English Civil War Horse

Finished up a few more items for the English Civil War this week…

(Remember: click on the pictures for a bigger version):

An element of ECW horse – I still need to do a cornet for this element but I can’t decide which one… I intended for this element to be a Knight or Cavalry General element for DBA-X or the command element for a unit of Cuirassiers in bigger unit battles.

Here is the same element with some previously finished Cuirassiers.

These are all from Old Glory Miniatures

I also finished up five more Scots Horse and rebased four others with them to make three elements of Cavalry or a single unit for big battalion battles. The figures are also from Old Glory Miniatures - with the exception of one fellow in the middle of the centre element – he’s from Dixon Miniatures.

This finishes up all of the ECW Scots Covanenteers that I have at the moment (Huzzah!) – Oh, I have LOADS of English yet to do and almost as many Highlanders (which are far more work on account of all that wretched plaid their wearing!?) AND I’ll probably have a few more Scots horse to paint up in the not-too-distant future (more bargains from The Assault Group that a friend picked up in exchange for me doing some painting for him…)

Also this week I played a game of Cruel Necessity with the kids as part of our study of the English Civil War. This was a fun little find - a solitaire/co-op game of the English Civil Wars. The player is a Puritan Parliamentarian trying to defend Parliament and forward Puritanism. Events and Royalist actions were determined by a drawing a card from a deck each turn and then the player (Parliament) basically had to react and work on their own campaigns - military or political - with a limited number of Zeal Points. It took a bit of time to read through and figure out the rules, but one they were figured out game-play was pretty quick and straightforward.

Overall I'd say I liked it. There was a lot of stuff to keep track of many, many choices to make and different things to concentrate your activities on. It was super hard, though. From the get-go it didn't feel so much like waging a war or directing a campaign as it felt like minimizing one disaster after another... We totally lost. While we did hold out until the Third Civil War, at the end of the Second, Charles I escaped after his sham trial and was never executed...

It didn't help that every time I had to roll anything but a one on a six-sided dice I would always roll a one - always... like three times in a row in a single turn... multiple turns in a row...

Actually if I had one complaint about this game is there was a bit too much randomness - There has to be SOME randomness, otherwise it becomes too deterministic - the card drawing was okay (Pandemic, for example, is driven purely by card draws an player choices), but the heavy reliance on a six-sided die to determine success or failure of every single action made it seem like we lost purely because of a long run of utterly crap dice rolls...

Since I've actually got some ECW miniatures painted up I'd like to get in a few games of with them using those - Ideally I'd like to get two more units of Horse and some artillery finished up for a big battle using Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames - though I could probably get away with what I have right now.... I definitely have enough that I could throw down a game of DBA-X right now. I also want to get some skirmish gaming in with the individually-based miniatures....

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

I never did post pictures of our game of Frostgrave on Sunday… perhaps I’ll get to that…

Also coming up is my Skirmish Saturday Halloween Horror Special (using Fear and Faith) so hopefully I’ll have a game report of that up on Sunday some time.