen by the Germans suited my deployment perfectly.
My thanks to Derek and the rest of SESWC for their hospitality, and I'm already looking forward to the next time I'm up.
It's been far too long since we saw one of Mark Luther's amazing 6mm IABSM after action reports...but I'm pleased to be able to say that the drought is over.
Mark played one of my scenarios - Wave Goodbye - taken from the 2011 TFL Summer Special: a French armor counterattack is hitting the flank of a German panzer column in an area east of the Ardennes in May 1940.
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Sorry about the lack of posts for the last few days: I've been busy with another of Jack's amazing after action reports. This one weighs in with an extraordinary 239 photographs, each of which I've had to individually download and label!
The report is taken from Jack's blog, BlackHawtHet...and you'll be pleased to hear that he and I are working on a better way to transfer the content from there to VL.
Anyway, this time Jack takes Kampfgruppe Klink on a trip to the cabbage fields of Moiste: using the IABSM scenario that I wrote for the TFL 2005 Summer Special "Moiste Cabbage and a Quick Cognac".
The background is simple: The Germans have found a ford that gives them access to the French flank, the French dispatch a force under the eponymous Captain Cognac to close the gap.
Jack seems to have had a cracker of a game (239 pictures!), so click on the photo below to see all:
Here is our first I Ain't Been Shot, Mum! After Action Report from Jack, taken from his blog BlackHawkHet.
And what an AAR it is: fully 169 photographs with a comprehensive accompanying text. It's taken me a few days just to get it all loaded up on here!
Having been in contact with Jack, I'm pleased to say that the inspiration for the game actually came from VL, and from one of the other battle reports posted here. To be specific, it was from James Tree's Pushing On game, taken from the Operation Martlet scenario pack for CoC.
Click on the pic below to see Jack's epic work...
Here's a quick and somewhat fuzzily-photographed IABSM microarmour AAR from Mark Luther, this one covering action in France 1940 as the French counteract with Somua tanks.
Click on the pic below to see all:
Mark based the game on another AAR from this site: this one from Brian Cantwell. You can see Brian's version (in 15mm) by clicking on the pic below (opens in a new link).
And now a quick request.
I am running out of battle reports to post up here on Vis Lardica.
I am getting the occasional report sent direct to me for posting, and many individuals are kind enough to have allowed me re-posting rights to their blog entries, but it is becoming more and more difficult to keep the flow of reports coming.
So here's the request: if you are playing one of the TFL games covered by Vis Lardica*, and don't have a blog of your own or anything like that, take a few pictures of the action, scrawl down a few notes on what happened, or even just captions to the pictures, and send the lot through to me at admin@vislardica.com. Don't worry about format or tidiness or anything like that: I can turn the raw content into a report for you.
That way you have a record of the games that you have played, a record that you can come back to and browse anytime you feel like it. I certainly enjoy reminding myself occasionally of the great tabletop encounters I've enjoyed in the past, and judging by the traffic stats for the site, so do the rest of you!
So don't delay and get scribbling!
*The site covers TFL's company-sized games - I Ain't Been Shot, Mum! (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf! (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (sci-fi) - along with their variants Rock the Casbah (the Arab/Israeli wars of the '70s); B'Maso (Africa in the 60's) and the various adaptions for Moderns.
Finally, one thing that did catch my eye earlier today...
I was trawling the Internet looking for interesting wargames content to read, and came across a Russian-language site with a battle report on it. A quick Google translate came up with the usual pidgin English, but one sentence particularly caught my eye:
"well, where in the truhistori vargeim without homruli"
It's like reading Chaucer, or listening to Grendel/Grendel's Mother speak in the Ray Winstone Beowulf film, but expresses a sentiment we should all take to heart: is a wargame truly a wargame without home rules!
Knowing I was in Edinburgh, fellow Lardy Derek Hodge was kind enough to invite me over to the South East Scotland Wargames Club for a game of IABSM.
We played Derek's adaptation of a scenario that I wrote for the Xmas 2005 TwoFatLardies Christmas Special: Moiste Cabbage and a Quick Cognac.
A great game, and played using Derek's 10mm collection rather than my usual 15's.
Find out how Captain Cognac and his gens braves got on by clicking on the picture, below.
Rather than immediately clear away the rather nice set up for the For the Honour of France game played a couple of weeks ago (click here to read the AAR, opens in a new window), I decided to use the same scenario for a game that I was umpiring between John and Dave that took place last weekend.
A very different game from last time. Click on he pic below to see all:
Vis Lardica is a website devoted to wargaming and military history, with a special emphasis on the company-sized rulesets produced by the TooFatLardies: I Ain't Been Shot Mum (WW2); Charlie Don't Surf (Vietnam); and Quadrant 13 (science fiction)
Welcome to Vis Lardica, a not-for-profit website mostly dedicated to the company-sized wargaming rules produced by the TooFatLardies, but encompassing my other gaming interests as well.
If you need to contact me, you can do so at:
vislardica@gmail.com
If you have enjoyed visiting this site, please add a link to it on your own wargaming blog: www.vislardica.com.
