And the activity continues - tricornes and more tricornes

After recent forays in bigger figures, I reckoned it was time to get back to 15mm.

First up were the final units for the Great Northern War Swedes. The bases have still to be finished and the flags added, but I'm happy to get to this point. At the top left is a finished unit I used for quick reference. The cavalry at the top right are the Life Guards in their pale blue uniform. The chaps at the front are the traditional Swedes in blue and yellow. I used Miniature Paints for the blue and yellow. Mid-blue for the coats and canary yellow for the facings. Nice and bright, and looks good across the table.   

And after a long time, I'm getting back to the Seven Years War Austrians. I want to see if I can finish enough to do a decent scenario of Austria vs Prussia with these chaps.  

Finally, some pictures from a recent Black Powder game at a friend's house. Napoleonic British vs French in the Peninsula.  In 15mm.   

A group of us have now got the Black Powder 2 rules.  We've had some great games with BP1 and hopefully BP2 will be just as good. 

I'll do a critique of BP2 later. I think the rules are still good, but I feel the physical production of BP2 is disappointing compared to BP1.  BP2 has typos and bits that are bad to read. The layout has changed a bit and it seems to have been rushed. Disappointing when it could have been so much better. 

More later …  

close up on the 28mm Italians

Some photos on the Italians. I've not found a flag yet, so I may well just doctor a French flag and paint the blue bits green. 

First the command. The senior officer holding the sword in both hands was a mini-conversion job. I liked that pose from when I did some Historex stuff a long time ago. 

The skirmishers. 

The fusiliers firing.

The fusiliers marching.

A closer picture of some fusiliers marching. Why is it I only spot a figure is skew-wiff on a base after I've taken the picture. The officer is now standing straight in the picture below. 

And the grenadiers. 

Sometimes I think I put too much flock on the bases, yet at other times it looks OK.  The slightly curved sabot bases came from Warbases. The idea was to give the impression a line of troops without it being too precise.  

More later … 

And the 28mm Napoleonic Italians are done

Here are the finished figures. 

First a couple of pictures from my outdoor varnish session last Saturday.  It was a good dry day with minimal wind, everything worked out fine. 

And the finished figures, though I've still to do a flag. Overall not too bad, though I may have slightly overdone the green undergrowth. 

And having done these, the question is what to do with them. I'm going to move on to do French and British.  I'll offer these Italians to chaps at the club and if there are no takers, then they can go to ebay.   

I'll also try to take some better pictures of these. Maybe some close up. 

When I'm painting my next batch of 28mm figures, I reckon I'll try to adopt a much simpler style of painting - almost toy soldier style with bright flat colours. But we'll see … more later. 

Current activity 2 - some 28mm Napoleonic Italians

No posts for ages, then 3 show up at once.  :) 

This is my current painting project. I'm trying to get these Victrix Napoleonic infantry finished. 

First, the chaps nearly finished. This is an officer and a detachment of the Italian 1st Light Infantry. This was done using my favourite semi-wash technique over a white undercoat, followed by more detail painting and a small bit of shading.  

And some chaps that are work-in-progress.  White undercoat again, and shading in the folds. 

And waiting on the tray are the rest of the chaps. There are 60 figures in total.  

I'm not sure if I'll keep them after this. Painting them is fun, but the force was put together for Sharp Practice, which I'll not play again, and I may not use them for Black Powder. I'll see how I feel after they're all done, and then offer them to chaps at the club or put them on ebay. 

Hopefully more posts soon.  

Current activity - some 10mm WW1

Here are current activities.  First a bit of stumbling with WW1 figures and black undercoat. 

Now, I'll admit, I've never really liked a black undercoat, much preferring white.  I think it's really because I can't see any detail on a black undercoat. And so, when I got some Kallistra 10mm WW1 figures I had a debate about which to use, then decided to trial both. 

Here are pictures. After undercoating black, I gave the those figures a top down dusting of pale grey. It looks OK so far. 

Then I applied some field grey, and washed over it with a green wash, because I understand the WW1 German uniforms seem to have been slightly more green than in WW2.  It's OK so far, though I'm not convinced the black really achieved anything. 

However, at the back was my airbrushed attempt to do the blue coat on the French, and it was a mess. I just didn't like it, and after a bit of a debate, decided to strip the paint and start again. 

And a final shot of the figures after being brushed with isopropyl cleansing alcohol.  It was like reverse dry-brushing.  

After all this I've decided to pause and think some more about how to paint these figures.  I think I may even rebase to 3 infantry and 2 cavalry per base. 

More later. 

games have been happening

I've not posted in ages, though gaming activity has continued. There were a lack of decent pictures on my part, mostly down to forgetting on the day and sometimes a shaky hand on the camera.  

Here's a selection of reasonable pictures. 

First was our first game of 1914. It was a new rule set and we played with 15mm figures belonging to a couple of the chaps at the club.  A nice game system based on playing initiative tokens to do stuff. As the name suggests, it's for 1914 and the initial battles where there was still an element of movement. I liked it and would like to try the game system again, but we have so many games to play. 

Next is a snapshot of a Black Powder game and an AWI scenario.  This battle took place in open woodland, hence the scattered trees.  The British were advancing from the bottom.   

And the clash when the two lines met.  This was another fun game using Black Powder.  

Back to the great war, this time in 6mm and using the Spearhead rules.  The figures were by a fellow club member.  6mm may not be to everyone's taste, but I like the more operational possibilities in games like this. While 28mm looks very good, many games do tend to involve charging over the table as fast as possible and throwing lots of dice.  

If I remember correctly, each base represents a company, and this is me, as Germans, trying to take a river crossing on my left flank, with 3 battalions of a regiment with accompanying machine guns and artillery support somewhere off to the rear.  

And this is my corresponding attack on my right flank with a similar sized force. 

Back to Black Power and a Great Northern War scenario. Holzowyn.  This is the only decent picture I took. At the top of the table the Swedes have just emerged from the marsh to attach the Russian right.  The rest of the Russians stretch down the table towards the camera, and are defending a long low ridge against more Swedes advancing from the left. 

The objective of the scenario is that the outnumbered Swedes have to attack and win before all the Russian reserves arrive.  It was a really goo game, but we stumbled a bit by having 7 people round the table, most of whom were new to Black Powder.  I'd really like to do this scenario again with 1 vs 1 or 2 vs 2, to play more slowly and demonstrate the rules  a bit better. 

 More to come. 

Black Powder game with small units

Here are pictures of a game we played recently at the club.

Black Powder, but with little differences. We played this AWI game as a kind of skirmish game with 8 figure units. None of us have enough figures to do a game like this with 24 figure battalions, so I suggested a skirmish type game as I thought all the mechanics would still work. And they did. We had a great game on a 6 x 4 table.

The other thing I suggested using was the Quick Start rules from the Waterloo boxed set. This is a simple 7 page easy intro to the game and was perfect for what I wanted to do. We were all rusty on the rule mechanisms as we'd not played BP for a long time. 

The scenario we chose was Freeman's Farm from the BP rulebook. Here are the British on the road. In the distance are the British skirmishers being surprised by the Americans emerging from the woods. And, to my eye, this looks fine as a game of BP. 

And here are the first American die rolls, needing 4+ to hit.  Hilarious.

The British advance over the river. The British advancing along the road have hits and are disordered. The Americans in front have hits. The British are about to take their break test. 

And some time later the British advance over the river in the opposite direction. The British attempt to move around the left of the wood may show some success.  

Same view from a different angle. Near the back of the table are Americans who showed an amazing ability to fail their command rolls. 

On the British left flank, three American units are advancing while the Hessians on the road stand and watch. 

At the end of the night is was looking like an American victory.  It was a great game, and to the chaps who played, the game played well and looked well.

We'll return to this simple version of BP again and probably with the same size units. Though next time we may try the full BP rules. 

The other thing that's come out of the game, is my decision to keep my 28mm plastic Italians and Waterloo box set and my own AWI/imagin-nations stuff.  

The reason behind this is a couple of weeks back I had a game of Sharp Practice 2.  I've never really taken to SP and while the game was OK, I just got fed up of the writing style and trying to find stuff in the rules. And to me, the SP rules are not well written. I seemed to spend more time figuring out how many actions this officer or unit could perform and checking charts and tables than I did playing the game. I came away from the game somewhat down-hearted and thought about selling off my 28mm stuff.

But then my mind turned to Black Powder and what I regard as the elegant simplicity of it's mechanisms. There seemed to be no reason not to play this as a skirmish style game with smaller units.  And it worked.  Particularly with the Quick Start rules. And so I'm happy and looking forward to another game, and I'm going to keep my 28mm figures. 

As a final note to fellow gamers, if you have or can get the BP Quick Start rules, try to have a game as a skirmish. It's great fun, and the rules need minimal tweaks.

And a note to Warlord Games; please consider doing a skirmish version (or supplement) of Black Powder using the Quick Start rules as the basis.  It may not sell a lot of figures, but as an intro to BP for those without huge armies, it would be great. 

More later.