Monday 27 September 2010

Balkrunia and Karagoz - The War at Sea

One of the facets of an early 20th century ‘imagi-nation’ that I intend to take full advantage of is the naval side. As my two protagonists are based on the Balkan nations and the forces of Ottoman Turkey then the potential for much in the way of naval activity is very high. The ‘terrain’ I will be fighting over makes use of the 1914 -1918 maps of the Mediterranean available in the board game ‘The Great War at Sea: The Mediterranean’ although some of the national boundaries will need to be modified. For the ship models for the two sides I have been extremely fortunate to have acquired a substantial reinforcement to my existing collection of old Minifigs 1/1200th scale WW1 ships and so these models will furnish all of my needs in respect of hardware. The first batch had been acquired from ebay but far and away the largest portion came from Bob Cordery ; to whom once again I extend my most grateful thanks.

I will post a fuller background to the composition of the fleets once I have decided how best to split them up. My feeling at the moment is to have a Karagozian fleet mostly of earlier vessels but with a couple of ‘state of the art’ types whilst the opposition has more modern types overall but is mostly lighter in weight. In any event, I want the fleets to be quite different in their composition in order to present each side with differing tactical challenges.

For the rule I will probably use a variant of Axis and Allies: War at Sea as these are simple and great to use for a club night game. I will also be making use of the aerial dimension as well and plan to make use of the Irregular miniatures 2mm biplanes and probably some Brigade models dirigibles for air support.

The models themselves will be easy to paint as detail wise they are very basic. It was a great shame that Minifigs never expanded the range (German ships were mooted but never materialised) and indeed, the moulds seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth. When the fleets are ready I will post some pictures to the blog of the Eastern Mediterranean’s finest in action.