And NB IV goes to...

... Warmodelling Miniatures, a new Spanish company resulting form the merging of Capitán (Captain) Miniatures and Warmodelling.

My best wishes for this new aventure!

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The new Napoleon's Battles IV Edition

Maybe you, Napoleon's Battles fans, have been following a thread in the NB yahoo group about the possibility of a new re-incarnation of this 24 years-old venerable rulebook. The co-author Bob Coggins has marked tomorrow, February 16, as the date in which an announcement will reveal the name of the company that will market the new Edition.
After the somewhat disappointing experiences with Five Forks (NB-II) and Lost Batallion Games (NB-III), this new venture maybe will mark another Age of Gold for Napoleon's Battles
The only key about the company's identity, according Bob himself, is its European and non-British nationality. French, Italian, Spanish? I have heard (and read) some rumours and my candidate is chosen. To paraphrase a former Spanish president, maybe "those responsible are not in remote deserts or remote mountains"...
Place your bets, ladies and gentlemen!

P.S. However, everything is subject to Earth will survive the passage of asteroid 2012 DA14!

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Getting used to the new scale for SDS

After so many years using a distorted scale in the gaming table, I'm finding very hard to visualize the houses, trees, streams, bridges, roads. etc to the same scale, 1/72 (HO), of the figures forming my wargaming armies.
Before, when Napoleon's Battles (NB) was my only ruleset (the scenery of my previous wargaming efforts was too stylised) one figure represented always 120 men, and a 4-figures base the area covered by 480 men. On the other side, a NB building or B.U.A. was the representation of a village or small town, while several buildings or BUA's made for medium-sized towns. A forest consisted of an area with several randomly scattered model trees and with the ground covered with lichen or model foliage. Obviously, roads and streams were oversized, while rivers were undersized, a bridge was a bridge, a lone tree was only an ornement... in short, a small chaos where everything was abstracted. However, my brain was perfectly accustomed.
When I moved to Lasalle, which has a larger scale and allows to game smaller battles, the things began to change slightly, but everything was still easy to fix by simply increasing the number of buildings or B.U.A.´s or increasing the forested area... and so.
But we arrived to Song of Drums and Shakos (SDS), a skirmish game where one figure is one man. Here, the things definitely do not look good, because the soldiers look like giants when they are side to side to buildings or trees.
The solution is simple: to build new scenery elements at the correct scale... and there we are.
The following pictures show the play area of Kosen, the next SDS scenario. The scenic elements are not yet fully finished (mostly need the final painting touches), but the overall look will be about the same.

Too realistic for me!

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A bridge not too far (for SDS)

The Kosen SDS Scenario is based around a wooden bridge in the extreme flank of the Austrian defensive line. All my miniature bridges were built for Napoleon's Battles, so they are undersized when used for 1:1 skirmish games (in the same way that my houses and trees). Therefore, a new bridge was mandatory, and this post describes some of the steps of its building.
1) The inspiration

http://achesoncreations.com/

2) The scheme (drawn on Powerpoint) and the materials used

3) The basic frame and the water painting

4) The bridge building. Square matchsticks and rounded wooden brochettes (kewers) were cut at the adequate size and glued onto the cardboard.

The bridge will be (hopefully) finished in a short time, so... watch this space!

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No hay pan para tanto chorizo!

This is a blog about one of my hobbies, Napoleonic wargaming with figures, and I rarely post here anything not related to that topic. But sometimes, the daily miseries grow and accumulate, and there is no choice but to go down to real life.
I am Spanish and proud of it, but sometimes I am deeply embarrassed by the misbehaviour of my countrymen, especially when they belong to the ruling class, government and royal family, i.e. when they are people forced more than any other to have a flawless legal performance.
The recent news about corruption affecting (1) to the top levels of the ruling Partido Popular party, and involving to Mariano Rajoy, the current prime minister, and to part of his cabinet colleagues and (2) Iñaki Urdangarin , son-in-law of King Juan Carlos I, are demoralizing and disappointing.
In these times of crisis, when the Spanish people is demanded to make sacrifices: wage cuts, loss of social rights, mass layoffs, etc., we are finding that our top ruling class has been illegally enriching for many years, defrauding the Treasury continuously.
The possiblity that they can get away with these crimes, by using legal tricks, gives an idea of ​​how corruption has installed in my country.
Democracy will allow us to clean all this misery and dirt of the public life! ... I hope

See the news in The New York Times, The Washington Post; Die Welt ; The Telegraph. (It's easy: google 'Rajoy', 'corruption', 'scandal' and so...)

The sentence of the picture is Spanish slang. 'Chorizo' (pork sausage) is used to make sandwiches, but is also a synonym of 'thief', so the sentence says that we have not sufficient bread to use all the available pork sausage, i.e. we have too many thieves!

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