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The Orkney Wargames Club meets

in Kirkwall on Thursday evenings.

 

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Pre-Dreadnought

Pre-Dreadnoughts – Playing the Period

Edwardian Firepower & Krupp Steel I never really wanted to do another naval period. Three seemed more than enough. However, one day Colin Jack from the Edinburgh Club invited me to join him in a 1/3000 scale Pre-Dreadnought game, using a set of rules he developed – ones that later became Perfidious Albion. I’d used

The Battle off Dagö, 1906

Pre-Dreadnought Naval, Perfidious Albion, 1/100 scale You’ll search long and hard for anything about this battle in the history books. It was, of course, a made-up affair, based around my eclectic collection of hand-built pre-dreadnought models. In this alternative history scrap, in 1905-06 France and Imperial Russia were both at war with Imperial Germany, and

The Battle of Cape Hel, 1905

Pre-Dreadnought Naval, Perfidious Albion, 1/1000 scale Apologies for the delay in posting this – and the next few reports. I suppose it’s fortuitous really, as with Covid-19 on the rampage, and all socialising on hold, then its good to have a backlog. Silver lining and all that. This was a fictitious naval game, set in

Battle of the Fehmarn Belt, 1906

Pre-Dreadnought, Perfidious Albion, 1/1200 scale The rather ludicrous excuse for this game involving three navies was the Algeciras Conference of 1906. The main diplomatic protagonists were France and Germany, and in our alternate history tensions had mounted so much that the countries were at the brink of war. To rattle the German cage a French

The Battle of Chioggia, 1905

Pre-Dreadnought, Perfidious Albion, 1/1000 scale You’ll look in vain to find any account of this battle, save for the Venetian-Genoese scrap of 1380. Sometimes you just need to invent things in order to justify why six nations turned up with battleships, eager to blow each other out of the water. The rather fast and loose

The Grand Review Battle, 1910

Pre-Dreadnought Naval, Perfidious Albion, 1/1200 Something’s wrong. This was the second incredibly silly multi-player game in two weeks. In fact, both games were remarkably similar – multi-national contingents all battling it out for no apparent reason. The premise – a very loose one – was that a major European war broke out during a multi-national

The Battle of Blit, 1910

Pre-Dreadnought, Perfidious Albion, 1/1200 scale We were all at sea this week, fighting a fictitious naval battle using some of my beautiful pre-dreadnought ships, built by the late Mike Earll. Essentially it all centred around the succession of Montenegro from the Ottoman Empire in August 1910. I concocted a convoluted reason why this might lead

Cape Hogue, 1908

Pre-Dreadnought, Perfidious Albion, 1/1200 scale Whenever we want to play a game which doesn’t involve much effort, we tend to opt for something nautical. As the period between Christmas and New Year is a time of laziness (unless you’re a self-employed author with deadlines), I reached for a box of ships. Similarly, whenever we play

Battle of the Goodwin Sands, 1908

Pre-Dreadnought Naval, Perfidious Albion, 1/1200 scale For the first time in ages we played a naval game, largely because the planned Second World War scrap had to be cancelled because the organizer was in New York. It gave me the chance to field the beautiful scratch-built models I bought earlier this year – all the work

The Battle of Cap de la Chevre, 1890

Pre-Dreadnought Naval, Perfidious Albion, 1/200 scale We’d planned to play a Seven Years War game this week, but at the 11th hour wargame buddy Dave Imrie called and cancelled – after spending an hour in a traffic jam on the approaches to the Forth Road Bridge he failed his morale test and headed home. So,

The Battle of Start Point, 1890

Pre-Dreadnought, Perfidious Albion, 1/1000 scale Thursday 19th October was the club night closest to Trafalgar Night, and appropriately enough I earmarked it as the day when I inaugurated my new pre-dreadnought fleets and cool-looking sea mat. The ships are 1/1000th scale, from Dale Kemper’s Houston’s Ships in the States, while the mat was made by

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