Off the bench - upscale!

 Sometime ago I bought an excellent 40mm Napoleonic collection from Lee Gramson, it is near as damn it complete. Certainly the French and British are about there, the Spanish need some additions and if I want Portuguese then it looks like I will have to do some heavy conversions and get them cast. 

However I digress on my paint bench a unit of Spanish Infantry have been languishing for a long time, receiving a dab of paint every now and then! Anyway this week I was determined to start clearing the paint bench and the Spanish moved to the fore.

I’m pretty pleased with them as I haven’t painted 40’s before. The one big thing is I decided to base them on smaller bases than Lee did as I’ve just about decided on the style of game I want to play and these will work better. So there’s a large rebasing project to be done now. Hope Lee doesn’t mind!

The ECW project - The Royalist Army.

 Quite some time ago I decided I would like to return to the ECW. When I presented demo games we presented a number of ECW battles all in 28mm and I thoroughly enjoyed them, with the break up of the group the collections were disposed of.

So I decided I would start again in 15mm using the Peter Pig figures which I personally find to be full of character and are pretty straight forward to paint. As a framework for the collection I chose the Battle of Edgehill, it would give two good sized armies and if I wasn’t too fussy would allow me to fight a lot of the other battles. 

For rules I quite like Tony’s (Prometheus in aspic) blog which are a variant of the Command and Colours system. I have also incorporated a few tweaks, some as suggested by the Jolly Broom Man and a few by myself.

Whilst I have painted some figures over 95% have been painted by Lee Gramson ((Napoleonic therapy project) and he is still working on the project. Having a little time free I decided to set up what is completed for the Royalist army, as you can see there’s still work to, bases to finish, flag edges to paint, characters to finish and base etc. 

The Parliamentarian army isn’t too far behind and I would hope to be able to refight Edgehill before year end! 

 As Lee knows once this project is finished then we move to Montrose, The Covenanters and Newcastles army! 

I know there’s always a bit of debate around the use of smaller figures compared to the ever popular 28mm and whilst I have access to an 8’x5’ table which can grow to 10x5 I much prefer  using the 15’s!

Hope you enjoy the pics

A busy week

 First can I thank the people who have bought some of the rules and books I put up for sale, I haven’t got around to putting the remaining ones up on Lead Adventure yet but maybe next week.😁

In terms of gaming and focusing on where I’m going with the hobby it’s been quite an active week,

I finished a 15mm Sumerian army for a forthcoming Biblical campaign at the club

I will take some better pics when they are deployed for battle, these are Museum miniatures from their Z range digital sculpts and very nice they are to.

Lee Gramson sent me another batch of painted 15mm ECW for my Edgehill project. He’s painted over 95% of the collection and I think I’m now in the final stages, I need to paint some artillery pieces and some wagons and I think my next blog post will be about the collection.

On the 28mm front I’m painting another French unit for the 1796-1799 collection they should be done by next week and once based it will give me two demibrigades and I will then just need to paint one more for my game.

Gaming wise it’s been An Kent’s at the club but following on from my desire to return to boardgaming last Friday Steve and I played the introductory battle -The Battle of the Bargradas plain. From GMT’s SPQR in their Great Battles of History series. 

The notes did say the game favoured the Carthaginians and so it did with my Republican Romans taking a severe beating. The system is very similar to the Man of Iron series so I was reasonable comfortable and we played with the GBOH simplified rules which were just at the right level of detail I was looking for

This will be certainly getting a run out in the near future for sure and has a lot of playability, I shall give a report if the scenario isn’t so one sided 😁

Finally I purchased the following two games. I wanted a low level WWII game that was reasonably straight forward to pick ( no where near as complicated as squad leader) and had depth. Norm form the Battlefield and Warriors blog suggested Panzer and as it so happens he has just posted a neat insight into the game on his blog.. The introductory scenario will certainly be getting a lot of my attention over the next week and I’m hopeful that I can use the system for a mini campaign and potentially some figure gaming in the future

I apologise for the paucity of photos but promise there will be more interesting ones next time 😁