Late January Update

We are now most of the way through January and I shall certainly not complete my secondary objective this month. On the other hand, I have now completed painting all of the goblins and am most of the way through basing them. Pictures will follow when the bases are finished. I am looking forward to getting these figures onto the table now, although this time last week I was wondering if I would ever finish painting them.

One problem I have had with achieving my objectives this month has been our games of Koenig Krieg. We have played a couple of games this month and enjoyed them very much. The pre-game manoeuvring section of the rules is particularly fun, because you manoeuvre your brigades on 'blinds'. Each 'blind' is a large cardboard counter that represents a brigade. Depending upon the initiative level of your general, you may get a number of dummy blinds too. In short, you set up your 'blinds' so that only you know where your troops are and try to scout out the enemy forces and manoeuvre your own troops into a strong position for the attack. This makes each game different and very interesting.

Anyway, playing Koenig Krieg has led to me being distracted by my Great Northern War armies, so I have been fiddling with them, rebasing some of the figures and generally preparing them for more games, instead of painting Goblins and Normans. I have also realised that the armies at Helsingborg are too large to work comfortably with the Koenig Krieg rules. Therefore we plan to try Polemos:GNW this weekend and see if that suits us better. Failing that, I shall fall back on Volley and Bayonet, which are simple, fast rules and fun to play. They don't really have as much period flavour as I would like, but they do make for a great game that can be finished in a reasonable time. We shall still play Koenig Krieg because the rules are good fun, but our games will be smaller than the one I had envisaged.

Below is my Swedish army for Helsingborg in 1710. As you can see, the bases need finishing. The same is true of my Danish army for the battle, which is all painted but still needs the bases finishing. I propose to work on these armies as a secondary objective in February.
(Click the picture for a larger version)

All this focus on older projects and actually playing games using them, seems to me to embody the essence of thrift. I have had the Great Northern War armies painted for nearly 10 years now and have played maybe four or five games with them at most. This is due to a lack of opponents that were interested in the subject matter. With the emphasis now on using what I have and making the most of existing resources, this is the perfect time to work on completing a project that has lain dormant for ages. With the bases on the figures done, the next step will be completing the terrain, which is also half-finished and in storage at the moment. I hope it has not gone mouldy!