British Riflemen (and Line Officer)

 earlier this month... or... maybe at the end of last month...? I placed a small order with Minifigs/Matchlock Miniatures - mostly for the Regency Zombie Hunters, but also to fill in a missing guy from a unit... and while I was at it, I picked up a few other things for fun. 

Two of those extras were British Napoleonic Riflemen. One from the Old Minifigs line and one from the newer Matchlock Miniatures Peninsular line. 

The matchlock Miniatures Peninsular line is... rather small.. as in the number of items available - the miniatures themselves are solid 28mm chaps. There are TEN miniatures in the entire like - two Brunswickers (officer and infantryman advancing), a Hessen officer and infantryman, three Portuguese (Officer, Infantryman advanincing and Cacadore), THIS BRITISH RIFLEMAN (reaching into his cartridge box), a French Cantiniere, and a Female Guerilla...  I ordered the Riflemen, Cantiniere, and Guerilla. 

The Matchlock Miniatures Riflemen has been added to Dulles Rifles.

The Minifigs Rifleman was needed to finish up a second unit of twelve riflemen I'll be using with Rebels and Patriots (and possibly other games). Both units are made up of a mix of old Minifigs and older Wargames Foundry Napoleonics - which aren't TOO out of scale.

I have a third unit of twelve Riflemen - though that unit is made up of a mix of Warlord Games and Perry miniatures models and, like the rifleman from Matchlock Miniatures are a tad bigger than these. As they are in a separate unit, my hope is that if there is enough space between the units the difference in scale shouldn't be too noticeable. 

I also ordered a British officer from the Matchlock Miniatures War of 1812 line... He's on a larger base, as I have done for all the leaders of my "Special Units" for The Silver Bayonet. He will lead another new until. Perhaps I'll take the Rifleman back from Dulles to serve with this fellow...? 

I also finished up some Royal Navy Officers and sailors... But I think I'll save those for another post. 

35th Regiment of Foot

I know, it's over 6 months until it's released... but I'm already preparing for Rebels and Patriots! If you haven't heard (and can't be bothered to follow the link, Rebels and Patriots is another in the Osprey Wargame series by Dan Mercy and Michael Leck using the same basic engine as The Pikeman's Lament (which I played earlier this week), The Men Who Would Be Kings, Dragon Rampant, and Lion Rampant. This set will cover the Horse and Musket period including the Seven Years War and the wars of Napoleon (and anything in between - and potentially a few before and after! I just mention those two because they are the two I am most interested in gaming).



These gentlemen are from the 35th Regiment of Foot. The figures are from Dixon Miniatures. My friend Paul was looking to offload a portion of his lead-pile earlier this year (just after Rebels and Patriots was announced) so I snapped them up - and then ordered a few more from Dixon to make nice even units of 12 with an officer and drummer in each. I don't know why I decided each unit should have a drummer... probably because the first lot I picked up had three and since I was putting them in some of the units, I though I'd best put one in all!?



I also did a couple of casualty/wavering morale markers if the same colours.



And the regimental colours.

The scale of the game, I am imagining, will be the same as the others - 1:1 figure ratio making for a large scale skirmish. In which case, I'm not sure the colours are really necessary, but I thought I might use them to designate which unit has the commanding officer.



Originally I thought the colours could substitute for two of the figures in the unit...



But more recently have been thinking I could simply add them to the unit - as a marker of sorts - that add nothing to the strength of the unit and are never removed as casualties... just there to mark where the captain is at. Of course now I've just realized that if that was what I was wanting to do, I should have put them together onto a single, larger base.... ah well... If that IS what I decide to do in the future, I can always re-base them!

I think I have four more units of regular infantry this size to paint (and a unit of grenadiers, and three units of light infantry, and 2-4 units of Highlanders - I have a few that were earmarked for multifigure bases, which I may rebase for this - and 3-4 units of Rangers - unless rangers end up being 6-figure units, in which case I'd have 6-8 units of Rangers!). I'm kind of torn about how to paint them. This unit has the orange facings of the 35th Regiment of Foot. At this scale it would make sense that all the regular infantry on the field would be from the same regiment and should be painted with the same facings. I was briefly thinking, however, that I might do each unit with different facings. I mean what if I want to use the force to represent a unit that ISN'T the 35th? If I did each unit in a different colour of facing (Blue, Buff, Green, White, or Yellow - some of the common facing colours at the time in the British army) at least ONE of them would be right. I even had a daft idea of doing regimental colours in each of the different facing colours!? Different facing colours could help differentiate units from each other on the table...?

I guess I have a bit of time to think about it some more. I probably won't get any more of these on the table unit closer to the release date...


Coming Soon to Tim's Miniature Wargaming Blog:

May Games Round Up - I'd wanted to do it last night, but instead sat and watched some TV with Amanda and the kids - we're all down with nasty colds and no one felt like doing anything other than sitting and doing nothing.

I did get some painting done while "watching". Quite a bit of painting done, actually.

I've had these Warhound Titans since January, and while I've been really excited to get them painted and on the table - well... at least get it painted... I'm not sure when I'll even find anyone that actually wants to face it on the tabletop in 40k - and I don't really have enough other forces to play epic just yet... I've been kind of back and forth on how I want to paint them. Do I do them in some sort of camouflage - like the rest of the Tallarn that it will likely be walking in support of? Do I pick out some brightly-coloured, medieval- knight-like heraldry to paint them in? Some sort of combination (camouflage on the carapace, knight-like heraldry below)? So many of them (and, indeed, many other 40K vehicles and equipment) are painted with large parts in bare metal (or gilded metals), which I'm not really a huge fan of - we've figures out how to paint metal in the 2nd millennium, and for good reasons, how could they have forgotten how in the 41st millennium?

Well, yesterday I had a stroke of inspiration and started painting away on the mighty beast (and the wee one too)! Anyone care to guess what sort of colour-scheme I've come up with? I'm already done the carapace - hopefully I'll have it all finished up by the end of the weekend or early next week...

I have to admit, part of the desire to get this done is also because of the immanent release of Imperial Knights: Renegade, which I'm actually considering picking up, but couldn't bear to do so if I hadn't gotten the titan painted yet!