Sharp Practice Musings

As I am going through the Swamp Fox supplement, I wanted to determine what would be needed in terms of movement trays to be able to game any of the scenarios in the supplement. I was really pleased with the movement trays that I bought from Litko for my Pirate project. They worked out very nicely. So I wanted to duplicate the effort for my AWI troops.

Militia will need two types of bases. The more experienced Veteran militia will be in units of 8 men while long service and poorly equipped militia will be in units of 10 men each. All of my AWI troops are based on US pennies. So a sabot base with 20mm holes is needed. Then there are skirmish troops of 6 men each. While these don't necessarily need a sabot base, I thought that they would look nice based that way.

A trip to Litko's website gave me sticker shock. 7 2x5, 7 2x4 and 5 s slot bases worked out to over $100. That is more than I paid for the miniatures (if I remember right). Once I recovered, I set about to try to find an alternative that didn't involve me making them by hand. Warbases showed up in my search. I thought that this would be hopeless as the shipping costs would be terrible. I was wrong. The bases were each less than a pound each. I even threw in two of their casualty markers and the total with shipping was less than $37. A few clicks later and now I just need to wait on the postman.

Since Rich is getting close to releasing Swamp Fox, I have started to take a look at my older AWI supplements. Starting with This Land Divided, I am retooling the scenarios to work with the Sharp Practice II rules. I am actually really excited about this project. The aim is to keep the original supplement in tact as the scenarios worked well for the first version of the rules. Then include a second presentment of the rules, redone for SP2. That means the scenario will be close to 130 pages in length but the player can print out the parts they want rather than the whole book. When done, I also plan on releasing them on Amazon as a paperback. No kindle version for this as I doubt the usefulness of a kindle version of a wargames supplement. It seems PDF and hardcopy are more useful.

I set up my table and started to get ready to take some pictures for This Land Divided. I realized I do not nearly have enough trees. I have individual trees and some groups of trees. But not nearly enough. What I do have is a bunch of Chinese trees that I bought from AliExpress. And some model railroad birch trees. So I started working on making tree bases. I have two bases pained and flocked. I started to drill holes and fix the trees to the bases. I have too much more work to do before I take pictures. Hopefully, I will have something by the weekend.