Last year I picked up the Forager skirmish rules via a Kickstarter...of course as usual I haven't actually played the rules although they look pretty good and I had an interesting chat with the authors at Salute. I was interested in how adaptable they might be for later periods such as Colonial: the authors weren't convinced that the mechanics and ranges etc would hold up for that period although I'm still fairly optimistic that they would work with minimal changes.
Actually my plans for Colonial skirmish is to use the Horse and Musket version of A Fistful of Lead. I've played a couple of excellent games of this at Eric the Shed's (Link) and they should work very well, especially for multiplayer games. We're planning to try this out next month so I'll need to get thinking about scenarios.
Back to Forager...the Kickstarter also included French, British and Guerilla figures (and Cacadores but I didn't sign up for them). The figures are interesting...quite chunky and caricatured and at first I wasn't overly impressed but actually they have grown on me and I've now painted them all up. They'll make a useful addition to my Napoleonic figures, either for Forager or for Sharpe Practice.
As it has been a wet Saturday I've also been working through some of the buildings that I'd picked up at Salute from TT Combat. Building things really isn't my strong point. I'm notoriously ham-fisted when it comes to any form of DIY.
The first of these to be completed is this 28mm Japanese Minka...I wasn't actually sure what a Minka was and when I googled it the first entry was an article on an American/Korean porn actress by the same name! After a bit more googling (and hoping my wife doesn't look too closely at my browsing history) I discovered that a Minka is a traditional Japanese house for farmers, artisans and merchants. It only took 30 minutes of so to stick it all together and I managed to avoid putting anything on back to front or upside down! TT Combat have instructions for some of their buildings (including this one) online but worryingly they don't have any instructions for their Cowboy range which are next in my building queue! This did seem fairly self-explanatory though so hopefully it will all make sense. The model comes unpainted but with some coloured card for the timber frame and the roof and I reckon needs little more done to it.
Next was a 4Ground 28mmWild West store. This looks a bit more impressive as it is pre-coloured but was, again, pretty straightforward to build. I did find that some of the lugs that fit the roof onto the main building didn't align very well so just chopped these off!
Finally we have a 15mm ruined house, again from 4Ground. I found this in my box of WW2 stuff when setting up for the game with Keith last week (see my previous post) and must have bought it a couple of years ago but had forgotten all about it. Again it all went together surprisingly smoothly. I have a good mind to send photos of these to my old woodwork teacher...I was asked to stop trying to make things in Woodwork classes as I was 'just wasting wood'. On second thoughts that might be a bit weird...
Those look great, the rules were a little to low level for what I had in mind, but teh figures are great. Cracking paint job Alastair.
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