This Blog Aten't Dead

 What can I say about the past few years that has not been said? I shall confine myself to the ever-pertinent monosyllable, "Oof".

Much to my surprise and resistance, I have become embroiled in a madcap scheme to collect 28mm Napoleonics. For decades I have been adamant that this is quite the wrong scale. It takes forever to get everything you want done. I can't say I've changed my perspective, but I admit the formations do look appealing when they're done. Moreover, it's a scale other folks are happy to game at, even though the painting takes a while, no matter how many corners I cut!

Over the course of the pandemic, consequently, I have painted for Black Powder two (24-man) battalions of Hanoverians, three of British foot, 17 Riflemen, a pair of French 12-lb guns (to represent a single battery), a single Royal Artillery gun and crew, at least thirteen French battalions (including Swiss, Irish and Italian units to spice things up), five Prussian battalions and a dozen Jaegers, three (12-man) regiments of Chasseurs à Cheval, two Prussian cavalry regiments, half a dozen brigadiers, two dozen casualty markers to hold dice, and movement trays for all the above. I've also completed a huge hill with a footprint of nine sheets of A3 paper.

I've even - gaps between lockdowns permitting - managed to fit in a few in-person games of Black Powder. Remarkable. Fingers crossed, next year we'll be playing a campaign. :)

Getting into Black Powder and Napoleonics cheaply

If you are interested in Black Powder, but daunted by the prospect of painting lots of large models, the following may be of interest. I'll go through the background, the painting, basing and gaming, then touch on future plans.

 

• Background: 1/72 plastics
• Painting: An easy formula for general use and a specific recipe for Austrians
• Basing: A scheme adapted from Shako that works for Black Powder
• Gaming: Some general notes on playing with smaller figures.
• Postscript: Future plans.
  

Background:

Back in my uni days I played Shako, providing both sides in 1/72 plastics. For a long time I after I had no games, miniatures languishing in boxes, others unpainted. About a year ago I invited some friends to visit during the summer of 2020, and at the same time my club had started getting into Black Powder. I had signed up to produce a French force for this, but I didn't fancy producing vast numbers at the time - and tried to keep myself on a short rein. I thought back to my old Shako forces, and fancied I could use them as a springboard.

My friends honeymooned in Vienna, so they were quite interested in leading some Austrians to glory against the French. Games Workshop's Contrast paints were out just then, and I realised I could produce some tolerable Austrians for a minimum of effort. I bought two packs of infantry, a pack of artillery, one pack of heavy cavalry and another of light, and brought them to a tolerable standard within a few months.

Painting:

1. Wash your miniatures with lukewarm water and washing-up liquid and let them dry.
2. Glue them to a tongue depressor or lolly stick for painting.
3. Apply a coat of PVA glue and leave to dry.
4. Prime them in the colour of your choice.
5. Paint with a few simple bold colours. Don't get too hung up on detailing.
6. Apply a suitable wash or a contrast paint.
7. Glue them to bases.
8. Varnish prior to applying static grass, if you're using it.

 

Example painting with the Austrian foot:

1. Primed white as this was the main uniform colour.
2. Applied GW's Contrast Apothecary White all over the models and let it dry.
3. Drybrushed white.
4. Flesh: a flesh colour.
5. Facings: an appropriate colour.
6. Musket: dark brown for wood, silver for metal.
7. Backpacks and rolls: brown for the packs and an apt colour for the rolls.
   
8. Black bits (Shako, boots): Contrast Black
9. Apply washes to flesh and anywhere you'd like to accentuate detail.
   

Basing:

 

The basing scheme I followed for Shako was 6 horse for a cavalry regiment (Two bases: 3 horse on a 2"/50mm deep by 3"/75mm wide base) and 9 men for a foot battalion (Three bases: 3 men on a 1"/25mm deep by 2"/50mm wide base). I used 1/72 plastics, which you can still buy for about a tenner a box. One box generates 2-3 regiments of cavalry and 3-5 battalions of foot at my scale, i.e. about a brigade in a box.

For the Austrians, who field larger units of foot than other nations, Shako suggested adding a fourth base to an infantry battalion. Black Powder's recommendation to have a Large unit be about a third larger than a normal-sized one. Therefore, my existing units of French were 9 men to a battalion, while the new Austrians were 12.

Gaming:

Ranges, movement and base sizes:

A benefit to using smaller sculpts is that you can fit in a game on a lesser space. I'm lucky enough to have repurposed a table tennis table, which can fit a 4'/1.2m by 8'/2.4m setup quite easily. I shrank all the distances in the Black Powder rulebook to 75% of their originals, e.g. cavalry move 13.5"/34.3cm per bound, not 18"/45.7cm. A lucky command roll for cavalry on turn 1 of a Black Powder game at normal distances can see them move 4.5 feet/1.37m, which is deeper than my table space allows. Using reduced distances just for 28mm models is suggested in the Peninsular War supplement that Warlord have produced, so I know I'm not alone in this! A normal foot battalion in line Black Powder's recommended scale for 28mm is c. 24cm/9.4" across and 40mm deep, whereas one of mine is c. 15cm/6" across, or roughly 2/3 as broad. Therefore, you can either fit more men onto the table or, if you have a big table, leave room for flanking manoeuvres.

Playing the game:

I mentioned above that I painted these Austrians up for some friends I invited to visit in the summer of 2020. This being the Year of the Plague, they weren't able to visit, of course. However, that hasn't stopped us gaming. We've been using video calls via Messenger on Facebook. I know many others have been using Zoom for this sort of thing, too. With a camera in your mobile, you can happily get both distant and zoomed-in views of the action. I find it helpful to offer my own thoughts, especially when introducing people to the game, "You could move that battalion there, but note my cavalry brigade is just here," swivel the camera to highlight an area they've missed, "and you'll be exposing your flank". You'll find that the more you play, the less you need to do this, but it's more enjoyable for your opponent if they aren't making the sorts of mistakes they wouldn't make in person.

We've been having a battle of a Saturday afternoon for several months now, and it's a lot of fun!

 

Postscript:

My friends and I have rebooked our in-person game for next summer, when we'll be playing in the garden. Given this year's restrictions, and the government's inconsistency in addressing them, I have in mind a three-month window (June through August), and we'll narrow things down closer to the time.

 

They've been bitten by the Napoleonic bug, and have picked up the Black Powder rulebook and some of the Victrix Napoleonic Austrians in 28mm. I did say earlier that I had wanted to avoid producing two armies, but "the best laid schemes o' mice an' men gang aft agley", and I've found myself helping a friend paint up his 28mm Waterloo starter set from Warlord in addition to my own 28mm French. Consequently, we should have a few brigades on either side on a nice big battlefield: 12'/3.6m by 6'/1.8m is my plan for the garden!

This doesn't mean I'll abandon my old 1/72 troops. I dug out three regiments of French cavalry last night - chasseurs a cheval, hussars and line lancers - with a view to painting them up. I'm sure I have divisions' worth of infantry in the house: British, Prussian and French. After years in silence, they are seeing the table again!

Return to Napoleonics

Come the end of August, I have arranged for some old friends to visit for the weekend for a spot of gaming. As part of my preparations for that, I've been pulling miniatures long abandoned, and getting them ready for a battle or two. A load of Napoleonic troops are currently on the desk. Some of them received a very basic paintjob back in the day - and I don't even intend to try to get them repainted for the summer. I just mean to base them, pop a spot of protective varnish on, and then they should be good enough for gaming. Some infantrymen who never had any work done on them have had a coat of undiluted PVA, as I understand this should help them retain their paint. Wish them and me luck!

Small Hill Spruced Up

Today I present a little detour. I was inspecting a box on a shelf, and chanced on a very dusty hill I had completed ages ago. I think it was an attempt at a more realistic style, but it may be too small even for 6mm. Anyway, I wasn't quite happy with the colouring, and so it must have ended up forgotten in the box. I have been becoming steadily happier with flock, and so I brushed it down and gave it a go. I am pretty happy with the result. Here's a brigade of Napoleonic Brits from Baccus standing ready to defend the vertiginous heights.

Form Square! Back to 6mm Napoleonics

I was inspired last night to a spot more work on my Baccus 6mm redcoats. I follow my own basing method with these lads. The little chaps come four models to a strip. The recommended basing method is two strips deep and three wide on a base, with one of those being a command strip (officer, two colour bearers, and a drummer), yielding a group of 24 models. I only use the command strip on every third base, as I have both fond memories of Shako with plastic 1/72 chaps, and a desire to get round to my place the chaps I played this with at uni, and have a few games with the 6mm chaps. In the Shako small-scale rules, an infantry battalion is three stands in size, you see. With the 1/72 models we had representative units of 9 men, and this way there are 72 of the little fellows. I am not quite mad enough to go for 1:1 ratios of men yet! Anyway, I was inspired by seeing Ian's 54mm project, peering at my Sharpe DVDs again, and a chap on Warseer who's making some Napoleonic-themed Imperial Guard. I find it is often the case that I will notice one little thing, which makes me notice something else, and then things snowball!

The weather here continues to be unpleasantly warm, so I continue to imbibe drinks from glasses that are 80% ice cubes. I'm dawdling my way through Millennium, as I paint, and have reached the start of the final season. Rather bizarrely, the world clearly ended at the end of the second season, only for the makers to have been granted a reprieve from cancellation. I fancy a post-apocalyptic season would have been more honest a continuation, but there would probably have been some trouble in having the central character continue to profile serial killers when almost everyone is dead. So it was only a little outbreak of death, and society is back to normal again with a slightly different cast list. Rather amusingly (or jarringly), the makers seemingly realised finally that all their main characters were white, and that they had also got rid of the two major female characters. So there's a new FBI agent added to the mix, who's black. "Pete, I'm not getting what's comic or jarring about this." Ah, just wait. They introduced her in an episode which dealt with lots of blue-eyed blonde clones. To quote Giles of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, " I believe the sub-text here is rapidly becoming... text".

Coming up soon is a week of frenzied activity. Dad is going to be out most of the day at church, as there's some sort of harvest festival thing going on. So I will be taking advantage of his absence to get as much painting done as I can. To recapitulate for those just tuning in: the house needs a bit of painting done, but Dad is a bit of a stickler, and insists on overseeing or painting himself, so won't let anyone else do it. However, he has no time, so he can't do it. Fortunately, we men are not the observant half of the species, and his sense of smell is a bit degraded by years of smoking, so I have been patching up this window ledge and that peeling bit of wood for several weeks now, and have yet to be detected. The main problems are drying times and that Dad is often at home working on church stuff.  Since he's going to be out all week, I doubt I'll be painting any soldiers then, but you might end up seeing some proud pictures of gloss-coated outdoor wood! For the time being, here are those Napoleonic redcoats.