Terrain Time

I have had a few moments to get some hobby time in and have started to work on terrain. I managed to make some trees. Most of these are chinese trees that I purchased from AliExpress. They were cheap and look pretty good. The pictures are rubbish. They make the trees look far shinier than they are in reality.

And one more shot that is of the ones above.

And two more sections.

I have several more bases of them that are in various stages of being. I hope that I can finish more this week. Once these are done, I have swamps to make. These will be fun.

Swamp Fox is Released!

Swamp Fox is now availible for purchase on the TooFatLardies Website. It is availible for just £7.00.

The supplement includes 12 historical scenarios that follow Francis Marion's campaigns from August of 1780 up to January of 1781. Also is a series of campaigns that are all linked. There are four for the British and four for the Rebels. They are played simultaneously.

I would love to hear from you on what you think when you have a chance to read it through.

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.

Swamp Fox Supplement for Sharp Practice version 2

Rich has taken my supplement and is busy turning it into a work of art. The original working name was "Murder and Devastation in Every Quarter." That comes from a quote from General Greene as he described the situation in South Carolina when he arrived in Hillsboro, NC to take over command of the Southern Theater. We are changing the name to Swamp Fox as it is focused on Francis Marion's battles and skirmishes.

Rich has shared the edited text with me and it is looking great. In addition, he has been running some playtest games that he has posted on Twitter.

Mark Luther also ran a playtest of the first scenario in the supplement over the past weekend at Gigabytes Cafe in Marietta. As always, his games are beautiful. He has posted some pictures of it here. Stop by and take a look at the game. He really did a good job capturing the look that I was going for with the scenarios.

Things are proceeding quickly and I think the supplement will see the light of day in a few weeks time.

Second Kharkov Campain

Wanted to post an update here. I managed to break my 3d printer. I think I have replacement parts already but I am very sad about it.

I managed to get some writing done and have the first of several pint sized campaigns laid out. It begins with the initial assault of the german positions at Federovka. The small town was laid out on a dirt road that ran north to south. It provided a natural spot for the Germans to set up a hedgehog defense line. It was in the direct line from Stari Staltov to Kharkov.

From the 1:50,000 scale map that I have, i have outlined the two areas I am looking to use for the town battle. The first is the initial outposts that are positioned along a balka or deep ditch that runs outside of the town on the hill the town resides on.

I annotated the map based on a document I found on-line that explains russian map symbols. It is very comprehensive and makes for a very useful key. I am going to provide a map like this in the booklet so people can move the map around to match the terrain that they have if they wish instead of the spots that I picked.

The Germans had a bad position as their line of retreat was through a grassy swamp that was directly to their rear. Initially the infantry held up against the infantry assault. But when airsupport and tanks arrived, the Germans at Federovka broke and fled to the rear. These troop pulled back to hill 119 that is just to the left of the map above.