Friday, October 25, 2019

Projects...

It has been quite a while since I updated this blog. real life has got in the way with a couple of Hospital visits for tests for stomach problems and the recent death of my Mother which has meant I haven't had as much time or inclination to report on games or actually play games.

I also have been playing fewer 54mm based games recently, which was originally meant to be the focus of this blog.

I have decided to expand the focus and just to blog all the games I am currently playing and projects that are on the go.

I reccently had a clearout of projects in an attempt to focus on projects that I wanted to play and periods I was interested in. This has seen the selling off of a range of projects including everything under 20mm except my own Martian Empires 18mm collection.

I sold a lot of 15mm Napoleonics and ancients and then swapped the rest of my painted 15mm Napoleonics with Ian Hinds of Hinds Figures for a large, painted 20mm plastic ACW collection. The initial idea was to get enough to play Battle Cry ACW with figures, but in the end, I decided to get the whole collection which will allow me to play larger games with other rules as well.

As part of the clearout I also catalogued my painted figure collection and was rather surprised by the totals which are:

4201 Infantry
437 Cavalry
64 Artillery
66 Vehicles

They vary in size from 18mm to 54mm. The largest collections are around 750 25mm FPW, around 600 25mm Lord of the Rings figures and the 500+ 20mm ACW collection.

I have a number of other collections that I am working on and want to bring up to scratch to get on the table. These include:

40mm AWI
I was offered a collection of Front Rank AWI figures for a price that made them irrestible and consequently I bought all 800 unpainted figures for less than £1 each (usually £2.50 each)...

I need to sort them properly into units and work out what I need to add in the way of cavalry and generals but I have painted 2 12 man British units so far for Rebels and Patriots rules.

54mm Punic Wars

This is a long term project to play Command and Colours Ancients using 1 54mm for each block. I have nearly everything I need. The intention is to simply undercoat each side a diferent colour initially and then to gradually get them all painted.

54mm Napoleonics

This is mostly the collection I bought from Andy Duff's widow, plus some Prussians I bought from Anthony Morton and a few units I had already painted. I need to sort the British out and carve off the wings to make centre company figures before sortng them into units. I also need to add more cavalry - which I have unpainted and in boxes and plan the rest of the additions...

28mm Konflkt '47
I have a fairly large collection of DUST figures and would like to play K47 with them but need to add a couple of squads of normal WW2 infantry to the Germans and Soviets to start the forces. i have the figures from Great Escape Games and have undercoated them but haven't started painting them yet.

20mm WW2
I haven't used this early war collection for quite a while but played a fun game of Bolt Action recently with them which re-awakened my interest, so I need to add some more support weapons and sort out some additional troops.

54mm 19th Century

I am booked in to run a participation game at Salute next year using the Portable Wargame so I need to add to my existing forces to increase them for a 4 player game and I want to add some civilians as well.

So, quite a lot of variety and a lot of things to work on in between painting Toy Soldiers for other people. I am hoping to get the part completed projects to the stage where I can play a game with them over the next year before starting on anything new (such as the 54mm ECW project which has 25 boxes of plastics sitting in the loft!).