Flagging Morale

Just a quick post.   Later today I'll be putting up a battle report on our last game held on July 14th, but a separate post for this one as the report is getting long enough already.

Here are some disorder markers I just made for our Black Powder games.  Rod here at the West Tokyo Wargamers had come up with the idea some time ago, and his markers have proved very useful- and aesthetically pleasing- in our games over the past year or so.

But with all the squadrons and battalions we can now field in our games, we were running short. So I decided to remedy the situation (for the French at least- I've no British in my collection).

I have lots of printed paper colours and standards to spare.  I use GMB flags for my regiments, and there are a number of unneeded ones that were left over from the sheets I bought.  

I also had some Russian flags that I had ordered from Graham, only to find out later that they were the wrong flags for the regiments I wanted to do (Russian infantry flags are a complex subject).  On top of these, there were some sheets of printed flags lying around that had come with various boxes of plastic kits (Victrix, Perry, and Warlord), all of which were surplus to requirements.

So given that I have all these perfectly good flags languishing unused and unloved, I decided that I would get my money's worth out of them as disorder markers.  

So far, I've made markers for French infantry and cavalry, a Prussian (or at least Germanic) flag, and one for the Russians (yes, Russians; so far I have the grand total of one horse artillery battery). 

These were quite easy to do. I started with 1" circular plastic bases, glued down some heavy washers for weight, and added a wooden toothpick as the staff.  

 

Once the glue had completely dried, I coated the bases with a mixture of sand and PVA, which when thoroughly dry anchored the "staffs" nicely.

 

Having first painted the staffs, I then wrapped the flags around the them using good 'ol PVA.  Before the PVA had set hard, I added the furls into the flags, holding them in place (lightly!) with rubber bands.

Once these had dried, I next painted the bases and the flag edges (other WTW Napoleonics gamers take note!).  All that was left to do was just a bit of drybrushing,  some static grass, et voilà!  All done in little over three days, and representing about three hours of total labour.

Hopefully my French won't have much call for these in our next game- but I doubt it. 

As for casualty markers, we have been using little plastic stars from the 100-yen shop. While they do the job, they are in sparkling pink, blue, silver and light green; we can't help thinking that they give the table an unfortunate "My Little Pony" ambiance that doesn't really suit the occasion.  So at some point I will try putting some casualty figures on a base, with a number on each side of the base to mark the number of hits the unit has taken.

We also need some markers to denote units that are shaken, but we haven't come up with any good ideas yet.  All in good time.