Projects Update and Albuera

Don, Scott R, and I joined Scott M. for the christening of his new house to wargaming. Scott set up the Battle of Iuka in his living room and we gathered for a day of good gaming and camaraderie. The battle was played using Scott's figures and Regimental Fire and Fury. A nice recap can be found on Scott's blog at http://macpheesminiaturemen.blogspot.com/.

As in many of our games, it takes a few turns to reacquaint ourselves with the rules. One aspect that we didn't pick up on in this game was leader casualty checks. I wager that at some point during the game, 80 percent of all units engaged rolled a '10' and went "low ammo". With all of the low ammo forcing 10’s we rolled, we should have had a number of leader casualty checks. In the heat of battle, we may have forgotten that a leader w/I 4 inches of a unit hit with a ‘10’ takes a leader casualty check. Given that, our Iuka game may have seen the ground littered with killed and wounded leaders. May not have impacted the outcome but it might have had local impacts. 


18mm SYW Project:
Work progresses on two Austrian dragoon squadrons. These two squadrons will muster as squadrons 5 and 6 of Dragoon Regiment #7, Batthyany. Also on the painting table is battalion #2 of the Swiss regiment, Diesbach. The dragoons are Eureka and the Swiss foot are Blue Moon FIW French. 

15mm Narvik Project:
In the recent Warweb order were two bags of 15mm armor. Both bags were from the recently released Command Decision French armor models. I ordered one bag each of three French Panhards and three Hotchkiss H39s (with the short barrel). My goal for this weekend is to assemble and paint these models and complete the three Panzer II's I've had sitting in a partially finished state. Since the picture I have of the H39 in Norway shows a solid light color, Scott recommended Panzer Dark Yellow for the French paint scheme. A trip to the local discounter, White Elephant, yielded only Afrika Mustard. That color will be close enough for me. Oh, I cleaned out WE's supply of Dullcote as I often do on my resupply runs. The guy behind the counter quipped that I must be the one that messes up his inventory by buying all of his stock on a periodic but infrequent schedule.

Working on these models got me motivated to pull six bags of Peter Pig French alpine troops to prime and place into the painting queue. 

Still awaiting a refight of Albuera but below is a picture of the game table with the battlefield setup. The first picture shows the battlefield deployment viewed from the north while the second picture shows the battlefield from the east. Both pictures depict the deployments around 0930am at the time of the French assaults against the Spanish.


Battle of Albuera: