Hex Acrylic Templates

   I am a big fan of Archduke Piccolo's Napoleonic campaigns, and have been thinking of trying to use his rules for a game. While leaning towards using 2mm blocks, I have also considered other scales.

  Archduke Piccolo's campaign uses hexes for movements. I wanted to come up with a 15 x15 hex board. I went to Google trying to find some hex templates. While looking through the illustrations, I noticed hexagon templates  for quilting. 

 These templates are heavy acrylic  hexes in different sizes, with holes to mark fabric, with an additional 1/4 inch for seems.

I went on Amazon and found an 8 pack of these templates, with measurements being 3/4",1",1 1/4", 1 1/2", 1 3/4", 2", 2 1/2", 3". The price for this set was $9.99! For me it's a dream come true. I have printed out several articles on how to make a hex board; usually requiring careful measurements. Even on my best days my ability of measuring is questionable.

Hopefully this will be helpful to other measuring challenged wargamers.

The acrylic hexes. A hex piece from "Battle Cry sets on top of the 1 inch hex, for scale.

The Battle Cry hex is on the 1 1/4 template. It shows the 1/4 seem allowance that each template has.

The bag the templates came on. I plan to hang them on my work area pegboard in this, so hopefully I won't  lose them. By the way, on Amazon they can be found by searching " Honeysew hexagon template quilting 8 size sewing rulers"

More Peter Laing Gifs

   We had a bad blizzard a couple of weeks ago.  The winds brought down lots of trees, including in my yard. This last week my wife and I spent many hours cleaning the damage. For me that meant cutting down very large branches into manageable sizes. 

  By night we were too tired to do much. One night I took some old pictures of Peter Laing figures from my blog and animated them.

This one I described as "Chariot riding through desert with Pyramids in background."

The resulting video.

This was "Elephant charges into battle with archers firing."

"Elephant and camel in desert sandstorm."

"Elephant gun with sailors enter mountain pass."

Charge of the Peter Laing Light Brigade

 We were hit by a bad Noreaster that dumped around 20 inches of snow and had winds of 70 MPH. Needless to say, we lost power for 3 days.

 It did give me time to get one wargame in that is going to be part of a mini campaign. I also played with the AI app. I thought of my Peter Laing Crimean War  Light Brigade to play with. Below is the result.

The first photo I used for the AI.

1st South Carolina Regiment

 I found another set of Edmunds Toy Soldiers at a reasonable price. A little research showed they are the 1st South Carolina Regiment. I believe they were stored where the original box suffered water damage (the seller didn't send the box) but still were a good buy.

I took these pictures to use with AI animations.

AI Distraction

 I'm slowly learning how to use the nauknauk app. I had tried to make the Vikings vs. Bunnies animation several times. The first couple of times I thought something went wrong, so I would retry to download the animation. Turns out I have three versions of that animation, with three different outcomes.

More AI Action

 After my last post about playing with AI animation, an animation popped up that failed to load the first time. It was my first attempt with Vikings vs Bunnies. I dare say this outcome was bad for the bunnies.

In the comments someone also mentioned if there was a way to lose the bases on the figures. While looking for some pictures from my blog to try to animate, I came across a picture of my Edmunds toy soldier collection in column formation. I put them on a piece of green felt, which match their stands. I decided to try this picture to see if the felt would camouflage the bases in the animation. It did a pretty good job, with only a few bases showing up.

The picture used for the animation.

Painting 15mm Falcon ACW Figures

 In the past I hesitated painting figures when I didn't have many of them. This means sometimes it would be years before I got the never just to start painting them. With my 15mm Falcon Miniatures I decided to paint a couple of units. Once I started I kept going, until I was down to 20 figures left to paint. 

Needless to say, the large purchase mentioned in an earlier post has given me more freedom in painting these figures.

I have been painting them as different militia units at the start of the war, with some liberties taken. 

When I won these figures, it started me thinking of going in a different direction with them. Another thing I started collecting are cigarette cards from the 1880s of militia uniforms of the United States. Being from Massachusetts, I have collected what I believe is most of the cards representing Massachusetts militia uniforms of the 1880s. My idea is to paint units of Militia based on these cards.

The first unit painted is the 2nd Corps Cadets Massachusetts Volunteer Militia.

New Falcon Civil War Reinforcements

 Last week in the middle of the night, I realized that it had been a long time since I checked Ebay for Falcon Civil War figures.

Next morning while drinking my morning coffee I went onto Ebay and found 8 Falcon ACW sets for sale. They were in lots of 2, and priced reasonably enough that I just bought all four lots. There were 5 sets of infantry that I didn't have, and 3 sets of cavalry. 

I was a little disappointed that there were no command packs or special sets such as militia or USCTs, but that is minor. With the cavalry I got two sets of cavalry in hats with shotguns. As my cavalry will be units of three, using Battle Cry size units, that will give me two units with two spare horsemen. I am thinking of converting these two figures into generals for both sides.

I was concerned that when I first opened the box, several of the packages had some kind of residual in the package. I was afraid it was "lead rot" (although after I read that they are made with the finest lead free pewter). After opening the worst of lot, I realized that it was just the foam in the package had disintegrated.

AI Toy Soldier Action

 After seeing several videos of animated toy soldiers on Facebook, I wanted to give it a go.

The first picture I used for animating.

This last one was really fun; Vikings vs Bunnies.
The animations mpeg videos: I converted them to gif, as I've used gif files before and if I want I can get individual pictures from them. I just hope this won't distract me too much from my gaming, as I was just getting back on track with my 2mm games.

Another 2mm Midnight Madness Wargame

The two armies drawn up. Red is the aggressor.

End of turn two. I decided at this point to take a photo at the end of each turn, more for my own pleasure than for blog.

End of 4. First blood to blue army.

End of turn 5: red has lost 3 infantry and 1 cavalry to blue's loss of 1 infantry and 1 cavalry.

Turn 6, action picks up. It's a bad turn for red; they lose half their cavalry 

Turn 7 for red: I do something I have never done in a game. I spend red's turn consolidating their line and try to bring up reinforcements.

Blue gathers their forces to launch an attack on their right.

Turn 10: blue's attack on the right is devastating.  Red loses three infantry units.

Turn 11: Red launches a counterattack on the blue cavalry on their left. The red battery eliminates one cavalry unit, another is force to retreat.

The blue's artillery fire on the strong red artillery and infantry with great effect. 2 infantry units eliminated and the 2 artillery batteries are forced to retreat.

The beginning of turn 12. Red has lost over 50% of the army. I had decided a turn 8 to have 12 turns in this game (so I could go back to bed!) Red could continue to fight and maybe do a little more damage to blue, but then would've been exposed to blue's return fire. They chose to retreat.
This game has me thinking of starting a campaign game. I have already started to work it out in my mind: now to start putting it to paper.