Friday 27 January 2017

For a few Shakos more...





 Just a few pics of my British and my growing French force.

Voltigeurs..


 



A few Rifles next to a scratch built barn...


Lt. receiving his marching orders...


An added bit of ooomph...


Grenadiers... (these were my favourite to paint)


Wednesday 25 January 2017

First game of Sharp Practice 2


 Back in the summer I played the 'new' TooFatLardies Sharp Practice 2.

Now, I'm a big fan of Sharpe and have read all the Cornwell books since I was a lad and my dad introduced me to a Readers Digest condensed version of Sharpes Eagle, which is still my favourite story.

I wasn't too much in love with the TV versions in the 90's but I watched all of them and was happy that somebody had made them.  The books always described large battles but on the TV budgetary constraints meant we had to make do with the same number of confused Ukrainian extras running around in circles with a smoke machine in the background. 

I had given up on collecting my own Napoleonic force but Song of Drums and Shakos gave me enough impetus to get started.  Victrix had had a sale and me and a friend picked up and shared a box each of their flank and centre companies and I added a box of French for myself.

A few months later I added a box of Perry Light Dragoons and some Rifles and they were ready for when SP2 came out.
 








More images can be found on at http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=93889.0 where Björn has added a commentary.

We enjoyed the game a lot and have had a couple more rounds where we have grappled with the fine points of the game.  The randomness of the cards when deploying has been a thorn in my side and others have commentated on their disatisfaction with diced movement but neither of these have prevented us from giving up on it, and frankly, I haven't yet read of a game which plays this period better.




Monday 23 January 2017

As I was saying....

Well that was a little longer hiatus than I intended.

After a motivated start to blogging in the earlier part of the year, during the summer the urge kinda left.

This doesn't mean that I've been inactive, as actually 2016 was a pretty busy year in gaming, painting and model building.  The big surprise was an awakened interest in Epic after I dug out my old Space Marine set and finally painted an Imperial Guard army.





I also bought a few miniatures from http://vanguardminiatures.co.uk/ which are a pretty decent proxy for Space Marines.



To support my IG Vanguard also supplied me with a few proxy Big Tanks and 'not Valkyries'  - lovely models and fun to paint.  Sadly no photos.

Despite having the mini's I'd never really played a game of Epic until this summer - we used NetEpic, I think, which was very simple to pick up and there is some talk (there's always talk) of some sort of campaign between my forces of the Emperor and Phil's Orks.

To prepare for this, and because original models are difficult to come by, I scratch built this Thunderhawk to use as support.  I tried to use somewhere near the correct scale as I wanted it to be more than a representative piece.  It still needs a lick of paint.





Another project was this simple Epic scale adobe village made from offcuts of foam, covered in filler and white glue and painted with a few simple motifs and patterns.  I have a few 40k bitz that i'm going to add to make it into some kind of primitive technology used by the inhabitants - think Tattooine.

My original Space Marine box has more Rhinos than I need for my force so I had a go at scratch building a Vindicator from a bit of plastic rod and plasticard - not bad I think.


Epic has gone off the boil in recents months but the good thing is that I now have all I need when we pick it up again and can go straight into it.  Assuming other projects don't get in the way.......