French Refurb Project - Getting Organised

The bewildering thing about a big refurb project is that every time I look in a known box of figures I find when I count them that the number is not what I thought it was last time. On occasions, this is because a new box has materialised somewhere else - one which I have forgotten about. It is possible for the effort of trying to keep track of what I'm doing to become so great that it leaves little time or energy for doing whatever it was I was supposed to be doing.

Enough.

The refurb figures which are painted and finished are now properly mounted on magnetised bases, and everything is logged on a proper spreadsheet. If I leave gaps on the bases where the figures are missing, or still being painted, then I can see at a glance where I'm up to. Another (cunning) advantage of this approach is that if on a short evening I decide to paint half-a-dozen figures, I can plan exactly where they will go, which is a considerable help with stuff like company pompom colours - not to mention motivation.

When a unit is actually complete, I finish off the bases, supply an official 110mm x 110 sabot, give 'em a flag, and they move from the box-files to The Cupboard, ready for warfare. Snapshots of this morning's state show two box-files in use - one for the Hinton Hunt and Der Kriegsspieler battalions and one for the Les Higgins battalions. The figures are not incompatible, but I keep them separate for historic reasons which are a bit dim and distant now.

Higginses on the left, HH/DK on the right. The big brown areas are where I've got masses of rank-&-file on bottletops in a big Really Useful Box, being worked on; the smaller brown areas are usually because I'm missing a command figure or a flanker (which may, of course, be on a bottletop as well) - there is a general shortage of drummers for the HH/DK units at present - I'm hoping to make use of some Schilling castings to plug the gaps.

And here are the boxes the other way up, so you can see I have nothing up my sleeve. A lot of the DK figures are ex-Steve Cooney. The furthest-away columns in the left hand box are ex-Eric Knowles Hinton Hunts - waiting only for drummers - I believe I have some proper HH drummers lined up for these. Nerds with exceptional eyesight may detect some HaT plastic eagle-bearers in the right-hand box. That's how desperate things have become in the world of 20mm French light infantry. It's OK. Everything is beautiful in its own way.

In addition to this lot, the recently-arrived Freitag Battalion flashed through to completion without loitering in the boxes, so that's already in The Cupboard. I have two further battalions away in foreign parts, being worked on, I have two battalions of Higgins figures on my own bottletops, being retouched in the evenings, I have three Higgins light infantry battalions waiting to be started (though they look pretty good to start with, so that might not be a big job - put your hand up if you've heard this song before), and a further Higgins battalion which is currently scheduled to be retouched as the 3eme Suisse, though I may have a change of heart and transfer them into the French army (which would involve stripping and repainting from scratch). Then there is a mass of DK figures - also on bottletops, which are in the current queue. I also have some (small) shipments of command figures coming from Art Miniaturen and Old John, plus a trial pack from Newline, to see if I can live with undersized drummer boys. And I have some command figures at a painter.

Yo.

After that, I am hoping to slow right down on the French army. I have Higgins figures for yet another light battalion (though no command at present) and also for a battalion of Young Guard voltigeurs (same situation). I am going to have to train myself to stop buying old figures I don't really need. What happens is that the planned army establishment gets a hike to accommodate the extra figures, and it all justifies itself. So all I have to do is stop.

Easy. What could go wrong?

Anyway, organisation is the key at the moment.

Coming Up - Ney Day?

There's a great deal made of anniversaries these days. The great thing about an anniversary is that we know when it's coming round, so the media people can prepare something in advance, during slack periods. Sometimes these anniversaries can seem a bit contrived, or they commemorate something that isn't very interesting, or that nobody has heard of (which is a special case of "not very interesting", I suppose).

Recently it was the 54th anniversary of my Uncle Harold accidentally reversing into the lady next door's car, in Bromborough. The stature of this anniversary is limited by the fact that very few folk who knew of the incident at the time are still alive, and those who are cannot remember it anyway, so it is unsatisfactory on a number of counts - not helped by the fact that no-one was hurt.

No - we have to aim higher. This post is all the Duc de Gobin's fault, by the way, since he reminded me of the classic Waterloo film from 1970. Subsequently I was browsing around the subject of the movie - online, like - and I discovered that Dan O'Herlihy, the Irish actor who played Marshal Ney in the movie, was born on 1st May 1919. If Steiger will always be the true Napoleon to many of us, then for me O'Herlihy will forever be the iconic Ney, the man who told the Emperor to abdicate, for goodness' sake. You can't get any more important or influential than that - though it surprises me that I never saw O'Herlihy, as far as I know, in anything else. It has been suggested that they had to pay so much to secure the services of Steiger, Plummer and Orson Welles in the Bondarchuk movie that they economised by filling the rest of the cast with lesser lights - first-rate actors who were less well-known. And Terence Alexander, of course. 

Anyway, this means we are fast approaching the 100th anniversary of the birth of The-Man-Who-Played-Ney. I don't expect this to get into the BBC Radio 4 world news on 1st May, so I guess I'll have to commemorate Ney Day privately. I can always watch Waterloo again, of course, with a mug of cocoa, but I'd welcome any good ideas about a suitable way of celebrating.

Any thoughts?

To get myself in the mood, here's the classic opening sequence, in which we discover that Napoleon's Marshals were trained to speak in turn, in the best traditions of panto, that Marshal Soult was a Scotsman (played by an Italian actor), that Napoleon wore specs and that Marmont was a rotten scoundrel. Great stuff. Love it.

***** Late Edit *****

Scrapbook stuff, courtesy of the Interweb.

Ney (Michel, not Dan the Man) was born in Saarlouis, which these days is in Germany - his birthplace is now an Italian restaurant, but the situation is rescued by the fact that its address is 13 Bierstrasse, which is more like it. I don't know if the restaurant is the original building, but since his father was a cooper, it is no surprise that they had a big cellar.

Here's young Michel in the 4th Hussars, 1792.

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For King and Parliament - At Last a Proper Try-Out Game

Last week I finally (finally) managed to set up a range-finder game of For King and Parliament - Count Goya was kind enough to travel down from his estates up North to take part.

What follows is not a serious critical review of FK&P - since the game is becoming very successful and popular, and is played enthusiastically by a number of people whose taste and judgement I respect, anything I write here is likely to say more about me than it does about the game, and much has already been expressed about its merits. If you have not played it yourself, there is a good chance you will have seen one of the spectacular demonstration games at wargame shows in recent months. On the other hand, whether or not it suits me is - inescapably - an important personal criterion.

I did have some concurrent distractions going on in the Real World, which is a lame excuse really, but I found it quite difficult to get up to speed with the rules. I had no background involvement with its Ancient and Medieval father, To the Strongest (and I still reckon that makes a big difference to understanding the concepts). I found a lot of excellent ideas in it, and I very much liked the spirit in which the rules were written and presented. I have also benefitted, I must add, from some very kind after-sales consultancy from the co-authors, and from on-line friends and blog contacts who have played it already, so I have little or no justification for being obtuse.

It's not that the game is complex - it is a little unusual, maybe even quirky, in some respects, but that's all grist to the wassname. I found there was a lot to remember - a lot of exceptional combinations of things which need to be jotted down somewhere [example - although I thought I was OK with this one, I suddenly had a wobbly moment during our game - I was sure that when "Dutch" style horse attack "Swedish" style, the melee has to switch around so that the defenders become the attackers (in rule terms). Damned if I could find it in the rule-book in the heat of the moment, so we had to fix up a Convention of the Day. I was disappointed with myself...]

With all due respect, I have to say that the official QRS is among the three or four worst I have ever seen - it is verbose, yet it seems to avoid saying anything about combat, for example. I was very grateful for the inclusion of a very good index in the book though - I'd have been in big trouble without it.

I had real problems getting my head around the Activation Penalties rules, but it turned out that I was confused by a couple of errors in the worked examples in the book. I know that Ver 1.1 of the rules has these slips corrected. I have no problems at all with the gridded battlefield, that's all pleasingly straightforward (though Morschauser followers may object to the fact that I find square-based terrain a lot more alien than my usual hexes). The use of playing cards did not alarm me, provided I could keep the tabletop clutter down to acceptable levels - I have bought in supplies of half-sized patience cards, which helps a lot, and have tried to develop a very OCD regime for tidying up after each turn. One thing which is actually suggested in the rule book, and to which we should have attached more weight, is the need to keep the "To Hit" and "Save" cards physically separated from the "Activation" cards - it is important to keep the former on your baseline, and tidy them away immediately after play, and to keep the latter on the table, placed tidily alongside the unit or leader to whom they apply. My newly-developed house protocols also require the cards to be tidied and placed face down with each brigade when its activation is complete (so you can see which brigades haven't done anything yet this turn), and we tidy all cards away and shuffle them back into the deck when the player's turn is finished. This game includes a lot of potential for making a real mess with the playing equipment, which is aesthetically suboptimal and especially so if you use small figures like mine. You have to be able to take photos of your game, after all...

On the same theme, there is a lot of information to be carried around with the units. I was a bit alarmed at the outset with the potential for the game to become buried in counters. The systems are well thought out, no doubt, but I think it is necessary for each player to decide for himself how he keeps track of the unit info. I have a long-held hatred of off-table rosters, which I find distracting and which disrupt the on-table flow. I am also famously cack-handed when it comes to knocking over piles of tiddlywinks, or leaving the things adjacent to the wrong unit, which may be explained as the Fog of War, but doesn't help the already-confused.

I got a lot of help and good ideas from a number of people (to whom I have offered my thanks previously), and I adopted (to some extent pinched) a system of small, attached labels, laminated, on which records may be maintained in dry-wipe whiteboard pen. The labels actually worked out pretty well, though the magnetic attachment system proved unreliable - labels kept getting separated from their units, which was fiddly and inconvenient. I had hoped to avoid it, but I think I had better make proper sabots for the units to stand on - it will simplify moving, and tidy things up a lot. That's sort of pencilled in as a must-do.

One aspect of the game which I appreciated (perversely, maybe) is that to some extent it is an ideas toolkit - it is not overly prescriptive - there is a need for each player adopting the game to think seriously about how he will set it up physically - what size squares, how (and if) he uses playing cards, or chits-in-a-bag, or decimal dice, how he adopts (or adapts) the information counters system to suit his scales and his sense of aesthetics (and level of OCD).

I set up a decent-looking game the night before the arranged date, and spent some of the night worrying about it, so that first thing the next morning I came downstairs and cut the size of the game down by about half. That was a sound idea - we played very slowly, since we spent a lot of time with our heads in the book, but we did OK. As units collected "disorder" markers, their fighting effectiveness fell away, and for a while there was the impression of a relentless (occasionally bewildering) series of card drawings which for the most part didn't achieve anything. With more time and experience (and wisdom), of course, we'd have put more effort into pulling units back out of the action and attempting to rally them back into shape, in a more soldierly manner. The card play is entertaining - in a social game, there is good scope for associated banter and mock applause, etc, but for a solo game I am not so sure. It might be a grunt.

We didn't finish the game, but that wasn't the point. I am left with a recollection that, even in a small game, each player's turn is quite long, and it is easy to forget where you are up to, especially when units are fighting back in melee, or returning fire - I think I might try to add a little jotter system to remind me whose turn it is. We didn't use Victory Medals (though I strongly fancy the chocolate coins idea) - we counted backwards on my ex-billiards scoreboard.

Unfortunately, my period of induction to the game has coincided with some issues elsewhere, but for a couple of months the rulebook has accompanied me on train journeys and so on, and has been my bedtime reading matter. It is a genuine relief to have advanced as far as playing a game - I have a better feel for what is involved now, I can put some more focused effort into setting up the next game. I can also put the bloody book away for a few weeks and think about something else!

The game is good - it is not the life-changing experience some might have hoped for, but it will doubtless become more familiar and more intuitive. My first impressions are a bit mixed, but overall probably more favourable than my first efforts at Commands & Colors, which has become a way of life for me now!

Some pictures follow - I won't attempt any kind of logical narrative, since it was a rules try-out, and there isn't one. Apologies for the cut-price scenery - I'm working on it.

The trial game - if the cards behave themselves, and co-operate, you can get a lot done in a single turn, and move some of your units a long way

Horse - we adopted a convention that "Swedish"-style (galloper) horse deployed as a line of 3 bases, and "Dutch"-style as a column of 4

Foot getting up close

General view - our trial game was a little sparse (intentionally so) - note the face-down cards, tidily denoting that each brigade has finished its business for this turn, and the little pile on the left is the used "To Hit" and "Save" cards - very confusing if these get mixed up. Parliament on the left here, with the red cards.

No Victory Medals for us - too mean, for one thing - just the old scoreboard waiting patiently for some action

This and the remainder of the photos are here under false pretence - this is the original, larger game I set up the night before, which would have been nice to look at but a really bad idea for getting to grips with the rules.

 

In passing, note that the ploughed fields were cut from a pair of needle-cord trousers I had in about 1970. Astonishing that I cut them to fit the square grid I would adopt for this game nearly 50 years later. What planning has gone into this hobby, now I think about it.

As always, I use undersized buildings to help with the ground-scale anomalies - 15mm Hovels buildings here, with 20mm men, laid out on 7.5-inch squares (or boxes, as we say in FK&P). Plenty of wine handy, but the Puritans won't touch it, of course. The rules are within easy reach, too - the "corners-only" phantom grid markings work nicely.

 

eBay/PayPal - Glitch Department - Be Very Afraid...

Short post about a potential misadventure I had this week. Hopefully everything is sorted out now, but it bothers me because it looks like a security bug in PayPal, which would be a huge confidence shaker. I use PayPal quite a bit these days for all sorts of online purchases, and if I have any doubts about its sanctity I shall drop it like a hot potato.

A few days ago I completed a routine purchase on eBay - large, reputable seller I've dealt with before. Paid via my PayPal account, and received all the usual confirmations and "order completed" mails from eBay. As ever, I filed them away in the "eBay" folder - just in case - you know how it is. As ever, I didn't really look at them. After I'd filed the order details, I suddenly realised that there had been something odd about some of the information on the last document. So retrieved it and - sure enough - the delivery address was someone in London who is not me. I've never heard of this person, or had any dealings with them. I checked my PayPal account, found the payment entry, clicked on the details, and there it was again - everything was correct except the delivery address.

I mailed the seller, who is a decent, helpful chap, and explained the situation - he has agreed to send the package to my correct address, so no further worries there. The wider implications are a bit scary, though.

It seems that, as part of a routine PayPal settlement for an eBay purchase - a situation which must occur zillions - possibly even brazilians - of times every day, PayPal has correctly made payment to the seller, but has supplied him with an incorrect delivery address. From someone else's account, it seems.

Some thoughts:

* what if I hadn't spotted it? - the parcel would have gone to a complete stranger, though the seller would have no cause to suspect that anything has gone wrong. As far as I am concerned, the parcel would simply never have reached me. Another mystery of the sea.

* more worryingly, if this is a glitch in the PayPal security system, what else could go wrong? How much does this shake my confidence in PayPal? How likely am I to use it again, for anything?

I've now changed my passwords for eBay and PayPal, as one does, and I've emailed PayPal to report the incident. It isn't a catastrophe, I've caught the problem before any damage was done, the amount of money involved was not large anyway - no need to dramatise. The big problem is that I really do not wish PayPal to have frailties, or make mistakes. I use PayPal because it is convenient, provides a level of confidentiality between me and the seller, and because it is not one of the Bastard Credit Card Companies. If my faith is compromised, I shall change my habits - that's for sure.

Of course, PayPal have not yet replied, and they may send me a perfectly reasonable explanation and appropriate reassurance, but at the moment I am hard pressed to think what they could possibly say that would make me feel comfortable.

Just saying. If you use PayPal to pay for an eBay purchase - or anything else for that matter - recommend that you check very carefully all the documentation that you receive, including details of where your package will be sent.

If anything further develops, I'll stick a little post up here.

***** Late Edit *****

OK - I received an email message from PayPal explaining how I may amend my postal address if it is incorrect. No help - not what I was looking for. On Tuesday, once the Easter weekend was over, I emailed them again and explained that they had missed the point of my previous message, or had possibly not looked for any point in it, and that I had serious concerns over security.

Very quick email reply from them asked me to phone them - the number was a free UK 0800 number, but I was speaking to people in the US. Heavy going - they were going to reverse the eBay transaction and do all sorts. We sorted that out - they understood that I had sorted out shipping details with the seller, and that primarily I was worried about how the PayPal address for someone else had been supplied to the seller for my purchase.

PayPal staff said they were confident that a default shipping address had been supplied from somewhere else, and it had suppressed the request for the address from my PayPal account, but that this must be due to a fault in eBay's completion software, or in some website application used within the seller's online shop. As we say in Scotland, it wusnae them, whatever. They also said they will raise it as a potential security issue, so that the software people may include it in future reviews.

They assured me that it won't happen again, but I can promise I will be checking very carefully the details of any PayPal transactions I take part in for a while. Really not very happy about all this.

Anyway - move on - let's find something else to worry about; however, the more they tell us that nothing can go wrong, the more disturbing it is when something does.

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Hooptedoodle #332 - Where Are We, Anyway?

This follows on from a conversation I had with the Contesse, which rambled around the (supposedly) related topics of spatial awareness, how we find our way to somewhere (in a car, for example), and the impact of satellite navigation systems, both on our lives and the way we think about travel.

I was very interested to consider the different approaches to this - that's the wrong wording - "how we think about it" is better. I also realised that since I moved to live in the country I have changed my own thought patterns.

If you are flying an aeroplane, or sailing a boat in the open sea, then the information you need to get to somewhere is likely to be a direction - a magnetic bearing. You will have to conform to accepted legal sea-lanes and so on (which is a bit like streets, I guess), but otherwise the actual direction of travel is the important item - and maybe whether you have enough fuel to get there.

On the ground it isn't like that.

Street Map - follow the Yellow Brick Road

 I grew up a townie. Lived in cities for years. When I was a kid, we didn't travel as much as we do now, and we tended to stick to our own locality. If I needed to go further than usual, all I really needed to know was which bus to catch, and where it stopped - then it became the driver's problem to get me there. When I started cycling, I found that to visit my uncle in Woolton I needed to know more than the simple fact that the no.73 bus went there - I needed to know an actual route. That route might start off by being very similar to the route which the bus took, but it would get refined to avoid (or take advantage of) particularly steep hills and dangerous bits, and to shorten the trip as much as possible. The route I would learn would consist of a string of street names and turning instructions, and it would be tweaked to be suitable for a young chap on a bicycle.

Go to the end of Rose Lane, turn left into Allerton Road, go along until the right turn at the junction with Queens Drive, and go along Menlove Avenue for about 3 miles, turn left into Woolton Village High Street, go over the hill and bear right after that into Manor Way... and so on.

The instruction set would be a string of information not unlike what your sat-nav will tell you - names of streets, and when to turn into the next street. If I got lost, on my bike, or if one of the streets was closed for roadworks, for example, I might know enough about the area to be able to improvise, or I might take an educated guess, or I might need to look at a street map if things got tricky.

When I am driving my car to somewhere by a route I do not know well, if I pull over for a break along the way and someone asks me "where are we?", the odds are I won't actually know. I can look at the display on the sat-nav, and it might tell me that I can expect to be in Worcester at 17:14, and it might tell me that I am driving on the A6, and the next turn is in 8.7 miles. As to where we are - unless I have a rough idea from other knowledge, or there is a sign of some sort, or something distinctive to use as a landmark, I don't really know. Obviously that is not something that I absolutely have to know for the purposes of this stage of this journey. Unless something goes wrong.

Sat-nav explains things in terms of the streets - safest way if you're a stranger in these parts

If something goes wrong, then I had better have a road atlas in the car, or be able to ask someone who knows the area. If, during my break from driving, I phone someone and they ask me where I am, I may only be able to give them a rough idea - I'll know where I'm headed for, I may know how far I've driven, or how long I've been driving for, but apart from these I would need some familiarity with the area to offer an opinion. This becomes suddenly rather important if the stop is because I have broken down, and I need to request the rescue service to help me. I might be able to tell them "I'm on the A6, somewhere just south of Shap", or my mobile phone might be able to offer me a GPS reading.

Otherwise, then, we normally know where we are hoping to get to, how long it will take, how long we have been going, and that's probably about it.

When I was a boy I was fascinated by maps - I used to stare at random pages in the family's big Times atlas, and spot some unknown little town in India, and wonder who lived there, and what they were doing at this moment (I did once wonder what were the chances that someone in that town was, at that very moment, looking at a map and wondering who lived in Liverpool - I was a rather odd child). It would be possible to spot all the villages off the A6 as they passed through the sat-nav screen, and maybe even to wonder who lived there, but that sounds a rather stressful way to pass a journey.

Righto. Almost 20 years ago I moved to the country. You can forget street names, for the most part, unless you are in a village. The sat-nav will tell you that you are driving on the B1904, perhaps, but that means nothing - no-one knows the road by that name. A journey, I find, has stopped being a succession of streets and has become a string of places I am going to travel through. Thus if I wish to drive from my house to the Flight Museum at East Fortune, for example, I know that I will travel via Auldhame, Halfland Barns, Blackdykes, Leuchie, Balgone Barns, Kingston, Congleton Mains, past the garden centre at Merry Hatton and then to East Fortune. These places will be villages, farms, big houses, sometimes a lake or a quarry, whatever - the focus is on the places themselves rather than the names of the roads which connect them - mostly the names of the roads are meaningless, unless they are fairly big roads. Many of the roads look similar, in fact. I got to know the area by doing a lot of cycling and from a period during which I used to distribute a community magazine. The places I know by their names are the nodes of some form of mental map, I guess, rather than the connectors. As part of my knowledge of each place, I also know where all the roads out of that place go to, so I can build a route as a series of hops between locations.

In the country the places themselves become important - this isn't just a change of scale, it's a different thought process

This is a completely different way of finding your way around. As a by-product, it suddenly dawned on me (after a lifetime of not having dawned on me) that the reason so many towns on the British mainland have a London Road is not because everyone wanted to name one of their streets after the beloved capital, but because it is (or was) the way you got to London by horse from there. Street names are mostly decorative these days - Acacia Avenue, or Widdrington Crescent (named after some glory-grabbing Victorian town councillor) - the idea that a road's name might commemorate the fact that it once had a useful function did not occur to me until I lived somewhere they had very few streets. Duh.

Entirely Separate Topic 

This afternoon we went for a walk on the farm - it was a very fine day - very pleasant. Near the cliffs at Tantallon we saw a raven. We know they are around, but very seldom see one. Apologies for the not-brilliant photo - this was on a mobile phone, and the bird was some distance away, but there is no mistake. Raven. South-east Scotland, April.

French Refurb Project - The Freitag Battalion

What better use for a new flag than to stick it on a new unit? I am delighted to welcome The Freitag Battalion - much travelled, and very kindly painted by Jonathan - a very big help indeed with shifting the backlog, and excellently done too.

These are the first battalion of the 26eme Ligne, who will form part of Ferey's 3rd Divn of the Armee de Portugal of 1812. For the casting nerds, the rank and file here are Les Higgins figures from the 1970s, all stripped and recycled, and probably very pleased to find they are back on duty. As always with Higgins figures, it's a challenge to find compatible command - the officer in the second row and the porte aigle are Qualiticast, the colonel and the drummer are from Art Miniaturen and the officer at the back is by NapoleoN.

Many thanks to Jon - this is really very much appreciated, and they will make a fine addition to my army.

French Refurb Project - More Homebrewed Flags

This morning I've been fiddling away with good old Paintshop Pro, making up flags for the new units which my Refurb Project will deliver. I'm quite excited for a number of reasons, but one in particular is that I had a Good Idea - it had to happen eventually.

I've had a problem for a few years in that the old-fashioned coated-on-one-side-only high quality print paper which I used for flags went out of production. When I asked about it, I just got blank looks - there had never been any such thing (a bit like the 20mm Hinchliffe Napoleonic artillery pieces, in fact). So I've been struggling a little since then with available papers. The advantage of the single-sided stuff (provided you put it the right way round in the printer, of course), is that you can get it thinner than the two-sided paper, and it is more flexible. This means it will produce nice curvy flags without creasing - when the PVA dries you have a splendid standard, fluttering in the breeze. [How lovely]

The Good Idea was that I remembered that I have a large envelope full of spare flags which I have printed in the past on this extinct paper, and these are mostly printed 2 flags to a sheet of A4, with the flags in diagonally opposite corners. I was shaving when it occurred to me that each of these sheets has a large unprinted space in the middle, so that all I have to do is overprint some of these old sheets with new flags in the centre of the page, and it will be just like 2011 once again.

You will understand my excitement.

So this morning's flags are ready to be printed and - just in case they are of any use to anyone - here they are. These are 1804 pattern flags, as you see, for units in the 3rd and 6th Divisions of the French Armee de Portugal in 1812, which comprise the planned extension to my army. For 1/72 (approx) I like my French infantry flags to be about 15 to 16mm high.

If you wish to use them, please do so. A couple of notes:


* Click on the image and save the big version.

* Experiment with the print scaling to suit your figures - I wouldn't recommend these for anything bigger than 1/72

* The individual flags in the image are only roughly lined up by eye, so I recommend you cut them out singly - don't try to cut a row at one go!

* If you pass them on, or become famous using them, that's no problem, but please mention where you got them. [Usual deal]




***** Late Edit *****

I hadn't realised that Blogger would restrict the file size for the flag sheet - if you want the bigger version, it's available at Google Drive via this link. Any problems with access or download, please leave a comment here or email.

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