Day: July 4, 2011

Previously I’ve posted about the plastic army man project for Historicon 2011.  Briefly, the HAWKs received a large batch of plastic AWI figures from the estate of Wally Simon.  Through a series of painting days, we block painted eight Continental armies and eight British Armies.  We are running two events at Historicon 11 for four kids each.  Each kid who plays in the event walks away with what you see in the picture above.

Of course, they get both a Continental and British army.  In addition they get a copy of Big Battles for Little Hands, in which Milk and Cookies rules are included.  They also get a green ground cloth, some green moss for wooded aries, a set of suede roads, and two hills.  They get a pack of cards a set of six-sided dice.  They get two paper buildings to assemble.  Finally, they will receive a bag of some extra figures that they can take home and paint themselves to supplement their armies.

This is pretty neat gift for a ten-year old kid!

Sammy ran her first wargame on 2 July 11.  She used my Eureka toy soldiers and teddy bears.  She made all the terrain herself.  The windmill came unpainted from the craft store.  The roads and rivers were made from white foam painted with acrylics.  Note the defensive walls made from miniature blocks.  See the ones arranged to spell “I love GASLIGHT.”

She used GASLIGHT to run the game.  Since the toy soldiers were originally mounted and organized for Milk and Cookies Rules (units of four) to groups made an eight-figure GASLIGHT unit.  We used 8-sided dice, instead of 10-sided dice, for morale checks.

Note the trees made to look like lollypops.  The log cabin was made from miniature Lincoln Logs that Sammy glued together.

I have more toy soldier units than bear units, so the bears had slightly better stats.  The game was extremely balanced.  When we had to quit, the toys had three full-sized units, a cannon crew, and a handful of beaten-up units.  The bears had two full-sized units, a cannon crew, the fort, and a couple of chewed-up units.  It was a very good game.

Sammy did a nice job running the game.  A couple of times she had to make decisions about ambiguous events, and she made good calls.  Now she wants to run the game at a HAWKs night.