Kolyusha's Blog: 2018

Mittwoch, 19. September 2018

Slow Mo Piquet Game 2: preparations

Here are some setup notes for a second attempt at Piquet SYW with the Grünewald flats.

1. House rules unchanged from the first game version (plus learnings) here

2. Playing field with very special Ankerstein town wall (see this post)

Battle field with Ankerstein town wall. Wunsch Frei troops visible in the small woods bottom right. Empire will enter from the right.

3. Scenario: Empire vanguard is pursuing retreating Prussians and trying to forge ahead, bypassing the town as fast as possible. They are not aware that a Prussian rearguard was in the town for one night and will run into them as they march by the town.
Prussians need to slow down or stop the Empire troops, Empire need to exit as many units as possible on the short table end by the town.

4. OOB

Prussian garrison

Pickets in the woods outside of town:

10 - 8 - 6 II/Wunsch Frei Infantry
2 bases of Wunsch Jägers (I'll have to come up with a simple house rule that turns these guys into s simple speed bump without full unit capabilities)

guard unit on duty (start game in the town gate, start moving when enemy is within 20" or first shots are fired):

10 - 8 - 6 I/Salmuth

rest of the garrison (start inside town, roll a d6= 5 or 6 to wake up and show up at the gate as soon as the Salmuth guard start moving)

12 - 8 - 8 Willemey Grenadiere - elite
12 - 8 - 8 Burgsdorf Grenadiere - elite
10 - 8 - 6 II/Hoffmann
× - 6 - 6 Malachovsky Hussars
× - 8 - 6 Plettenberg Dragoons
average rear guard staff (rolled D20 = 10, +3 from army list)

Empire vanguard

advance guard

10 - 8 - 6 combined Grenadiers (mostly Kurmainz) - new unit, elite
× - 8 - 6 Ansbach Dragoons - new unit

main body of vanguard

10 - 8 - 6 II/Kurpfalz Garde zu Fuß (1st rate inf stats, but treat as elite for reload)
10 - 6 - 6 IR Kurmainz (4 bataillons) (2nd rate inf)
10 - 6 - 6 I/Hohenlohe (2nd rate inf)
× - 10 - 6 Hohenzollern Cuirassiers
average staff (no large base yet) (rolled D20 = 18, -3 from army list)

5. Army Characterization Cards

Prussia: 7 units +2 elites divided by 3 just about makes the minimum of 3 cards

They draw (from the 34 card deck) 6, Movement Effect Infantry, Movement Effect Artillery. They remove the useless latter card for Movement Effect Cavalry, discard that for a 10 for a total of

16 morale chips
one extra Inf Move in Open card
4 opportunity pips (independent of cards drawn)

Reichsarmee: 9 units + 1 elite, divided by 4 is below the minimum of 3 cards.

They draw 10, Infantry Combat Effect, Cavalry Movement Effect for

10 morale chips
one extra Musket Reload Card
one extra Cavalry Move card
2 opportunity pips

I won't bother replacing the Artillery cards with Dress Lines, it doesn't matter whether I skip or replace them.

Freitag, 14. September 2018

Anker: GK NF 14 city wall by Falk Gundel

I'll try to combine two modelling hobbies of mine by using an Ankerstein building as a backdrop for a miniatures tabletop game.

When I made plans for projects with GK-NF 16, and a kind of "last hurrah" round of GK-NF 14 projects, I saw the Falk Gundel "city fortification" model from this CVA archive entry I immediately thought this might be a great backdrop for a tabletop miniatures game.

It was great fun to build, and looks fantastic.

As always, you can click on the pictures to enlarge them.

Vire from inside town. On the right you can see I used some stones from 16A to show a bit of city wall.

This was the most fun part to build - nice timber framing over the large city gate, and a small stairs leading up from the building on the right to the walkway over the small gate.

The whole ensemble with a renaissance facade building on the right, a small tower and the city gates in the middle and a large tower in the background.

View from the outside

The covered walkway above the city gates

I built this fortification in a corner of my gaming table, as a backdrop for my next game of Piquet.

Empty gaming table awaiting the deployment of troops. Actually, one Prussian bataillon of the Wunsch Frei regiment and its Jäger company are already deployed in the woods in the bottom right corner.

By the way, combining Anker and flats is not a new idea, of course. See for example this old magazine with a picture on page 2. Nice.

Samstag, 18. August 2018

Anker: Set 16 storage

The newly added set 14A means I have to revise my storage because some of the boxes as used before for GK-NF 14 can't hold all the stones anymore.

So here's how I will sort stones into the original boyes for easy access during building with GK-NF 16:

White blocks - red blocks - blue roof blocks - columns and special roof parts, arches, small red/white blocks, red and white #19

The two small boxes from 4 and &A, and the large boxes with roof parts, are only filled to below box height for easy stacking. So here's how these go to the shelf:

Freitag, 17. August 2018

Workbench: Skirmishers

A few quick snapshots showing some innovations on my workbench.

The first is that I started working on a few units which will be meant to be used as skirmishers. I'll base them on the same size bases as regular units so they can fight in closed order, too. But I will use only three minis per base, and try to use the additional space for more varied arrangement of the minis. I also tried to mix more and more different poses to show a unit keeping up low intensity skirmishing fire.

Currently being painted: Wunsch Freibatallion and Jägers.

For the Wunsch Frei infantry I'll base one batallion, plus two optional stands of Jägers, for skirmishing and one batallion with the regular four minis per base for use in line formation.

I will do the same with two batallions of my first Croat grenzers for the Austrian army.

The tricky thing for unist mixing many poses is to find a balanced arrangement of the minis across bases, and still to place the officers, NCOs etc. in the right place. So for these kinds of units I decided to fix the arrangement before I even start cleaning up the minis for basecoating, and therefore have a number of units arranged on the table waiting to be taken up:

Blanks waiting to be cleaned and basecoated before painting. The firts two ranks are from different units where parts are already further advanced in the production line.

This mini arrangement is even more important for the mixed Grenadier batallions combined from the different Grenadier companies of the Austrian and Reichsarmee units. Sometimes, these even have to make sure people with the right type of uniform and Grenadier hat are in the right place (one of the first mixed Grenadier units I already painted contains the Ernestinisch Sachsen infantry, even mixing different hats, and different uniforms, within individual companies coming from one batallion...).

In addition I'm running out of storage / display space for the table top ready flats, so I have banned some individually based 30 years war troops to card board boxes and will start to use the new space for tabletop minis:

Newly freed up shelf space waiting for tabletop troops. Top row: Reichsarmee infantry and Prussian cavalry (right most minis are individually painted representaties of all Cuirassier regiments, already shown here). Bottom row: 30YW infantry on the march, now in card board boxes, Next to that, Wallensteins carriage and, in front, an experiment to use 6mm minis for a 1:1 scale representation of the central company of prussian infantry batallion.

Anker: GK-NF 16 Teaser Building - Church

In the Richter plan books, the first building in a new set is the teaser for which one of the pictures is already shown on the back page of the previous set. In best marketing fashion, these are usually very attractive buildings.

In case of GK-NF 16, this is the big Parish Church. I hads really been looking forward to this one while doing a few "farewell" projects with the GK-NF 14 set.

One thing that always makes me curious is which new stone shapes are in a new set, and when they will be used for the first time. Here is the first new shape used when building the church:

First new stone from box 14A, and it is a new shape: a red stone 26

In addition to a few more stones from the new box 14A (new and old shapes), the next picture also illustrates a nice functional use of one of the tiny 1/4 x 1/4 x 1 stones #79. I appreciate it when these stones are used where they are really needed to provide the right kind of spacing (as in this case), not just as sugar coating for putting small pieces in random decorative positions on ledges, roofs etc.

Green circles: stone 79 is needed for its size, to make the distances match underneath the roof of the side. Orange circles mark another new stone shape from box 14A, the small triangular #218, and the first stone #4 taken from the new box because all others have already been used - note that 14A does add lots of new stone shapes, new roof angles etc, but also adds quite a few standards like #4, 15 and 17.

Another thing I like to document (maybe I can use it in future ad hoc building projects) is the way the layers carrying the roof are held by the building walls. Here's the last walls-only layer before the first wooden beams are laid down:

And here's a walk around the finished building. As always, you can click on all pictures to see a larger copy.

Front with entries to the tower and the main building

Tower and the building side with the (one) aisle, with a much lower and rather flat roof.

Complete view of the church with the apse. Oh, and mnd the roof ont he tower with the new, steep roof angle with different thickness side stones for each layer, made to fit building proportions with a lowest layer from the less steep, older stone shapes.

It will be fun to see the church building plans grow even more in larger Ankerstein boxes, maybe with symmetric pairs of aisles and larger choirs and apses.

The final touch

Montag, 13. August 2018

SoM NNL Replay: Hilldale at New York Game 1 of 4

This is the first of a four game series between the first and last placed teams in the ECL; the 4-5 Daisies, with an anemic offense so far, will have to show some offensive prowess today to avoid a false start into this important series - and they do, in rather convincing fashion.

New York starter Bill Holland still seems to be a bit hungover from the relief outing two days ago - he gives up one run on two walks and a single in the first, and another three runs as the Daisies nearly bat around on a walk, two singles and two doubles. While Holland continues to concede runs, Hensley pitches solid inning after solid inning. Only Mule Suttles can put a small crack into Hensley's display of control as he scores his sixth homer of the season.

At the game's half way point, the Daisies seem to become a bit too comfortable with their eight run lead. In the fifth, the Giants can score two runs helped by two infield errors. However, if the Daisies are loose, they also continue to score and take back the two runs immediately. And they do flash some leather in the bottom of the sixth, as Mackey makes a difficult catch on a bloop popup along the third field line and Torriente makes the final out crashing into the left field fence at full speed [F1 rare play...].

The Hilldale show goes on in the seventh with another run scored by Blackwell after a triple, and Torriente crashing into the left field fence once again to rob Dixon of what looked like a certain homerun, and two batters later reaching into the crowd along the left field line to catch a foul ball from Beckwith. Things continue unchanged to the end, with Hilldale scoring another three runs inthe last inning, and the Giants at least getting another two runs back, and with them some hope that thei second game of the double header might go better for them if their ace Manning can cool down the red hot Hilldale bats.

7/9/16 Hilldale Daisies at New York Lincoln Giants

Team

W:	E Hensley
L:	B Holland

Hilldale Daisies

New York Lincoln Giants