The Back of Beyond

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm Next month we’re playing a big weekend multi-player game, set in “The Back of Beyond”. This game was all about giving people a flavour of the rules, and trying out a few amendments. The brief was, each of the four players had a battalion-sized force of four

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 1920 This week we played out a game from the scenario book for Setting the East Ablaze!, which follows on from one we played in January. In that, the Bokharans repulsed an attack by the Bolsheviks, and lived to fight another day. Well, this was that other

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm First off, let me apologise for the ropey photos. I left my good camera in Edinburgh, and these were taking with an old and temperamental one, which I’ve forgotten how to use. Anyway, the game was so much fun we’ll do another one soon, using these

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm This was the second half of a two part game – the first instalment was played out the week before (see Journal 96) The two sides spent the game landing or advancing, and now both sides were poised for a fight through the dusty streets of

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm This game was something of a trio down memory lane – the (fictitious) Turkish landing at Krasnovodsk on the eastern side of the Caspian Sea featured in a game played out back in 2006. It was the opening move of the Turkish entry into the Edinburgh

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm You may be forgiven for not knowing where Skobelev is. The place is now Fergana in Usbekistan, on the North Silk Road, to the south-east of Tashkent. As a town it is very decidedly in “The Back of Beyond”. It also set the scene for this

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm This was a long-overdue return to “The Back of Beyond”, a period I really enjoy, but for some reason play far less often than I’d like. Largely because I didn’t have the right sand-coloured cloth to hand, this game was set in Northern Russia, rather than

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm Given the enjoyment of the large Back of Beyond game earlier this month it was almost inevitable that I’d revisit the period. Besides, all the figures were ready to hand, and it was something different to stage in Orkney – none of the other two wargamers

The Back of Beyond, Setting the East Ablaze, 28mm This weekend it was time for another wargaming extravaganza staged by the League of Gentlemen Wargamers, a motley collection of gamers who meet three times a year in Kirriemuir, in north-east Scotland. On this occasion their behaviour was far from gentlemanly, with no end of plotting,