Joy of Six - Final Prep

With Joy of Six just two days away I finally finish the last miniatures for our demo game The Storming of Hougoumont. Long term followers may be scratching their collective heads at this point since this time last year we managed to do a display game of the whole of Waterloo without missing a single battalion. So what gives? Well mostly I am just adding furniture with four French caissons as the board looked a little empty when we set up the troops for the game so I thought it would fill in the empty area a bit. 

However one battalion that was on the field as a full unit has been split into four skirmish bases for a more historical use. Lee had some spare voltigeurs so all I needed to do was base them up.

These are Adler and typical of this supplier with very nice sculpts with loads of animation. The only issue is that the larger of the caissons are a little to big to go on the 60x30 bases so need to be put on a 60x60 base across the diagonal.

I wanted to take advantage of the larger base so made an effort to tell a story. My favourite is dashing through a gap in a hedge with one of the excellent Leven Miniatures trees built into the hedge.

The other three are less flamboyant but with the fantastic sculpting look like they are racing towards the guns with much needed replenishment.

These will be placed behind the advancing French as The Boy tries to take Hougoumont by storm.

In this game they have no physical use beyond eye candy but in future games could be part of victory conditions. Lee and I have discussed the possibility of placing caissons behind foot artillery like we do limbers for horse artillery. Not sure if this will happen as the time taken and cost of each one of these for a battery of guns would be rather expensive and time consuming. It's a possible winter project for the future though I think I would mix in the odd four horse limber or wrecked caisson.

These are the four bases of voltigeurs that will do battle to take the orchards off the defenders. The figures are Baccus and are usually seen at the front of our 60x60 battalion bases. We have discussed about how to represent French (and other) skirmishers within our rules and the simple adding of a base of figures at the cost of one strength has seemed to be the best solution. As such I need to paint up at least twenty bases mixed between ligne and legere for future use. A trip to the Baccus stand then I guess.

I will have to probably do a few for the Prussians as well but not as many as the French seem to have always had far more skirmishers out front than the rest of the nations.

Last year was at a new venue that has plenty of room and the big games can be seen from above for a real treat. We benefited from this last year and I am keen to see the big games from the same angle this time round. It's going to be fun putting on a much smaller game this year. No game planned for next year, though if things go well we should be back with another large game in 2018, ok maybe 2019? So I hope to see some of you on Sunday, more details here.