The Boys of Summer

GdB  Guillaume Vendredi du Bonton, 6e Légère.

A disgraceful lack of new posts over the last quarter, but time for blogging has been at a premium these past few months.  With an office move in early October, as well as the usual increase in workload that comes about this time of year, work once again showed a blatant disregard for my hobby time (and sucked a lot of the life force from me in the bargain).   

On the home front, late last month the hard drive of my old- yet beloved- iMac G5 finally (and quite suddenly) bought the farm after years of sterling service.  

Thank the Gods I had gotten myself an external hard drive in June.  With all the data having been backed up properly using Mac's Timemachine, moving everything lock, stock, and barrel to my new MacBook Pro proved to entail a lot less bloodshed than I had anticipated.  But it was still tedious going.  Not everything was compatible with the new OS, in which cases I had to download a number of updates and/ or alternative applications.  A goodly number of weekends and evenings ended up being consumed getting everything up and running again.

Still, despite all this it was a relatively active summer on the gaming front, and I was able to get in a least some painting/ modelling time for our Napoleonic games, at least up to the end of the summer season.  October saw no gaming at all for me, but we had some classics in August and September.

It was the blogging that I really let slip.  I had intended to write up battle reports for the games we played, and took a lot of pictures with that in mind.  But you can't always find time for everything, and besides, I was rapidly getting fed up of typing away at computer keyboards and staring at monitors.   

But another games day approaches, and I'm beginning to get "the itch" for rolling dice and for mocking my opponent's martial blunders again.  The new computer is proving itself to be everything it promised, so what better time to update the blog with pictures from the games we played these past three months or so.

*****

As time marches on, and as memory plays false with all that happened in the whirling dust and fearsome noise of combat, I've now forgotten many of the details of how the games played out.   The more cynical of you out there may infer that this is a result of the French not having achieved, shall we say, their fullest potential (ahem...), but I'm sure none of my readers would be so ill-bred as to speculate publicly on such things.  

I can testify that they were great fun to play- and that the tabletop looked fantastic. 

So today, and in no particular order, I'll just post some selected eye-candy from our August and September slugfests. Rules used were, as usual, Warlord Games' Black Powder.

Prusskis and Crapauds duke it out over a farmhouse.

 

Muzzle-to-muzzle...

 

 

 

Prussians in the French rear.

 

 

Beaucoup des Frenchies.

"No magic spells?!?  What kind of game IS this!!!?"  
This was only Giovanni's second game of Napoleonics.

Commanders of Giovanni's new Bavarian contingent.

Giovanni has a thing for "retro" figures, and didn't hesitate to paint up and field these home-cast figures from Prince August Castings.

Although more like true 25mm figures, they turned out looking just fine on the tabletop alongside their more "sexy" Perry brethren.  Did creditably well, too...

...ditto these Hat plastic Bavarians.

Oktoberfest!

Lots of nicely painted troops, good looking terrain, and plenty of excitement, as in both games the fortune of battle ebbed back and forth until the very end.  Reputations made and lost, cowardice and courage on display in equal parts, and the Dice Gods were, on the whole, pretty balanced: making a mockery of the aspirations of all commanders with considerable maliciousness and disdain!

We have a big game coming up next Sunday, so hopefully I'll be able to post something more in the way of a proper battle report. It should prove a big one, too.

*****

Finally, I would be amiss in not announcing the talented winners of the La Bricole SALAMANCA CHALLENGE painting contest!  

Congratulations to Kerry ("Valleyboy") and Burkhardt ("14th Brooklyn") for placing first and second respectively in what turned out to be a very fierce competition, with loads of talent in evidence.

You can see their splendid entries here.