American Generals and a Bit of Rebasing

With our fabulous week of gaming over and rapidly receding into distant memory it has been a long week, made seemingly longer by five days of software vendor presentations at work.

All these distractions have played havoc with my painting schedule, made worse by the fact that the lead pile is flat and orders placed to replenish it are still at least seven days away from delivery. Those same distractions caused me to overlook an event that would once have excited me - slipping past 200,000 visits to my blog. But as all bloggers know today such statistics mean very little since the Viagra advertisers and the bots from other dubious locations started worming their way through the blogger sphere.

Nonetheless I have had some items to paint. These were the Wargames Foundry American War of 1812 generals required for the recently played War of 1812 game that arrived too late (and with two horses missing I might add). So here they are, two mounted and four dismounted commanders. Two more mounted figures will join this set when the missing horses arrive.

Thanks to some miserable weekend weather I spent a bit of time rebasing some figures. These are the Crimean War British cavalry that I had painted back in 2016. So why rebase them? Well first of all I have committed to put on a Crimean War game at next year’s Tarawera gaming week and while that is still a long way off it has prompted me to look at completing the Heavy Brigade, the figures for which are back in production. Second, these regiments were originally organized in units of six figures and based two to a stand whereas my preference is to have three to a stand. So for the sake of consistency there was a need for change. Then I had the rather alarming thought that two stands of three made pretty small units and did I need to expand the size of these units?

Fortunately the answer to that question is no because the British only took two of squadrons of each regiment on the expedition and by the time they landed in the Crimea they had been ravaged by disease (which is why at Balaclava all five regiment of the Light Brigade counted only 668 officers and men), so two stands is not an unreasonably sized unit. It does mean, however,  that the Russian units, that were historically larger, will need expanding and the figures for that expansion have been ordered along with the Heavy Brigade troopers.

So here is rebased the Light Brigade.