Ga Pa!

The Swedes are done.

Well, I say 'done'. They still need to be varnished, but it's been raining all day. And I will do something more attractive with the bases as well. But they are in a mostly done state.

And here they are - about 100pts worth in Maurice terms.

I'm taking a few days off painting now, as I'm going away for a long weekend to celebrate my 21st wedding anniversary. But when I get back I'll be ready to start on the Russians.

Do You Have A Flag?

My Swedes do. Well, some of them; I've been trying out an idea for putting flags onto the existing standard-bearer figures, and it seems to work OK. Now I just have to hand-paint a flag for each of the seven infantry units I have. Easy

Update - A good evening's work; all seven units now have flags. I have no idea if the regimental flags correspond to the uniforms; I just went with flags that (i) looked nice and (ii) were relatively easy to paint.

Two Years!

The Stronghold Rebuilt has now been running for two years, and I'm still finding things to post about. How about that?

As with the first year, for a blog that was conceived to be a repository for posts about 'Hordes of the Things', it's seen a majority of posts about other games. I could have done what other people do, and have a different blog for different types of games, and it has to be said that single-subject blogs are not without there appeal. But my ability to concentrate on one game or project for more than a few days at a time is so limited that it would be pointless; I'd have heaps of blogs in no time at all, and I have enough trouble maintaining the four that I do post in. This one get's 90% of my blog time, rest assured - the others aren't game-related*.

Anyway, I won't bore you with a run-down of the last year; I pretty much did that at the start of January. suffice to say it's been a varied year of interesting games, and I've had fun sharing them with you.

In the meantime, here's another picture of my Great Northern War Swedish infantry. I will probably give the bases a temporary coat of green until I decide how I'm going to do the army as a whole. In addition I'm not doing the flags, as I may replace the standard bearers with better figures, converted from the basic infantryman in the same way that I did the pikes. That will have to wait until the batch of Risk figures I've ordered from eBay arrives ...

And now it's time to get back to painting the Swedish cavalry and artillery. My aim is to have all figures, if not the bases, completed by the end of the weekend. It's raining here, so I can't see us going out anywhere.

*There's one for our business, one in which I sometimes document  my crossdressing adventures and a new one I'm using to publish  my old writings on the Sherlock Holmes stories.

Painting Swedes

I have been making some progress on my Risk figure Swedes this week. The infantry are now almost done.

Pikes added ...

Basic painting ...

Nearing completion ...

I will finish them off tomorrow, then make a start on the cavalry and artillery.

Battle Cry!

With all of the square-grid games I've been playing recently I was up for some more Battle Cry, and Caesar was happy to oblige. For various reasons our session kept getting postponed, but last night we finally got down to it.

We played two scenarios, both from the 1862 Kentucky campaign. And we used my 6mm figures rather than the ones that came with the game.

Here's Caesar contemplating his cards as we play the Perryville scenario. He played the Union, who have a stronger force, but with a lot of it wedged behind a river and rough terrain, so slow to enter the game.

I had a smaller force of Confederates, and launched the usual furious assault.

Unfortunately Caesar had the cards to oppose it, and neat positions like this - artillery on a hill with a solid infantry line in front of it that it could shoot over.

We had a nice little cavalry action. Mine came off better and, in fact, worked its way behind Caesar's line, doing a small amount of damage before the cards and dice caught up with it.

Caesar's reserve infantry pushed forward on the other flank

Eventually it rolled over my limited resistance, to give Caesar a 7-4 victory.

Perryville was fun, but along scenario, so we decided to try something quicker, and play it twice, swapping sides. We went for the other Kentucky Campaign scenario, Richmond, which took place about five weeks before Perryville. Here's the setup, with the numerically superior (for once) Confederates in the foreground. The Union are positioned well on a line of hills, but inferior in cards.

Both games were close and fun, with the Union desperately holding a line against a fierce Confederate assault.  I played the Confederates in the first game, and won it, albeit with a close score (6-5, I think).

We then swapped, and I got to try the Union defence. Their position looks strong.

Caesar was up to the job, though - the Confederates won again, 6-4. Here his cavalry pushed a Union unit out of their field fortifications.

Richmond is a very interesting scenario that I'm keen to try again sometime.

All of the games saw the usual cunning card-play, with Forced March being popular, and useful, in all games to make sudden assaults with a mass of infantry. In two games we had cases where a player had both Bombard cards as well, allowing them to swiftly position artillery on one turn, and punish the enemy line with double-fire on the next.

The 6mm figures looked great in the game. If I was doing them again, though, I'd use narrower bases - maybe 20mm x 15mm. At present they fill the hexes nicely, but what if I wanted to make proper 3D terrain tiles, eh? There's no room for terrain and the figures at the moment.

Ralph and Bryan played Flames of War, so here's something we've not seen yet this year - one of Ralph's burning tanks.