Shopping

Well, I had a little bit of fun money and started surfing the web. I was looking for more sabot bases for Dux Brit and Sharp Practice. One thing I have seen on a few blogs was a single figure sabot base to identify individual leaders. I like the idea. Several companies offer them. Supreme Littleness, Warbases and Greenstuff Industries in particular have them. The last one is a US based company. I decided to go with Warbases for 2 reasons: 1) they were the lowest cost and 2) their individual sabot base was less intrusive than the others.

What I ordered was a 30mm base with a 20mm slot in it. There is just enough room to place a number on it and base it to look like the figures. I bought 12 of them. The plan is to number them one through six in red and blue. This will work for Sharp Practice, Dux Britanniarum and Chain of Command as my leaders are all on the same size base (a US penny).

This will reduce the number of times I end up asking, who is that guy again? During the course of a game. I'll take pictures when they show up. I plan on getting some work done tomorrow on my ships and possibly some empty bases to put in my sabot bases when casualties are taken. We will see if that happens.

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.

Sabot Base Problem Solved? or Litko to the Rescue

My thinner styrene attempts at sabot bases is a failure. I have one that almost works and five more that don't work. Therefore, I am scrapping that. Now I need another solution. So I sent a mail to Litko and they responded with a link to buy them in about 20 minutes! I have now placed an order and we will see what they come up with.

Did some more painting last night. I now have some miniatures that are close to being done. I started finishing the bases on 36 militia. Then bases on some 8 Delancey Brigade troops and two NJ Volunteers. I might finish them off tonight. Once the sabots arrive, then the whole mess will be ready. I did more work on my log cabin tavern as well. That could be ready as early as this weekend.

What does this mean for me? I should be able to start playtesting scenarios from my Marion book by the end of the week. I just need a catchy name for it. Any suggestions?