Ottomans

The more I play SAGA, Dead Man's Hand, Chain of Command and Dux Brit, the less time I have for Field of Glory.  When our group does play FoG, it's for ancients only.  I realized my Later Ottoman Turks hadn't been on a tabletop since 2012 so, off to the market they went.

The Ottomans brought a commission to paint the  army into the Renaissance era. I'd always planned to do this myself but a lack of interest in FoG - Renaissance in the Twin Cities meant I never tried the rules and never made the leap.  Coming in 3 years after the original army was completed, these figures are the Renaissance era Ottomans I always wanted to paint.

The Janissary musketeers are all Mike's Models.  Possessing an Old School charm, I was uncertain how the figures would paint up.  It turns out they were quite nice to work with. It goes to show you can't judge a figure until you put some paint on it.  

These Tufekcis musketeers are by Old Glory.  The variety of poses, uniforms and colors give them the irregular look I was aiming for.  

Azab bow are by Mike's Models. While painted as irregulars, I kept a tight palette to avoid the dreaded "clown army" look.  

The Delis or "Mad-Head" cavalry are Mike's Models.  In Field of Glory, these fellows are tough!  

The Tufekcis cavalry are Mike's Models as well. 

To round out the lot, I painted up a Serbian allied command stand and Azab handgunners. 

The new owner is an active FoG tournament player. The Ottomans will get to travel across the globe for games in the US and abroad.   That's quite a change up from sitting on the shelf for 2 years. Cheers and good luck with these lads, Dannie!

The Sultan Smiles! A Maurice AAR...

Maurice is a big hit in our group, so much so that we're into our 2nd campaign since August.  There are many things to love about the game but the campaign rules are genius. The campaign allows a player to:

• Write a back story for your army, leader and war if you like.  
• Choose the kind of army you run by purchasing National Advantages.  
• Deliver smack between battles and change up sides frequently. 
• Write clever AARs in character to share with the rest of the players.  

The campaign also gives a narrative, energy and game to game results that are absent from a one off match.  Our group is so hooked that we've managed a game every 2-3 weeks.  Being a family man, it's no easy task to sneak out the door for my games.  When my wife pointed out I was gaming two weekends in a row, I replied "but this is a campaign game" and it worked!

I was playing Hugh in this match and by the way, Hugh had never lost a campaign game.  To prepare for my big showdown,  I read the rules cover to cover and filled up a notebook with tips and ideas.  I also got practice games in and brainstormed with my sparring partners.  So, how did my training and  hard work pay out?

The game had a promising start when I won the scouting role and was able to choose to defend.  6 pieces of terrain went down and Hugh made a point to drop his terrain in my deployment zone to mess me up.  The village, marsh and woods cut my deployment zone in half so I shoehorned my army into the right half of the board.

In addition to being a stone cold killer, Hugh has a spectacular Coalition army made up of French and British troops.  A 00 or 000 brush was burned up painting these handsome lads and all of their piping.

 

My Ottomans wedged themselves into a double line between the two villages while my cavalry held in reserve.  The boys in red are my Guard units, The Sultan's Own.

In the early game, Hugh swung his army out in parade formation and formed up just outside of musket range.  I declined to bombard with  my cannons in order to load up on cards.  That turned out to be a wise decision indeed!

If you're going to knock off the Big Dog, you need some luck and luck was with me in the early game.  I pulled 3 Event cards that I quickly put to use.  First, I played "That's Not on the Map!" to drop a marsh in his line of attack on the village. Then I played "Confusion" to march one of his Guard units out of line and into the marsh in canister range of my cannon.  Then I played "Heat of the Battle" to charge his weakened Guard unit into two units of The Sultan's Own, destroying the flower of his army.    

These 3 event cards put Hugh back on his heels.  He pulled his infantry back to reorder and realign.  At this point, I was tempted to come out of my defensive position and try to grab a decisive victory but I resisted.  

Hugh made a valiant attempt attempt to work my flank but the woods and my reserves on the other side made sure his push came to naught.

In the spirit of a gentlemen soldier, I offered Hugh terms near the game's end.  In perfect character, Hugh replied sharply that he had no interest in terms but he was willing to accept my surrender! 

Night fell and with it came a a minor Ottoman victory with an epic point for the carnage inflicted on the infidels!  Two games into the campaign, the village bells rang to celebrate the amazing fact that Sultan al-Adin is undefeated! !  

Maurice Ottoman Army finished!

I wanted to do Janissary in black.  Of course, black by itself would have left the figures looking like I'd primed them and put them on the tabletop. So it was black, dark grey highlight and a lighter grey highlight after that.  In other words, not too black when you're finished!  Here and now, grey is my new black.

And the inspiration.

No matter the continent, century or cut of cloth, combatants always look crisp in crimson.  I think it holds true here.

Inspiration:

9 foot, 4 cavalry, 3 irregular foot and 5 cannons-the Maurice Ottomans massed up.

That's enough to give me plenty of options in my campaigns so I'm calling the Ottoman Project bitirdim (if you guessed finished, you are a clever lad or lass).  In retrospect, I could have build this army to more closely parallel its 18th century counterpart.  I'm embarrassed to admit this didn't cross my mind when I started out down this road. I didn't realize OG carries a Seven Years War Ottoman line or that the SYW figs are in marching order.  What I've done is painted up an army and at the finish, realized that technically, I'm on the Imagi-Nation road.  It was a short drive and I rather like the view.  I'm now ready to get a campaign going so all is good.

As is my habit, we'll exit the brief Ottoman Project with The Pogues "Turkish Song of the Damned."  Here's hoping Mark's British army will be doing the two step off the table's edge when they meet my Ottomans in Maurice!

Ottoman Janissary for Maurice

This weekend, I had the pleasure of playing my second game of Maurice.  It was a nail-biter with the game going down to the wire. The deciding rolls were preceded by good-natured hooting, hollering and high fives.  Before you deduce that we're a bunch of hooligans, let me just say Maurice is flat out fun to play.  It's so much fun that it's pushed everything else we play off the plate.

The game is driven by action cards used to activate forces and modify actions on the field.  I grew up in the era of wargaming without cards and as a result, I sometimes view card driven games with a bit of suspicion. No more.  The  action cards are where Maurice shines.  Each player has a hand of cards and actions/activations on the field cause you to use your cards.  As the active player, you are limited in which forces you can activate and use.  During your turn, your opponent can play a card that interrupts an action or activity.  This means that every turn unfolds with surprises, a punch and often a counterpunch. At the same time, you have to pace yourself because you don't want to run out of cards and have your attack or decisive action thwarted.  No cards means no actions for a turn.

Maurice also incorporate a system where you can choose the national attributes for your army, meaning that one army can  have a different style of play in each campaign.  This is in contrast to Field of Glory and other systems where you have to paint up a whole new army if you're looking for a different style of play.

After our first game in June, my friends Mark and Brent agreed to paint up Maurice armies in 15mm to run in an Imagi-Nation campaign.  I realized that I could use much of my 15mm Later Ottoman Turkish army in Maurice including:

• 5 wicked looking pieces of Ottoman heavy artillery  
• 4 units Ottoman cavalry
• 4 Ottoman command stands
• 2 Irregular units

With these units in hand, I only needed 9 units of infantry to complete my Ottomans for Maurice.  I put in an order for 160 Old Glory Janissary and out came the brushes! For my first batch of 5 units, I painted the base color in a dark blue, then a wash shadows, a mid tone and a highlight over the mid tone.  I generally don't do triads in 15mm as it's a bit of work for a smallish payout.  I think the results here are decent if subtle. The highlight does help them pop a bit and in 15mm, that's an effect I like. You can judge for yourself.    

For the sake of the photos, I put them in column but most of the time, they'll be fighting in a single line of 4 bases.  For the hard core Maurice folks, you'll notice that my Janissary are in a single line per base.  I did try to base them in a double line but I didn't account for the fact that 50% of the Old Glory figures are in firing poses.  As such, you can't properly mount a double line of figures on a single 40mm x 30mm base.  In the 17th century, the Ottomans were a throwback army so I'll attribute their odd appearance to that fact.  If you want to build an Ottoman army with a double line per base, pass on these Old Glory 15s and find a line that does Janissary in march order.

Edit:  Its been pointed out that there is in fact an OG line with marching Janissary.  You have to do a word search for "Janissaries" and it'll turn up the SYW Ottomans.  No photos available on the website so I'm taking this on the word of someone who told me on TMP.  Thanks for the correction!

Here was my inspiration for these units.

The Black Army Stumbles

I'd planned to do loads of yardwork Saturday but rain and cold weather gave me an excuse to put off until tomorrow what I could have done today!  Then Brandt asked if I was up for a game of Field of Glory. Perfect! I was a bit down about missing Little Wars in Chicago this weekend due to family commitments. In the alternate, we did a Littlest Little Wars convention in my basement featuring Later Ottoman Turk vs. Later Hungarians.  My Turks and Hungarians haven't seen a tabletop in 2012 and this was a historical mash-up I've wanted to try for some time.

At the start of the game, I got initiative and Brandt got almost no helpful terrain to go with the Turks. Undaunted, he came out swinging.

Early action saw Brandt jamming me with his light horse and skirmishers.  Everything in the Turkish army can shoot and I was shedding bases to his bow fire.  My 2 units of Serbian Hussars each lost a base and went disrupted, limiting their effectiveness the rest of the game. The upside was that 3 battlegroups of his Akinjis  light horse got way out in front of his army with no clear retreat path.  If I could charge them quickly, they'd be forced to either stand in place and melee or evade through his supporting line and disrupt units. I was salivating at both prospects.

Ottoman Heavy Artillery

These Ottoman Heavy Artillery minis are from Venexia Miniatures and they'll help port my Later Ottoman Turks into Field of Glory Renaissance.  Bruce is busy painting up a Cossack army and we'll give FoG Renaissance a go later this year.  I found a US distributor for Venexia and bought out their entire stock of Ottoman artillery.   There's something about the freakishly enormous wheels on these. Once I saw them, I knew I had to buy them and paint them up!

I painted the metallic areas on the wheels and frame in black and then painted silver over the top, thin enough to leave a thin strip of black as a shadow. It worked to good effect, given how much metal is on these monsters.  I used Devlon Mud to blacken the ends of the brass colored barrels to give the appearance that they've been in heavy use. There's a ton of detail on these figures and such excellent molding give a painter the opportunity to shine.  One day, I'm going to have to paint up a Venexia army.

Lastly, I want to share some photos that came to me from a blogger from Istanbul named Artar. Remember the line from the movie Crocodile Dundee when Paul Hogan is threatened by a tough guy with a switchblade? Paul says "That's not a knife!" and whips out his enormous Bush Knife and says "THIS is a knife!"

Paul Hogan looks over my Later Ottoman artillery and says "That's not Ottoman Heavy Artillery.  THIS is Heavy Artillery!"

The Sultan steps up

I finally got my Later Ottoman Turks on the tabletop against Al's Later Serbian army today.  Al's girlfriend Genna was co-running the Serbs and they made a great team! I couldn't help but notice more people approached us about our game than usual.  Coincidence?  I don't think so!

The Serbian army was knight heavy with cavalry, loads of lancer armed light horse and a single foot unit of medium archers.  My army was built around Janissary with a good deal of foot troops in support. I knew that if I didn't play this carefully, Al would roll me right off the table. My first break came when I won initiative and was able to select Hilly as my terrain choice.  I put down 2 brush and 3 steep hills to give my foot troops somewhere to hide from Al's knights. 

My Serbian Ally knights getting ready to go against...Serbs. 

Al put his knights down in the center.  I knew I'd get overpowered there so I deployed heavily on the flanks and left a screening force in the center.  In the early game, all the action was on the flanks while the knight block contemplated its options.   I pushed my Janissary up to secure the brush on the left flank and the steep hill on the right.  I was hoping that the difficult terrain would make it impossible for Al and Genna to send  knights in against them.  I hoped to pour archer fire down into the center of the board or in the alternate, support my left and right flanking maneuvers.

One of the great things about this Ottoman army is that everything except the Serbian Knights and the camp shoots.  For the first half of the game, I couldn't hit anything.  I did make good progress pushing both the left and right flanks out.  I realized if I ventured too far out, the Serbian knight block would crush me.  That's why I was content to stand pat on my left flank with a defensive line built in the brush.

On my right, I pushed forward into his Al's Light Horse. With my knights in tow, it was slow going.  Even worse, lance armed Serbian Lights chewed through a battlegroup of Akinjis in a single turn and then sacked my camp. Ouch!  4 quick points to my opponent!

Al saw an opportunity and pitched into my left flank in the brush.  His lance armed Serbian Lights went into my Janissary Handgunners and a block of knights went into the Janissary medium foot (in blue). The poor terrain and some good dicing on my part resulted in a flurry of disrupted markers for the Serbians.  While I could not hit a thing in the first half of the game, my archery fire was accurate in the second half.

The game was decided in a place I'll call the "Bloody Angle." The Serbs had me in a pinch, literally and figuratively.  If the Serbian Lights broke my handgunners, they'd sweep in on the flank of my Jannisary.  If the Serbian Knights broke the janissary, they'd sweep the handgunners. This melee ground on out over 3 or 4 turns. 

At a crucial point, my Janissary wavered and went disrupted. I then lost badly in melee and had to make a morale check with a death roll.  I needed a good roll with higher being better.  

Yes!  At turns end, the Jannisary rallied back from disruption.  The knights were neutralized and the Lights broke. On the far right flank, I'd pushed through the light cavalry screen and was a turn away from sacking the camp. Game called with my very first win with the Turks! 

This fast-paced game was a complete change of pace from running my Gallic or Carthaginian heavy foot armies.  It was interesting enough that a couple of people pulled up chairs and watched the second half.  It was also by far the best game I've played and of course it didn't hurt that I made some good rolls.  I'm really looking forward to throwing my Turks against Scott's Mongol horde and eventually, my in-progress Hungarian army as well.