AWI Collection

Here are some more snaps of my AWI collection. As I said previously, this is still very much a work in progress. I still have more cavalry, Continentals, artillery and French to paint up. In the meantime, these are the meagre forces at my disposal for the defence of Liberty and Freedom.

The 3rd Continental Dragoons.

Continentals, including Kirkwood's Delaware light infantry, 2nd Rhode Island and the Continental Marines (c'mon, you've got to have the Marines!).

                                     

 Artillery and riflemen.

 Militia. These were the most difficult to paint. I tried to get a mix of clothing colours and styles. It's not always obvious in this scale, and period paintings show a lot of quite dull colours - browns mainly - but I think I did an adequate job of capturing the 'not regular' appearance of the units.

I've always loved ships, especially sailing ships and galleys. As a kid I had some wonderful books on the subject, and read avidly about biremes, triremes, carracks, galleons and the rest. Yet somehow I never really got into naval wargaming, at least with miniatures. I bought the Avalon Hill 'Trireme' games and 'Wooden Ships and Iron Men' rather than buying ships. I still bought rules, though for the most part they were so detailed as to be unplayable except by the dedicated. I'm not into masses of record keeping and charts. One exception was a set I picked for the grand sum of 50 pence at a show in Nottingham. It was a very short set from WRG for C16th naval warfare. I thought it looked fun, and bought half a dozen ships to have a game. Over time, I acquired a few more ships. I liked the period, and looked at other rules, but never really liked them as much. I left all the ships at my parents' when I came to Japan.

Then I picked up a copy of Roger Crowley's 'Empires of the Sea' on a trip home. Somehow it reignited my interest in a big way. I dug out my old ships, brought them back and managed to persuade some of the gamers in Tokyo to give them a try. The game was a success, and I sent of to Navwar for more ships. So I now have a pile of lead to sort out paint. Eventually, I'll have Holy League and Ottoman/Barbary fleets to face off. New ships are being assembled and painted, some old ones repainted. Just for a taster, here's the Holy League's Genoese squadron in the shipyard.

These are also on my other blog, The Kapudan Pasha's Blog, with some old pictures of some ships in action.

I am a wargamer living in Japan. Like most gamers I have a range of periods of interest, and flit from one to another over time. And, like most gamers, I have piles of unpainted miniatures in storage. One reason for starting this blog was to be able to post pictures of my miniatures and games, simply to give me some inspiration to get more painting done. 

I thought about trying to create blogs for each interest, but it would be way too much work, and (as you can no doubt see from the quality and format of this blog) I am not particularly computer savvy. As time goes on and I become better at creating and formatting posts, I hope that will change, but until then, please bear with me.

So, to kick off, a couple of pictures of some of my American War of Independence figures.

The figures are all Baccus 6mm. One of the members of the West Tokyo Wargamers, Matt Ashton, is building up the British/Loyalist forces, while I'm doing the Rebels and French. The top pic shows some of the militia units, the figures in the lower are Continentals. We use the Black Powder rules and just measure everything in centimetres rather than inches. They seem to work pretty well and let us use some quite large armies. Our standard unit size is 48 figures, and when I finally paint everything up, I'll have about 24 Continental and militia regiments, 4 French, plus artillery and cavalry. The British have similar numbers. I haven't bought the Warlord Games AWI supplement yet, but it's on the Christmas list.