Thursday 9 May 2013

At Last! All can be revealed....

Yesterday evening saw yours truly at the club meeting up once again with Ernie (he of the downsizing of his collection and giving loads of stuff away to deserving causes fame) and taking delivery of a great wad of stuff. This time I was properly staggered by the sheer quantity of material heading my way and so will be heaping untold words of thanks and gratitude on the dear chaps noble head for some time to come.

The big star of the collection was a ton of unpainted 15mm ACW figures (mainly Essex but with a smattering of Peter Pig); together with copies of Fire and Fury and the Peter Pig ACW rules, not to mention a couple of books and sundry other goodies.

I knew about this haul for a week or so but have been rather coy about describing it simply because I had not decided on whether to paint them as ACW troops or to use them as the basis of a Fezian/Rusland (Russo/Turkish) type set up. I have thought long and hard about this over the week and have settled on using them as they are intended - for the ACW.

The clincher for this is the fact that it fits in ideally with my planned river based activities along the Mississippi. I have a fascination with the whole river campaign idea for the ACW and so having the armies (made from figures rather than blocks) makes sense. As yet I do not have any models for the naval aspect but that will be remedied with a swift visit to Navwar for a modest selection of 1/1200th vessels - nothing like the shipbuilding-fest of the other year - as I certainly do not envisage needing more than a couple of dozen ships at most (shades of 'famous last words' or 'heard that before!').

In a sense this recent windfall has put me in the position of not having any excuses for undertaking this project - especially as it has occupied so much of my time and thoughts in recent years. I have the rules for the land and naval side; I have most of the models for the land side and know exactly what I need for the naval side and finally I have most of the library I am likely to need - at least in the short term that is!

Once again a huge thank you to Ernie - I will make sure that the first action I fight with the figures will be with him if I can!

As an aside the game at the club last night was the old club night standby of Space Hulk - using the the very nicely painted toys of Mr Fox. Yours truly was one half of the chittering horde that managed to chomp their way through a mere two of the Emperor's finest. Luckily one of these was the sole flamer marine who needed to survive if the marines were to win the scenario.

They didn't....;-)


2 comments:

tradgardmastare said...

A great windfall to get and a most interesting project.I look forward to following your progress here.

David Crook said...

Hi Tradgardmastare,

The project will be relatively modest in terms of number of figures as the rules I shall be using do not use that many. Size wise I would say each side will probably be equivalent to a couple of DBA armies.

If I have learned anything over the last few years it is that you do not needs hundreds or thousands of figures to have a good game!

All the best,

DC