Wargames Vault have pulled out all the stops and have made THE PORTABLE WARGAME COMPENDIUM available online in watermarked PDF format.
It is on sale for the same price as the Kindle edition (£5.00 or its equivalent in local currency) and can be found here.
If this proves to be a success, I may well publish some of my other books in the same format with Wargames Vault.
The Spring 2022 issue of the Victorian Military Society's SOTQ (Soldiers of the Queen) arrived in the post yesterday, and as I have come to expect, it contains a very interesting selection of articles on a wide variety of subjects.
The articles included in this issue are:
As 'The Four Feathers' is one of my favourite films (I own three versions on DVD!), the article by Dr Roger Atwood was by far and away my favourite one in this issue, but the article about the Life Guards' mutiny was a topic that I had never heard or read about before, and it certain ly piqued my interest.
The cost of membership of the Victorian Military Society (UK: £25.00 and Overseas: £30.00) is well worth it.
In response to several requests, here are some photographs of the four sets of imagi-nation Armed Forces in my collection.
The Armed Forces of Burgundy
The Armed Forces of Khakistan
The Armed Forces of Schwarzenberg
The Armed Forces of Stalbania
Amazon was very fast off the mark when I approved THE PORTABLE WARGAME COMPENDIUM for publication, and the printed paperback edition is now available to buy online. Furthermore, the Kindle edition is available for pre-order for publication on 28th April.
The hardback edition will be available to purchase once they have been printed in Europe and shipped to various Amazon warehouses.
I am still trying to find a way to make a PDF edition available. One avenue that I am exploring is distributing it myself. If I do, I will ask buyers to contact me on a dedicated email address, and then bill them using a PayPal invoice. Once that is paid, I will email a copy of the PDF to the purchaser.
Having completed the model ironclad battleships for my Belle Époque imagi-nations, I thought that a review of the collection I have been building up was due.
THE ARMED FORCES OF BURGUNDY
Navy
The Burgundian Navy currently comprises the following ships:
Army
The Burgundian Army currently comprises the following units:
Units shown in italics are reserve units.
THE ARMED FORCES OF KHAKISTAN
Navy
The Khakistani Navy currently comprises the following ship:
Army
The Khakistani Army currently comprises the following units:
Units shown in italics are reserve units.
THE ARMED FORCES OF SCHWARZENBERG
Navy
The Schwarzenberg Navy currently comprises the following ships:
Army
The Schwarzenberg Army currently comprises the following units:
Units shown in italics are reserve units.
THE ARMED FORCES OF STALBANIA
Army
The Stalbanian Army currently comprises the following units:
Some time ago, I (and several other people) helped to encourage Paul Wright to produce a new, revised edition of his FUNNY LITTLE WARS book. He has, and it is now on sale from Lulu.com for £20.00.
The book is substantially different from the first edition and reflects the developments and changes the rules have undergone in the intervening years. The book comes in two parts, the first explaining the background to the rules, the way the rules work, a couple of scenarios, and suggestion on how to build a suitable toy soldier army and to conduct a garden wargame. The second part contains useful information and a brief summary of the rules.
The contents include:
The Army Lists include ones for:
The book contains numerous colour illustrations, both old and new. and in my opinion is even better than the first edition.
The book opens with a very interesting statement which sets the stage for the rest of the book:
This is a work of the imagination.
Picture a garden, with HG Wells and toy soldiers ...
...the idea of a Late Edwardian afternoon, and a little campaign in the sunshine set in the far away world of hills, forests, castles and forts.
This is a game of imagination ...
'I dream, therefore I exist'
August Strinberg
FUNNY LITTLE WARS: EDWARDIAN GARDEN WARGAMES IN THE STYLE OF MR HG WELLS was written by Paul Holcroft Wright and published in 2022 by Battlefield History Litd. (ISBN 978 1 4583 7005 1).
It took me less time than I expected to build my model of the Khakistani ironclad battleship and to paint it.
The colour scheme I chose was similar to that on the other ships I had modelled, and featured a black hull, beige upperworks, and an ochre funnel.
Yesterday I finally drew a line under any further work on the forthcoming PORTABLE WARGAME COMPENDIUM and uploaded the text to Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). There were a few minor problems that needed to be solved, but these just took a bit of time and some effort on my part to sort out. Once that was done, I saved the book in draft form and ordered some printed proof copies. These should be with me by the middle of next week, and once I have checked them, I will release the book for publication.
The cover of the paperback edition looks like this:
They will be printed in colour and the final price will be about £20 for the hardback and £14 for the paperback. I’m still looking at how to make the book available in PDF format as KDP does not support the sale of books in that format.
At 9.00am on Tuesday I was phoned by one of the nurses from the Urology Department at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Woolwich. They asked me to go for a short consultation at 11.00am and to collect a prescription for the first stage of my treatment. Sue and I drove to the hospital, and by 11.00am we were sitting in the reception area for the Urology Outpatients Clinic, waiting for my appointment. The nurse was running a little late, but by 11.45am I had been seen, and we then set of to the hospital pharmacy to collect my prescription.
That is where things began to go a bit awry.
On reaching the pharmacy, I had to join a queue to hand my prescription in. This took fifteen minutes ... but when I got to the front of the queue, I was told that the prescribing doctor had not written their name in the correct box on the prescription form and that I had to go back to the Urology clinic to get this error corrected!
I did as requested ... and then had to re-join the queue to hand my now correctly completed prescription in. I then had to wait for a further forty-five minutes for the pharmacist to complete my prescription. During this hiatus, Sue went off to find somewhere outside to sit.
By the time I left the hospital and re-joined Sue, it was after 1.00pm. On the way back to our car I tried to pay for our parking, only to discover that the single coin payment machine in the whole car park was full and would not process any further payments. I then tried to pay online ... but as I did not have the parking company's app on my telephone and I hadn't got my credit card with me, I could not pay! I now risk a £80.00 'fine' for non-payment, so I took a photo of the machine showing the fact that I had tried to pay but was unable to do so.
The icing on this particular day's cake came later in the day when I went to my GP's surgery to hand in the paperwork the hospital had given me for my doctor so that I could arrange an appointment to have an injection that will form part of my treatment. (I have to take a course of tablets for four weeks, and halfway through I have to have an injection of another drug that will work with the tablets.)
When I spoke to the receptionist at the GP surgery, they told me that they were not able to arrange an appointment unless they had the drug ... but they were not sure if they had to give me the prescription for the drug so that I can get from the pharmacy and take it to them or if they could order it directly.
The receptionist consulted the practice manager, who then had to discuss the situation with the person in charge of processing prescriptions. They eventually came up with a solution; the GP surgery will order the drug directly and then contact me to arrange a date and time for my appointment.
The thing that I found disturbing was the fact that they had no idea how long it would take for the dug to be delivered. I kept repeating that for the drug to be effective, I needed to have the injection on Wednesday 3rd May. The practice manager assured me that she didn't expect there would be a problem ... but I was not convinced when I left the surgery and won't be until they confirm my appointment.
Khakistan is an imagi-nation that draws its inspiration from Ottoman Turkey, and when thinking about a design for an ironclad battleship for the Khakistani Navy, I looked at the various warships that served in the Ottoman Navy during the 1880s and 1890s. After considering the options, I chose to base my design on that of the Osmaniye-class.
These ships were constructed in the 1860s as broadside ironclads, ...
... but they were modernised and reconstructed in the early 1890s. They were re-boilered, re-engined, and rearmed with two 9.4-inch/24cm guns mounted in single centreline barbettes fore and aft of the ship’s main superstructure.
The modernised ships looked like this …
… and when ‘cartoonised’, the design looked like this.
