Three "Finds"

It always pays to dig through your old stuff. Though the "CinC Lead Gardens" often accuses me of hoarding, my boxes of gaming stuff and my pile of files gleaned from the internet are, to my mind, rich veins of "cool" to be regularly mined. Today I've got three things that I recently unearthed.

The first was an electronic copy of "The History of the Seven Years War in Germany" by Johan Wilhelm von Archenholz that I had saved a few years ago. It is available free on the internet, I think both from "Project Gutenberg" and from "Google Books". A few days ago I found the file and started looking it over and really got excited by the wealth of scenario ideas the book offers for 18th century gaming. Though the book is a sweeping history of the war, it also deals with incidents and small actions revolving around individual leaders and situations like defending supplies, holding bridges and the like. So I thought it warranted having a hard copy so it arrived in the mail yesterday!...and some good summer reading is in the offing.

The second cool thing (actually two things) that I found was inspired by my working up a proxy skirmish for AJ over at the "Hetzenberg Chronicles". The scenario requires a few 18th century gunboats and a pair of sentry posts, so I did a bit of digging and found a couple of plastic boats that I had got on ebay a few years ago in an out of print pirate game from Pressman. These boats are just the right scale for gaming and only require a bit of modification to get good results. I made a colonial dhow with one of the three I have, but the other two have sat in a box until now. The dhow will be pressed into service for the upcoming proxy battle as is but the other two are going to get finished this weekend as 18th century gunboats of the Hetzenberg flotilla! The sentry posts are files that I had saved from the "Junior General" site where lots of nice paper figures and terrain are available for free. These card stock sentry posts were a snap to construct and I scaled them to RSM figure proportions. I reinforced the roof with illustration board and added a 40mm square base and simply drew on some paving stones and it was done.

Here the boats are under construction...you can see where I have clipped off all the original plastic projections on the decks prior to adding deckplanks made of wood coffee stirrers requisitioned from our local Starbucks.

And finally, one of my readers commented on a redoubt shown in an older post and it inspired me to dig out some of the 54mm figures that the redoubt came from. These are AWI figures and were available at "Toys r Us" in a playset that is no longer available but can be found on ebay pretty easily. The castings are a bit clunky, but with some care I think would work just fine...another "someday" project.

A test unit of American infantry using figures from the set.