If You Go Down To The Woods Today....

My weakness of mind was again highlighted last Saturday at the Battlefront Show in Stockton. I was helping out doing demos on the Hawk stand, when I was suddenly taken by a stupid and irrational urge to start a new period.

Typically the seeds had been sown by an old gaming friend Mark Hadman as we talked about gaming trends, and generally bemoaned the state of the gaming world. High on our agenda was the problem of finding opponents and opportunities to play games we wanted. Both of us had come to the same conclusion by different routes - that we had to diversify and play games that are popular, even if we don't particularly have a lot of enthusiasm for them. In passing Mark mentioned he had played Muskets & Tomahawks, and that it was a good, fun and easy to play game.

I never held a lot of enthusiasm for the black powder period. To me, Napoleonics may as well be a funny sort of three coloured ice-cream. the American War of Independance & French Indian Wars also were low on my hit list, although I did enjoy playing Andy Callan's superb "Loose Files & American Scramble" rules. However, Mark's comments also happened to coincide with another club member (John) wanting to play AWI. John has been trying to whip up interest for a year  or so without success. It seemed like maybe I could tie both these threads together, so after some cajoling I also roped my regular opponent Paul in, and we set of to see Dave Thomas to do "a deal". After the usual horse trading cash changed hands and we walked away with a couple of boxes of Perrys AWI ,  some Wargames Factory AWI Militia, and a North Star British Wilderness Starter Force for the FIW. Clearly our planning and coordination were not what they should be as when we finally sat down to assess our haul of plastic and lead we discovered we had forgotten the French!

Part of the plan is to get these painted and on the table fast, so I immediately got to work on some Indians, assisted by loaning a copy of the BBC series "Last of the Mohicans" with Phillip "Dont tell him your name Pike!" Madoc playing Magua, and here they are ! Not the greatest paint jobs but they'll do for me

Six down - still need basing etc bit not a bad start. That leaves me with 16 more British Rangers and an Officer to paint, so watch this space