Return to Darkest Africa: December 2007

Friday, 14 December 2007

German Schutztruppe Askari

These are my Schutztruppe Askari. They are Copplestone castings figures. The German is a Brigade Games miniature sculpted by Mike Owen. These are dressed as they were at the beginning of the war. Later on they adopted floppy hats and khaki puttees.

Wargaming Darkest Africa

I had never collected metal wargames figures having always been a 20mm plastics man. I had maybe five metal Hinchliffe Napoleonics when I was about twelve but couldn't see the point of saving my precious pocket money when you could get so many Airfix plastics for the same amount.

So I didn't start buying metal figures until about fifteen years ago and the very first metal 28s I bought were some of Mark Copplestone's Foundry Darkest Africa figures. I had pictures of them in the magazines but it was only when I actually saw some figures at Salute that I decided to take the plunge and buy some explorers. For a long time all I bought was Darkest Africa so now I am in the unusual (for me) position of having more figures painted than unpainted. Unfortunately, most of them are painted to a very poor standard. Latterly, I have repainted a few characters and they are much improved but I can't really bear repainting all my tribesmen! Having said that my more recent Zambezi campaign has seen me repainting quite a few figures.

I have read, and continue to read, extensively on nineteenth century African explorers and several scenarios have sprung to mind based on my recent reading of Tim Jeal's book about Stanley.

I use Chris Peers Darkest Africa rules but find them (like all of his rules) relentlessly bloody and am really more interested in gaming a campaign which follows an expedition over a number of encounters and scenarios. For this I have been thinking of modifying Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings rules. Their Battle Companies add-on handles campaign type scenarios well and you can weight the abilities of your heroes to make them more or less indestructible. I don't want a set of rules where my heroes are killed in the first game!

Apart from the classic eras of exploration and colonisation I am also interested in World War 1 in East Africa and will continue to gradually collect the excellent Brigade Games figures for that conflict.

This site will look at the period from 1855 until 1918 and I will try to list useful books and other sources as well.