"Black Powder" Napoleonics.

 I'm still enjoying the Black Powder family of wargames rules and have been playing some Napoleonic games. 

I have used a couple of different approaches...

My 1/72nd toy soldiers.

And my Commands and Colors wooden blocks.

Using the blocks gives me all of the main Napoleonic armies as I am lucky enough to own all of the army expansions. I had a grand game of Austrians versus the French and I think the blocks give a moving battle map look to the game.

I took a few photos at the end of the game.

 My 1/72nd toy soldier collection is small and limited to French and Russians but have the toy soldier appeal.

Here are a few photos of tonight's game...

Great fun.

Commands and Colors blocks used for Black Powder.

As I was driving home from work last night the ABS warning light came on. The brakes were ok and I made it home alright. This morning though, when I set off I found that I had a grinding noise and very little in the way of brakes. Luckily the roads were quiet and I made it to the mechanics safely. Well I couldn't get to work, what could I do...

I had this game set up since the weekend. I had planned to play it tomorrow (day off) but I'll make up the time then.

 The inspiration for this was the maps in Bruce Quarries classic book.

 I used my Commands and Colors blocks for the armies and used the lists from the Napoleonic scenario in the Black Powder Rule book.

 I used centimetres instead of inches for all ranges and movement.

 French marching columns.

 As always I forgot about the broken brigade rules until too late, ah well.

 The lying down artillery pieces signified limbered guns.

 At this point I decided that I should check brigade and army morale and marked the broken brigades with a red counter.

 Both armies were beat. I called it as a narrow French victory.

I will do this again probably on a 4x4 board rather than 2x4 with a bit more forethought, a proper scenario with objectives.

But as an experiment the little blocks work very well in my opinion. I could even use my ancients blocks for Hail Caesar.
What do you reckon?.

Lately, I've been...

playing Air War C21.

I copied the missiles from this gentlemans blogpost,  glueinthecarpet.blogspot.co.uk

 Painting up a couple of 1/1200th scale ships.

 USS Hornet

 HMS Duke of York

 And spending a lot of time thinking about recreating the Grant armies in 6mm. I think it would be very nice to command such famous fictional regiments.

 Some unfinished Irregular Miniatures SYW in 48 man units look quite like the real thing on the front of The War Game.

 The Lorraine army is fairly easy to copy, being very similar to the historical French army.

The VFS was a real mixed bag of uniforms... blue, grey, green and yellow!. I own a copy of The War Game Companion too, but info on the VFS is a bit sketchy.

I have this lot here and probably as many again of Marlburians both Heroics and Irregular.

I would use Black Powder rules using centimetres as inches and go for a real old school look.

I might do it, or I might not. I have too many projects on the go, but most of us do!.

A Black Powder battle with 18th Century imaginary armies

 Today I had a game of Black Powder with my very old 15mm 18th century collection.

 This was an early "imaginations" project dating from about 1988. It featured the armies of the Grand Duchy of Normagnia and the Electorate of Falzstadt. They are mainly uniformed in white and red respectively.

 The armies consist mainly of Warrior Miniatures with some Peter Laing models too.

 I used a figure ratio of 1:100 and some simple homemade rules.

 Grand Duke Louis and his adolescent son Jean-Luc, a much smaller Peter Laing model.

 Mercenary foot fighting for Falzstadt.

 An Airfix Captain Cook from the Bark Endeavour kit that I made as a boy commands one of the guns. He's the chap in brown strides.

The cavalry clash as the game hots up.

I didn't take any more photos but it was a very good game indeed.