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...
Mike,
ReplyDeleteNo idea if you will see this comment - I think your blog is a bit like mine a good idea but a lot of work!
I discovered your blog from this post when searching for Neil Cogswell's rules.
I've seen the bits he wrote in Wargamer's Newsletter which are the bare bones, but seem to keep changing (I've seen 2 versions of the morale rules). While I intend to use VnB, I found some parts of NC's rules intriguing, especially the random command and control.
I'd be very interested to see what you have done to fill in the blanks.