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...).

Not Back on It...Still on It

I am a gaming autodidact.

By this I mean that I never had a mentor or group who showed me the way into the world of tabletop gaming. No older sibling or cousin to pass down their chipped miniatures and tattered manuals, no group of my peers to welcome me in.

No sir, starting around the age of 12, it was all cobbled together by yours truly from the pages of Dragon, White Dwarf, and the Wargames West catalog, punctuated by trips to my not-so-friendly local gaming store. Due to accidents of demographics and timing, I didn't meet any fellow "seasoned gamers" until I was well into my teens—by which point that crowd was a year or two younger than me (a lifetime in adolescent world!).

I say all this as a preliminary to the reason why I'm announcing...

See, in the process of teaching myself about the hobby, I became determined to master the Big Three: RPGs, miniatures wargaming, and board wargaming. These ventures have met with varying degrees of success and failure over the years. RPGs are unquestionably my greatest arena of success, but there were times over the years where I could have just as easily veered off into miniatures wargaming as my prime tabletop gaming outlet. (Board wargaming, sadly, has never been more than a footnote.)

Because I came into the hobby circa 1990, and at an impressionable age at that, many of the Old Ways of the Hobby impressed themselves into my tender brain. In the realm of miniatures gaming, this chiefly took the form of appreciating the role of Napoleonics in the foundations of modern miniatures wargaming and even role-playing games. I always felt...well, almost a duty to "get into" Napoleonics as part of my overall self-designed curriculum.

That was over 25 years ago now. I won't get into the multitudinous reasons why I never quite managed to meet that goal, why Napoleonics consistently eluded me. I'll only say that a chance bit of browsing the Internet a few weeks ago led me to what I believe is a final homecoming to this most tricky of niches.

So why does this mean I'm back on my bullshit, you ask?

Well, like most hobbyists, I've done the whole "no new miniatures" pledge. Or rather, no new projects without clearing space from my collection first. For example, my Fantasy Warriors project was made possible by clearing out my Armies of Arcana and WarmaHordes collections.

But this dip into Napoleonics constitutes a whole new project. So how do I justify it? Well, you see, it's a very, very small project...

Those are blocks of 2mm scale units moving across a (mostly) flat acrylic battlefield. The whole concept comes courtesy of Forward March Studios, from where I snatched the photos above and below and who I now have to thank for giving me an entry point to Napoleonics after all these years.

See, the 3-D printed minis offered by Forward March are suuuuper cheap, which addresses one of the chief problems with the genre. And the figure scale practically dictates a grand-tactical approach (for which I have selected the intriguing Et Sans Résultat rules to drive the table action), nicely doing away with the at-times fiddly tendencies of period rulesets and focusing on what makes the era so arresting: massive armies moving in great columns and lines across a war-torn landscape.

Best of all, all the component pieces (save the plastic "board") fit into a little tackle box!

So, you see, I get to cheat a bit, as this is something perhaps a bit closer to a kriegspiel-style "operations room" wargame than a traditional miniatures game. Hell, I'm even tempted to pick up a couple croupier's sticks to move the units around! (I'm only half-joking...)

I'm also happy that this is a project that doesn't represent much commitment in terms of painting time. Those 2mm blocks paint up real fast, or so I'm given to understand, and terrain is pretty much accounted for. At this point, I'm mostly just waiting for the ESR rulebook and my 3-D printed strips and buildings to arrive in the mail and I can conceivably have a game up and running within a few days—quite a refreshing change from the extremely slow burn of all my other projects!

(Speaking of those, I should have some stuff to post soon. Gen Con prep and various writing commitments slowed me down a bit this summer, but I've been steadily plugging away on my 40K and DBA projects, and I just need to make time to take some photos so I can post about them.)

Once I get in a game of my micro-scale Napoleonics, I'll be sure to post about the experience here!

I'm a Union Man!

It's been nearly two years since I posted here! Wow.

I've been kind of keeping a foot in my miniatures hobby during that time, but recently my dear wife pointed out to me that now that my other main hobby has become a full-time career, I was rather in need of an actual hobby to occupy my precious few spare hours. And hey, what better way to unwind and relax than with a bit of minis painting of an evening, and even—gasp!—the occasional game!

So I'm firing up this blog again as a way to document my focused return to the miniatures hobby. Which is a bit ironic, since last year I decided I'd kind of had enough with the "hobby community" at large...but that's a subject, perhaps, for a future post.

No, this blog is pure self-indulgence. I'll post pics and talk about plans, but mostly just to create a record for myself so I can go back and look through my process in the months and years ahead. I'd like to make posting to this blog a semi-regular thing. We'll see how successful I am in that. Comments are, of course, welcome, but I'm mostly just here for myself.

Another motivational tool I've just picked up came in the form of joining the Brush Wielders Union Patreon. I'm a sucker for cool swag, and I'm a sucker for analog record keeping. The fact you get a little "dues booklet" with space to record what you've painted and what you're planning that month? I didn't stand a chance...

I have a few posts in the queue regarding current projects, but for right now I'm just going to list what's currently in my collection and where things stand in terms of painting; all collections are 28mm unless otherwise stated:

• WWII Skirmish: East Africa 1941
• 4/11th Sikhs (mostly painted)
• Italian Colonial Infantry and Blackshirts (mostly unpainted)
• WWII Skirmish: Gothic Line, Fall 1944
• Brazilian Expeditionary Force (mostly painted)
• German 148th Reserve Division (unpainted)
• RSI Italian "Monte Rosa" Alpini (unpainted)
• Warhammer 40K: Black Templars (about half painted)
• Warhammer 40K: Sisters of Battle (mostly unpainted)
• Warhammer 40K: Genestealer Cult (unpainted)
• American War of Independence: Patriot army (unpainted)
• American War of Independence: British army (unpainted)
• 6mm Sengoku-era Takeda and Uesugi clan samurai armies (unpainted and mostly unbased!)
• Gempei War-era Samurai skirmish forces (unpainted)
• 6mm Epic 40K: Titan Legion (painted)
• 6mm Epic 40K: Orks (painted)
• Malifaux crews
• Ortegas (painted, though I have an "alternate Perdita" model I'd like to paint up)
• Viktorias (painted)
• The Dreamer (painted, though I'm going to re-do Lord Chompy Bits)
• Yan Lo (mostly painted)
• Brewmaster (unpainted)
• Fantasy Warriors
• Human army (planning)
• Amazon army (planning)
• Goblin army (planning)
• Undead army (planning)
• DBA (1/72 plastics)
• Classical Indians (mostly unpainted)
• Later Achaemenid Persians (unpainted)
• Skythian (unpainted)
• Later Hoplite Greek, Athenian (planning)
• Later Hoplite Greek, Theban (planning)

Phew! That's a lot of projects, and with only a very small percentage of them actually complete, I've got a lot of painting ahead of me. I feel a bit like Utgar Skullcleaver here, facing down a lumbering Goblin War Giant...

Oh yes, more details on that little acquisition next post!

Starting a Miniatures Gaming Club

Pictured: where I hope to get one day.

I admin my local tabletop gaming Meetup group. It started out as RPG-only, but when I took over adminning, I opened it up to miniatures gamers as well (due to my old-fashioned ideas of RPGs and wargaming being two sides of the same hobby coin). We've had a good number of miniatures gamers sign up, but no one's really stepped up to get anything going by way of regular meetings.

 And so, on top of my other hobby and work-related commitments, I've been thinking of jump-starting an (initially) monthly miniatures gaming club. I'm currently in the process of finding a suitable public space to hold meetings, but beyond that I'm a bit in the dark. I've never been a member of any kind of gaming club, miniatures or otherwise. I know these sorts of clubs seem to be pretty regular in the UK and parts of the US, so I thought I'd put out a general call and see if any of my readers have pointers to blog posts or other resources that might cover some "best practices" for setting up and running a miniatures gaming club. Or, if you have personal experience with same, feel free to sound off in the comments.

 Thanks!

A New Priority for My Miniatures Hobby

So in my last post I mused about ditching WWII skirmish gaming for WWI skirmish gaming. I laid out a wide variety of compelling reasons as to why this was a good idea, from personal interest in the period to the aesthetic appeal of the figures. And I left off the post promising that I'd think about it, but, in reality, thinking that I'd already made up my mind.

Here I am, a couple weeks later, however, and I've decided not to go through with the switch. But I'm glad it came up, that I posted about it, even talked it over with a couple friends. Because that whole process ultimately led me towards a moment of clarity regarding my approach to minis gaming.

See, here's the thing: over the last decade-plus, I've moved around a few times, and I've moved out of the orbits of the folks I used to play miniatures games with. We still keep in touch - quite a bit, in fact - but it's been years since we were all in the same town and able to get together for games. So I've gotten in the habit of building two armies simultaneously whenever I get into a new game or genre. I've got Undead and Amazons for fantasy gaming, British and Germans for WWII skirmish, Space Orks and Titan Legions for Epic 40K - I've even got two little factions for Ronin samurai skirmish games.

The thinking here was that, if I met someone who was interested in minis gaming, I'd have a "loaner" army for them to use and see if they liked the experience. The problem with this approach has been three-fold:

• First off, this scenario rarely happens. In the same time period, I've been able to introduce a rather significant number of people to RPG gaming, but hardly any of them expressed any interest in minis gaming. Most people have heard of D&D; far fewer have heard of Warhammer. Of those who had, they perceived it to have a much, much higher buy-in cost in terms of time and money than RPGs. (And they're right, frankly.) The presence of a "loaner" army was not enough to sway them to even give the games a try.
• Secondly, it makes building a miniatures collection a lot tougher, buying two factions at once. Inevitably, it slows the process way down and prevents me from picking up some of the cool stuff that I might otherwise have gotten right away. It dilutes the collection, in the end.
• Thirdly, and most importantly, when I'm collecting only for myself and without any outside feedback, it tends to create a rabbit-hole effect where I find myself collecting increasingly obscure periods or sub-genres. This had happened to me before with WWII, where I eventually ended up building Romanian and Soviet armies based on the fighting around Odessa in 1941. What the hell? I mean, it's a fascinating and little-known part of the war, but how the heck was that supposed to act as an embassy to the hobby? Clearly, I was starting to go down the rabbit-hole again with this WWI skirmish idea.

So I've made a resolution. From now on, I'm only going to collect single factions initially. Furthermore, I'm going to make an effort to target games that are actually being played in my community, and play those games with (gasp!) other people. (It helps that, currently, those "other people" happen to be people I know and like.)

For example, I've decided to stick with WWII because Bolt Action is a really popular set of rules right now. Sure, there are other rules systems out there, but I've taken a look at BA in the past, and it seems perfectly suited for my current goals. (Plus there's a points-based army building element to it, and I like points-based army building and I don't care who knows it!) But I'm going to sell off half my collection (the Germans) and focus on my Brits; I'll probably be selling off most or all of the Brits, too, actually, so that I can get a fresh start on the collection, but I'm still going to model them on Normandy-period forces.

Hmmm, maybe I could split the cost on this with a couple local players and they could take the Americans and Germans, and I'll keep the rulebook and terrain?

I'd already inadvertently started this process last month when I picked up a single faction for Malifaux. One of the above-mentioned "other people" heard me talking about wanting to get into the game during a wargames-focused episode of a podcast I contribute to, and she called my bluff. So now I have a single faction for that game and a potential opponent. My plan's already in motion!

I'll also be using some of the proceeds from my WWII sales to finally get into Warmachine/Hordes. I found a faction I really like, and it's quite popular in my neck of the woods, with active groups in my town and neighboring communities - one of the more popular WarmaHordes video blogs even "broadcasts" from Albuquerque, about an hour south of where I'm living.

I'm also giving serious thought to starting up a bi-monthly wargames club via a local tabletop gaming Meetup group I admin. This would be a great way to grow the hobby in my town and meet some new opponents. My "single-faction" approach kind of forces me to this, which is a good thing. No more sitting on esoteric collections of miniatures that just gather dust and never get played! The only trick will be finding a good space to host the meetings. Hmm, George R. R. Martin lives in my city, and he's a big miniatures wargaming guy - maybe he'll let us use his basement?

(For the record, I will be keeping my double-faction collections for Ronin and Epic 40K; the former takes up hardly any space on my shelves, and the latter is just pure nostalgia for me. Plus, it never hurts to have a couple loaner armies. . .)

"A New Period - Really, Man?"

I dunno, Rhetorical Self, I'm thinking about it. I'm just throwing some thoughts up here, gonna see what sticks.

I'm currently recovering from a minor, outpatient surgical procedure. This has given me time to catch up on some back issues of Wargames Illustrated that have been sitting next to my bed for too long. Today's issue was from January 2013, and was dedicated to the theme of World War One.

Here's the thing: when I was a wee lad, I was fascinated by World War One. The rhomboidal tanks, the gas masks (on both man and horse!), the churned earth of no-man's land, the colorful biplanes. Loved the whole thing.

In high school, along with my gaming buddies, I was pretty much a Games Workshop guy when it came to miniatures gaming. Eventually, we got burned out, as often happens. Too many price hikes, too much corporate BS. Historical miniatures had always appealed to me (I was just getting started on my eventual BA in History), and I pushed my friends to start exploring that end of the hobby. Since I had made the initial push, I left it up to them to pick a period that appealed.

They picked World War Two, and the rest, for me, was history. The irony, of course, is that WWII was never really my thing. In fact, I remember being somewhat taken aback when my friends suggested that as a period (this being many years before Flames of War) - I thought to myself, "Do people even play that period?" The historical minis I'd seen on display at the local game store had all been Greek phalanxes and Napoleonic divisions and Civil War regiments, that sort of thing. Twentieth-century wargaming? Really? But I went along with it and educated myself on the period and the different scales of engagement.

After many years, I've settled on skirmish as my ideal for 20th-century wargaming. Larger engagements seem better served by boardgames or computer games, and I like injecting a level of humanity into the giant mill of industrialized warfare. And I've immersed myself pretty deeply in World War Two miniatures gaming over the past, gosh, 18 years!?

Another amazing Lonely Gamers table.

But as I perused that Wargames Illustrated issue, I started to cogitate. One of the articles quite reasonably pointed out that the war wasn't just about static trench warfare, that the opening and closing phases of the Western Front were actually quite mobile and open, and that other theaters never got bogged down at all. I was also reminded that there are a handful of skirmish-scale WWI rules out there, including a set of rules from one of my favorite publishers, Iron Ivan Games. I'd been aware that people gamed WWI, but I'd always assumed it was large-scale games featuring regiments and battalions and divisions. The idea of gaming WWI at skirmish scale just like my WWII games sort of hit me like a brick upside the head.

Nowadays I pretty much carry the WWII torch for myself. The people who initially suggested the period long ago grew disinterested in historical wargaming in general and, besides, they now live 1,000 miles away. My local minis gaming community (such as I'm plugged into it) is more focused on WarmaHordes and 40K. So, as far as 20th-century skirmish-scale wargaming is concerned, why not switch to a period that is a little more authentic to my interests anyway, I says to myself? The Great War still holds the sort of morbid fascination that drew me in so many years ago, and I'm excited by the prospect of being able to game it at an engagement scale I'm comfortable with.

And, to be perfectly honest, the fact that this is the centenary year of the opening of the war just adds a certain appealing synergy to the whole thing. In fact, I've been mulling the idea of starting my collection with early war, 1914-era troops. Uniforms were still colorful and old-fashioned, and it's the clash of the old and the new that's long been part of my fascination with the period. Visions of French cuirassiers, Scottish highlanders in kilts, cavalry lancers, and Germans in pickelhaube helmets are now dancing in my head. (And, as those links attest, I'm also finding that there are tons of great figure options available.) If I end up having fun with the period, I could see adding more units from later in the war as the years go by, perhaps branching out to cover the mid-war years in Palestine and Arabia, and finally adding Stosstruppen and A7V tanks in time for the 100th anniversary of the March Offensives in 2018.

I dunno, it's fun little gimmick, I guess.

So what are the cons?

1) I've already got 2-3 other ideas in the offing for projects in the coming months and years: an 18th-century Imagi-Nations project, a third army for my Armies of Arcana collection, a new fantasy collection based on Joe Dever's World of Magnamund... So it's not like I'm starving for projects or inspiration.

(On the other hand, those are all big projects that I've resolved to put on the back burner until we can get moved into a slightly larger living space that will allow for proper display of the painted minis. The appeal of skirmish scale is that you can get a game-able, displayable collection together pretty quickly and easily.)

2) This would probably be my farewell to WWII for the foreseeable future (unless I get suckered into joining a Flames of War club or something, god forbid). And that's kind of sad to me. I've got a good nucleus of a collection going now, I'm happy with the chosen period, the manufacturers, everything. But I have to wonder how much of this is just inertia? I like the period well enough, but I didn't really get into it until someone else suggested it.

(I suppose I should explicate that I'd sell my WWII collection to purchase my WWI collection. I guess I could hold on to my WWII collection and put them ice, but that would slow down the new project quite a bit and...really, I'm not enough of a hardcore hobbyist to keep a collection that I only intend to play once in a blue moon.)

3) Speaking of my WWII collection, I've got enough painted at this point to have small games of Operation Squad and such. So starting over from scratch would mean no "modern" wargaming for a bit. (My goal would be to have something ready to go by the August centennial.) On the other hand, I've got my Epic 40K, Malifaux, Armies of Arcana, and samurai skirmish forces to occupy my paintbrush and tabletop time, so again, it's not like I'm desperately lacking.

I'm going to ponder this for a few more days before making a final decision, but it should be pretty clear which direction I'm leaning towards, here.

Missing Out on the Painting Challenge

I discovered the excellent Analogue Hobbies blog last year, right after Curt launched his annual Painting Challenge. I watched in fascination as entry after entry poured in and resolved to get in on the action the following year.

Unfortunately, as I had missed the beginning of the Challenge, I had also missed the point that it's a "historicals only" affair. Had I known, I would have reserved more historical figures for this time of year, instead of knocking them out earlier in the fall. I've still got a small pile of WWII figures to work on, but it's only a couple dozen or so - not really enough to justify (in my mind) joining the Challenge. I want a big project to tackle so that the Challenge will motivate me!

I think I'm going to set my sights on building up such a project over the next year, so that I'll have a nice, impressive pile to dive into. I've been meaning to start a 6mm Great Northern War project; winter 2014 seems like a perfect time to get cracking on that.

In the meantime, I've been laboring (and I do mean laboring) over my first batch of vintage (and distinctly non-historical) Warlord Titans, part of the batch acquired back in May. I've been incredibly pleased with how they're turning out, but oh my word it's taking a long time. Disruptive camo patterns: never again.

I'm hoping to finish up the batch by the weekend and post pics then.

On the Importance of Fluff

I'm re-reading the Adeptus Titanicus rulebook and old Epic battle reports from White Dwarf and, in so doing, I'm being reminded of the value of "fluff" (ugh, sorry to use that term) in miniatures gaming. Lining up armies and having a bash is all well and good, but the games take on a much deeper meaning if there's some sort of background to the conflict and the forces involved. An extra dimension is added. It's why I'm not just painting up generic "Normandy" miniatures for my WWII project, but instead choosing a time and place (the fighting around Tilly-sur-Seulles during the first week after D-Day) and modeling units accordingly. Thus, it's not just "British", it's men of the 6th Durham Light Infantry; it's not just "Germans", it's panzergrenadiers of the Panzer Lehr Division. All of this adds an extra level of immersion to the game, even if the battles themselves are not based on any actual engagement.

Something that's long been missing from my fantasy wargaming (first with Fantasy Warriors and now with Armies of Arcana) has been this sense of background immersion. I was going back through old posts and noticed that in my very first FW battle report (which was also the very first post on this blog), I wrote a bit of game fiction in the style of those old White Dwarf battle reports. I'd like to get back to doing that once I start gaming and posting battle reports again in earnest, but without a clear idea of a game world that the battles are taking place in, it's tough to do that.

Part of the problem has been getting a fix on what this fantasy world might look like based on the miniatures in our collection so far. A few weeks ago I posted that, in the wake of Ray Harryhausen's death, I was coming to realize that our Undead and Amazon armies convey a pretty strong vibe of pulp fantasy. That vision has only grown stronger in the time since, growing to the point that I'm now envisioning a sort of Appendix N-style fantasy world of amazons, necromancers, cavemen, and dinosaurs, all with a healthy dose of post-apocalyptic fantasy thrown into the mix. I've got visions of making some terrain pieces of "futuristic"-style ruins, maybe a half-buried spaceship, and of tracking down some vintage fantasy miniatures armed with sci-fi blasters and such.

To illustrate the value of even a bit of fluff: as soon as I'd figured out even a background as vaguely-sketched as this, I immediately came up with an idea for a third fantasy army, a project I've been wanting to put together for some years now. I've toyed with various ideas: crusading knights, "regular" dwarves, "feral" dwarves, "Roman" gorillas, Wargods of Aegyptus, and so forth, but they all felt too much like bog standard fantasy or, at best, a thinly-veiled derivative. With my pulp fantasy idea, though, I instantly thought of a perfect third project: cavemen and prehistoric animals! I haven't decided if I'm gonna go with "early" hominids and dinosaurs (as in the style of the Frazetta painting above) or "later" hominids and Ice Age mammals (certainly, a woolly mammoth or two on the caveman side would form a suitable counterpart to my Undead Mammoth). But whatever the case, it certainly feels right. I love the idea of there being this degenerate race of savage cave dwellers as a counterpoint to the bronze-clad Amazons, and I really like the various caveman miniatures I've looked at so far. I don't know why I never thought of doing a Frazetta-esque fantasy army before, particularly in light of the Amazons and their curvy general, but it's on now!

Or rather it will be once I clear a project or two off my table--hoping to get started on this one maybe by fall or winter. In the meantime, I'm hoping to fill in some of the details of this Appendix N fantasy world that's brewing in my head.

Current Projects Update

Here's the most recent shot of my work area. Two of my current projects are easily discernible; the third might be a bit harder to pick out, still being largely in bags, but it is, ironically, my current obsession.

• The Normandy project is moving along nicely. Shortly after posting those pictures of painted Highlanders, I decided that consistency of scale was more important to me than I had realized and I resolved to limit myself to a single manufacturer as much as possible. I plumped for Artizan, and all the figures have since arrived, been based, and primered. (And as a change of pace, I'm taking the advice of several other bloggers and doing the base texture before I paint the figures. Should be interesting to see how that pans out.)
  
  As an old fan of Necromunda and Mordheim, I couldn't be more pleased that the figures currently occupying space on my table constitute the entirety of what I need to play Operation Squad. Of course I plan on expanding by adding other squads and eventually moving into the game's vehicular supplement (see the primered Panther over on the left?) as well as playing larger, platoon-scale games of NUTS! once my collection gets big enough, but I'm loving the small scale that the basic OS game offers. Next up: ordering a few buildings from Paper Terrain, finishing up a couple other terrain-related odds and ends, and then playing some games! Hoping to realize the latter goal by the end of summer at the latest.
• Up on top of the plastic drawers sits another skirmish-level project, my 28mm samurai. I'm looking forward to Osprey's Ronin rules, but if those aren't quite what I'm looking for, I've always got Taiko. In fact, I'm planning on basing my samurai with magnets so that I can mount them in scenic movement trays in the style of Impetus to do larger-scale Taiko battles even if I end up using Ronin for my skirmish games. I plan on working on these guys slowly but surely, mostly as a colorful relief from the earth tones of my Normandy project.
• Lastly, there's the surprise project: my return to Epic-scale 40K. I posted back when I made an impulse purchase of a heap of classic Titans on the subject of my abiding love for Epic gaming and the many good times that Space Marine provided. Well, my old adversary Alex and I have been furiously exchanging emails, planning out our return to the fold. Amazingly, I just last week landed a complete boxed set of Adeptus Titanicus (styrene buildings and all!) for less than half of what I paid for it 20 years ago. And I've been slowly acquiring other pieces for my quickly-expanding collection, all the while trawling NetEPIC and ginning up armies. The plan in place right now is to build a Titan Legion/Space Marine army and paint up a few traitor titans as well - I've already picked out legions and paint schemes and can't wait to get started on that. The long-term goal is to build up an Ork army with my three old Gargant models as centerpieces. Alex is putting together a Knight-based Adeptus Mechanicus army with his long-term goal being the fielding of an Eldar army similar to the one he had in days of yore.
  
  This way we can play both the original Adeptus Titanicus rules with a handful of titans per side or have nice big bashes with NetEPIC armies. We only manage to get together about once a year at best (living 1,000 miles apart tends to put a crimp in social plans), but we're already planning to bring our tiny little armies along for whenever it is we see each other.

Oh, and I've also got plans for a third Armies of Arcana project, but that's projected to be a ways down the road and will warrant a post of its own, coming up shortly.

Selling Figures, Looking for Figures

First up, since I've decided to shift gears slightly in terms of my collection, I'm selling some of my WWII minis. Two separate lots, one of British, the other German. If you admired my painted Jocks from a previous post, they're up for grabs in this auction, so take a look!

Painted 28mm WWII British Squad and More!

28mm WWII German Infantry and Tanks

Second, with the death of Ray Harryhausen I've been thinking about starting a third fantasy army. I've got an army of skeletons (including an overt Harryhausen tribute in the form of my undead hoplites) and an army of amazons - it's got a definite pulp fantasy vibe. Armies of Arcana has a list for an army made up entirely of Giants; I thought it might be fun to do an army of cyclopes and other titan-types. Anyone know a good source for suitable figures? I'd also welcome any other suggestions for manufacturers that make a line suitable for a pulp fantasy Harryhausen/Frazetta vibe - hairy barbarians, sinister fishmen, or anything else along those lines. Pointers would be much appreciated. If I get a good handful of suggestions, I might even run a poll and let my esteemed leadership decide!

[Samurai] Rebooting the Scale?

When I started this blog waaaaaay back in 2006, one of the first things I wrote about was my burgeoning interest in getting into Sengoku-era samurai battles as a new genre of historical miniatures wargaming. Due to a combination of factors, this project did not pan out as planned. It was only last year that I actually managed to get some painted samurai armies on the table, and even then it was in a much-reduced, DBA-ized capacity from my original grandiose schemes.

A major contributing factor in the failure of these schemes was the difficulty I encountered in historical research and finding a ruleset I liked. Yet, going over old entries, I've realized that those problems were addressed and solved over time. The other factor at play was, unfortunately, less easily resolved: my choice of figure scale. Initially, I thought 10mm would be a good choice, as I pictured ranks of colorful banners and sashimonos advancing across the field of battle. But what I came to realize is that it's as much about the lacquered armor and detailed, colorful fabric prints when it comes to the aesthetic appeal of samurai, and that 10mm was too small to fully appreciate the elaborate panoplies donned by the Japanese warriors of the 16th century.

I've been aware of the Perry 28mm samurai and other ranges for some time now, but I've never really considered making the switch to a different scale. I've got  easily hundreds of 10mm figures (that picture's just a portion of my whole collection), even if only about 10 percent of their number are painted and mounted, plus some buildings and rice paddy terrain. So what's a hobbyist to do? Sell off the collection and use the money to switch scales?

Figures painted by the Lonely Gamers' own Leroy Simpson.

Don't mind if I do.

As I wrote in my last entry, I'm in the process of fully embracing my love of 28mm, and a switch away from 10mm is certainly part of that. This daring scheme has the additional advantage of my chosen ruleset, Flagship Games' Taiko!, offering a 1:1 skirmish variant of their 1:50 scale "army" rules, so it will be possible to have games even as the collection is built up and developed for grander engagements.

The downside is that, in selling my 10mm collection to fund my new purchases, I have no idea how much money I can expect to generate. As I've said before, 10mm samurai are a niche of a niche of a niche. I would need to de-mount the unpainted figures that I've got on bases, then count 'em all up, then figure out a reasonable pennies-on-the-dollar amount to charge (and what to charge for the figures that are painted and mounted), then cross my fingers and hope for the best on eBay. That's a lot of work, and so this planned switch will, realistically, remain a pipe dream for the time being.

Unless someone just wants to take the whole collection off my hands for a flat offer. My Google+ contact info's over in the sidebar if you're inclined to talk about an exchange...

EDIT: A reader has done just that and taken the collection off my hands for an agreeable sum! So it looks like that's the final chapter on my star-crossed 10mm samurai. On to Samurai 2.0, then.