Well, we’re not gone. I recently went for yet another surgery on my arm, which has limited my gaming related activities to reading and planning. Now though, with my arm healing up and most health protection measures lifted, we’re about to kick off a bunch of gaming and posting!
As I laid out my 25mm Napoleonics to figure out how to rebase them earlier in the year, I was struck that I didn’t know enough about the period, so I ordered some books to read as I convalesced. I’m working my way through Elting’s book right now and enjoying it. Jacques of All Games is working on my 15mm French Army (WIP miniatures above), which is helping with the sizeable lead pile.
We’re about to play our first game of Chain of Command in a very long time to refresh ourselves, using some 15mm early War figures that Lucius has painted up. There will be a Ready for Battle posted soon with the forces that are ready so far. We’ll then be starting to play Caesar’s Camp, a pint-sized campaign from TFL set with the 51st Highland Division (campaign here). We’ve not tried Chain of Command in 15mm so it’ll be interesting to see how much more room we have on the table top.
Lucius has also been painting up some Cruel Seas ships. This lead to an interest idea. We got to talking about doing raids on the Axis supply runs to Tunisia. Then we recalled the squadrons of 1:200 scale aircraft we have. That turned into a concept of an invasion of an imaginary island (so we wouldn’t be constrained in our forces) where we could fight sea battles, fighter sweeps and bombing as well as land battles using our normal Chain of Command. We settled on OPERATION LEOPARD, the invasion of Isola Pisily.
The Allies will be likely be Commonwealth and Americans, while the Axis will be Italians and various German units. I put in an order with Perry to build an Italian force and bulk up the Germans we already have. I noticed that Warlord Games increased their prices significantly so it’s much cheaper for me to order Italian troops from Perry (also in the UK). I think that Warlord will see reduced sales, at least in North America as the prices are getting high enough that we’re looking at other options. One of those options is 3D printing. The model is of a Bathurst class corvette and is printed in resin. The cost of the resin for the corvette is over 3 x cheaper than the Warlord model before shipping. I’m excited to see it painted up as this will likely the be the first of very many 3D prints we’ll be doing. There will be several more posts in the next bit about OPERATION LEOPARD as we figure out how we’re going to structure this campaign.
With any luck the rather long dry spell of posting (and playing) is at an end!
I look forward to following Operation Leopard.
Good luck with your recovery.
Thanks! This one has been the easiest recovery so far. Operation Leopard has been an interesting and fun challenge to chew on. Posts and thoughts to follow!
Funnily enough, I printed the same corvette. It was fragile enough I lost the boats though.
Looking forward to more posts as some very ambitious plans appear to be in the offing. Glad you are no longer in sickbay and on the mend.
Great to see you are back at it.
Swords around the throne is such a great book! Really should get you pumped for Napoleonics.
Operation Leopard sounds like great fun too, looking forward to seeing what you do.
Yeah, it’s been a great read! Since I’ve started the book I’ve looked into 6mm Napoleonics as well, though I think 25 and 15mm will keep me busy for some time!