The third of the Louisiana Tigers miniatures is somewhat different from the run-of-the-mill.
The Land of Counterpane
Thursday, May 15, 2025
Tigers 3 and 4
Thursday, May 8, 2025
Tiger 2
The second of my Louisiana Tiger zouaves is done!
This is similar to the first in painting style. I have actually done the jacket using a three-colour approach. The base colour is Vallejo Dark Blue with Intense Blue shadows and the highlights done by adding a little white to the Dark Blue. The result is quite subtle when seen in real life and even more so in photographs.
The trouser stripes are in Intense Blue and I'm quite pleased with the effect. I've used a brown wash on the gaiters and haversack.
Figure 3 was going to be an attempt at using the stain-painting technique (a predecessor to commercially available "speed paints") but the lack of large areas on single colour on these figures means it's not really achieving much. Look out for a significant departure from the approach so far in the next figure!
Wednesday, May 7, 2025
Sharp Practice Scenario Generator
Regular readers of this blog (I know there are a few of you) will know that I've been working towards a mini-campaign set during the 1812 French invasion of Russia. Rather than going with the well-known march to and retreat from Moscow, the plan is to cover Marshal Macdonald's advance towards Riga with a corps made up almost entirely of German and Polish troops.
Inspired by the approach used in Osprey's Rogue Stars sci-fi skirmish rules, I decided to have a go at a random scenario generator for the campaign. The following system doesn't try to establish every single detail of a scenario. Instead treat it as a source of ideas; you'll still need to nail down some of the details by agreement (if you don't have an umpire).
To generate a Sharp Practice scenario, start out by rolling a D20 to get an idea of the general terrain on the table:
If a village shares the table with terrain that precludes farming, eg forest or boggy ground, the village is (or was) inhabited by Jewish traders and artisans. They are used to being attacked so their caches of food are well hidden. Add 5 to the foraging Task Values.Monday, April 28, 2025
A towering performance
Shortly before watching Liverpool demolish Spurs to become Champions of England for the twentieth time, I finished my own towering accomplishment.
It's made using Firedragon's textured high density foam sheet with details added from card and gateposts from square-section bamboo skewer. The base and curtain wall are from different grades of PVC board, the latter engraved with a ballpoint pen and a craft knife.
Tiger Tiger!
Richard Phillips kindly sent me some Perry's ACW sprues among which were some zouaves. In fact three whole Sharp Practice Groups' worth of zouaves (24 figures with a few left over for NCOs and an officer) . I plan to paint them up as Louisiana Tigers. They can be used for my The Battle of Patriot Run game and to play Mark Backhouse's Three Days With The Tigers mini-campaign from WSS issues 91 and 92.
It occurs to me that with 26 figures to paint and about 26 weeks to go until Steel Lard, I could do one a week and see how my painting changes. I won't say "improves" because I suspect I'll grow to hate painting striped Zouave trousers and start to simplify the process!
Here's the first one I've done.
It's more or less block painted. The only three-colour work is on the face using my usual mix of Saddle Brown, Medium Flesh, and Dark Flesh (all from Vallejo). I think I also highlighted the folds on the jackets but it's pretty subtle.
There seems to be a huge amount of dispute about the Tigers' uniforms. Blue or brown jackets? Or maybe blue jackets that faded to brown because of poor quality dye? Full Zouave-style lacing or just red trim around the edges of the jackets? Fezzes with or without turbans? With red or blue tassels? And was the whole unit in the Zouave uniform or just one company?
It might be interesting to try some alternative painting techniques. Stay tuned for future episodes.
Tuesday, April 22, 2025
More ACW developments
With Crisis Point out of the way and with Andy T seemingly well on top of the planning for our Joy of Six game, I find myself increasingly focussed back onto Sharp Practice in general and the American Civil War in particular.
My plan this year is to put on a game at Steel Lard that doesn't require ridiculous amounts of specially built terrain. I don't want to get hyper-focussed on one project to the exclusion of actually enjoying my gaming and I really can't afford the storage space for a large amount of new terrain.
The plan, then, is to create a game that uses my existing ACW collection and little or no scenario-specific terrain pieces. That game is provisionally titled Running From Bull Run. It's inspired by this painting:
I want to create a game where most of the players represent Union officers struggling to put together some sort of ordered rear-guard in the chaotic aftermath of defeat in the first pitched battle of the war.
It seems like a good idea to take advantage of the space available at Patriot Games and the fact that I now have two very nice Geek Villain mats to create a long table (12'x4') depicting the Warrenton Turnpike, down which the Union troops are fleeing. I already have enough road sections and a river and bridge that can represent Cub Run and disguise the join between the two mats.
Game rules are in development - I'll certainly need to find a different way of handling morale as any reasonable assessment says the Union Force Morale has already reached zero!
-o0o-
The other consideration for Steel Lard is that I don't want to find myself in the position (again) of having to put on an emergency game because a game-runner's had to drop out at the last minute. Inevitably the players in any such game get a little short-changed.
My plan, then, is that Running From Bull Run can be replaced, using more-or-less exactly the same forces and terrain, by The Battle of Patriot Run. This would be a fictional, up-to-four-a-side battle still using Sharp Practice but designed for minimal umpiring complexity. The presence of a river (the Patriot Run of the title) dividing the battlefield into two halves would allow the game to run as two parallel, smaller games to keep the action moving.
Having said that I don't want to get involved in building loads of new stuff, I do have some unpainted figures and want a variety of troop types either retreating down the turnpike or in line of battle astride Patriot Run.
After a little research I decided to paint some Perry plastics as the 13th New York Infantry, a unit that at Bull Run was in grey uniforms with pale blue trim and dark blue kepis.
Thursday, April 17, 2025
Crisis Point 2025 - Sunday report
On Sunday morning we gathered once more at the Village Hall to start some new games.
Andy and Neil went with Maurice again (I should perhaps point out that the rules are named after Maurice de Saxe, the German general of the War of the Austrian Succession and not the BeeGee of the same name), this time with a larger game depicting a second attempt by the Honourable Black Sea Company to establish a presence in Andreivia.
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The British are coming! |
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I do like the burned-out car |
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An Andreivian T-55 |