28mm Napoleonic French Vivandiere and Orderlies

Its been a few weeks since my last post, but summer is upon us and we're taking full advantage of the great weather. Nonetheless, I've managed to finish another rear area stand to add a bit of colour to my Napoleonic French army. This one's a bit more whimsical, depicting a Vivandiere bringing a tumbler of wine and some bread to a gallant orderly and his companion (In my mind's eye I think she's a bit sweet on him). 

I've always really admired the sculpts and animation of each of these figures and so I've been saving them until I thought of a suitable composition. 

The French orderlies are from the Perry Waterloo range while the Vivandiere and her trusty donkey is from Warlord Games.

Like my other 'rear area' stands these will either tuck-in behind the artillery caissons to add a bit of depth to the formation, or be loitering in nearby villages.

28mm Napoleonic French REMF Base

My apologies for not posting much lately, I've been working like a Trojan on getting our back yard re-landscaped. Nonetheless, I've not been completely idle hobby-wise and have managed to finish this small vignette depicting a group of French infantry who are taking a break from assisting an artillery battery and chatting with a visiting orderly.

These are assorted Perry castings from their Waterloo range. This is the first time I've tried doing a leopard skin effect on a shabraque which was kinda fun. Ultimately my plan is to have one of these bases behind each of my gun models with ammunition caissons following on behind them. 

With a little luck I hope to have another one of these vignettes completed in the next week or so...

28mm Napoleonic British Command

Just a short post on a new British command stand I completed recently.

Figures are from the Perry range. In order to make the stand less Waterloo-specific, I cut away the 'Belgic' shako from the right figure and replaced it with a bicorne from a Victrix sprue. I still have some work to do on the white horse as I'm not too wild on its midtones. 

I'm working on a few Napoleonic vignettes right now so I should have something on them in a week or so.

The 1st of July is quickly approaching so Happy Canada Day to those of the 'Eh' persuasion!

Prototypes of 28mm Napoleonic Unit / Casualty Markers

Like a lot of gamers, I like to keep the tabletop clean of dice, measuring tapes, rule sheets, pets, soft drinks, etc., but I know that concessions have to be made for marking unit status and displaying other game mechanics. Nonetheless, I really don't like casualty caps, especially anything plastic, as they seem to break the aesthetic of the painted miniatures and scenery. I've always liked the look of casualty figures, but in several rule sets a unit can take numerous 'hits' so it can seem that there is a cloud of casualties following along, and if they get too close to one another confusion can occur in determining to whose casualties belong to what unit.

So I'm playing around with how to compress as much unit information into as small a space as possible. Here are a few unit status markers that I've mocked up that combines a small vignette, a 'fin' for mounting a unit ID card, plus a few slots to fit small (7-8mm) six-sided dice to track hits. 

Here is a shot of the base showing the ID fin and the slots for the D6.

These were built on 50mm steel bases with bits of plasticard to build-up the slots and fins.

These two castings are from Offensive Miniatures. I quite like the wounded drummer boy.

The slots work reasonably well to keep the dice all in one spot and prevents accidental mix-ups when units are compressed together in a scrum. For a game such as 'Black Powder' the dice can be of different colours to track Disorders, 'standard' hits and Shaken status. We've also come up with a simple protocol to move the stand from the back of the unit to the front to keep track of which stuff has been activated - pretty straight forward stuff really.

Foundry Rifle officer with Perry plastic British casualty.

I've noticed that Litko has a new casualty base featured in Jim's Lab that has a numeric dial which looks quite promising. If I could get them to prototype one that incorporates a couple dials in it then it naturally would be able to track two different sets of information and I could get rid of the dice - something to ponder...

Victrix plastic British officer along with a Offensive Miniatures drummer casualty.

Victrix plastic French officer with a Perry infantry casualty.

Battle Report: 'Ney on Ice' - Part II (using 'Food for Powder': a Black Powder variant)

As described in my last post, this scenario set an 'allied army' of Russians and British against a French division commanded by Marshal Ney. 

The game started with the British deployed in one corner of the table to which they had to move across the long length and exit the other side. They were composed of four highly trained infantry battalions, a battery of Royal Horse Artillery, two sections of rocket artillery and two squadrons of Light Dragoons.

The Russians...