28mm Churchyard at Aspern

A while ago I mentioned to my friend Sylvain that I've always wanted to do a tactical Napoleonic scenario that focuses on the ferocious fighting for the village of Aspern at the Battle of Aspern-Essling (May 20-21 1809).

Before we go any further you have to understand that Sylvain is completely mad. Bonkers. Nuts. Certifiable. 

Yeah? Oh, so now you want me to create some freakin' battlefield in Austria for you...? WTF. You know man, I have needs too...

Anyway, Sylvain likes to scratch-build buildings and since he's a bit 'touched' (and doesn't do anything in halves) he got it in his mind that he'd make me a 80% to scale representation in of the Aspern churchyard with all its buildings and grounds for my 28mm collection.

As you can see its pretty amazing.

With a 32 figure battalion as indication of scale.

Below you can see the roof has been removed so you can place figures in the upper galleries.

The roof can be removed to show battle damage and allow figures to be placed on the third level.

Another shot of the roof timbers and firing platforms.

The church tower can be removed as well in order to place figures.

Both the Church and the Rectory can be broken-down like a layer cake to allow each section to be defended separately.

 

The bottom layer of the Church with a nave and attic.

Her is the Rectory broken-down into its three component layers (minus roof).

Sylvain tells me he has another building (a mausoleum, I believe), the graveyard and the surrounding walls to add and then the project's done. Its going to dominate any table but if the action is purely focused on taking the church grounds then the scaling will work great. I'm thinking of using a beefed-up variant of Sharpe's Practice to do a monsterous tactical scenario based around the churchyard but first I need to paint and groundwork this stuff AND finish a raft-load of Austrians...

Bravo Sylvain! Awesome work!

Simple Movement Trays

A French battalion tucked into its movement tray.

I've always liked movement trays. They can really cut down the time it takes to set up a game as units can come right out of the cabinet ready to play, they allow players to quickly, easily (and safely) move units around the table, and it speeds up the cleanup time as they go right back into the cabinet ready for the next battle.  I asked Sylvain if he could make me up some movement trays for my Napoleonics and so he made me a shed load of these out of simple heavy card.

240mm x 60mm raw card tray.

The way we have based our Napoleonics is that a standard sized battalion in line has the same frontage as a standard sized regiment of cavalry in double line of squadrons (240mm) so this way we can pretty much use the same movement tray system for each troop type.

Battalion in Line in a single tray.

Two trays accommodate a Dragoon Regiment in Double Line.

I used acrylic Liquitex Gel to seal up the perimeter joins and give the edges some texture so the trays were easy for players to grip.

Edges applied with Liquitex gel medium.

Once the gel dried, I sprayed the trays with Krylon Olive Green. I then used inexpensive Americana craft paint to drybrush the edges the same colour tones as my figures' bases. 

I wanted to get away from using flocking on the movement tray edges as they often come off on player's fingers so I opted to use Woodland Scenics green undertone emulsion to give the impression of turf and for the bases to better blend-in with the surface of the table.

 

There you have it! Simple movement trays for your troops that are as cheap as chips.

The Boys all trayed-up and ready to water their horses in the Danube (or the Dnieper, or the Sambre, or...)

I think I'll do up trays for Attack Columns and perhaps Squares next...

Prototypes of 28mm Napoleonic Unit / Casualty Markers

Like a lot of gamers, I like to keep the tabletop clean of dice, measuring tapes, rule sheets, pets, soft drinks, etc., but I know that concessions have to be made for marking unit status and displaying other game mechanics. Nonetheless, I really don't like casualty caps, especially anything plastic, as they seem to break the aesthetic of the painted miniatures and scenery. I've always liked the look of casualty figures, but in several rule sets a unit can take numerous 'hits' so it can seem that there is a cloud of casualties following along, and if they get too close to one another confusion can occur in determining to whose casualties belong to what unit.

So I'm playing around with how to compress as much unit information into as small a space as possible. Here are a few unit status markers that I've mocked up that combines a small vignette, a 'fin' for mounting a unit ID card, plus a few slots to fit small (7-8mm) six-sided dice to track hits. 

Here is a shot of the base showing the ID fin and the slots for the D6.

These were built on 50mm steel bases with bits of plasticard to build-up the slots and fins.

These two castings are from Offensive Miniatures. I quite like the wounded drummer boy.

The slots work reasonably well to keep the dice all in one spot and prevents accidental mix-ups when units are compressed together in a scrum. For a game such as 'Black Powder' the dice can be of different colours to track Disorders, 'standard' hits and Shaken status. We've also come up with a simple protocol to move the stand from the back of the unit to the front to keep track of which stuff has been activated - pretty straight forward stuff really.

Foundry Rifle officer with Perry plastic British casualty.

I've noticed that Litko has a new casualty base featured in Jim's Lab that has a numeric dial which looks quite promising. If I could get them to prototype one that incorporates a couple dials in it then it naturally would be able to track two different sets of information and I could get rid of the dice - something to ponder...

Victrix plastic British officer along with a Offensive Miniatures drummer casualty.

Victrix plastic French officer with a Perry infantry casualty.

New Side Project: 'Architects of War' Terrain

When I first saw some of the 'Architects of War' stuff online I was quite intrigued as it seemed like high quality, well thought-out terrain. Then I saw JohnM's review of the their brilliant Tree Bases on his blog and that sealed it - I wanted to get some of this for my own table. Over the Christmas season Barb and Bernie at Architects of War had a great 'North American Terrain' deal which I was quite keen on. As it turned out, in the chaos of the holiday season I completely missed the deadline for placing an order.  Nonetheless they were kind enough to fill it after the fact and even allowed me to fiddle around with swapping in substitutes. Thanks very much guys!

Behold, a crap-load of resin and white metal!

The shipping box was very well packed and packaged and the same can be said for the individual items. I haven't had time to go through each of the boxes yet but the ones I have examined look very good.  The resin is very clean, crisp in detail and most importantly, not warped. The white metal looks well-formed and the castings seem quite clean. 

The pig sty - very reminiscent of my bedroom as a teenager...

I think with this order I have a decent sampling of products from their General Purpose range. There's two sets of trees, a large plowed field, a turnip field, tobacco field, garden, family burial plot, dung heap, farm implements, a well and a pig sty.

An example of a finished piece from the website.

I'll post photos of each of the pieces as they come off the painting desk.

Quick Reference Sheets for our variant of 'Fast Play Grande Armee'

Its been a busy couple of weeks but I thought I'd quickly freshen up the blog by posting a gaming aid/variant we've been using for 'Fast Play Grande Armee' (FPGA) over the past few years. In the 'Rules Tweaks' section you will find our quick reference sheets (QRS) for FPGA which also incorporates our modifications to the existing rules.

Game Mat from Hotz

I have this thing about seams. I don't like the look of them on a wargames table. Ok, I'm a bit weird that way but that's why I have a blog to work these things out. Anyway, in the quest for a 'seamless surface' I ordered a 72x90 'European Fields' game mat from Eric Hotz at HotzMats to see if it looked as good as on the website.

Well, almost two months after my order the mat showed up at our door.  I quickly cleared off the kitchen table, put on my foamboard game surface and draped the mat over the whole works.

 

I was quite impressed with how easily the mat shook-out its wrinkles and flattened out over the table surface. This is good as I often have all my gaming stuff packed away and having something that can be quickly laid out and played on is a definite bonus.

I quickly put out some terrain features to get an idea of how well they blended with the surface. I think it looks quite good. I really am impressed with the use of colour and pattern to give the impression of the different fields.

I tried putting a hill under the mat and while it looks rather neat it is really hard to determine where the flat surface ends and the hill starts - which is requirement for most rules so I think that hills will have to stay on top of the playing surface.

I wanted to see if I could use pins to fix stuff to the surface as regularly do in my games. So I pulled out the excellent rivers that Brian made for me way back when I had a head of hair (but alas not Brian). These are ingeniously made from sheets of thin blue foam, cut to shape and then hot-glued with flock and tallus. I've added a few more sections to the collection over the years so I have around 8ft of the stuff if need be.

Anyway, I pin the river sections down so they lay nice and flat. After I set in the pins I use a dab of cheap, dark green hobbycraft paint to touch up the heads of the pins. They just disappear into the flock and the rivers look like part of the landscape.

Voila! A river, a hedge, a field and some pliant sheep. What else would a Scotsman want?

 

There, pins and rivers removed without any telling marks to the HotzMat surface. Brilliant! Even the nervous sheep are happy. 

Republic to Empire Wooden Markers from Litko

Another dorktastic post here. About a month or so ago I ordered these custom wooden game markers from Litko for Republic to Empire. The author of the R2E, Barry Hilton, has his own markers which are nice but I find the coloured plastic somehow out of synch with painted minis and terrain.  Its funny as I sometimes don't mind a coloured marker for significant events like charges, retreats and routes but that's my particular hangup.

Here are the seven markers I had made up. Most of these are placed next to brigade commanders to denote what type of 'order' they are operating under.

I rather like the look of these. They are just noticeable enough but not too obvious.

My Groovy New Dice Tower

I just got this bad boy through a chap I met on Ebay. This was acquired in an effort to save my figures and terrain from over enthusiastic dice rollers (tossers? throwers? hurlers?). You know who you are (<cough> Arthur, Dan...).

Anyway, this is pretty darn cool in a dorky kind of way. It was custom made for me by Bob Giesen in the U.S. who is a very nice fellow. He allows you a choice of wood, stain, felt colours, sanding finish, etc.

Its in two pieces and fits together nicely for storage. Pretty posh, eh? Eh?! Anyway, I'd now like to get one shaped like a windmill that would blend in with the table. You think that's too much? Naaa.