Painting Update - AWI

The painting continues! Here's what I've been working on since last time. 

Any British force in the Horse & Musket era will need its flank companies. So to accompany the regulars are a unit of Grenadiers, with combined facings to match their parents units.

I also used the same color scheme to paint the light infantry.

And that's a project completed! The only thing I can think to add at the moment would be limbers for the artillery, but I think this offers a good representation of British and American forces for use with Rebels & Patriots. Now I just need to actually play the game!

Of course, any wargame could use some terrain, so I had previously ordered some buildings from Stone Mountain Miniatures. This is where all the miniatures for my AWI project came from, so I thought I'd go back for the buildings.

At around $7-$15 apiece, these 15mm buildings are pretty well detailed and only required minimal cutting and sanding to make them ready for priming and painting.

With these and some handmade snake rail fencing, I've everything I would need to make an 18th century American battlefield.

Painting Update - FIW, Warhammer Fantasy

It sounds like, in the area in which I live, some lockdown restrictions are going to be eased to allow non-essential stores to allow customers to come back into the building. This means access to the local game store, if they decided to open. This should also hopefully mean more gaming! I'll have to find a comfortable mask to wear. 

However, in the absence of games, I've continued working on various projects. 

AW Miniatures recently had a sale on their site, so I bought a couple packs of French and British Regulars to round out the units I have. I finished the French first, since I've got the foam to store them in. I'll get around to the British when their foam trays arrive.

Also finished were a unit of Goblin Wolf Riders and two Goblin wizards to support my Classichammer Orcs & Goblins army. I'm so close to finishing it! There's three units - Boar Riders,  Black Orcs, and Trolls - and a few characters to paint and I can call that project complete. 

Miniature Musings - Tabletop Simulator

I haven't played any more solo games, and my painting progress has slowed a bit so that I don't have enough to justify a painting post. 

I have, however, been fooling around on Tabletop Simulator. 

While the restrictions around the pandemic have been loosening (to where we'll be able to game in stores again mid-June, it looks like) plenty of people have had the time and inclination to hone their skills and develop more modules. 

For those of you who aren't aware of Tabletop Simulator, it's basically a physics engine designed around board games. It doesn't have any actual assets beyond the basics like Chess or Checkers, but it does allow users to import files of their own. These can be self-designed playing pieces, high-res pictures, or lines of code that actually follow the rules of the game. However, most of the time it's on the players to know the rules. 

As an example, this is a fantastic module for To The Strongest that features pre-made armies themed around 1066 England.

Each army has appropriate units, army lists, markers, tokens, and card decks to play with.

As you can see, I set the game up to look like a turn is being played. Thanks to TtS! grid-based movement, it's very easy to move troops around the field. There's also ten different pre-made terrain setups for the map.

There are plenty of modules for other games as well. This is a setup for the first scenario from Rangers of Shadow Deep.

There's a DBA 3.0 (and a 2.2) module.

There's even a X-Wing: Heroes of the Aturi Cluster module! It's a little busted at the moment since Tabletop Simulator updated, but I'll keep an eye on it for when it's hopefully fixed.

You can get Tabletop Simulator for $20 on Steam. There's officially licensed board games that you can pay for, but a lot of the modules are available for free.