Back in the Saddle

You may have noticed a drop of the blog’s activity lately.  Nothing to do with my health or loss of gaming mojo… in fact the result of the biblical-scale club’s premises flooding last June, forcing its closure and hence resulting in a very low wargaming activity…  I managed just a few games in a friend’s house over the summer and September (see my previous post from late August).

Not having much to comment, I have been investing most of my gaming  time in painting my Napoleonic figures and reducing my lead pile. Those who follow my Twitter account may have seen my progress in that front!

The good news are that I may enter now into a more active wargaming phase, as the club doors opened again just yesterday; so hopefully I’ll be playing most of Sundays from now on, as in the past.

The grand opening

I went to visit the premises only today… by the way, throwing my first dice in weeks, with three games of Command & ColoursAncient played this morning (great, fun game for Sunday morning or a casual match any afternoon!!).

Salivating after many months

The new refurbished site is wonderful, we have gained in terms of light, quality and safety too: taking advantage of the disaster, the club “junta” decided to undertake a safety study and adapt the place to the local regulations. This means also that we can now organise public events too, hopefully attracting additional membership.

Kudos also to my fellow club colleagues comprising the “Junta” and its President Tomás (aka the KlubFuhrer) for the way they have managed this most unfortunate event and how they have put back in operation the club is a reasonable timeframe.

Returning to the gaming activity, what is the pipeline in the short term?

I guess mostly Napoleonic, but I’m afraid that not a lot of Sharp Practice. The rules are great indeed but have not captured the imagination of my gaming group as Chain of Command did.

And the main reason is the game scale: playing skirmish games in the FIW or AWI period is OK; but frankly speaking, when moving into the Napoleonic period, one wants to see large masses of men, horses and guns moving in a table and this is an experience that Sharp Practice cannot provide, they are not designed for large scale battles.

Our quest for a suitable set of rules led us to Age of Eagles (the Napoleonic version of Fire and Fury) but a new contender is looming in the horizon: Pickett’s Charge the new ACW rules published the TooFatLardies sister company Reisswitz Press.  Yes, they are for the ACW period but the author already announced a future Napoleonic set.

Some of my colleagues that already played PCh got very comments and impressions. I borrowed the book from one of my friends and I must admit that although ACW is not my period at all, the rules mechanics are elegant and simple to learn so I may give a try with an eye on the Napoleonic version ahead.

The other major topic will be Kurt’s Analogue Hobbies PaintingChallenge which I realized to my horror (a year is already gone???) is approaching fast. I need to start planning as time flies and we’ll soon be summoned by the Dark Lord himself to offer him tribute.

The question now is what project to undertake. On the one hand I’m very tempted to work on a Anglo-Portuguese Napoleonic army; I even bought some plastic Warlords before the summer taking advantage of an offer.

But on the other, after visiting Arnhem a year ago just this week coinciding with Crisis in Antwerp, I already planned to paint a British Paratroopers force for Chain of Command; this way I would already have the three main nationalities (US, German and British).

So this is it for the moment. I expect to stop here more frequently than over the past few months and share with you the progress in the different issues.