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

Somethings stirs in the basement

Well I have at last started to paint some on the Hartford. I have done test paintings on the deck and trying to learn how to approach this kind of model. I have never painted ships before and not a ship with this many little details. I do not know what colours to use and I really don´t know what colours things should be. So you can understand that I have some trouble to get this going. But I have started to read about civil war naval warfare and am starting to learn. 

I also keep painting on the 25mm Dixon miniatures. They are a joy to paint still and if I should be honest to you I paint a little to much on them... At the moment there is a cavalry miniature on the table. I have painted him as a confederate soldier with butternut jacket and brown pants. I am done with the trooper and have started on the horse.

I plan to use the Dixon miniatures in some sort of skirmish game. I have not decided on the rules jet. I will play a game of Bonnie Blue just for old times sake but after that I don´t know. O well you can have worse dilemmas than have rules to chose. At the moment I have three rule sets I want to try and hope I will be able to do that during the summer break.

I also found these two photos taken by a friend. He said I could use them here if I wanted. They are from GothCon this year and shows one of the game sessions that i ran.

Thats all for now so until next time...

...Roll sixes!

/Conny

Were did the ship go?

Good evening to you all

At the moment I am done with three more Dixon miniatures that I am re-painting. They are a joy to paint these miniatures with so much character and charm to them. I have also started to prepare some more so that I have more on the table for the times when I need a break from the other project. How does it go with the ships you might ask? Well not that well. I have never painted ships in this scale before and are unsure of how to proceed with it all. Should I prime them black, brown, red? I am a bit lost here. I have also searched the internet for what colors the USS Hartford had in 1860:s and found a lot of pictures with the ship in different colors so I also need to decide here also. I will return here as fast as I can with pictures of a ship! Next week will be ships week.

Anyway here are some pictures of my new set of Dixon miniatures. Soon I need to decide what to do with them, or do I?

Here you have a picture of the old painting. The idea here is to show you a before and after photo of them. So stay tuned...

The one to the left will be a confederate and the one to the right will be... you guessed it! a union officer.

So until next time keep...

Rolling sixes!

/Conny

Sail on the horizon

At the beginning of last week I got a small box in my mail box. I had ordered some boats from Peter Pig and hoped that it was this order that had arrived, and it was :).

In the box there was four ships, USS Hartford, USS Cairo, CSS Drewry and CSS Selma. 

I have also begun to read the rules, River Wars in earnest to get a grip of what I needed. If I had been an organised person I would have read the rules first and chosen ships that there was stats for in the rules. But no... I had to buy ships that there was no data cards for in the rules. O well, I will figure it out some day. USS Cairo at least was in the rules. At the moment I have contacted a Scott Mingus that has a blog were he writes a lot about the rules and I hope he may have some advice for me, http://scottmingus.wordpress.com/category/civil-war-wargaming/acw-naval-gaming/ .

I have started to assemble the USS Hartford since it was such a nice model. No bigger problems to put together but I have 6 guns, 2 large and 4 small that I don´t really know were to put on the model.

I have also, like so many of us in this trade, started a bit to many project at once. But I am slowly working my way trough them. On my painting desk there are at the moment three confederate Dixon miniatures and four bases that are supposed to be HQ bases for Alter of Freedom so I can play test it with style.

That was all for now but I will return, soon I hope, with more pictures of soldiers and ships that are done. But until then keep on...

...rolling sixes!

/Conny

More Dixon done

Now the exhaustion from GothCon have gone away and I am again taking a grip on my painting schedule. O well I am trying anyway... I have now completed three more Dixon 25mm ACW. I also have three more on the painting table ready to get some paint on them. The three that are done are some union troops. When I have some more confederates I can start to test a small idea that I have, but more of that at a later time.
Here you have some pictures of the miniatures:

I have also ordered some boats from Peter Pig for my river combat project and am anticipating their arrival in a couple of weeks.

On the reading front I have now read all the books about Starbuck by Connolly that I had. I shall buy the last book in the beginning of summer to have a good read at the start of vacation. But at the moment I am reading Shenandoah 1862 by Peter Cozzens. I am only at the first chapter but it seems it will be a good read this to. 

I am also preparing some HQ bases for "Alter of Freedom". When they are done me and a friend will test the Corinth scenario with the rules. I have rather high hopes for these rules and hopefully they will deliver what I want. Until next time...

...Roll Sixes/

Conny