I've now assembled the battlefield, which may be fudged slightly to get the soldiers in. I had a great idea for representing the famous Vieux Pont, but alas I was outsmarted by the fact that the bits didn't fit together as I had hoped. Never mind - I did (briefly) consider some brave scratchbuilding with spare MDF and porridge, but wimped out.
The soldiers can stay in their Cupboard and boxes until the day before the game (the game is Wednesday), to keep the dust and the sunlight off them - I have a sketch map showing who goes where, so that shouldn't take long. My house may be a shambles, but my soldiers are immaculate.
An empty Commands & Colors battlefield is an odd sight; this is the view from the North East, the French will be defending the long edge on our right here. This is the 10'4" x 5' version of my battleboard
Here, on the French right flank, you see the village of St Boès and its church
View from behind the Allied left, with St Boès at this end and Orthez at the far end. You get extra points if you spotted a couple of spare pieces of Mothercare's interlocking Safeplay floor leaning against the radiator. My table is based on a substratum of these - good for stability and sound insulation (in case the people who live under the table are disturbed by the warfare)
The scenery will not win many awards - here is my cheap-and-cheerful impression of the iconic bridge at Orthez. The 4 arches have become 1, the central tower has moved to one end. It is still unuseable, though, since the bridge and the archway have been blocked up with masonry, and one of the arches has been mined (see if you can guess which one). You will observe that by 1814 France had sunk to a state where all the stonemasons had been sent away to fight in the war.
The stage is set, actors to be added next week, then the players!
ReplyDeleteGood man - you can feel the excitement building, eh? Hope things good with you, Peter.
DeleteVery elegant setup, Tony. Enjoy your game!
ReplyDeleteThanks Jon - I'm looking forward to it.
DeleteTable looks good, looking forward to the battle commencing next week!
ReplyDeleteHi Donnie - you may notice that the buildings indicate that this is a very Spanish bit of France! I am rather short of authentic French buildings, so any further north and they'll be living in English Medieval stuff.
DeleteLooks like its gonna be a good game, just be careful of those people under the table. I find it best to deliberately drop some crisps or peanuts on the floor. That satisfies them here in Kent?
ReplyDeleteGood idea, but I live on a farm here Ray, so any peanuts under the table and there will be mice very soon afterwards!
DeleteGood looking table, Wednesday huh?
ReplyDeleteWednesday it is, sir. I'm stocking up on energy drinks and practising my heroic stare in the mirror.
Delete10"4" wide - I'm jealous but very much looking forward to the game report.
ReplyDeleteHi Rob - I have provisional plans for another extension - an extra 3-hex slice (to be added to the middle) would give me an extra 1'9", but would also get me up to a nice, round 20 hexes, which is appealing. Problems at present are (1) 1970-vintage 1/2-inch chipboard is very hard to get hold of these days, and (2) the extra table length would only be possible by removing the wine-table at the end of the room on battle days, and even then the players on the backside of the table would have to crawl under the field to take their position (hard to do this elegantly), so generals with weak bladders would have to stay on the door side (probably too much information, but necessary to think of these things...).
DeleteA yet bigger table? Normally I'd be all for it without a second thought - but losing the wine-table seems a bit drastic, how's chap to celebrate his triumph other than with a nice fruity Malbec?
DeleteThe bridge has merit (buttresses, by the looks of them), Tony, which is the main thing. Your terrain is lovely.
ReplyDeleteThank you sir - lots of Merit - you are right. Some of the stone walls and quite a few of the trees date back to a daft project I embarked on with a school chum (Hutchy, down the road at No.20 - you must remember Hutchy..?) to build a model railway layout in his dad's loft. This didn't last long, since I didn't get to play with it very much, and Hutchy's dad was peeved about the loss of his loft, so, before we fell out, Hutchy divided up our investment - he got most of the track and the rolling stock and I got the trees and the houses. I still have all the trees; I've added to them from eBay over later years, but they must be on this battlefield somewhere. The model railway episode dates back to about 1960. Hutchy later was a Physics lecturer at Manchester University - I believe he's dead now.
DeleteNever mind, I got the trees. There's a sort of monument in there somewhere. Years ago, when some of the trees were still kept in their original boxes, I remember that there was a price label on one box - one shilling and ninepence (that's £0.09 in new money), for 6 fir trees, purchased from Duffy's, in Rose Lane, Liverpool. I knew you'd want to know about this.
Looking good...Commands and Colours isn't a bad game when you substitute figures for blocks of wood or plastic, we have played a few games of that too in our time ( I play A LOT of different rule sets, most of them for four to six games at most before our gracious host discovers another set he wants to try!)
ReplyDeleteThanks Keith - yes, not a bad game at all.
DeleteGood looking terrain - looking forward to the battle report. Can Soult do better this time? :-)
ReplyDeleteHi David - since I am going to be on Soult's side in this game, I don't fancy his chances!
DeleteThis should be an interesting encounter. I like your solution of buildings and hexes where both troops and structures need to fit within the hex. I am attempting to do this but my hexes are a bit smaller than yours. The Spanish buildings are very attractive too.
ReplyDeleteThanks Bob - you know all this, but I use 20mm/"true 25mm"/1/72 figures - the infantry sabots are 110mm square - the table hexes are 180mm across the flats (that was 7" when I decided on this strategy in 1973) - the buildings are (sometimes smallish) 15mm/1/100 scale. I reminded myself when I was setting this game up (it's been a while for Napoleonics) that I also use a "squaring the hex" technique for setting out BUAs on my table, such that each BUA pinches a little space from neighbouring hexes so that everything fits OK - the write-up in my next blog post should show some examples!
DeleteMy collection of Spanish buildings includes a ceramic "ornament" I bought as a souvenir in Collioure, near Perpignan, Languedoc, years ago (decades, in fact). It looks Spanish!