Return to Darkest Africa: Zambezi Campaign 4: Regular Askaris

1st Unit of regular Askaris

I have now finished the first two British units for what I am now calling my Zambezi Campaign. These are the two units of 8 Regular Askaris. I have given each one a Sikh NCO.

2nd unit of askaris

I actually painted 26 askaris so have twelve in reserve if I ever decide to increase the forces. To start with, though, I am going to stick to Gary Chalk's initial forces.

The complete batch

To complete the British expeditionary force I need a unit of irregular askaris, a standard bearer and the officer (actually, I am going to use two officers).

Next up and ready for undercoating, is the Naval Brigade. I hope to get going on them this weekend.

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.

Return to Darkest Africa

Thursday, 6 January 2011

Zambezi Campaign 4: Regular Askaris

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