Colonial Newbie, have some questions.

[jetengine]

I've been interested in playing a 15mm game with firearms in at my club for a while now. Sci-fi is kind of bleh, WW2 is dominated by FOW whose rules I'm not a fan of whilst moderns, napoleonics and WW1  are ignored. No one has done 19th century however. So I've got a few questions.

1. Sources for 15mm Colonials ?
2. Rulesets ? I intend to use Ospreys 'The men who would be king' if I enjoy it at Salute but it's always nice to know.
3. Going with British Redcoats as the main faction whom would their enemies be ? I'm guessing at Afghans, African Tribes, Indians (mutiny), Chinese (boxer rebellion) and Boers ?
4. What are the pros and cons of colonial gaming.

[FifteensAway]

First, a major pro going with 15 mm is you get a much larger battlefield for the same price and it just looks better.  Or you can play on a much smaller table if space is a real premium.

Rules - not my favorite but have stood the test of time and are still popular and that is Sword and the Flame, but there are many others.  Others will fill in that knowledge gap better than I.

You didn't mention a couple of the most popular periods - the Anglo-Sudan war which can range from early 1880's up to later 1900's (though not without significant gaps in between) and the war with the Zulus.  I don't care much for the latter because it games a lot like slaughter with rifles versus spears and it is very hard to get a good balance between masses of Zulus and the British (and rules that work to portray this).  But all of the others are workable though the British uniforms and equipment would have changed of course.  In 15 mm, if you are not a died-in-the-wool purist that might not be so hard to live with. Except for the later change over to khaki rather than red coats.

Suppliers are many but I'll just mention a few: Essex has a small selection of smallish ranges, Peter Pig has the Sudan, for larger 15s I'd absolutely go with the fantastic Blue Moon figures available through Old Glory 25s.  They have the main periods including the Pathans of India.  And they are expected to come out with the Boxer Rebellion - and doing appropriate buildings to go along with it.  That is likely to be a fantastic hit.

Negatives, for some, for 15s are you can't paint the detail - but those folks haven't seen some of the brush work I have.  But, really, if your focus is on the gaming a 'gaming standard' is all that is really needed for most of us.  Just a very high standard here on LAF.

And, as my moniker here on LAF shows, I'm a big fan of 15 mm.  I have over 30,000 of the little buggers so, if you don't feel like buying figures, just move in down the street and I'll let you paint thousands and thousands of figures for us to game with.  I have bunches of colonials, including the Indian Mutiny (no Pathans, well a very few).

Hope that helps get you going in the right direction.  Cheers.

[jetengine]

Thanks.

At what point did the uniform change from red to khaki btw and is the pith helmet always part of the uniform or is that just for african units ?

[Mad Guru]

Re: the pros and cons of colonial gaming... well, they are probably joined at the hip, or perhaps even identical.

What makes colonial gaming special or different from other periods and genres is its inherently "asymmetrical" nature, pitting forces with significantly different weaponry and/or strategy and tactics, against one another.  Most of the time, the "modern" British and their native allies face off against enemy forces armed with more primitive weaponry, present in far greater numbers, and strengthened by their intimate familiarity with the terrain of their homeland.  There are some exceptions to this rule, such as the handful of battles in the Second Afghan War involving the Afghan regular army, whose weapons and tactics were very similar to those of their British and Indian foes, and the brief Anglo-Egyptian war of 1882, in which the Egyptian regular army was basically a lower quality version of their British enemy.

With a good set of rules this asymmetrical style of warfare can make for excellent and unpredictable games... but not every player will enjoy commanding either side of such uneven match-ups, even when the odds are balanced out by sheer numbers or a well-crafted scenario.

Re: rules... in addition to The Sword And The Flame (aka: TSATF) and its "Big Battle" variant, Eight Hundred Fighting Englishmen, some other sets in use for colonial gaming include Black Powder, Battles for Empire, and Piquet Field of Battle.

I'm principally a colonial gamer focused on a very narrow slice of history, the Second Afghan War of 1878-1880.  To me it is an incredibly rich source for a great variety of games, stretching from skirmishes to division level battles, to sieges, with British and Indian troops facing off against mixed combinations of Afghan regular, tribal and religious fanatic forces.

As FifteensAway says above, the Sudan Campaign is a very popular theater of colonial operations, and it allows you to add gunboats and Naval landing parties to the mix, and to engage in river battles on the Nile featuring British and Mahdist gunboats going head-to-head, or prow to prow.

EDIT: During the Second Afghan War the British and Indian troops wore a "transitional" style of uniform which included various mixed combinations of red and blue home service dress, and khaki campaign uniforms, some units wearing all of one or all of the other, and other units wearing blue trousers and khaki tunics.

It's generally agreed that the last time a British unit wore redcoats into action was at the 1885 battle of Ginnis in the Sudan, though some say it was a decade later at the more obscure 1896 Battle of Ferkeh, also fought in the Sudan.

The foreign service helmet, which I believe is what you are referring to, was the standard headgear for British units in the tropics from about 1870 until the introduction of the Wolseley Helmet, around 1900.

[FifteensAway]

And what Mad Guru didn't tell you is that he creates some of the best colonial games on the planet, maybe several planets.  While he works in the larger scale, you can still learn much by following his terrain building projects.  Just look for his name next to a thread here on the colonial adventures page.  His work is stunning.

[Hobbit]

It's probably a good idea to do some background reading before jumping into the period. Assuming that it is British colonialism that you're interested in you could do far worse than this book as a one-stop-shop introduction: http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Colonial-Wars-Source-Book/dp/1854091964

[Deedles]

Plenty of scope within the Victorian era .. It can be called science versus pluck , but clever scenario design can make all the difference. challenging the imperial player against time constraints to keep them moving rather simply stand there firing , or making sure you have to think about ammunition , water, food, civilian protection etc as well as thier native "enemies" machinations can make for balanced fun games