Readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed my mentioning of Bob Cordery's take on the gridded rules pioneered by Joe Morschauser in the early 60's and discussed at length on his blog http://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/. I have followed this project with much interest and the rules at the time of writing are both for the 'modern' (primarily WW2) and for 19th century. I am very enthusiastic about both sets of rules and will certainly be using them for my own projects - the Balkan Wars for one - due to their ease of use and logical game mechanics. Another gaming friend of mine drew my attention to the pictures of the Morschauser system in action in Donald Featherstone's Advanced Wargames and very impressive it looks as well. The figures in use look very much like 40mm old toy soldier style offerings - all gloss paint and attitude - and have a unique charm about them. I am a great fan of this style of figure and of course one of the main advantages would be the fact that using models of this size would certainly mean fewer to paint. Irregular Miniatures produce a range of 'toy' style soldiers in 42mm that are quite reasonable as well as their Deutsche Homage range. There other ranges in this scale but they are more serious figure painter's figures and would need a lot more effort than certainly I would give them! With unit sizes being small (4 foot or mounted, a gun and two crew for the 19th century) then building up a force of models in a larger than normal size would not be hugely expensive and painting time would be correspondingly reduced. One could even go down the route of using some of the many cheap 54mm plastic figures that are available (probably increasing the square size would be a help in this scale!) for a truly Wellsian looking game but on a grid!
Thinking of my own set up with an 11 by 11 grid of 3" squares it occurred to me that as the number of figures needed for a viable set up would be quite small it would give the advantage of being able to experiment with different periods as the mood takes, rather like DBA.
Certainly worth thinking about - both in terms of size and variety.
2 comments:
I gave serious thought to using the larger sized figures for my games but the thought of having yet another scale of figures in my collection put me off.
If I every have the time, space, and/or money I might well go down that route, especially when I get older and my eyesight gets worse.
All the best,
Bob
Hi Bob, I guess I am relatively fortunate in that I am not so heavily invested in any single scale so that for me it would probably be less painful! 6" squares and 54mm figures would make a superb display game but I have no plans to attempt that!
I would use Irregular 42mm figures in any event as they have a very 'toy soldier' feel about them but, as I say, no plans to tackle this anytime soon!
All the best,
Ogrefencer
Post a Comment