My Little Wars Games Have Been Entered

 

Carthaginian elephants with light skirmishers providing protection.
54mm HaT Industrie figures that I painted

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Yesterday I entered three games for the upcoming HMGS Midwest Little Wars convention. The show will be held from April 24 to 27, 2005 at the Sheraton Lisle Naperville hotel (3000 Warrenville Road, Lisle, IL). This is the same hotel venue as last year.

Hannibal and his retinue. These are metal figures from John Jenkins Designs.

I am running three 54mm Hannibal! games during the convention:

Thursday April 24, 2025    Scenario TBD

Friday April 25, 2025        Battle of Zama

Saturday April 26, 2025    Battle of Zama

Here is a link to the HMGS Little Wars convention web site where you can get more information. Game sign up begins on April1, 2025 at Noon CDT (Chicago time).

Little Wars 2025 link

As with my two previous 54mm convention games (Khartoum and Pickett's Charge), I hope to have three tables 6ft by 15ft running parallel to each other. The games at this convention and at Historicon in July 2025 will be the third part of the 54mm Big Game Trilogy that I have hosted over the past three years. After this year, I will retire the large 54mm games for a year of two and go back to hosting smaller 28mm games.

The first game on Thursday evening will feature a general encounter between Republican Roman and Carthaginian forces somewhere in Italy. The game will include elephants, of course, so it is not the recreation of any particular battle since Hannibal had lost all of his elephants while crossing the Alps.

The Friday and Saturday games will recreate my version of the Battle of Zama. The battle is to Hannibal as Waterloo was to Napoleon, a final defeat that followed a string of famous victories.

Preparations 

I was going to include a Roman town on one of the corner areas of the game tables, but I think that it might take up too much table space and interfere with the movement of troops. Instead, I will have several Italian farm houses set up on a corner of each of the two back tables in my game. I am also working on the construction of a Roman aqueduct that will span the entire width of the three game tables. The aqueduct will be set up on one of the table edges. I have five feet of aqueducts in various stages of completion so I have another six feet of structures to build from scratch.

My Roman army has three Roman legions and one Italian allies legion. I need to paint one more set of 32 figures to complete the Italian legion. Other than that, my painting of units is complete and I have shifted my time over to terrain building.

Two of the three units that comprise one Italian legion.
HaT 54mm figures that I painted recently.

I now have a bunch of Roman buildings in various states of construction that I probably will not need for either of the two conventions this year. What to do with them? My thought is to continue modeling 54mm buildings and over time, build a complete city that will fit on a 6ft by 12 ft table in my basement. This way I can add a few bits here and there over time and end up with something fantastic. This is sort of how a model railroader constructs his train layout.

A view of the town from across the river. You can see the "shells" of the aqueduct pieces
at the rear of the city. The black buildings are works in progress and need to be finished.

A view of the city from another direction.

Another view of the town forum. You can see the start of a basilica structure
(white foam core board) at the top end of the forum.

The carpenter's workshop 

Dockside in the town

The town forum or central square in the city.

The table mat is made by Cigar Box Battle Mats and these are a recent addition to my table top set up. The mat looks really great, but I wish that the company had the option to order it with grey stones rather than the earth tones used on this mat. Despite that, I like the mat because now I don't have to make city roads. I just lay all of my buildings on top of the mat.

I am considering creating a scenario called "Who Killed Julius Caesar?" that is based on the board game "Clue" (or "Cluedo" as it is known in the UK). I am working on some other ideas for skirmish style gaming events inside the town. The Gangs of Rome rules look a bit complicated for my taste so I will write my own Roman Skirmish Game Rules in the future. The idea is to have something that uses the many civilian figures that I have accumulated in recent years.

You can never have too many pictures of 54mm (1/32 scale) elephants. These were ones that I painted in 2024.

More later...

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