The Back of Beyond

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies, 28mm With Angus missing out the game due to his temporary exile in Orkney, this report comes to you from Comrade Bill Gilchrist;  This weekend we played out a large scale Back of Beyond game set in 1920, in the short lived Far East Republic in eastern Siberia.

The Back of Beyond,  Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm This lively little encounter came about for no other reason than we hadn’t played a Back of Beyond game for almost a year. It used to be one of our main wargaming staples, but for some reason it dropped by the wayside. I’ve

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond 28mm We hadn’t played a Back of Beyond game for almost a year, partly because the campaign organiser Colin Jack was wrapped up in his fictitious “A Very British Civil War”. In the “BoB” campaign the Turks landed on the eastern shores of the Caspian Sea,

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm We were due another “Back of Beyond” game, and for a change this one was set near the border between Mongolia and North-Western China, rather than in southern Central Asia – our usual “Back of Beyond” region. The game saw a Chinese warlord’s

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm This week we revisited our Back of Beyond campaign – loosely based on the Central Asian theatre of the Russian Civil War. The game involved a Red Army assault on the city of Ashkhabad, which was defended by the local Emir and his

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm We’d planned to play a Seven Years War game, but as we’ll be doing that on Sunday, we opted for the Russian Civil War instead. This was a small and pretty straightforward game, played out on a 6×4 foot table. The objective was

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm This was a Colonial game with a difference – a merger of a typical “North-West Frontier” game with “Back of Beyond”, our long running campaign system for the Russian Civil War. In this scenario, a small Bolshevik expeditionary force was attempting to cross Afghanistan and

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm This game had everything – armoured trains, British gunboats, submarines, tanks, armoured cars, biplanes and flamethrowers. In other words no early 20th century wargaming cliché was left unexplored! The loose premise involved a Bolshevik attack on the newly-autonomous state of Livonia, which was

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm For a while I’ve been painting through my backlog of Pathans and Afghan regulars, so when Colin Jack suggested a North-West frontier game I jumped at the opportunity. The idea was that a British outpost (manned by a detachment of the Khyber Rifles)

The Back of Beyond, Contemptible Little Armies / Back of Beyond, 28mm This Back of Beyond game involved my Turks (with a few “White” allies) taking on the Bolsheviks (owned by Colin Jack & Dougie Trail). It was a meeting engagement, with initial reconnaissance forces being bolstered by reinforcements as the game progressed.  We fought