Returning to The Wargame

[Sir Barnaby Hammond-Rye]

Years ago, when I first started wargaming I made 48 man infantry battalions as per Charles Grant's "The Wargame" using boxes and boxes of plastic figures - Airfix, Revell, etc. I bought them 10-12 boxes at a time so I could have all the figures in the same pose and then made up multiple battalions from the various figure poses.

"The Wargame" were the first SYW rules our club used. Then we tried Age of Reason and switched to those rules, breaking apart the battalions to suit. Then the club split up and I moved on to Colonial, WW2, etc.

I've got SYW Hessians, Prussians, Austrians, French and Russians, and AWI British. All in  28mm but all in 20-24 man battalions - with larger sizes for the Austrians.

Recently I've decided to give The Wargame a go again. I can't remember what planted the bug - I probably saw a blog post on an Imagi-Nation site or something. Regardless, last month I ordered some artillery from Foundry, taking advantage of their Easter free postage sale. I bought Foundry because I saw on the Minden Miniatures blog that Frank recommended Foundry guns, and wasn't going to make any himself. I ordered a three pack of long guns and a three pack of howitzers. All Russian. I chose the Russian guns as they had a range of three sizes and as I intend these for ImagiNations I don't care about which nation they originated with.

This last week, being payday, I started my foray back into the world of 48-figure battalions and ImagiNations proper, placing my first order of Hanoverians from Minden Miniatures. These will, I think, be my Sinistrians. Clad all in black and hunter green.
I've only ordered a single battalion to start, plus the civilians and three sets of artillery crew, my thinking being each side will get a battery of two long guns and a howitzer.

I've decided to do my battalion organization slightly different from standard practice: 48 rank-and-file, to be sure, but the Morale rating will be generated by the Mounted Colonel, two Officers and two NCO's only, and not the Standard Bearers and Drummers. My reasoning re. the standard bearers is that if the bearer is killed another will take his place as long as there is somebody available (and not in melee) so while they can be captured in melee they are not killed by musketry and if killed by being under a template an ordinary musketeer is killed instead. The musicians I am intending to use for show, and as "soak offs". If still alive they will provide a move bonus of 1" per musician (and perhaps a formation change bonus?) but they can be taken as a "soak off" at any time in place of a musketeer who has been killed.

So you can see I am deviating slightly from the original rules, but we always played some things differently anyway. We never based the figures singly, for one, and that meant we had to do melees a bit different. And the way musket shots are distributed is done more efficiently that the original rules.

Howard

[fastolfrus]

Sounds good to me.

[Captain Blood]

I had that book too. I even bought a shedload of Spencer-smith miniatures so i could re-enact the battle of Mollwitz!
Didn't ever get round to painting them though...