Thursday, July 31, 2014




































Some pictures from our "Retreat from Moscow" game. The first pics are from the pre-game set up; most of the wrecked items are Bruce's but the third pic, the Duellist's wagon, is mine. Figures on the speckled gray table are mine (and I realized that I forgot to "snow up" their clothing!), those on the wooden table are Bruce's (some he painted, some he got Fernando Enterprises to paint) and those on the white table are Mikey G's eBay purchase. Lots of awesome looking figures.

The players, from left to right around the table (and forgive me for not knowing everyone's last name!) are: Scott Murphy, Bruce Duthie, Bruce Meyer, Mikey G, Mark, John McEwan, Steve Ghan and Gene Anderson. Kevin Smyth arrived late (he's in the ball cap at the end of the table in later pics) as did Gary Griess (however, he failed to appear in any of the pictures I took!) An awesome group of gamers in the Gig Harbor Irregulars!

The rest of the pics are from the game. The French arrive in a gronk or disorganized mass. The Russians slowly whittle them down and the column slowly gets strung out with some French units more threatened than others. Russian Cossacks, regulars and peasants made an appearance on the table. Mark and Kevin's Frenchmen did a great job getting their original units across the table; Mark's wagons are seen getting off the table. Gary and John did a Malachi Crunch and captured Steve's group and wagon; Gary's peasants even did an awesome job fending off an attack by John's Cossacks intent of stealing their captives. I lost three units in the game but, due to the capture of a French gun, scored big as a Russian player. We did some in-game rules tweaking and know we've got more to do but Bruce's rules are pretty much 80% there on the first go!

Wednesday, July 30, 2014

A test picture - reduced to 33% by Microsoft Paint - to see if I can post it on the Steve Dean Painting Forum without taking up the entire page. Russian regulars advance against the retreating French columns, burdened by all the swag they were taking out of Moscow. The lines are starting to get a little spread out and a little more vulnerable. The "Duellists" wagon can be seen in the background.

Saturday, July 26, 2014












More stages in the final construction, weathering and winterizing of the broken down cart from the Duellists movie. More of the "how to" will be published on the Historical Minis Dot Com website shortly. Look for post game pictures there, too!

Test Piece





 
Before I started the final stages of the broken down cart from the Duellists, I needed to try do a test figure. I wanted to try out the snow technique on something small so I could figure out how best to combine painting and adding snow. In the end, my fears were unfounded - the process was really quite simple and I really liked the final piece.