Hiatus

Some stinking realty problems forced my recent hiatus. Nearly a year later, I have gotten back into a small roll on the gaming front. I have a nice little agenda I have tried to create and successfully implement.

First, a local gaming store has relocated and it has provided a small impetus for me to get playing again, especially since they have a bit more tables, which will allow me to set up some real battles and recruit new interest. It also seems a local group who regularly meet on a typical work night for me has claimed many saturdays at this game store and will relocate some of their gaming up to my back yard. Yea! more people rolling dice!

Secondly, I have had lots of fruitful contact with the RTE crew (Clarence and Barry) and I hope to be providing a good chunk of my forces to help their gaming weekend. This will hopefully get me to complete some of my basing projects and flesh out my OOB. I have a large but quite amorphous collection that really needs a unifying OOB for each army to give me a natural boundry at which I can (gasp) stop collecting.

Thirdly, I had a great talk with a VERY NICE guy whom I drove down to the Williamsburg muster to meet, Rick O'Brien. He gave me an exhaustive amount of time on how to install the flags and had quick and apparently appropriate answers to my many either sophomoric and/or insightful questions. If it indeed proves that he moves up here to Virginia, then I expect I will enjoy inviting him up to play a fair bit of games. Creating a uniform look with my flags was/will be important to me moving forward with my collection. I will try to catch up with him again at Cold Wars. I suspect that if you many of you are aware he runs www.flagdude.com, and offers a very helpful and important, quality authentic looking flag with pole for your miniature units.

Fourthly, I have had some fruitful discussions with 2 painters, both of which should be sending me more painted lead over the next few days. Nothing gets a game going quicker then reinforcements who need to be christened in battle. I really look forward to 6 new battalions of French legere, and a host of Russian cavalry. I expect now to have enough Russians to create way too many divisions.

Lastly, I got an invite to play up at Keith Rocco's place to play some 15mm napoleonics later this spring. I will try to catch up with a AAR after the event. Before then, I will try to get a game of either RTE or CGII accomplished.

I will look to post some more scenarios, now that I have time to contribute that as well.

First!

Let me start with the disclaimer that I don't paint. I have before, but no longer. Instead, I keep the talented among us with a steady stream of income. Some of my 15mm ACW is "home-grown", but none of my 28mm Napoleonics are so lucky as to have been painted by their current owner.
My templates for collection of my armies are large and glorified "what-ifs". I have collected a large Confederate and Union force that is patterned after a 1862: "What if Jackson had headed east toward Manassas to threaten Washington, instead of starting the Valley Campaign?" . These armies are based toward gaming with Fire and Fury, but I have also flirted with a few regimental games in the beta testing of RF&F.
My Napoleonic army is largely Sash and Saber with a significant supplement of Foundry. I have a few Perry commands, and perhaps some stray Front Rank figures as well. These 25mm Napoleonic era beauty's are fantastic to observe when on the table. I have purchased a few Dutch, British and other German Minor States, but the 800 lb gorilla in the room is the Russians. I am not so secretly waiting to game some 1812 and later years so that the Russian full army can be on display. My "what if" here involves the Teugn-Hausen battle. I have put together the skeleton of a game in which the Austrians arrive a bit earlier and strike at the French a bit further north while Gudin is alone and marching east to west toward and through Teugn. 2 Austrian Corps against 3 Divisions of Davout's III Corps.
For these troops, I am playing "General de Brigade" or "In the Grand Manner". I suspect like so many others, we will just end up making a ton of house rules and calling it a day. Once I get some pictures, you will get to enjoy the spectacle. I have not tried to be a stickler about uniforms. Lots of incorrect for the period figures are present (i.e 1812 Russians used for an 1805 OOB), and lots of uniform choices are on thin ice. Nothing is intentionally flagrant, I just don't sweat the differences in strap colors sometimes, especially when someone else is painting for my enjoyment.