A Return to the Table

Well the Christmas holidays are nearly over and things are beginning to get back to normal.  Since I made the decision to get back into the hobby three months ago, things have moved quite quickly.  Period and rules have been decided, figures purchased, terrain and table sourced. The painting balance sheet is not looking too good at the end of the year with 333 figures purchased and just 36 fully painted and based.  Hopefully, January will see a big turnaround in those numbers though. So, the plan for January is to get another order in for figures, order some basic terrain and get a table sorted out.  I am still trying to decide what is best for the table, I can either buy a folding wargaming table or, alternatively, I can buy a couple of sheets of MDF and try to hinge them together.  Two things are affecting my decision making are cost, it is £144 for the pre-made table and just £30 for me to make my own, which could mean an extra £114 in the fi...

The first regiment of foot is now completed.  I decided to update my painting by moving away from the enamels of my past and to give acrylics a try, so off I went and picked up about fifteen Vallejo acrylic paints. Painting the figures was fairly straightforward, it is great that the figures come in strips of four, which fit neatly on to a UK 2p piece to use as a holder.  I started off by undercoating the figures using a black spray can, though once this can is empty I might give a white undercoat a try.  I would have liked to have done the Kings Lifeguard as my first regiment, but I don't have the correct standard for them yet, so, it is going to be Sir Thomas Salusbury's Regiment of Foot.  They had red coats and the standard was either red, blue or white, so I will go with a blue one. Now my painting has never been the best and given the scale I will certainly not be making highly detailed figures so no detailed faces or lacework and no shading.  They...

As I live in Newcastle upon Tyne but come from Worcester, I think my first batch of figures will be Royalist. I decided to go with Baccus figures as they look great and they had great reviews.  The last time I ordered some 6mm figures it was from Heroics & Ros and they were not the best castings I had ever seen.  Still a lot can happen in thirty years and I am sure H & R figures are better now. I ordered a booster pack of infantry, which makes eight regiments of thirty six figures (24 musket, 8 pike and 4 command), I also ordered some cavalry which will give me enough figures to make five regiments of nine figures.  So, that is a total of 333 figures, hopefully by the time I have them all done I will know if I am capable of painting in this scale. So while I waited for the figures to arrive I spent several weeks researching coat colours of the regiments on both sides of the conflict.  I managed to track down details for quite a few foot regiments, ...

The first tricky decision is deciding on the scale I want to use, 28mm or 15mm are going to be out of my budget and also I will not have the storage space for them.  10mm is marginal for my current budget and also for storage, so I have opted for one of the smaller scales 6mm.  With 6mm you get a high number of figures for the money which translates into plenty of units and a visually pleasing battlefield. The next decision is to decide on what armies to get.  My first love has always been the Napoleonic era, but I could spend the next six months deciding on what armies to get, maybe while I am getting used to painting figures again I will work on a Napoleonic project and make a decision about it.  The same logic also applies to Ancient armies, too many to choose from. So, I will go with the Renaissance period and specifically the English Civil War between 1642-1651, at least there were just the two sides to choose between (if you discount the Scots). In t...

This blog is going to show my attempt to get back into the hobby of wargaming after a thirty two year break. I started wargaming back in the late 1970's after a school friend introduced me to a book by Bruce Quarrie, Napoleons Campaigns in Miniature.  At the time all I had in terms of figures were 1/76 scale French Imperial Guard by Airfix, but I soon graduated on to metal 25mm figures by Miniature Figurines. For the next ten years or so I collected armies from various periods and in various scales.  After university though I no longer had the space available to set up large tabletop games, so I consoled myself with my rapidly expanding collection of boardgames and consigned what figures I had left to storage at the old family home. About ten years ago we had to sell that home and bring all my stuff up here to where I live now.  I was surprised to find that quite a few figures had survived the time spent in storage, including a 25mm English Renaissance Army, some 15mm ...