First club night of 2023

An interesting mix of games down the club last night. I wound up playing “Terraforming Mars“, AndyM being one of the two club members who acquired it over Christmas (in addition, DanR has merely borrowed my copy for a week to see if his family like it). It’s all Adie’s fault, who has had it and several expansions for a while and encouraged people to play it  

We also had Bolt Action, Star Wars Legion, some 20mm ww2, Pikeman’s Lament, Warlords of Erewhon and Battlegames In Middle-Earth. Not a bad mix for a relatively under attended (by 2022 standards anyway) evening. 

In other news, my hobby spending for the year currently runs to 4 assorted books off eBay (more of those when they arrive), and an agreement to meet up and buy a not insignificant collection of painted stuff on Thursday lunchtime. Some of the latter will wind up in a club show game probably not until 2024, but it was an opportunity not to be passed by (honest, dear). 

There's less here to do than I thought...

It's probably a sad indictment of how long this has taken that my regular process when picking up the Dux Compendium after a break is to read right the way through the current draft and take notes/make a todo list. Kind of fresh eyes probably don't hurt, to be fair.

It both amuses me greatly and pains me that this is the first time I've added the words "Britanniarum", "playtest" and "Lardies" to my spellchecker on this Mac (which, admittedly, I've only had for 2 years). I suspect there'll be more to come. [Ed: "warband", "foederati", "wargame" (!!!), "Cartimandua", "shieldwall"]

<wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey dissolve effect>

OK. Some minor "how did that ever get past" fixes done, as well as once again curing the inevitable yet inexplicable way the document formatting mysteriously changes when left alone. 

I have a to-do list. It's not actually that long, and only one of the bits is scary :D

ACW Rules. Which do you prefer?

I'm resisting the temptation to actually count the pile of shame (or as Jeffrey Knudsen puts it, the Cabinet of Temporal Insufficiency), but I have just done the maths on the two ACW starter sets - that's 12 Union and 12 Confederate sprues in each box, each of which has one commander, 4 gun crew and a gun and ten stands of 10 infantry (which double ranks 2 to a base) That's not counting the box of metal cavalry, ditto of zouaves and dismounted cavalry. That's over 5000 figures, by my reckoning. 

Eep!

I console myself with the thought that a smallish action probably needs about 150-200 on a side, and they are easy to block paint - after all they come in blocks! It's less scary if you call it 500 stands of infantry, I suppose :D

Anyway. A question for my readers: what are your preferred ACW rules? Particularly looking for things around Black Powder scale, so 3 bases per unit (they're 60x20mm bases), and with some measure of friction. I know Epic ACW is intended for 5 bases/regiment, but that gets kind of big on a 6' x 4'.

Currently I have:

• Black Powder
• Altar of Freedom (on its way)
• Pickett's Charge (just arrived)
• On to Richmond

I know there's Fire and Fury, and Longstreet, out there. Any other thoughts?

2022 End Of Year Review

The end of another long strange year.

So, where to start?

On a personal note? Changed jobs again, which was almost as much a surprise to me as it probably is to you. A definite "it's not you, it's me" moment as I got a contract offer from CricViz I couldn't refuse, which also allowed me (as it is only a 3 days a week contract) to take on a second contract for a project I was in at the beginning of that I'd been trying to squeeze into my non-existent free time. Result? Hopefully both more money and more free time, helped by having more trained minions for church tech stuff.

The club, back from a fresh start at a new venue in 2021, grows from strength to strength: we have lots of new members, and consistently over 20 people showing up each Monday. Show wise, we took a big 54mm WW2 game to Hammerhead, our mad 1:1 garden gnome patio skirmish to Partizan, the equally mad Dead's Army (everything is better with zombies!) to Campaign:MK, and our 6mm IABSM game set on D-Day in Chef-du-Pont to the Other Partizan. 

Additionally, we ran a club open day (at which our Bloody Omaha game saw another outing) and Posh Lard, at which the Chef-du-Pont game actually got its first outing. 

We restarted our Wednesday night 'paint and natter' sessions late in 2021, which have basically seen a small group of club members variously doing work on club projects and personal ones. Principal club project at present is detailing the Chef-du-Pont boards, but we will have to revisit and tart up our Dambusters game for the Salute 50th (and Operation: Chastise's 80th) anniversary next year.

As for my personal hobby stuff?

Definitely New Year, new start.

• Just sent the most up-to-date set of Dux rules corrections off to my partners in crime. Now I genuinely have some free time, I'm aiming to crack on and finish the Compendium before the end of Feb. I know - you've heard that before: this time, hopefully is the charm.
• Slowly working on some fresh buildings and vehicles for a narrative Bulge campaign using IABSM - this was supposed to start this year but didn't :D
• I bought two Warlord Epic Battles ACW Starter sets off a club member in February: they are probably the 'second half of 2023' project - there's a heck of a lot of figures there, so it's going to need a good batch painting strategy, probably using Army Painter Speedpaints.
• I'm also aiming to set aside an hour a week to blog, initially, in 2023. Once the Compendium is out of the way, that time will go towards restarting the podcast. I wound up listing to a couple of Meeples episodes recently and realising how much I missed it.

• 

  Studio, including WIP Chef-du-Pont board.
  Garden detailing work started on the three houses
  near the camera.

  The hobby room (studio) just acquired an Ikea Kallax to store all the boardgames, and is looking pretty fine. I have to get some shelves up above the workbench in the end room (workshop) and then I'm aiming to set up the spray booth, hot wire cutter, Cricut machine, 3D printer (or printers if I get a resin one) and maybe an MDF cutter along its length along with a Mac to run them all.

A Happy New Year to you all, then, and hopefully you'll see much more of me online in 2023!

A Merry Christmas to all my readers...

...if there's any of you still out there!

Hopefully Santa (secret or otherwise) brought you some good things - I am the lucky recipient of a couple of American Battlefield Trust ACW map books, and an airbrush spray booth. 

Christmas got a little dented by another bout of something that was almost-COVID (Anne's still coughing two weeks later), but on the whole, I'm happy to be alive and healthy, not to mention in a new job.

Enjoy the rest of your day, folks - I intend to spend mine with a bottle of Papworth Brewery's finest, and a the aforementioned books.

Peter Capaldi reads a Captain's WW1 Letter from the Christmas truce, 1914

As a change from the usual poem, I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole not so long and found this.

Chef-du-Pont update - turning to 6mm

So, after a couple of evenings of largely Myk and Andy poring over maps, aerial photos and our boards, we've reached a major decision over the Chef-du-Pont game we're building for Posh Lard. 

Myk and I tried out the board layout on Monday at club, and by the time we'd placed the models for the Mont Blanc creamery, it was clear it was all looking a bit cramped. There's about 1500m between the creamery and the Château Isle Marie, and that's essentially 5m in IABSM's ground scale (as close to 6mm scale as makes no nevermind). The best we can do for a sensible table is for that distance to be about 2m, so with 15mm scale buildings that's going to be very very cramped, and a lot of the very recognisable buildings (the Château, the Co-operative and Mont-Blanc creameries, the bridge over the Merderet and some of the groups of buildings on what's now the Rue du Capitaine Rex Coombs) are going to lose their 'look'.

Big breath. Quick look at Baccus' and Heroics and Ros' WW2 prices. Y'know what? Time to switch to 6mm.

Myk and Andy spent yesterday evening plotting roads on our 5 2' x 4' boards (we planned for a sixth, but it turns out to be all flooded, so better left out for easier access. I, meanwhile, actually managed to clear enough workbench space that I can set up the 3D printer and Proxxon hot wire table!

Except more WIP pictures over the next three and a bit months.