I am a bad man

Hello, my name is Melvyn and I've been bad. I've neglected this blog for nearly a year. It's not really my fault. Life got int the way. There are only so many hours in the day, and I've got more responsibility at work, as well as now coaching rugby twice a week. All this eats into gaming and painting time, reducing my ability to get anything done, let alone update the blog.

So what have I done? On the plus side I've managed to get several regiments of SYW Spencer Smiths painted. I've based them for Black powder (4 castings on a 40x40 base) which I played for the first time this week. I did it originally thinking it would be perfect for the British grenadier or Kreigkunst sets of rules but never got round to playing them and eventually sold them on eBay!

I'm also interested in the Bolt action rules, although I'm worried they might just become WW2 40k given the podcasts etc I've heard. I want to game ww2 in 28mm, but havent found a set of company sized rules yet. I did wonder about IABSM, but i'm not sure how my sons (my main opponents) will deal with not being able to move all their units every turn. When we played black powder, Tom (11) seemed to be ok with the concept of issuing orders to get troops to move, but this might have something to do with the fact that I rolled far more blunders than he did. One of these required a brigade to take 2 moves to the rear, promptly removing them from the board!!

My wargames collection is in a state of flux as well. As we are having work done on the house, they are all packed away and relatively inacessable. It's made me realise that I've lost interest in some periods and scales. I have decided to get rid of my 28mm Napoleonics as I've never used them. Even the beautiful plastic sculpts from the Perrys and Victorix have not rekindled this era. I think the problem is that this period screams out for massed figures which I just cannot manage in 28mm, given that even when the building work is done the most I'll have to game on is a 6x8 table. At the back of my mind is the thought of going to 15mm, but I've tried this before (all be it with 6mm) and lost interest in the shear numbers of figures needed. Perhaps when the Plastic Soldier Company releases their 15mm plastic napoleonics then I'll come back to the era, but we'll wait and see.