Saturday 7 February 2009

The Charge! aesthetic




To add further encouragement in the field of 42mms I thought I'd post my reasoning. As a child of the 60s I'm naturally influenced by the work by Peter Young 'Charge! Or How to play Wargames' which has some great photos of battles fought over a large area. I'm sure you all know it. One of the things that appeal to me now looking back is the fact that all the figures are unbased - they're all singles standing on their cast bases - and that to me looks very pleasing - and so the logic is - how large in scale do you go before you go into single unbased figures? Another pleasing thing is the fact that officers, drummers and so on are placed outside the block as they were at the time. It might look like the above painting. Quite static but very much capturing the age. So...if you were rich, maybe very rich - would you not like to see an old school game of this era fought in this scale - with the very minimal scenery as depicted in Young's seminal work?

5 comments:

tradgardmastare said...

Yes ( I admit to myself and others) I 'd love to see an old school game for this period...
Have you seen the mid 18th century games on Emeror v Elector?
There has been a discussion on OSW yahoo group of late about adapting Charge for the late 17th Century. Do you have any ideas of your own on this ?
best wishes
Alan

tradgardmastare said...

Where would I get hold of a diagram of organisation for an inf/ ca regt for the 1670/80's so I can begin to think about charge formations?
Alan

Bluebear Jeff said...

I also like the look of individual basing.

What I'm thinking about is having my figures based on steel and using green-painted magnetic sheets underneath them as needed until I wish to deploy them singly.


-- Jeff

Corporal_Trim said...

Hi, Ralphus.

Great site you have here. I've been lurking for a while, just checked into Google so I could say hello.

I too like the Charge look a great deal. It's realistic and gives the appearance of a little more depth than the usual two lines. Here's some Terana 20mm flats which I painted recently, depicting a French WWS battalion, mounted in that manner.

http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z39/cpl_trim/Flats/terana_3014.jpg
http://i193.photobucket.com/albums/z39/cpl_trim/Flats/terana_3010.jpg

Regards,
Steve

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

No need to fret as there's a fair few chaps still doing it that way - see these:

http://grimsbywargames.myphotoalbum.com/view_album.php?set_albumName=album04

...these were taken at the Partizan Wargame show in May 2007 - a refight of Mollwitz using the Charge rules...

You should also check out Stokes' blog:

http://grandduchyofstollen.blogspot.com/

...for oodles and scads of singly mounted figures and delightfully elegant, simple, wargame terrain... see here for one of his games:

http://grandduchyofstollen.blogspot.com/2009/02/stllemnian-army-quits-field.html