Angus Konstam's Edinburgh Wargames
The Great War (and "Back of Beyond")
Gaming the un-gameable...
Who on earth would want to wargame the First World War? It's all suicidal charges, trenches and machine guns, isn't it? Well, yes, of course it is .. if you only want to game the Somme or Verdun, but the war was also fought in modern-day Iraq, East Africa, the Balkans .. all over the place... and that's not even adding on the Russian Civil War, which lasted six years and stretched the fighting from the Baltic to the Pacific. It all began with East Africa, when I built up a small German Schutztruppe force, using 28mm Brigade Miniatures, Foundry, Battle Honours and Copplestone Castings figures. Then came the Turks, pictured below. The idea was, I could use them against many of the British figures which people painted up for East Africa, and they could also join in the Club's "Back of Beyond" campaign, set in Central Asia in the 1920's. The picture above is them storming a Bolshevik trench at Baku, while the shots below show the army in the deserts of Palestine a few years earlier. Johnny Turk is nothing if not versatile...
We use Chris Peers' Contemptible Little Armies for our WW1 and "Back of Beyond" games, and they work very well - although the results can be incredibly bloody. They always produce enjoyable games, and you can't take the whole thing too seriously - which tends to scare off the part time DBM players! We tried the same rules for East Africa but they didn't work so well. the preferred system is a modified version of Chris' Heart of Africa rules, which have all the African flavour you could wish for. The pictures below are taken from a game where the Germans defended a crossing of the Pangani River (near Mount Kilimanjaro), and gave the King's African Rifles and South Africans a bloody nose. You've got to love those acacia trees, and the baboons running ahead of the KAR troops!
I know I started by saying that Verdun is virtually un-gameable, but that's exactly what I've been doing next. Dougie Trail painted up the French, while I opted for the Germans. My excuse is that my Uncle Rudi was killed at Verdun in 1916, so its a sort of tribute to him - I've even put his regimental number, the 118th Hesse on the mens' helmet covers! How sad is that, eh?! Our battlefield terrain is particularly horrific - you feel shell-shocked just by looking at it.
The Great War in Africa The Western Front (Verdun), 1916
Army Profiles: Ottoman Turks German Army, 1916 (pages still under construction)
Downloadable playsheets: Contemptible Little Armies In the Heart of East Africa
For examples of Great War Games in Africa, see Journal 3 & Journal 17
For examples of Great War Games in the Western Front, see Journal 6 , Journal 7 & Journal 15
For Back of Beyond Games, see
Journal 1, Journal 3, Journal 4, Journal 5, Journal 7, Journal 9, Journal 10 , Journal 11 , Journal 13 , Journal 14 , Journal 16 Journal 19 & Journal 23
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Colonial The Great War Second World War Vietnam