Making a Cossack

 So after making the casualties, I sculpted and cast a hooded minion for my pulp gaming. He turned out pretty well, and it occurred to me that the long robe would be a decent base for a Cossack figure. I started with a real basic design inspired by a decorative figure from a Beauplan map.

 

 

 

This one has a Gripping Beast head and an old Wargames Factory right hand and gun. I am working on sculpting some weapon hands and heads of my own, but realistically I am going to be using a lot of real bitz because they look better. Even so, these homemade miniatures are not going to be front-rankers, but with my long-term plans I'll eventually need hundreds of Cossack infantry, so they don't all need to be professional quality. Besides the heads and weapon hands, I've also made some variants of this body for, uh, variety, iteratively from this one like how this one was iterated from the minion.

I did notice my painting is even worse here than my normal standard, so I have since bought a pair of reading glasses. Hooray for being 40!

I have a box of Wargames Atlantic generic horsies on the way, once I have those I'll start working on Tatars, Polish noble levy, and pancerny, all of which I want in bulk.

Wanna See a Dead Body?

 So, one of the very first posts I ever did here was a couple of casualty markers. But since then, I haven't really kept up with that. However, playing my big birthday Tczew game, I definitely saw how some little dead guys might enhance the tabletop experience, even if ultimately I would still be using dice to track the specific numbers.

But even further back, way back to the mid nineties when I was in middle school, when I first encountered wargaming miniatures at all, one of my first reactions was that I wanted to sculpt my own. That also fell by the wayside for a couple decades, but when I was recently evaluating some battles I would like to recreate after Tczew, I realized that lots of them require large numbers of mediocre troops that are not available in plastic. So the idea of sculpting my own miniatures and casting them recurred to me.

Well, there's a bit of a learning curve with sculpting, so I decided to start with some dead guys for some low-stakes practice, and one of them turned out well, so I bought a casting kit to give that a shot as well.

Once the one turned out OK, I decided to make some variants - one with boots and gloves to represent a reiter, and a one with a bandolier to be a musketeer. The original mold I will use for pike casualties

I'm pretty pleased with the results! Additional castings will be fancied up with headgear, hands and weapons from real miniature kits for variety. Hopefully I can sculpt a full miniature soon that's worth trying a double-sided mold on.

Tczew Dirschau - more thoughts

 Now that I've had some time to reflect and recover, I can post something a little more detailed about my birthday Pike & Shotte game. Not a Battle Report though, the game did not proceed close enough to a conclusion, nor did I take the necessary notes or pictures to make it worthwhile. I had a lot of fun, and the players did too, but it was more of a miniature showcase and demo than a proper game.

Primarily, this is my fault. While I had tested and timed the terrain setup, I did not get a chance to do the same for the miniatures themselves, and it took much longer than I estimated to get the armies in place. Also, I had a nasty cold the week leading up to my birthday, so I did not have the time I had anticipated to re-read the rules or properly share them with the participants. So between the late start and the slow progress once we did begin, the game itself didn't really get exciting until just before we ran out of time/energy. 

Next time I will be more familiar with the rules, and also see if I can set-up the night before. Someday my wife and I will have a house with enough room to host such a game ourselves (and thus, set it up however far in advance we want), but until then, hopefully the local game store will be able to accommodate.

I am still extremely pleased with how everything looked, and with the historical background I was able to convey to the participants! Here are some pics from Chris, the overall commander of the Swedes.

Dirschau Accomplished

 So I ran Dirschau/Tczew for my birthday! Unfortunately a lingering cold the week before meant I wasn't as prepared as I wanted to be, so I too frazzled to take pictures or notes for a proper battle report, and things moved too slow to get to a proper conclusion. Nevertheless everyone had fun, so I call it a success anyway!

My sibling-in-law took this neat pic:

That's me in the Godzilla shirt (definitely check out Godzilla Minus One if you haven't) and the Swedish battalia commanders, also shows off Prism Games nicely.

I'll probably try the game again next year, under more controlled (less birthday partyish) circumstances. 

More Tczew stuff

 Been making lots of progress with terrain, movement trays and other miscellaneous aspects of the game. Less than two weeks!

Test run on the tables at the local game store where I'll be celebrating.

Roads and more/better swamps pending, and maybe some clutter for the camps and villages, but otherwise the terrain is pretty much sorted.

A Potocki (can't remember which one it is at Tczew), first Polish Commander I ever made.

Marcin Kazanowski

I've read that Mikolaj Abramowicz should probably be in western garb, I do have a mini in mind to replace this one but we'll see if I get it painted in time.

Johan Baner

Herman Wrangel

Graf von Thurn, one of my favorite conversions.

Put a wet bit on Koniecpolski's base, since his army's deployment zone has swamps in it.

Adolphus gets a fence to jump over, to disguise the support for his horse.

I saw a discussion on the Via Regia blog about how Koniecpolski wouldn't have had a banner, which I took as an excuse not to bother with banners for any commanders. Just musicians, sorry! The overall commanders each get a clergyman to make them seem more important.

Vignette for the Swedes

 Just a little something I put together for the invite to my birthday party.

Mat for Tczew

 I'd been toying with maybe doing a teddy-bear fur style grass mat, and it just so happened that I encountered a likely item on my most recent trip to TJ Maxx. $40 for a 7.5' x 7.5' chenille blanket in a light and natural-looking color, and it looks like it takes paint pretty well too! 

(A google maps image from the vicinity of the battlefield)