What a Tanker dashboards

At the last Trumpeter meeting at Bonsor, I tried out What A Tanker, the latest bit of fun from Too Fat Lardies, thanks Craig for hosting!  The game is great fun, fast playing with lots of decisions for the player to try.  When I got home, I logged on the interwebs and bought a copy of the PDF (and was fortunate to find that the Lardies were having a sale!).

One thing that Craig had commented on was a slight dissatisfaction with the dashboards.  Using tokens on the boards can be a bit risky as if the board is bumped, the pieces can slide around, leaving questions of where each marker was before the bump.  My idea (we'll playtest this upcoming Friday) was to cut out a couple of sheets of cork board and use push pins to keep things in place.

I suspect a new dashboard will be needed for each game as they will get repeatedly punctured over the course of a game, but they'd likely need to be replaced anyway if (for example) it becomes necessary to record damage. 

PS - I didn't mean to print out WAT twice! The PDF crashed the printer first time, so I only have one full copy, plus the first attempted print that only printed about half the pages!

Grenadiers WIP

For my Great Northern War Russian Army, I decided that I want grenadiers with grenades, in active poses, but, alas, I was not able to find any readily available.  So instead, I decided to make my own!  

Starting with the WGF plastic WSS Artillerymen as a base, and with lots of bits from other WGF WSS plastic sets generously shared by Doug and Kevin, plus a supply of pewter grenadier heads from Ebor, I have fabricated these:

Torsos don't match exactly.  I considered adding a bit of modelling putty to fill the gap, but I don't think I'll need that.  Once these are painted, the overlap won't be easy to see.

I used Ebor heads to match the Repnin Grenadiers I'd already painted:  https://willstoysoldiers.blogspot.com/2018/05/grenadiers-for-peter-greats-army.html

Grenadier mitres come in a distracting variety of styles. I'm not judging which is best and I'm certainly not ready to research the exact style of mitre used in this army, but I do want to be consistent.  The mitre here supplied by Ebor matches the mitre shown in the Osprey Man-at-Arms book so it's good enough for me.

Ingermanlandski Regiment

I'm still here, despite having not posted anything in about 6 months!  Here is the latest unit to join Peter the Great's army, the Ingermanlandski Regiment.  My original plan was to paint the whole army with the traditional "green coat and red turnbacks" but then I started to find references to various different coat and turnback colours for different regiments in Peter's army.  The yellow coats really stood out, so I knew I had to do them!

Then, once they were painted, I found this reference:  http://peter.petrobrigada.ru/unif/project3342/page23296.html

"In 1708 Tsar Peter wrote that green was the preferred color for soldiers' coats, however the diversity of uniform colors was considerable in Russian army of the Great Northern War period. They varied from such traditional shades like green, blue, white and red to more unusual like yellow (was proposed for Menshikov's Ingermanland Infantry Regiment in 1706 but it wasn't carried out)."

Well, I'm not going to repaint them!  They're going to add a nice bit of brightness to my army, and a quick check of other GNW blogs shows me that I'm in good company with my yellow-coat Ingermanlandskis!

I converted a few of the musketeers into pikemen, by carving away the musket and replacing it with a metal pike (liberated from pewter pikemen, who will now need to find pikes for themselves!)

Since Kevin and I started our GNW project with the idea of using "The Pikeman's Lament", I've organised the infantry so that they can be in units of 12.  Command are individually based to facilitate two units of 12 each, or they can be combined to a unit of 23.

Yes, that's right, 23.  I managed to lose one of the little buggers.  Maybe he'll drag his AWOAL ass back into ranks, or maybe I'll conscript soldier from another unit, or maybe I'll just live with one unit being one man short.