Friday, December 26, 2008

Shameless Plug

I paint a lot of the figures that I use in my wargames, but I'm also not afraid to buy figures when I can get ones painted as well or better than I can paint myself. The figures shown here are examples of the latter. They're one of the five units of French Young Guard that I'm listing for sale on Ebay (see my auctions here: http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQfgtpZ1QQfrppZ25QQsassZpease1

I purchased these figures a couple of years ago at Historicon in the flea market area. They're very nicely painted figures from I believe Battle Honors or Old Glory.

The reason I'm selling them is after basing up my French Army for Volley & Bayonet, I found that I had far too many Young Guard. These units are what remains after basing up both Young Guard corps for V&B. One of the big selling points for V&B for me is the low figure count necessary to field large armies. I purchased these figures when we were still using Napoleon's Battles which requires far more figures to represent the same units.

So, please visit my auctions, or send the links to interested friends. I'd love to find these figures a good home and turn the money earned by selling them back into other wargaming projects.

Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Kingsbridge - Covered Bridge

When my friend James and I decided to start doing projects for each other, the this is the first piece I asked him to make for me. Considering all of the covered bridges in New England, New York and Pennsylvania during the revolution and the American Civil War, I thought having a covered bridge for skirmish gaming and as a focal piece for larger battles would be great. The first use I had in mind was as the center piece for an AWI skirmish or V&B wing scale game using the forces that skirmished near Kingsbridge during the battle of White Plains. You can just make out the bridge in this photo when I ran this game at the first Tricon convention.

The bridge was masterfully built by James modeled after a covered bridge that still stands a short distance from his home in Vermont. The bridge accommodates 25mm figures nicely as shown in the photos. The roof, walls and even the deck are removable to allow access to the figures inside, or to simulate the destruction of the bridge by removing it and replacing it with some rubble. The river features sand shores, real rocks and water made from liquid latex artist's medium hand colored with powdered pigments. The roof is shingled by hand with individual wooden shingles.










Thursday, December 11, 2008

Small Breastworks - British Skirmishers

This is another of the terrain pieces my friend James made me a few years ago. This one was designed to hold a single unit of infantry based for The British are Coming! (TBAC) rules. We played TBAC for several years, but for the past few years have been playing Volley & Bayonet exclusively. We played a modified (house rules) version of TBAC which converted it to a turn, counter-turn system instead of the simultaneous movement system that it was designed to use. We found it worked more smoothly than the original design. In the end switching to V&B seemed the natural thing to do as our club has basically standardized V&B for all black powder periods. Having one set of rules for multiple periods means we don't have to teach the rules each game and we can get right to playing. Besting your opponent more often comes down to better battlefield decisions rather than a superior expertise in the rules. The V&B figure basing is slightly different than The British are Coming! but this terrain piece still seems to work nicely.

The British skirmishers are three stands I completed recently in order to prepare for a Brandywine Creek game I wanted to run. I needed to represent several small battalions, so I needed some extra skirmish stands. Knowing that this circumstance would occur often, I painted these three stands very genericly so that they can be used whenever I need such units. They're Old Glory figures from their 'British Firing Line' pack. I like this set of poses a lot and I've used several of these packs of figures to sprinkle throughout my other units to give the units a look of being in action instead of at parade rest. The rocks on the stands are small pieces of broken cork primed black and dry-brushed gray. They don't add much weight to the stand and fill the stand nicely giving the skirmishers some terrain to hide behind.

Saturday, December 6, 2008

V&B Road to Glory Rules Question

This is just a quick post about a rules question I'm going to be asking on the V&B mailing list. Since Yahoo Groups doesn't allow picture attachments to the e-mails sent to the mailing list, and I'm not savvy about posting to the Yahoo groups files section, I thought I'd just post my photo here and ask the question on the list and point the list membership here to view the photos. The figures are some random V&B stands from my French and Italian Napoleonic armies. I used them for this photo because they were handy.

My question revolves around the changes that are a result of the last sentence of rule 10.3.2 Advances After Combat which reads, "A victorious unit may not advnace to contact an enemy unit, and must stop a quarter inch away from it." add to the new version of the rules. In the situation where two lines of troops meet and one unit loses a melee and retreats (see photo above), our intrepretation of the first edition of the rules was that unit B above would be allowed to occupy position X vacated by unit 2. According to the new rule, this would be prohibited by the 1/4" non-advance zone shown from the neighboring units (see below). My question is simply is this an intended outcome, or was the 1/4" prohibition only intended to apply to the front face of enemy units?


Update, December 8th: For the curious, here's the answer I got from Frank Chadwick, the author of V&B: "Correct. It was actually never my intention that stands be able to advance into contact after melee, but that was not clear from the 1st edition rules. -- Frank" It's great to have such a quick and concise response from the rules author. Thanks Frank!

Thursday, December 4, 2008

Queens Loyal Rangers and Redoubt

Giles over at Tarleton's Quarter recently posted some photos of some of his excellent terrain pieces and that reminded me that I should do the same over here on my blog. This is the first of such posts. I'm also showing some figures I painted up a while ago that get a lot of use in my games, my Queen's Loyal Rangers.

The redoubt was scratch built by my friend James Gibbons in trade for some modeling work I did for him. We had a good system of exchanging time for time equally trading specialties. I received some excellent terrain like this redoubt, James received several 1/72 scale WWI aircraft models to use in his wargames. It was a great trade. The redoubt is sized for 25mm figures and features a firing step, and also an artillery embrasure with removeable gun platform.

The Queen's Loyal Rangers unit has both a formed stand, as well as two separate skirmish stands. Like most of my AWI figures, depending on the scale I use for my V&B games, the stands can represent the Queen's Rangers in all V&B scales by using a single skirmish stand, two skirmish stands, the formed stand, or all three stands. A lot of my close-up photos don't show my painting style in the best light as I use heavy highlights and washes to give a good tabletop look. The photo below of the Rangers in the redoubt gives a better impression of how this look works on the tabletop.