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Yes, it was time to focus on getting my 40mm Homecast French Revolution forces ready. Despite the bitter cold and damp I sallied forth to the woodshed and fired up the smelter. In a short time I had a selection of heads and bodies for the project along with a head of unusable castings due to the poor conditions, and a handful of goblins and wargs. Wait, what? Yup. Well, I mean I had the mould but hadn't used it and...well what harm could it do to cast them. Not like I was going to paint  them and then get a 25mm Medieval/Fantasy game going? Right? https://gatheringofhosts.blogspot.com/2020/01/fighting-for-hearth-and-home.html Yeah OK, not really a surprise then. Up Next??   Why are you asking me?!?  

Yesterday I took advantage of the annual 'January Thaw '  to cast up  enough figures to bring my two Revolutionary French units up to twelve figures each as well as a start on my first Emigre unit. Naturally, doing a test of the Emigre conversion using a PA Prussian grenadier and one of my own 1812 heads took precedence over finishing a unit!

This may sound over optimistic but after the last half decade of poking, prodding, experimenting and exploring, I think I may have just finally agreed with me and myself about what we want from the Square Brigadier .  Well, until I get a brand new idea perhaps. The rules are available  here (click)  . The armies march on and deploy. The game was a meeting engagement over random terrain with victory conditions being determined after laying it out.  ( Capture a road exit on the enemy's baseline while stopping him from grabbing one on your baseline. ) Each side had 4 "Brigades" totalling 14 units. Some dicing resulted in Blue having 4 cavalry, 8 infantry and 2 guns while Red had 2 cavalry 10 infantry and 2 guns. Anyway all of the old ideas have been tried in various combinations as well as every alternative or new idea that has come to me over the last 6 years and most had some merits and some faults but when push came to shove, every attempt to make the rules more d...

Yesterday Jeff, ( http://armchaircommander.blogspot.com/ ) hosted a group of Nova Scotia wargamers for a 15mm  Nappy's Battle of Friedland game.  Hopefully he will be posting a Blog post including some of the great pics he posted on FB. ( Thanks for these pics Gary ) The Russian Right Wing commander trying to balance questionable command decisions with even more questionable die rolling. Luckily as many a Russian commander knows: "Quantity has a Quality of its own" and I errr..I mean..."he" eventually  crossed the streams and stormed the village on the hill with great loss despite the 5:1 odds.....(against my opponent ). I will admit to a tinge of nostalgia at the sight of a table, loaded with 15mm troops yet not crowded, BUT , given that I needed to don reading glasses and peer closely to tell one unit from another, I'm not tempted to rebuild my 'lost' 15mm armies. Actually, I don't need to, apart from the horde of 15mm figures Jeff has painted,...

Today I gave my brain a break and used my free time to get a few more units onto their bases and to do a bit more of touching up of the 4" grid. The Rebel brigade has two units deployed (representing a typical 1870's heavy skirmish line with supports with 2 units formed in column in support. I did run my brain over some rules ideas though, helped, as so often, by some of the thought stimulating comments on the last couple of posts. Thats one of the reasons I enjoy getting comments in addition to the confirmation that someone is indeed out their. I'm almost ready for another test game but Saturday Jeff is running another group 15mm Nappy's battle and my old Cossacks will be expecting me!

I was stoked for the first game but with each stand being a unit, there were too many units on the table for the mechanisms to flow well and keep up interest and excitement in the game so something had to change. #2: An old chestnut of a scenario and improvised basing but a brisk game.   After rejecting various options as too "gamey" and abstract or too tedious, I remembered that I had at one point contemplated a system where 2 stand units occupied two adjacent 3" grid squares giving an easy way to reflect formations and frontages without complex or confusing rules or  excessive empty space to confuse me mid-game or distort the look of the thing.  The result feels much more "old school" than the Square Brigadier ever did but with all the convenience of a simple gridded game. So far that is! Early days yet.

"Form follows Function" and "Function follows Form", two duelling design maxims and like most such bitter fights, both sides of the debate are right to some degree. This weekend I belatedly realized that this debate was at the heart of my seesaw problems without it having been consciously considered in that light.   Worse than that, solving the issues was going to require deciding on priorities, making careful, informed, choices and sticking with them. Oh NO! "Sawmill Village" is an encounter scenario with victory resting on control of the crossroads town. Blue won the race to the town but wasn't aggressive enough to  take the whole thing before Red grabbed a foothold. One of the advantages of writing a blog is that I have a decade of posts not only recounting games and showing pictures but snatches of design discussions of varying merit. Somethings come and go, some things get invented and reinvented and too often forgotten, and somethings just keep c...

Had a delightful time playing the game this morning, a game both enjoyable and useful. They came on in the old style. I also have a half written blog post, mostly about rules and games and choices and preferences and the like. Hopefully we'll see what I make of it but right now, I'm off to bed.

Is Lost. Yeah, ummh,  sorry folks, no Noodle, no battle report. However, after hours of revisiting  8 years of Square Brigadier posts and rules versions and some experimentation, things are rolling again. A slight variation on 'Sawmill Village'. Sunday is forecast to be another storm day, freezing rain this time, so, my board is reset with the 5" Grid cloth, and the revised rules are typed up.  All is ready. Stay tuned!    

You might remember end of last year's Game Off game jam sponsored by Github. The winners have been annouced a while ago, and while again quite a few submissions were using closed source game engines, the overall winner isn't. So make sure you don't miss Sealed Bite , a fun little/short jump and run: Obvious inspiration comes from the very popular Celeste game . You can find the source code here , and not all that surprising it utilizes everyone's favorite Godot Engine :) Sadly the graphic assets are quite a bit less free (CC-by-NC-ND). Let us know if you enjoyed this gem of a game on our forums!

Today was a snow day so I was sure I'd manage to write up a battle report of Tuesday's game and a good copy of the revised original Square Brigadier rules......... Opening phases of Tuesday's game: On the first turn, the DG Bodyguard took advantage of a chance card giving a double move to gallop through town and seize a bridgehead over the river thus  giving the new dismounted troopers a chance to show their stuff. They held out for turn after turn against artillery and three times their numbers but help never came.  I didn't write a game report though. Instead, I replayed the game using the updated rules as adopted after the first, rather enjoyable game which was played with various mid-game rule adjustments ( eg:  drop a die vs cover or -1 from each die or just say 1/2 casualties, range 2 for rifles or 3, that sort of thing ). Once that was successfully done, I then spent an unconscionable amount of time trying to use my mental powers to clear the driveway while sippi...

Its January and in Atlantica the armies take the field for another season of hard campaigning. The Rebel column approaches Westbridge Farm as a pursuing column of Dominion troops appears on the far side of the river, marching hard. To be continued......

More by coincidence than any sort of clever planning, I have reached the new year at a moment of hobby tranquility if not stasis so it  seemed like as good a time as any to pause for reflection and make plans  form some vague intentions for the winter campaigning season.  ( Yay Snow! ) ( in moderation...) The next time the Governor General's Bodyguard needs to dismount, I'll have proper figures.  Last year I managed to get each and every one of my active collections on the table for a game. It felt good but also made it hard to focus on anything, which may be one reason that I didn't do a lot of painting last year. That's a good thing since the shelves are full but I have no intention of giving that side of the hobby up yet. I have mentioned recently that I don't enjoy painting as much as I used to but I was thinking mostly of the business of churning out unit after unit of 12 or 20 figures with lots of detail. A few 40's with simple shading or a few  gl...