Steppe Away From Those Cossacks!

That Russian Civil War game last week got me excited about the early 20th Century again but also reminded me of how limited and superficial is my knowledge of those wars.

My go to on this is the Pygmy Wars site ( pygmy-wars.50megs.com ). A wealth of both first hand sources that can be downloaded but also some excellent presentations dealing with both history and war gaming.

I also broke open a box of Strelitz, hoping that they had developed from ugly little trolls into attractive figures since I last looked. Nope!

However, by this time I was already running over why I had put the RCW aside and remembering about my plan to reduce the number of separate collections until some are more developed. I decided to haul out some more Scruby Boers to paint and ponder the possibilities.

A reprint of a picture of my first Jacklex and Scruby Boers.

If I were to stick with a strictly historical approach I would need to cover the 2nd Boer War, France in 1914, SouthWest Africa, East Africa, Palestine and the Russian Civil War. If I were to go the HG Wells route, I would need a campaign involving lots of cavalry and mounted rifles, mostly in uniform but including volunteers in civilian clothes, natives as well Europeans, artillery and machine guns, early trucks and armored cars, planes, amphibious operations, open plains with rivers, hills and patches of woods, small villages and farms and possibly some desert.

The 2  most obvious choices to me would be to either delay or soften the 2nd Boer War so that the 1914 uprising is successful leading to a hook up with German South West Africa forces for a prolonged WWI campaign or to add a 1/72 early 20thC chapter to the Atlantica saga. I'll paint the rest of my handful of Boer castings before I decide but any expansion of my RCW collection is going to have to wait.