Adventures on the Wargames Table

These Charlie Foxtrot Pantile models are, in my humble opinion, truly superb scenery kits and really evoke the feel of a Peninsular battlefield. A while back chum Paul showed me some lovely Grand Manner resin buildings suitable for the Napoleonic Peninsular era. As I love painting scenery (and Paul's not so keen) I offered to paint them for him. He was so pleased with the result that he asked me if I'd also do a couple of Colin's kits for him :-D  They're such lovely buildings, how could I say no? I thought I'd share the fun in a blog article. I hope you find it interesting. Before I get started here's a few more pics of the completed models. The Church. Astonishingly similar to the one featured in Sharpe's Rifles ... ;o) The Grain Store. I've blogged several times about building MDF kits so I'll skip that part. Here they are built and ready to go! Note the superb resin roof sections - the casting was pretty much perfect. ...

With these rules I want to be able to play games that tell a story, or series of linked stories. Players can then be swept along by the narrative with each game helping develop the story and set the scene for the next chapter. That, to me, is 'proper' wargaming! So, I'll need to collect some initial forces to help make this happen One of the joys of getting in to a new era is the plotting and planning associated with choosing your new toys and it's no exception here at the 'table. So... I decided to start by looking at the earliest era of the war; Lexington, Concord, the Boston Campaign etc. Now, if you're an AWI aficionado then please bear with me as I'm really only just starting to chip away at this rich seam of history. My view of the forces I'd like are (for the British) a core of tough, disciplined regulars backed up by enthusiastic loyalists. The latter might be of dubious military value but "By George!" they do love their King! Her...

Battlefields for conflicts such as the AWI or ACW often have a very distinctive style of fencing that, in my opinion, immediately evokes the right sort of feeling for the terrain and the era. My post & rail test piece In reality such boundaries were easy to produce from the abundant natural resources and very sturdy. So I thought I'd have a go at a test piece before making many feet of fencing in miniature! Building I began with an spare piece of 3mm MDF approx 4cm by 28cm, trimming the edges to give a slight 'chamfer' to the sides. The rails are made from kebab sticks - easily sourced from your favourite supermarket - Tesco in my case. Mark out the holes and drill them ensuring the diameter of the hole is slightly less than the diameter of the sticks to help get a snug fit. Ensure that the MDF is on a solid surface when drilling (I didn't and the board partially de-laminated so I had to shorten it!). The holes should be slightly further apart than th...

Basing figures is always worthy of some consideration I feel. So I've been mulling over various ideas for my nascent Sharp Practice II collection. I rather like the idea of basing all the figures for each group on a single base so as to make some nice vignettes. However, in these rules figures are removed to track casualties, so I would need to devise suitable tokens to represent this, that's in addition to tokens for shock and possibly other rules too; perhaps this might result in "token overload"? Chum Colin of Charlie Foxtrot Models makes some lovely sabot bases for a variety of round base sizes. These, I think, are the way forward! But that in turn leads to the conundrum of what base size to use. Options are basically 1p or 2p coins. This has the added bonus of being able to utilise rare earth magnets (embedded in the base of the tray) to hold the figures in place. So, here are the two options. British 1p bases on the left, 2p on the right. From abov...