The Decline and Fall of 2mm Napoleonics

A couple months back, I posted about my burgeoning interest in 2mm Napoleonic wargaming using 3-D printed figure blocks from Forward March Studios, and (brimming with confidence) promised more details soon to come...

Well, I can definitely say I gave it the old college try.

I ordered the figures and buildings from a couple different professional 3-D printing services and got out an old sheet of acrylic plastic I'd bought for wargaming, determined to paint it up to look like the rather clever sheets featured on the Forward March blog. I got my copy of the Et Sans Resultat rules and read through the rulebook. I assembled a list of units and devised a basing scheme.

Forgive the poor late-night lighting...

That single base is as far as I ever got.

In retrospect, the whole process was a lot more hassle than I'd anticipated, from printing problems to the whole acrylic sheet thing not really working out to the assembly of bases and labels to overall dissatisfaction with the scale. This latter point was really brought home to me when I recently completed a painting commission on some 28mm Napoleonic cavalry. Damn but those figures look fine, and I can see the appeal of the scale (even if I'd want a good-sized table to play at that size, even for something on the level of General de Brigade).

Not saying I want to get into 28mm. Not saying that at all. But returning to my 2mm last night, I just...couldn't. They're way too abstract. I realize minis wargaming is, essentially, just using three-dimensional counters at the end of the day, but these are a little too close to the "wargames counter" experience for me to get really excited about it from a minis wargaming perspective.

Besides, I recently discovered the Pub Battles line. That's basically the experience I envisioned when I first started thinking about this whole crazy 2mm project, and looks like something definitely worth checking out—might as well just go "full wargame" at this point, eh? (And hey, maybe I can figure out a way to integrate my 2mm blocks into the Pub Battles system?)

Regardless, it'll be a while before I find out—those Pub Battles games are expensive and a bit too bespoke for a casual purchase. I'm not that much of a hardcore wargamer! Something for next year, perhaps.

In the meantime, I found that, between my own projects, commissioned projects, and my day job as a writer and editor, I was straining my hands and experiencing some incipient carpal tunnel pain! That's a big uh-oh in my line of work, and obviously something has to give. I just finished one commission and will be finishing up the second over the next couple weeks. After that, I won't be doing any more commission work for the remainder of the year; I'll check back in with my hands next year and see if I want to pick that back up.

(Not that commission work is a big income stream for me or anything. Just a nice way to earn some supplemental hobby cash, and it can certainly lie dormant for a while.)

Even with my own projects, I'll be taking things (even more) slowly. I have an interesting DBA project I've been working on in fits and starts, and I'll be returning to that shortly, as it's pretty easy on the ol' paint hand. Pics to follow once I'm done (sometime around Christmas at the rate I've been going...).