Apr 28, 2013

Inter Arma applied to toy soldiers


Now that the weather almost feels like summer there was a chance of some garden gaming. Our centre yard is not too well maintained, two cars are crossing it and during rain it turns to a smallish Caspian Sea if you know what I mean.
Nevertheless I dug out some plastic toy soldiers to try how the modern implementation of Inter Arma works. To change the scale of the conflict I simply transformed every measurement to inches (e.g. where the book says 20cm it became 20" and so on) which sort of simplifies most of the things. 


The German commando could capture the Allied gun but took heavy losses. With some 1/35 scale tanks it would be more fun... A tank's firing range is, in most of the cases, up to 32".

21 comments:

  1. I used to do this in the green grass of my garden back home...with green troops....they're were a lot of losses....and lawnmowers took care of quite a few as well.

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    1. Good ol' times, I did that too when we had a proper big garden.

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  2. I once took my British 8th army and Africa Korps, Airfix soldiers to the beach....bad move I lost half of them in the sand!!!!

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    1. I also regret taking my 'army' to foreign places... That's why there are only a handful now.

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  3. LOL My mum and dad still turf some of my old soldiers now lol. We had an ace rockery used to have massed battles across it!

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    1. A few couple hundred figs and I'll be able to do that too.

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    1. Many thanks! I bet they would work for other periods too. Think about 54mm pike&shot battles in the garden!

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  5. It seems that nostalgia is here!
    So many "souvenirs" for me, when such plastic figures were the only ones that I was allowed to buy because of the low price!

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    1. Oh yes, I was about 8 when the first set of 'made in China' toy soldiers were bought to me. Those were the rip-offs of Airfix 54mm plastics and were darn cheap.

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    2. For me it was more Airfix and Atlantic figs ! Smaller soldiers but a lot of them ! Perfect with boats and planes of cartboard and some legos for the destroyd houses and bombs ! A good time !

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  6. At the moment I have one side of a similar sort of war (Kiivar), but for the other (Raesharn) I need troops of a different colour preferably Japanese or maybe German in style. As for the lawn - well, as the back lawn has become a doggy latrine, that clearly won't do... The front lawn is too visible from the street and half of it is asphalt pad anyhow. There's potential there, though...

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    1. Good thing our part is quite separated. Only cats are trouble.

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  7. Ha hah! That's how I played army in 1950 and onwards! Wow...great memories for me! I used to fly a Mitchell bomber over the battlefield (in the field across the street from where I lived) and drop "rock" bombs on the enemy positions.

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    1. Yes, one of my very first battles involved a lot of rocks and a fortress made of cardboard.

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    2. For satisfactory bomb and artillery shell explosions, sun-dried clay is the way to go - particularly if it lands on a hard enough surface. With such missiles, you do get a 'blast radius' and shrapnel effects. It also shows how effective entrenchments are for protection - give of take a direct hit, of course...

      I still remember fondly the trench warfare in the back yard 50-something years ago (I would have been aged 8 or 9 then), using inch-lengths of straw as the soldiery... Who knew you could buy actual plastic soldiers?

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  8. I'm to young to comment here really. do have a few stories with my old toy soldiers, the losses were horrific though. But I guess that's all part of the fun. lost a whole set actually that must have been a really big battle around the "mine" or rather that huge hole my friend and I dug in the back yard. their probably buried deep in there now its covered up.

    cool stuff.

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    1. Imagine the future archeologists' faces when they find them.
      'Mr Indiana Jones the 42th... Are these pieces of a mysterious cult?'
      'They must be indeed. Our ancestors were... strange.'

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