back from my trip.

I got back from Edmonton Alberta yesterday, where I was visiting my sister and nephews.  We drove out west, and camped along the way.  We were out there for 2 weeks, and in transit for about 6 days(there and back). 

I took a bunch of figures to assemble(but not paint, I decided to take a break). I did this because I was staying with my sister, and she lives in the country about 40 minutes northwest of Edmonton, and I do not drive.

I took with me 16 perry dismounted Dragoons, 16 Perry Hussars, 24 Warlord ECW cavalry, 120 Warlord Pike & Shotte Infantry, and 30 firelocks.  As you can see i only got about 1/3rd of the pike & shotte infantry done, and and 60% of the Firelock units.  Still, not bad considering i spent most of my time with my nephews, and on the weekends with my sister. My Nephews are 5 years 1.5 years old, so they are a handful.


We visited Fort Edmonton Park while I was out there. Fort Edmonton was a Northwest Mounted Police outpost that has been restored to it's 1848-era state.  I would have taken pics, but my I'm cursed with a habit of forgetting my Camera.

While I♦ was out there the Edmonton Wargamers Group happened to have a meeting, so i decided to see what  EWG Meetings and meeting place were like.  These seem like a good group of guys.  They meet the 1st and 3rd tuesdays of each month, at a clubhouse.  The club hose was nicer then MIGS, but they lacked the extensive storage space MIGS has, and their terrain collection was not as good as I'm getting used to. again, I'd take pictures, but my camera cruse had struck again.

All in all it was a good trip.  Now that I'm back I'll begin posting again

Convention scenario Playtest.

Friday night saw the first play test of a scenario I'm planning to put on at MIGSCON in October here in Hamilton, Ontario.

one of the things I wanted to try out was a slightly modified concept for the  sequence deck. I decided this because I've recently read a few articles and blog posts about how to run the ideal convention game. The central points were similar in all of them:

1. Try to keep as many people occupied in the game as possible.
2. Try whenever possible to have everything pre-deployed on-table, and keep off-board reinforcements to an absolute minimum.

To fulfill #1, I decided that instead of having a card for every single Big Men, I'd  have individual cards for all the big men of Initiative 2+, but a single card for all the initiative 1 Big men in each force. This seemed to work, but I think I'll go one further, and have a card for all Level 2 Big Men, and a card for all Level 1 Big Men in a force.

 British artillery unlimbers and 

begins bombardment.

Having done that, I completely forgot idea #2, and had a lot of the forces coming from off board. It made sense with the scenario, but practically speaking, it really slowed the game down. next time i will deploy all forces on table, even if it's on the edge. this should drastically speed up the game pace. Now that I have worked the basic kinks out of this scenario, I'll start planning the 2nd one i intend to run at MIGSCON.. 

 A colonial ranger picks an odd time to clean 

his musket barrel.

I probably won't be posting much over the next 3-4 weeks.  I'll be driving out west to Edmonton to visit my family. It will be a much needed break from painting.

More Goodies from Historicon

I painted a few more goodies i picked up at Historicon since last friday.

The first is a foot bridge I picked from from Acheson Creations. Now the end peices were on a base taht was a little thick for me, so i sanded the edges down a bit, glued them to MDF, and then used wood filler to smooth out the slope.  The whole thing is about 13 inches long( 10 inches without MDF) and the can be used on rivers 4" wide or less.  the width of the bridge is about 3.75".   I also picked up a few of their $0.50 pieces, most notably horizontal log barriers and a pair of stone-lined camp fires.  I have to say, the more i see if Acheson Creations, the more i like! hopefully they get their 28mm Grizzly bears molded soon.

the 2nd set of items are More miniatures From Eric at Conquest Miniatures.  This time, it's 2 more units of 8 Compagnies Franches de la Marine.  If you haven't heard, Conquest miniatures are absolutely fantastic.  Especially the Native Americans.  I own almost 100 conquest miniatures now(plus 3 of his longhouses), and when I can afford it, I'll be grabbing 3 or 4 packs each of his  marching French and British Regulars.

And finally, I thought I'd show a picture of my  full Native American  collection with the village as well. 48 Indians and 5 big men total.

Historicon & goodies

Well I had an excellent Historicon.  The venue was much better this year, and I could actually find games. I sold a bunch of terrain and funded my purchases, which included more Conquest miniatures and Crusader WW2 Russians, and a few small terrain pieces from Architects of War and Acheson Designs. As usual, i took a camera and totally forgot to use it.

This morning I painted about half my new Conquest Indians, along with the newer "combat ready" version of Magua. I tried a new technique for Native American Skin.  I don't really like some of the overly dark or overly red Native skin tones often used.  To me, they just seem wrong. I think this scheme strikes the balance of different, but not extreme in it's difference from my regular Caucasian skin tone. I went back and touched up the skin on a few of my older perry Natives to match.  I'll spend some time in a few weeks doing a major update. in the meantime, I plan on  finishing the other half of the new ones tonight, and basing the whole lot tomorrow.

The conquest natives are superb. They are very easy to paint, and their physique jump out when a simple wash is applied. I especially like the new Magua figure.  it's just spectacular. They blend very well with the small band of perry AWI natives I already have. I've show some comparison of similarly posed miniatures. I'm using new GF9 magnetic bases(also bought at Historicon), which are thinner so I've placed them on pennies, which level out the bases.  The unfinished bases are the Conquest ones and the finished bases are my Perry natives with updated skin tone.

Conquest 'Magua' and Perry 'Redcoat', and 2 kneeling firing bow poses.

2 natives with bow at the ready, and 2 standing firing

Starting next week I'll paint up my last18 more Conquest Compagnies Franches de la Marine to finish off my french. I'm also going to paint up some of the terrain I bought. I'm looking forward to the Architects of War Roast pig on a spit, and the Well.

Off to Historicon After all!

I got a call today form a fellow at my gaming club. it seems  he and his friend were going to be going off to Historicon this year, but his friend dropped out. now he was looking for someone local that would go on short notice, so he called me.

Now, I'm currently Unemployed, so i was not able to go this year. but this fellow gamer offered to take me down for $75 CDN. this gets me a room for 3 nights and transportation there and back(which is about 450 miles/8 hours).  Basically, he wants someone to ride down there with him so he's not alone.  I actually have enough money to cover that and admission to Historicon, plus a little extra for food.

That said, you can't go to historicon and not buy anything(at least I can't). So I'm taking a good lot of the 28mm terrain I've been working on. I'll have some of the rock outcroppings  I've been working on. I'll have 6 of them, and they will be selling for $30 USD (give or take, depending on the size). I'll also have a bunch of fields and an orchard:

1x 8x8" base with stone wall corner ($20USD)
5x 8x12" bases (various rail fence, stone wall and hedges, $25USD)
1x  12x12" base w Hedges($30)
1x  12x12" base with hand-made rail fencing all around ($40USD)
1x 12x12 orchard w/4 trees and stone wall ($40)

I'll be selling these in the Flea market on Friday and Saturday, but it you want to get the drop and arrange to met sometime on Thursday after 4pm, just email me HERE  Before midnight tonight.

Steve

Lord Brookes Regiment of Foote

I'm just about to head off to the Club for (hopefully) a night of gaming.  I just finished the latest Stands of Lord Brooke's Musketeers and thought i would post some pics.

32 figures strong at this point. Over the weekend I plan to finish the last 8 musketeers and bring the regiment up to it's final strength of 40 figures.

More ECW

After finishing the remainder of the FIW collection I have on-hand, I decided I wanted to switch modes for a bit. I decided to try painting up some of the Warlord Pike & Shotte plastic Pikemen and Command i have laying around.

I decided to paint them up as Lord Brooke's Regiment for 2 reasons. The main uniform colour is purple, and the standard happens to be on the Parliamentarian Flag sheet included with my Pike & Shotte Battalia Box.  I find that the heavy paper that Warlord Games prints their flag sheets on is too heavy for for the bending that i do with my standards. It does not bend smoothly and the surface can actually begin to crease and crack under the pressure. so I scanned the sheet at 600 DPI .  I chose 600DPI so that i can print it off much larger then the original without sacrificing  too much detail.

This regiment will be roughly 5 times the size it is now(40 Figures) when it is finished. there will be 8 more pike, as well as 24 muskets  after this one is done the next unit i intend to paint will be Lord Seye & Sele's  regiment.  I'm aiming to have 4 pike & shotte foot regiments, 2 cavalry regiments(12 figures each), 1 Dragoon regiment(12 foot & 12 Mounted), 2 firelock regiments(12 & 18 figures) and 1 artillery piece for my parliamentarian army..  If by the time i finish that, i don't have an opponent, I'll likely do a royalist contingent of roughly the same size.

I'm also looking for a good set of rules to use for ECW. I know Warlord is releasing an ECW supplement for Black Powder at some point, but no news on when yet. I've played 1644, and wasn't overly impressed, especially with the morale being completely divorced from casualties.  I am Curious to see what For God, King and Country by the Canadian Wargamers Group is like.  I've played Habitants & Highlanders as well as Rocket's Red Glare and enjoyed them.  If anyone has a copy of  For God, King and Country they would part with, Let me know.

New FIW additions.

Thursday morning i received a package from eureka miniatures USA in the mail.  It contained 8 FIW provincial infantry firing, 8 loading, 1 officer, 1 NCO, 1 ensign, and 1 drummer. Eureka USA's service was pronominal. total turn around from placing the order to them arrivingat my doorstep, across an international border,was 7 days,

I had already bought George Washington and 10 of these figures off of Nic and Rob at the eureka booth 2 years ago at Historicon  I knew then that they weer fantastic figures, i only waited this long to expand them because i only started really building up my collection a the beginning of this year. Combined, they complete my Virginia Provincial infantry contingent of 24 infantry and 3 big men, a drummer and standard for Sharp Practice.


Anyways, Friday night at the Club was a bust for me. No one was around to play a game with, so i chatted for a bit and came home(i'm within walking distance of the club house).I cleaned and prepared my Virginians  Friday night, and then sat down and painted 8 British light infantry that have been kicking around for some time.  I painted them in the uniforms of Colonel Gage's light infantry, the 80th regiment of foot.  In future games, they will be commanded by Lt. Anthony Hayward.

Saturday evening, in about 5 hours, i painted the 20 remaining Virginians. They will be lead in games by Major Washington, and Lts Conway and Basset. Getting the regimental colours for the Virginia regiment was not easy. When i searched Thursday night, i could not find an existing flag image, but Kronoskaf.com had a description of the King's and regimental colours.  So I decided i would find a suitable set of colours from a different regiment and modify them. I decided on the 66th regiment of Foot's colours, since they had a V in the roman numeral, and the regimental colour was a solid colour field.  This was important since the Virginia colours don't have a roman numeral. they instead have "VA Regt" in the rose & thistle wreath, on a plain whit back ground.  I simply changed to background colour to white, then deleted the roman numerals, except for the V. I flipped the V and turned it into an A, and then filled in the additional space.   After doing so I contacted Richard Couture at Kronoskaf.com and sent him copies of the jpegs. I made.  That way, Richard has a set of pics for the flags, and anyone else that wants it can get it

The Virginia regiment colours I created i created

Rock Outcroppings Finally Finished!

Well  I finally managed to finish off the first 3 of my rock outcroppings. they tuend out pretty good i think, especially for a first try. 

The trees I used were a mixture of things. the tall darker  coniferous trees are Bachmann trees. I really like their pine and spruce trees. Best of all,  for 11 bucks you get 8x 3-4" trees, or 3x 5-6" trees. the other coniferous were whatever I could scrounge up. There are 3  cake ornament trees, and the rest of them are the cheap bottle brush variety you see at Christmas, with some flocking added.  The deciduous trees on the 2 smaller formations are some "dead tree" plastic armatures from an old Siege board game that my friend Derek Watson gave me.  Normally they are decidedly two dimensional, but I used my heat gun and bent them around a bit. The foliage is Heavy duty stripping pad, torn up and stuck to the armature with hot glue.  learning to use this stuff to make trees will come in very handy for doing bushes and hedges with the same stuff in the future.

Perry Miniatures AWI Indians pictured 

on the largest outcropping

I have the other 5 outcroppings  treed-up and ready to flock. I'm hopping to finish them off today.

Conquest Miniatures Compagnies Franches de la 

Marine on 2 smaller outcroppings

Also, Thursday morning a shipment of Eureka French & Indian war colonial infantry arrived, so expect to see them kicking around the blog some time this weekend.

Rock Outcropings Revisited

Well it's been a week and a half since i last posted about the Rock outcroppings i was building out of Ceiling tiles.  initially this went quite well.  Unfortuantely, i did not have speciufic details on how to mix the carpenter's glue, water, and Durabond 90.

For starters, Durabond 90 does not mix properly with Carpenters glue(it does however with white glue). I had to mix it with the water before adding the glue.  after 2 coats of this mixture i found out that when you reach a certain amount of Durabond 90 in a carpenters glue-water mixture, it gels after about 10 minutes, and there is little way to slow the gelling process.

After that i switched to white glue, and all the problems ceased. you can mix in a ton of Durabond 90 without having to worry about it solidifying rapidly.  for the last 2 coats i mixed in a bit of gray paint. in between htese last 2 coats i left  the peices for about 24 hours in between coats.

The pics here show the outcroppings glued to MDF bases, partially painted, and with trees leaned up against them were I intend to glue them down.  I'm intending to glue some flock mix randomly around  outcroppings, and I have some clump foliage to spread around them too.  I'm planning to have these finished by Friday.