The Premise of this Blog

In the Beginning....

Well, a little over two years ago actually I was wandering around the Border Reiver show in Gateshead and came across a great looking War of the Roses game being played with a set of rules called Test of Resolve, by David Knight and Tim Couper.  The looked great and seemed like playing them solo would be straightforward.  It would also scratch an itch I have had for decades to wargame that period ever since I first played a game of Kingmaker.

Just over a week after the show, I was still thinking about starting a War of the Roses project.  Not that I didn't already have several other projects in various states of completion, I was just finishing up a 1066 project, my Napoleonic Peninsula project was being shifted over to a Hundred Days Campaign project and I was starting out on a Battle of Britain and Vietnam air war projects.  

To my surprise I got a Facebook advert for a new Kickstarter campaign, for a new version of Kingmaker, so I immediately went and subscribed to it (even though I would not be getting it until Q1 2023) and I got the feeling that this new project would be the right thing to do.

My initial thoughts were to do the project in 6mm and to get the figures from the Baccus War of the Roses range, so I did a small order to see how they would paint up and base.  As usual the figures painted up really well, but I just could not find a base size that worked well for them.  The Test of Resolve rules recommended a 40mm base width for 10-15mm figures and 60-70mm for 28mm figures.  I had used 40mm bases for my 6mm Greeks and Persians and did not like it and I had used 60mm bases for the 1066 project which I was much happier with.  Another downside to doing the project in 6mm was that, at the time, I could not find any good flags to use, I should point out that since then I have found a couple of producers of great flags for that period.  So I decided to try some 10mm figures from Pendraken and they worked really well and looked good on 60mm bases, so for the first time in my life I was going to get myself a couple of 10mm armies.

So, late 2022 saw the start of the Yorkist army, using figures from Pendraken Miniatures and flags from Pete's Flags who was local to me and was very happy to resize the 28mm and 15mm scale flags down to 10mm size.  By the end of March 2023 I had just about finished all the Yorkists and that was when the new version of Kingmaker was delivered to me, and it was fantastic, not only did it have the original game (with a few new Nobles) but there was also Kingmaker II, a slightly faster version and a Solo version of the game, which was ideal for me.  It was then that I began to think about how I could use the boardgame as a campaign tool, whilst fighting the battles with the Test of Resolve rules and my miniatures.

The rest of 2023 was filled out with finishing off the Prussians for 1815, then deciding to replace all the command stands for all the nations involved in the 1815 campaign, so again it was coming up to the end of the year before I could get started on the Lancastrian army.

Here we are now in 2024 with the Lancastrians all finished, the Battle of Britain project about half finished and the Vietnam air war project still not started.  But, in the last week I have managed to get back to looking at the Kingmaker campaign system and have begun to flesh out some values for troop strengths and timescales etc.  More on that in the next post.