Day: August 28, 2011

Individually 10mm (or 12mm) Napoleonic figures don’t look impressive, but in large groups, on the table, I think they look great.  In anticipation of the Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars, I had been purchasing some sets of 10mm Napoleonic figures, mostly painted, on Ebay.  Since beginning this project in earnest after the release of The GASLIGHT Compendium, I’ve been going through what I have, mounting it for LSNC: Napoleonics, and purchasing bits to flesh out full units.

For over a week I’ve been working on four battalions of French light infantry.  I finally finished them this weekend.

In other versions of LSNC (World War II and American Civil War) a base is 1.5″x3″.  In WWII this represents a platoon.  In ACW, this represents a regiment.  In the Napoleonic version, a “base” is still 1.5″x3″, but it is made of two 1.5″x1.5″ stands.  This allows them to be arranged into a column, line, or square.  For three-rank infantry, the figures are arranged as shown in the picture above, in three ranks.  When I get around to painting British (two-rank infantry), they’ll have just two ranks of figures on a base.

I also painted some Austrian Landwehr.  These are interesting, because they are in grey uniforms, so they’ll stand out on the table.  I have also begun painting another few bases of Austrian infantry.  I’ll paint these as Hungarian infantry with light blue trousers, since all my current infantry is wearing the white trousers of the German infantry.

A couple of years ago I wrote (and published as a .pdf download) a set of rules for PT boat actions based on Kurt Schlegel’s unpublished Fire at Will rules.  The rules, The Quick and the Dead, is a wild and wooly game, with no turns.  Players each command two PT boats.  They play action cards from their hands at their own pace (usually frenetic), make morale checks for each of their boats, draw more cards, and keep going until one side wins.  Games take about 30 minutes, after which players drop into their seats, exhausted.  In that sense, I think the rules do a good job of portraying the 20 minutes of action that punctuate PT patrols and actions.

A few weeks ago, at a HAWKs night, Chris and I began talking about modifying the basic system for a wizard duel.  We thought it would be neat to have a set of FAST rules that would allow players to recreate things like the fight in the Ministry of Magic in the the Harry Potter book.  Then I moved, went on vacation, and started a new (killer) job.  We finally got back to it.  We had our first play test on Saturday, as we awaited the arrival of Hurricane Irene.  Play testers were Chris, Dave Wood, my son, and me.

The rules worked really well.  We took a bunch of notes through four play test games for additional cards to add to the game deck.  We were all happy about how the game played — especially my son who won three out of four.  We played two exterior games (in an area with woods, rocks, a ruined building, etc.) and two interior games (in a wizards laboratory).  We even played a game in which each wizard had an elemental to support them.  We hope to eventually be able to get these printed by Superior POD, so I’m making the cards on their template.  It looks like a four-to-six player game will require three 54-card decks.

I’ll publish updates later, along with pictures.  The next play test is likely to be on the 17th of September.