Desert War 1

by Derek · May 20, 2006

A chance remark by Kevan Gunn last week, combined with a general increase in my level of enthusiasm for wargaming brought about largely by Cannonade 2006 (see below), has got me all excited about the Desert War of WWII.

Along with other members of the South East Scotland Wargames Club I first got involved in doing this period in 15mm about eight or nine years ago, but our enthusiasm died the death when we couldn’t find a set of rules that we really liked. Command Decision proved to be too complicated for our tastes, and we never managed to finish games off in the time available at a club night, while Spearhead was disliked by British players who all felt their troops were badly treated by the combat system.

At the moment there’s several WWII rules systems that I enjoy playing, all of which can use troops based identically. Most played at the club at the moment are the Battlegroup Panzergrenadier rules from Caliver Books (review here) and we sometimes still play the PBI II rules from Peter Pig which were very much a craze last year. Personally I am extremely fond ofthe Blitzkrieg Commander rules and I have played and enjoyed Battlefront WWII on occcasion.

Over the past year or two I’ve been mainly concentrating on the Normandy campaign of 1944, a favourite of mine as I have spent several long summer holidays in the area. I have forces for this period from 11th Armoured Division and 6th Airbourne. These forces are not yet complete of course and I’ve just placed an order for over £100 of stuff (mainly Para Jeeps and Shermans) with Peter Pig which should be ariving next week. What a sensible time to revive the desert stuff.

I didn’t really need to buy anything new for the desert, though I did splash out on a couple of the rather lovely 2pdr Portees from Flames of War at Cannonade and since then I’ve bought some of their Engineers to add to my force.

I did decide to rebase my entire desert collection of about fifty vehicles and around a hundred infantry/artillery stands. Not that I’m putting them on different sized bases or anything, it’s just that the way I’m doing bases nowadays just looks so much better than the way I did back when I started this project.

Anyway here’s some pictures of the stuff I finished off this week. The infantry and 2pdr are from Peter Pig, the small staff car from SDD. The terrain board was made by Kevan Gunn.

Currently sitting on my painting table getting rebased is a small force of Afrika Korps and I will put up some pictures of them next week sometime.