Alter of Freedom

Now I have moved back in to the Bunker. I have started to paint some more miniatures again and that was real nice. I have missed it a lot. I have also started to read thrue the rules Alter of Freedom again and also set up the Corinth scenario for named rule set. Me and a friend will try to have a go this week at the scenario and rules. I will then make a AAR of the event. So here are some pictures of the bunker and the set up.

My painting space. Here I try to spend at least 30 min a day.

The shelves with my games. I have sortef out some of the games I own for the sake of space. 

The rest of the room. At the moment I am looking for a new table. 

The Corinth scenario...

The union force and...

... The rebels!

 Now I only need to learn the rules and have a go at it, wish me luck ;)

Until next time keep rolling...

Sixes!

/Conny

Time to move back

Hi again

Now I am done with painting and renovating the Bunker and are begining to move all things back to the room. Hopefully I am up and running with all the projects to the weekend. I will start by finishing up the household troops for my Westeros army of my house Oaken. I will present the house and troops for you when they are done. 

As soon as I have got hold of a new table for the Bunker I will also do an AAR for Alter of Freedom with the Corinth scenario.

Soon it is christmas time and as always you never get more done with the hobby stuff as you think you would. But to all of you out there...

Keep rolling sixes!

/Conny

Still here

Well hi there

Things are sadly going slow here in the bunker. I am now painting at a larger scale since the bunker needed some new paint as well. 

And since work and family takes its time it goes slow with painting miniatures. But there are some light in the darkness! I am done with the miniatures for the Corinth scenario for Alter of Freedom and hopefully I will be able to play it soon and do an AAR of the game. I have also managed to do some work on the bases on my HHR miniatures.

I will make a slight change to the blog also. My intention was to make this blog only about my ACW projects but... I am a wargamer and when I get a new magazines or find a new rule set or whatever inspires me I change focus, its sad I know but there you have it, just like a child in a toy store… So I will start to write about the project at hand is the idea here.

I will show you all what I have been doing soon. It has with Westeros to do and is in 6mm.

Now that DBA 3.0 are coming I will probably fall for that one to… :) I have some armies all ready but I am very tempted to make new armies in 6mm. I have also started some Austrian Generals and officers for the Napoleonic wars in 10mm. They are from Old glory grand scale. I like these miniatures a lot. They are easy to paint and look good on the table.

So there you have it. I will try to blog more frequently again but to be honest I need to get done with the Bunker so things start to spinn again in the hobby world of Conny.

Until next time keep rolling…

sixes!

/Conny

It´s been a while

Ooo well work take it´s toll on me and my hobbies. I have done some painting and prepared more Dixon miniatures. The focus has been to finish of the miniatures I need to play test the Corinth Scenario with the "Alter of Freedom" rules. I am getting close but I have a lot of real live stuff to take care of also. I know, many of us have that problem. I am not complaining I am just sharing with you all why it takes some time to get things done. I have also for the last two months explored other parts of the gaming hobby, this in the form of card games like "A Game of Thrones LCG" and "Star Wars LCG" and soon the new LCG 40K Conquest. I don´t have that much time to put into my hobbys since the kids needs help with homework, food must be put on the table etc etc, well you have to live to, don´t you :).

Also a friend of mine have lured me into a new smaller project that we have been planing and now executing for some time. It is a miniatures game set in the world of Westeros and "Game of Thrones" in 6mm. Since this blog are about my ventures in the ACW you haven´t seen any of this here. Maybe in the future I will expand the content of the blog to also be about all of my crazy ongoing project that very rarely gets done... I am like a small child in the candy store and can´t really choose what I want so I go for everything. But ACW has been a long runner for me and I will soon return there in full.

Here are some pictures anyway of what I have done sone far.

The gun crew are going to be painted as union.

I will paint this one as a confederate cavalry trooper.

Here you have the HQ for "Alter of Freedom" and one more brigade for the union to complete the forces for the Corinth Scenario. Not that much left to do. But still got to do it...

Until next time keep rolling them...

Sixes!

/Conny

Work as usual

Well my vacation is over and it is back to the mine. This does that a bit less are done in the basement but it is not standing still anyway. I have now almost cleared the whole room out and are going to buy paint for the celling at the end of the month. Doing this hobby and living in boxes is not a good combination…

But I still get some paint on the miniatures, but at the moment theres is almost only terrain for my 28mm on the agenda. I have done some more worm fencing, but damaged to give some variation to it. I have also started to make some rail fences. Only three at the moment but at least three more are to be done. They were a bit more complicated than the worm fence but not much.

I have also started to plan how to build the first house to this project. I was on a start up conference with work and found that they had small wooden sticks that you have in you're coffee to stir. The looked to be perfect to use for walls on model houses. I started to take a few every time I passed and I also got my colleagues to take some for me. Now I have a lot of those to build from :) I need to find were I can buy thees things since I think they will work very well to build from. In the past I have build houses from cardboard and it is a pain in the **** to cut out strips of cardboard to get to the walls. But I am still to test this so I will return on the matter.

My goal is to get a house in the style of the Henry House from Bull Run. It won´t be exactly as this house but I use it as reference for my own building.

Here you can see some drawings from the early planing stage. I have also made a test wall from the sticks just to see how it could be.

O well, time to sleep… keep…

…Rolling sixes!

/Conny

Keep the cows in the corral

Well now I have seven soldiers a side for my little skirmish project. Plus one rider for the south and a special character. On the painting table I have started one more rider for the South and a cannon with crew for the union. The cannon mostly fot the fun off it. But I will be able to use it in a game to if I want. So now that the troops are getting ready I need something to fight over and so the project goes in to another stage, the terrain. I started out with some simple wooden worm fence. My thought here is to make all the terrain myself and only buy the trees if I don´t find a good, simple way to do them to. I will make fences, stone walls and hedges. Then I will also make two to three buildings of varying size. Roads and small streams always piff upp the table a bit. Some hills or more elevations also needs to be done so the table wont be all flat. So you can imagine I have a lot to do but I won´t stress this and work on it to much since there are more things to do in life…

A standard worm fence.

I have now made six of them and it took about one hour to do them. Now I only need to base and paint them... I plan on make four more. I think ten will be enough to work with for now. I will make some picked fences and some rail fences to.

Here you have a enclosured field and some fences lining a road. They take up a fair bit of space on a table. But it is better to have to much terrain then to little.

Two more soldiers are done, one for each side. The confederate soldier are supposed to have a uniform in butternut. I think it works rather well but will try to not get that hard change in color from the base to the highlight.

The union soldier are a sharpshooter so I gave him the green uniform to make him stand out a bit from the ordinary union soldiers. He has a sharps rifle that are classified as a good rifle in the rules and don´t misfire as easy as a springfield or an older rifle.

I have also made some more cards for my the skirmish games. More soldiers are added and some reference cards for the players.

Soon the HQ:s for the confederates will be done for Alter of Freedom so soon I will be able to test the rules out. But HEY you scream only write HQ on a pice of paper and have a go at it! True, true I could do that but I don´t want to ;). I want to do it right whit all the components there so I get a nice experience when I test them. But I will make some rule amendment to the rules. The first one is to change the scale from inches to cm. This because my bases to Volley & Bayonet RtG are on bases that are 3x3cm. The base for a brigade in Alter of Freedom are 6x3cm so since my bases are nearly half the size I think I can do this without damage the rule system to much.

I hope that the rules will appeal to me. I like Volley & Bayonet a lot but the rules are poorly backed up by the author or anyone else for that matter so if you want to play ACW with the rules you need to do a lot of research by you're selfs since the rulebook don´t have any scenarios for ACW just for Napoleonic. There is a scenario book for ACW for the first edition of Volley & Bayonet. Old Glory in the US have the book for 18$ wich seems like a fair price to me. So I went there and put the book in the cart and pressed checkout. Then There were 3$ extra for handling. Ok 21$ I´m fine with that, no problem. Continued true the system and wrote the destination for the book, Sweden. And then I saw it… shipping 59.95$. So for a book that cost 18$ I would be made to pay 80.95$ for, nope I did not finish the buy… And I can´t find the book anywhere else either so I leave it at that.

A rather expensive book…

I leave it at this for now and I hope you all will...

Roll sixes!

/Conny

The Heroes emerge

Well hello again

Now the heroes for my skirmish bands are done. My 25mm Dixon re-painting has taking over a bit on the painting table. This happens to me a lot, a project starts off as a side show to do when I need some distraction from the ordinary painting and then I find my self doing more on that project than the one I was supposed to do. Anyway at the moment I have prepared to do some more 10mm so I finally can do a play test of "Alter of Freedom". At least the labels for the Second battle of Corinth are done.

Here are some pictures of the heroes...

I also needed some characters that I could use in some scenarios. I had three miniatures at home from Wargames Foundry. They were meant to be for London 1890-ish but I thought that I could use them anyway so I went for it. The miniatures are a bit larger than the Dixon ones but since I base them individually I think it will work ok. One is done and the other two are to be base coated.

I call him "The Imp". A fun miniature to paint with a lot of character to him. I went for neutral colors so I could use him for both sides. The same will go for the other two.

Then I wanted to do some cards for the rules "Bonnie Blue". When the rules came out 1992 you had a A5 sheet were you recorded what you needed to during the game, like ammo, action points and wounds. I wanted to have cards for each character so I made some. I still need some more cards but most of them are done.

I like to have the different things in my games to have the same theme. So I made to dice boxes that I could use to roll dice in. One for the union and one for the confederates. I also got some new dice for them. The colors is not right. I wanted a color more of olive green but it will do for now.

Here are also some labels I have done to the scenario second battle of Corinth for "Alter of Freedom"

Thats all for now. Until next time...

... Roll sixes!

/Conny

No time for the summer time blues

O well, same thing every year. Vacation and I always think that, now, NOW! I will get a lot done with my miniatures project. And every year are realize that it is not going to happen. The family goes on day trips and I own a house and there is always things to be done. But now and then I get to go down to the bunker and put some paint on the miniatures. At the I am working on some things that are not ACW. When I do paint some ACW it has been 25mm miniatures. I am doing some character miniatures that I can use in some skirmish gaming. Sadly I don´t have any terrain for 25mm yet and will have to do some to get to game with them. I have a scenario in mind and will do it as fast as I can. I will play the same scenario with three different rule sets and then present the results here.
I have completed the re-painting of one confederate cavalry miniature. It was fun to paint but the horse have strange proportions. But they are Dixon both of them so here they are.

The naval project slowly make progress but it was more difficult than I thought it would be. The first misstake that I did was to put the masts in place before painting. Now they are in the way all the time.

I have started to do the HQ bases for Alter of Freedom rules and hopefully I will be able to test them out in a couple of weeks.

Here are some pictures of my 25mm that are done for now.

At the painting table now with my 25mm in mind are some characters in the form of officers. One for each side. I also have some civilians that I will paint. They are from The Foundry but will do as special characters before I get hold on some civilians from Dixon. The one to the left will be a confederate officer and the union will get the one to the right. They were both painted about 20 years ago.

Until next time...

Roll Sixes/

Conny