Cohorts of the Damned

After a long absence from this project, I finally made a big push to get the last combat troops for it done and dusted last week. When I started out, the plan was to do something along the lines of the British expeditionary force in China in 1860, with one British and two Indian regiments. As I went about planning, though, I decided that I wouldn't be able to choose between a Lancer or a Hussar regiment for the British, so I may as well go with both. Later on, as I was doing some reading on the 1860 campaign, it stuck out to me that the merits of heavy cavalry in particular – in this case the 1st Dragoon Guards – were heavily emphasised in the British reports, and that therefore, I probably ought to have a heavy dragoon regiment to hand, too. The end result was that I went from just three cavalry regiments to five. None of the regiments depicted here had any particular history with Japan; I simply pulled out three British regiments that were stationed in India in late 1867, plus tw...

After a determined effort, save for a brief sidetrack to round out the artillery , the infantry are at last done. The first of the infantry were done over a year ago, back in August 2022, so the completion of the full set has been a long time coming. My decisions for the infantry weren't too complicated. In short, I wanted to get a reasonable variety of appearances while sticking with regiments that were more or less on hand. That meant the Yokohama garrison, the Hong Kong garrison, and some regiments from India. As it turns out that was actually not too tricky to do: the late George Nafziger's compilation of orders of battle includes almost yearly accountings of the locations of the regiments of the British Army, so it was easy to check who was where. It also helped that there is some information on the Yokohama garrison I could draw on, which led to me finding out that there was a changing of the guard in early 1868 as the 1/10th took over from the 2/9th. That, conveniently, ...

Finally following on from  the last part , I stalled a bit on the artillery because there was just going to be a lot of technical complexity involved, in two main ways: firstly, I hate  painting wheels and have no idea how anyone gets paint between the spokes and along the inside; secondly, I like my wheels to turn, which means a lot of drilling and messing around with brass and pewter to get the axles fixed. Technically  I wouldn't consider the artillery fully done per se, but given that I've got all the guns and crew finished, I will call them just about complete even though I still have a couple of limbers and horse teams still to do. I have to admit it is quite funny that the first image you get when you google 'Armstrong Gun' is this one, showing of one of the half-dozen guns that were built in Nagasaki, rather than at Elswick or Woolwich. I did up the artillery basically on a whim based on what I thought would look fun, in no small part because my attempts to a...

Despite having played The Men Who Would be Kings for a couple of years now, it struck me that I had never got round to trying its much-vaunted solo rules. With my normal sparring partners unavailable and some bad weather rolling in, I thought it would be a good chance to have a go, and also to break in some of my Anglo-Indian forces. The game lasted a whopping 29 turns so I'll try not to do a complete blow-by-blow; instead I'll try to give a relatively general summary of what happened, and my thoughts on the Mr Babbage system. To get a criticism out of the way early on, how exactly to set up is not as clearly communicated as it might have been. That you should ideally just be playing a pure combat encounter rather than a scored scenario is the last of Mr Babbage's ten instructions, and when you are told to 'line your chaps up' you are not told whether to do so lengthways or widthways. Taking a cue from this solo game by Neil of the blog Toy Soldiers and Dining Room...