Introducing Battle Chronicle: The Retreat from Moscow

 

Last weekend marked the beginning of a brand-new miniature adventure, and it feels good to finally lift the fog of war just a little.

I’ve been working with Paul from the Pazoot Channel on a project called The Battle Chronicle. Paul has been deep in rules-writing mode, while I’ve been handling playtesting, staging the games, and—alongside my mate Ray—capturing plenty of photos and footage as the project starts to take shape on the tabletop. What you’re seeing in the pictures here is our first big playtesting session, where ideas stopped being theory and started becoming desperate little struggles in the snow.

So what is a Battle Chronicle? Each one is designed as a self-contained narrative skirmish mini-campaign. Inside a single booklet, you’ll find a complete skirmish ruleset, four linked scenarios, and a tightly focused historical theme that drives the action forward. The goal is to create something that feels like a story unfolding, not just a series of disconnected games.

The first Chronicle is set during Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow. The focus is on survival: stragglers clinging together, shattered formations, collapsing morale, and constant hard choices. It’s built as a cooperative experience, with players working together against an automated enemy system. In play, that has already led to some wonderfully tense and unpredictable moments—exactly the kind of drama this period deserves.

For Ray and me, this project has also been the perfect excuse to finally put our Retreat from Moscow collection on the table in a proper, story-driven way. Instead of one-off encounters, we’re seeing units carry their scars from game to game, and decisions in one scenario ripple into the next. It feels closer to history than a casual pick-up game ever could.

If you’d like a quick glimpse of how it looked in action, I’ve posted a YouTube Short showing moments from this very session. And next week, I’ll be releasing a longer video where I talk in more detail about the playtesting process, what we learned, what broke, what surprised us, and why playtesting is such a crucial part of building any set of rules. There’s plenty more frostbite, panic, and last-stand heroics to come.

Those Wargaming Habits that Drive us Mad (and make us laugh)

Every hobby has its little irritations, and tabletop historical wargaming is no exception. In my latest video, I dive into a viewer question that’s been waiting patiently in the comments for its moment in the spotlight: “What are your pet hates in the hobby?” Now, this isn’t a rant in the angry sense. It’s more of a warm, self-aware chuckle at the small things that make us twitch across the tabletop, even while we’re enjoying the best hobby in the world. Because if we’re honest, most of these “pet hates” are things we’ve all done at some point.

I talk about the sight of unpainted miniatures on the gaming table — especially when they somehow manage to defeat a fully painted army. There’s also the familiar frustration of stunning demo games at wargames shows that have no signs, no labels, and no explanation of what battle or rules you’re looking at. For a hobby built on history and detail, that little missing bit of information can make a big difference.

Then there are the smaller visual things, like plain bases that never quite got finished, or the odd effect of scale creep when miniatures from different manufacturers end up mixed into the same unit. Individually, these are tiny issues, but once you spot them, they can be hard to ignore. Of course, not all pet hates are visual. Some happen mid-game, like players who constantly nudge and re-adjust their units, somehow gaining that mysterious “extra inch” of movement, or the enthusiastic dice throwers whose rolls resemble an artillery barrage more than a game mechanic.

Through it all, the tone stays friendly and self-deprecating. This isn’t about telling anyone they’re doing the hobby wrong. It’s about recognising shared experiences in tabletop wargaming, miniature painting, and historical gaming culture, and having a laugh about them together. If you enjoy hobby discussion, reflections on wargaming culture, and the everyday realities of life with toy soldiers, this video is for you. Watch it, see how many of these pet hates you recognise, and then join the conversation — because every wargamer has at least one!

Do House Rules Ruin Wargames?

One of the most passionate debates in tabletop wargaming isn’t about which tank was best or whether Napoleonic squares are overrated. It’s about house rules — those little tweaks, rewrites, and “we do it this way here” moments that sneak into almost every gaming group sooner or later. In this latest video, I dig into the question that every wargamer eventually faces: do house rules enhance the experience, or do they quietly undermine it?

For many of us, tinkering with rules feels completely natural. We don’t just play historical games — we study history, obsess over specific battles, and get emotionally invested in moments when everything could have gone another way. When a ruleset doesn’t quite allow for that, the temptation to adjust it is almost irresistible. Maybe a unit should be tougher, maybe morale should matter more, or maybe the official army list doesn’t quite reflect what actually fought on that day in 1942 or 1815. So we change things, often with the best of intentions.

But rules aren’t just words on a page. Underneath every good game is a web of probabilities, balance decisions, and design choices that are usually invisible to the player. When we start altering things, even in small ways, we might be tugging at threads we don’t fully understand. A tiny bonus here or a new rule there can slowly warp how a game plays, sometimes without anyone noticing until it’s too late.

The video also examines the individuals behind the rules. Designers bring their own vision of history to the table, based on research, playtesting, and compromise. Changing their work can sometimes sharpen a game, but it can also erase parts of what made it special in the first place. And, just to keep us humble, there’s always the risk that we, as players, might not understand a period quite as well as we think we do.

At the same time, house rules aren’t the villains of this story. They can be powerful tools for learning, creativity, and personalising a game to suit your group. They encourage deeper engagement with both history and game mechanics, and they let us explore those wonderful “what if?” moments that make wargaming so compelling.

This video isn’t about declaring a winner in the house rules war. It’s about exploring the tension between creativity and consistency, between personal vision and shared systems, and how that tension shapes the way we enjoy our hobby. If you’ve ever rewritten a rule, ignored an army list, or argued passionately over a single modifier, this one is for you.

Painting Challenge XVI: 2 Soviet GAZ-AAA Trucks

I have just finished building and painting these two trucks from Rubicon Models, a matched pair of GAZ-AAA 2-tonners, and like the armoured vehicles I showed last week, they are daubed in a hurried whitewash over their standard Soviet green. That slapdash winter camouflage was not about style; it was about survival. When the Red Army crossed into Finland in November 1939, it found itself fighting in a world of blinding snow, black forests and temperatures that could sink past –30°C. Against that backdrop, a green truck might as well have been waving a little flag that read “please shoot me.” The Finns, masters of camouflage and patient marksmanship, took brutal advantage of anything that stood out, so Soviet units did whatever they could with limewash, chalk or even mud to blur their outlines against the frozen landscape.

The GAZ-AAA itself was a workhorse of a very Soviet kind. Based on a Ford design built under licence and then steadily adapted by Soviet engineers, it was a six-wheeled, twin-rear-axle truck intended to haul around two tons of men, ammunition, fuel or food across the vast distances of the USSR. In peacetime, it was everywhere, delivering everything from grain to bricks, and in wartime, it became the backbone of Red Army logistics. During the Winter War, it was often pressed into service far beyond what its designers had imagined, rumbling along narrow forest roads that had been hacked through the snow or driving over frozen lakes that groaned ominously beneath their weight. They were not glamorous machines, but wars are not won by glamour; they are won by whoever can keep rifles fed and soldiers warm.

Those conditions, though, were merciless. On the pls side, the GAZ-AAA was mechanically simple and reasonably tough, which mattered when you were hundreds of kilometres from a proper workshop and your hands were too numb to feel a spanner. The extra rear axle gave it better traction than a simple two-wheel-drive truck, letting it claw its way through packed snow and icy ruts where lesser vehicles would just spin. On the other hand, it was still fundamentally a road truck, not a purpose-built winter vehicle. Deep, powdery snow could swallow it whole, its engines hated the cold, and the Soviet fuel and lubricants of the period were prone to thickening into something closer to porridge than petrol or oil. There are plenty of stories, many apocryphal but all evocative, of crews having to light fires under the engine block just to get the thing to start.

A lumbering convoy of GAZ-AAAs will be a tempting target for Ray’s Finns. Hit the first and last truck, and suddenly you have a frozen traffic jam full of trapped men. I may need more tanks. Maybe the T26 Model 1931 with twin MMG Turrets? Guess I’ll be perusing the Rubicon website again pretty soon.

Incidentally, these models, like many of the Rubicon kits, can be built in different variants. The box contains the parts needed to make the GAZ-AA 1.5Ton single axle truck, and the canvas canopy is optional. There are also components in the kit to convert the model into an Anti-Aircraft truck (with the gun sold separately). All the models come with a driver, and I was surprised to find the figures were almost complete (only the feet are missing) despite the fact that the driver's legs end up essentially invisible, hidden inside the cabin. And that, for me, sums up these models from Rubicon, attention to detail, even the bits that probably can’t be seen once assembled.