Quick update!

On a whim (yes I know, but a leopard can't change its spots!) I decided to get hold of a few of the Perry's 40mm Peninsular War figures, they just looked so damnably good! Needless to say they are even better in the flesh than on the website where they looked fantastic anyway. I just had to paint one straight away, and after painting well over a hundred ACW 28s in the last month it was a pleasant and well deserved break. Click pictures to enlarge!


I have often fancied a bit of heroic skirmishing and my copy of the Sharp Practice rules are as yet unused so I will probably aim to build up a couple of small forces as and when time allows. I now have 3 active projects which is just madness really, still I can see games of Sharp Practice happening quite happily with just 30 or so figures a side, that isn't really a lot of painting!


Just to show I really have been painting other stuff here is a shot of the 20th Massachusetts (red blanket rolls but original white regimental not the post Ball's Bluff red one. That may be wrong but I like it!).


Will try to get some more ACW photos up soon, but I have a big job interview on Wednesday, busy busy busy!

What am I up to?

Busy month, and I mean seriously busy! I have spent most of my time in the last 3 weeks split between finishing the final chapter of my PhD (which is tantalisingly close!), arranging things for my wedding in September and applying for jobs and attending interviews. As you can imagine little in the way of wargaming time has been available! Even so I have managed to paint a surprisingly decent number of figures, mainly while watching television with my fiancée in the evenings. The secret has been the Army Painter system, which I am totally sold on. It really lets you paint very casually and yet gives very acceptable results. Now I certainly wouldn't use it for some projects, my imagi-nations figures for example, but for the ACW that worn and ragged look that results is just perfect.

Speaking of imagi-nations I have made the decision to rebase my 2 completed regiments. This was not an easy decision, I love the Grant style big battalions and they look wonderful on the shelf with their individual bases, but one go at moving them round the table in their current organisations immediately sold me on the multi-figure base route. Picking up a row of figures after they have collapsed domino style the first time may be amusing, it is certainly not so on the tenth occasion. I am also driven towards a different ruleset, Die Kriegskunst. The Grant rules are fantastic but unpracticable for my current setup of a 6 x 5 foot table. I want the big battalions, but my tablespace says otherwise. I have also become very keen on the General de Brigade system (upon which Die Kriegskunst and Guns at Gettysburg are based) and it makes sense to stick to one rules family, especially as they are so good!

Anyhow I hope to get some more free time soon to take and post some pictures of my ACW units (especially as I am expecting the arrival of some more Flag Dude flags this week). Toodle pip!

We are coming father Abraham

A departure from the norm today so I can blog a little about what is undoubtedly my favourite period when it comes to military history, the War Between the States. I have long had a fascination with this period (as perhaps you can tell from my mugshot to the left) but have been pretty unsuccessful with bringing that interest to wargaming fruition as it were. I think my main problem is that in the past I have gone about it wrong or to put it bluntly in the wrong scale. About a year and a half ago or thereabouts I started a 6mm project and completed around 20 regiments for each side. I was unhappy though as although I liked the models up close when I held them I felt they 'got lost' on the table and did not give me the feeling of character, individuality and excitement that I think the period merits. Now I am not knocking the scale in general, it is undoubtedly excellent in many ways, however it just felt too impersonal for me and I am afraid my interest in completing the project waned.

All pictures are clickable to enlarge!

"Hurrah! Hurrah! We bring the jubilee!

"Hurrah! Hurrah! The Flag that makes you free!"

A couple of weeks ago some friends and I attended Salute 2009 in London. I do not know what overtook me but having not planned to I was overwhelmed with the desire when I was there to get some Civil War figures. I had heard of the Perry plastics before of course but I could not help buying a box when I saw them there, and on a whim a pair of Flag Dude flags too. Having got home I was not even planning to paint them straight away - being short on time and heavily involved in my 18th Century armies. I then saw, however, a couple of threads on TMP about dipping these models and saw Monty's great looking troops over at his blog and I knew I had to have a go. The models above are the result. They took but a single evening to produce (around 3.5 hrs painting) and in fact I have to say I really like the results. They are a bit muddy and lacking in detail, but if you can knock out a unit in a single evening then to be quite frank, who cares?

"Hurrah! Hurrah! For Southern rights hurrah!"

"Hurrah for the Bonnie Blue Flag that bears a single star!"

I now plan to develop this project alongside my 18th Century armies, as those are being painted carefully and meticulously and will take some time to reach a playable state. I also plan to use my 18th Century armies with the Charles Grant rules and so I look forward to having armies based for a more modern set to complement them, in this case I am going for Guns at Gettysburg, which are based on the General de Brigade system. The 2 6mm photos above and below are of models I painted over a year ago. I always paint both sides nowadays as the difficulty in finding opponents with complementary armies can be quite a problem. In addition I like to play solo games and to host games for people that do not have armies and so having two complimentary armies on hand is always a bonus.

"We are coming, coming our union to restore,"

"We are coming, Father Abraham, with three hundred thousand more!"

I think the problem for me with the smaller scale is that I felt that when they were on the table I felt more like I was pushing around wooden blocks than model figures. My eyesight is not great and I had serious trouble dealing with the small elements in a game. I know many will differ with me here but I simply prefer the aesthetics of the larger models and the intimacy of smaller brigade and regimental level engagements. It will also help that I do not need to get a whole new set of terrain, with the majority of the pieces I use for 28mm games in other periods perfectly usable with these models.
Anyway it has been a busy few days but the Marquisate of Valerno's first regiment is finished. I will hold off posting any pictures until I can set up my gaming table this weekend - no dedicated gaming room for me I'm afraid. I have some friend's converging on Schloss Burnstone this weekend for some WW2 skirmishing using the Rules of Engagement and with a scenario I have adapted from one of Mr Grant's Table Top Teasers. We shall have the pleasure of using my friend Eddie Jackman's models, his painting skills are of the level the rest of us can but dream of. I shall take photo's!

"Hear the 'Battle Cry of Freedom,'"

"How it swells upon the air,"

"Oh, yes, we'll rally 'round the standard,"

"Or we'll perish nobly there."

A la gloire!

Finding your own way in the world of wargaming can seem a daunting task when you are brought up on a spoon fed diet of the "GW Hobby". With GW I always knew where I was when it came to opponents and miniatures and getting advice on all manner of things. I suppose in a way this is the greatest strength of Games Workshop's all in one policy when it comes to hobbying. They provide everything and so the gamer really needs to do little apart from buying, painting (actually from my experience a lot of GW gamers dont bother with this bit - but that shall be a later post) and turning up at a store or event where a game is more or less guaranteed.

This was not the case however when I decided to move away from GW. It is amazing what a bewildering array of diverse and compartmentalised sections the wargaming community at large presents to the new wargamer. It is hard to know where to start. Initially when I first decided to try historical gaming a couple of years ago I had a friend who was also interested (though less so than I) and so we discussed what we would like to do. For me I was able to split this into general periods of interest and game mechanics and possibilities that I would like to try. Firstly the game and what it would provide:

1. Scale, Mass and Spectacle: Whenever I played Warhammer Fantasy, my game of choice up until that point, I was always struck by the great gulf which seperated the background art, story and fluff and the reality of what you saw when a game was played. The talk was all great armies and massive campaigns but the reality more often resembled an insignificant little skirmish. Even so called horde armies (which in my experience are very rarely actually seen played as hordes) were fielding maybe 200 models at 2000pts (the average game size in my experience). These werent battles but backyard brawls. This is an inherent failing of games played with large scale figures and not confined to Warhammer, but for me it just didnt sit well.


2. Strategy, tactics and real generalship: Another constant irritation of Warhammer was the often ridiculous outcomes of battles and the crazy tactics required to achieve them. In Warhammer and indeed in the other GW games the levels of attrition suffered by the armies involved is patently ridiculous. It was rare to finish a game in which one or both of the armies were not completely destroyed. Now I know its fantasy but really no general would ever willingly fight a battle expecting the levels of attrition seen in Warhammer - how would he campaign if every battle completely destroyed his army (even in victory!). Furthermore the nature of the game encourages sacrificial units and total commitment of forces - in Warhammer there is no tactical reserve - if a unit is not in contact with the enemy he is not earning back his points.


3. Ease of painting and cost of miniatures: Well I am no great mini painter but neither am I totally without hope and I do like to feel I am making progress with a project and can finish one thing before I get the urge to start another. I wanted to move away from the larger scale miniatures (28mm) and move on to a scale that would be faster to paint and cheaper on the wallet. This would also solve the problem of mass and spectacle - I wanted my finished units to really look like regiments or brigades rather than half a dozen or a dozen men.
   

Secondly periods of interest; for me this meant one thing HORSE AND MUSKET! I have always had a keen interest in the Napoleonic wars and indeed further back to the Seven Years War and the War of Spanish Succession. However the real biggy for me, my real passion, is the American Civil War. I dont know when I really became interested in this period. It was certainly in my early teens and was greatly fostered by Bernard Cornwell and his Starbuck series and by a series of computer wargames made by a company called Talonsoft, the Battleground series (now available from www.matrixgames.com I believe). These were a series of I go U go hex based games centred on some key civil war encounters, Chickamauga, Bull Run, Shiloh etc. They were rather stilted and old fashioned even at the time but they played brilliantly and had a wonderful stirring soundtrack by Bobby Horton. I am not quite sure what it is about the Civil War which so captures my imagination, maybe it is the closeness of it (it really was not that long ago at all), the great personalities or a wealth of other things. I am afraid I have become a total geek on this and my Civil War book collection is threatening to overflow the new bookcase that my girlfriend and I constructed a couple of months ago [not to mention my very expensive reenactors uniform :( ]Anyhow back to the wargaming, maybe I will blog more on this later.

As a compromise my friend and I decided to go for Napoleonics and we proceeded to look at rules. We lighted upon Sam Mustafa's excellent Grand Armee and decided to go for it. Now it was just models - the scale of which is unimportant in GA. I was all for reducing in scale and so we initially looked at 15mm and 20mm, both of which are very well served by figure manufacturers for the period. I was still unhappy however as even with the scale reduction the aim of creating believable or even semi believable units was not being served. This is just about the time I ran across Baccus 6mm and their diminuitive little men, I was pretty stunned. I had never even considered people were gaming with such small figures. I can imagine what some of the painting fascists I knew from my GW circles would have thought of such models. Anyhow I was intrigued and so ordered a starter army for the Napoleonic French (for roughly what it would have cost me for 2 character figures from GW!) I was stoked. When they arrived I was shocked how small they were in the hand but equally and in fact probably more surprised by how bloody excellent the sculpting and casting was. I thought they would be pretty shapeless little lumps. I was wrong. Despite my excitement circumtances conspired against me (I moved, I fell out with the friend who was to do this project with me) and I never painted them.

Fast forward to about a month and a half ago and I ran across these guys garrisoning my closet (having returned to Warhammer and the Warhammer Ancient Battles rules in the interim). That very day I decided to paint a unit and was surprised and pleased to be able to complete them in about 2 hours. Wow I could actually finish a whole army in 6mm in a realistic timeframe. I was hooked. Here is a pic of that very first 6mm unit. Dont laugh they are very small and were my first. There is a knack to painting small scales (which I hadn't got my head around when I did these) and I will certainly blog more on that later :)

A french infantry unit with deployed skirmishers on a GW 50mm monster base. For Grand Armee.

Thats as far as I got with the French - as soon as I had done them I knew what must be done. A new project just for me - no one else to put me off. Two armies in the grand scale so that I could fight the great battles of the American Civil War. Where I started and what I am up to in a coming post :)