Catching up

Well it's been a while since my last post. What have I been doing since January? Mostly it has been a time of rationalising my wargames projects and deciding where I am going with various games.

Many years ago I bought two armies of plastic Spencer Smith Miniatures for the Seven Years War. I dug them out a while ago and played a game or two of "The Whites of Their Eyes" (my modified version of Neil Cogswell's rules from Wargamers' Newsletter in 1968 !!). It was good fun. Only problem was that I found that the paint was flaking off the plastic and in some cases the plastic had gone brittle and was beginning to disintegrate. What to do? Only one answer, really - replace the plastics with the new metal castings from the same masters now being produced by Spencer Smith. The first order was sent off and £90 worth of figures arrived a few days later. I am going to paint these in "classic style" but using acrylics rather than enamels.

Looking at my American Revolution armies, I had designed a set of rules I called "A Few Bloody Noses" that were based (to start with) on a board game called "Hold the Line". I wasn't really happy with them so I looked again at my old rules "A Small Colonial War" published several years ago by Gomi Designs. I reworked them and I now have a draft ready to play test. I'll probably also call them "A Few Bloody Noses" because I like the title (it's a quote from George III).

I wanted to be able to use my American Revolution British to do the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion as well (using Ian Drury's "Redcoats and Rebels" rules). These rules require units of 4 figures. So I have rebased both the Brits and the Americans to allow 8 figure units for AFBN and 4 figure units for R&R. In the process of doing this, I discovered I had painted the Highlanders wrong (no blue bonnets!) so that had to be sorted. I also repainted the facings on some units to match up better with the historical OOBs (for example, I didn't have a unit with red facings. The 33rd Foot, with red facings, featured in a number of battles.

Started putting together the shopping list for Salute, of which more later...