Napoleonics (3) - French Voltigeurs and Officer

 I have been doing very cursory research as I paint for this project. I believe these are essentially just Line Infantry that are capable of taking on the Skirmisher role. I decided after seeing some other photos that I would give them blue pants in order to make them more easily identifiable on the table. Colors are the same palette as the Line. I got 6 done so far and need 18 total for the project. I've got 12 more printed and ready to paint. The sculpts are from Piano Wargames

The Officer is just a plastic figure from the Victrix Sprue but it definitely gets the job done.

One thing that I think is pretty neat about the Piano sculpts is the backpacks. Theres all sorts of character. In particular I really like these two

I'm nearing the halfway point of this project. As of this post the rest of the French are at the bare minimum built and primed. I've been really debating between taking a break before the British and powering through. There's 2 other projects looming in on my workbench and I'm not sure if I want to divert yet. 

Napoleonics (2) - French Line Infantry

 As promised the next unit up is the French Line Infantry. 

These are some plastic figures from Victrix. The molds are.. rough.. to say the least. I've long not been bothered by mold lines as the extra work to trim them is usually not worth the hassle for your rank and file in my opinion, that said these have some very very noticeable mold lines. The scenario I'm running calls for a unit of 10 line so that's what we've started with.

I did make the point in the last post that I'm not super fussed with "historical accuracy" but I did find myself a bit down the rabbit hole looking up things like cuff colors. I didn't find anything that would make these paint jobs "wrong" but also I don't know if they're perfect and that's fine to me. 

As before these are all "Marine Juice" paint jobs. Colors as follows;

Dark Prussian Blue, Beige Brown, Chocolate Brown, Pz Aces Flesh, AK Grey Brown, AK Tenebrous Grey, AK Blood Red, AK Vampiric Flesh, offwhite, AK Leather brown, AK Gunmetal, AK Rusty Brass, AK Dirty Yellow, Ak Deep Green

I used the same "scene" from the last post. 

Napoleonics (1) - 95th Rifles

For the 10 years I worked at the Hobby Shop I managed to resist any sort of Napoleonic gaming. The only foray I've made into the subject was purchasing Blucher rules and playing with paper counters in all of my "gaming career" 

Obviously from the title of this post we know that something has broke. Years ago now, Chuck ran a sweet Peninsular war skirmish using Ospreys Black Ops rules and I've been thinking a lot about that lately. I also put some of the blame squarely on being facebook friends with the author of the upcoming Blood and Bayonets rules. He's been posting videos what feels like twice a day for a while now showcasing army lists. 

My approach to this is simple. I care less about accuracy than I used to, count the buttons all you want I won't be fussed. Hell, I'm realizing as I type, I didn't even paint Sharpe's Buttons. But regardless the itch has struck and I want a little collection of wardollies.

I started as one does with my credit card. An order to Brigade Games and an order to Victrix. While waiting for the bulk of the infantry to come in, I decided to peruse the pile when I remembered I had half a box of Wargames Atlantic British Riflemen (split with Chuck on release)

When I started these, I had been clearly spoiled by the nearly double-the-size figure from Halo Flashpoint. but these are quite serviceable. Painted using the "marine juice" method from Sonic Sledgehammer, paints are as follows. Vallejo Black Green, AK Sky blue, Gunmetal, Tenebrous Gray, Vampiric Flesh, Offwhite, Leather brown and a grey of some sort. Vallejo Flat Earth for the rifles. 

Plans include Chosen Men, Forager, Shakos and Bayonets, Sharpe Practice 2, and possible Blood and Bayonets down the line. 

I set up a tiny scene using some of the terrain I've got done already just to experiment. I can't wait to see the final table with all 100 figures on it.

First order of business was building something to start with so I am shamelessly ripping off the scenario I found on this blog HERE though I've decided to change up a few of the British Regiments to paint some more "generic" British looking British.

Next on the table for this project is some French line

Top 5 "New to Me" Board Games of May 2025

    This has been another slow month. Nearing the end of the school year means a lot less gaming. Painting continues and I'm feeling almost nostalgic that I have a work bench with 3 or 4 ongoing projects again. I'm trying to get a historical project on to the table for a possible Cabin Con in August as well as a small scale historical project I'm dabbling in. I have Barons War 2nd edition to crack open as well as some Horus Heresy stuff to finish up for a Hobby Goal. On the boardgame front, we managed just 16 plays this month only 1 of which was played more than once (Tether). Of the 15 games we played 12 of them were brand new to me. We did manage another game of Heat, and Hadrian's Wall. With just one play on each of the games in this list, I'm going to probably single out singular things that jumped out to me that made me want to table the game again.

Honourable Mentions

Molly House

The latest offering from Wehrlegig Studios (John Co, Pax Pamir) Molly House is a super bespoke looking board game with a wildly unique theme. This one makes the honourable mention list because to be honest, I don't know if I get it. During the teach I found myself saying something to the effect of "I understand every moving part but have no concept of how to turn it into points or form a strategy." As we played I found myself warming to it quite significantly but will need more plays before forming a final verdict. It was not an instant hit with me like John Co, but it is a great example of a Semi-Coop done right. 

Bebop

 This was an offering from a Bitewing Games Kickstarter that I did not back. At the time the price point scared me off but look at me now, doing stupid shit like buying the Trickerion Collectors box. Bebop is a Knizia inspired tile layer, I'm told. So was Rebirth. From what I can tell, not being super familiar with what that means, is that you place a tile on the board. That's the game! More seriously, both this and Rebirth felt the same to me in that, I read the rules and thought "ok, I'll figure it out as we go" when it comes to scoring. My wife is not a "figure it out along the way" type so these are not her kind of game. This one was great (to me) and a lot of theme drips through. The rulebook has a selection of recommended Jazz albums to play depending on the board you choose to play on. This raises a super interesting point too about the deluxeification of games. The rulebook references the expansion (separate purchase) and shows photos of the deluxe (separate purchase) tokens. I opted to pick up the boards but not the tokens. It comes across as "this is a 100 dollar game that you may shave parts off of to pay us less" and conceptually I think that's kind of neat.

My Favorite Things

Party game done right, though not a "fun" "game."  This is a trick taker where each of your cards is actually a thing ranked by another player. You give them a prompt like "favorite Marvel Movie," they secretly write down (and rank) their top 5 of that category then give those cards to you. Then you play a trick taker with those cards, guessing at that players interests. With the wrong group this sounds like absolute hell. With the right group you can use a prompt like "favorite fighting video games" and clean house because no one else at your table knows what the hell your talking about.

Top 5 of May 2025

5 Veiled Fate

Veiled Fate is from IV Studios and was sold to me under the premise that it is a "Social Deduction game that doesn't just bog down into people yelling accusations at each other." It is. I think its actually a super super interesting game. It possibly overstays its welcome a hair and it is very luck driven. Our game came down to the final flip of a coin. Though it was the 2 hours of decision making that led to the circumstances that resulted in the board positions and subsequent coin flip so YMMV. The production (like all IV games) is really really gorgeous. Was the game probably too expensive? Yeah. Will it see the table a ton? Probably not as much as I'd like. But it was a great game for a large group. 

4 Rock Hard 1977

 Worker placement games with 1 worker are kind of an odd duck. This one was really fun though. It makes me think of the old game Life but with significantly more agency and a game to play to boot. Players are rockstars trying to become bigger rockstars. There's a mechanic for taking "candy" to have more actions and a "sugar craving" mechanic for if you eat too much "candy." Cool kids will know what's up! Tongue in cheek jokes aside, mechanically the game is fun. It does emergent story telling right. In particular you begin the game with a day (or night) job. Miss 3 shifts and your fired. Eventually you say "f it" and get fired because now the music is more important. Discard your job to reveal that the "job slot" on your board said professional musician the whole time. You had it in you all along.

3 Ostia

Like many a FOMO based Kickstarter, Ostia came and went and I didn't learn about its existence until long after it was "out of print." This one was pitched to me as a Roman Trading themed game with a mancala mechanic. We got this one to the table and I really enjoyed it. Its a bit of a brain burner in the sense that almost everything you want to do needs to be planned a couple of moves in advance and that's just if you want to do an action. If you really want to capitalize on that action and run it to its full effectiveness you need to plan even further. My one point of contention with it is that the end game is player triggered and it can be difficult to assess who is winning. I thought I had for sure lost as my opponent had purchased 4 of the 5 end game bonus cards but the score ended up flipping wildly in my favor once we worked out the math. Would play again. 

2 Iberian Gauge

Apparently there are "Train Games" (this) and "games with Trains" (Ticket to Ride). I set out to find out the difference and purchased this, Wabash Cannonball, and Shikoku 1889. This was the one that hit the table first. Despite all of us feeling like "wheres the game? How do you win when were all working together?" one player (who we were fairly certain lost) ended up miscounting her money and actually won by a very significant margin. I like mathy games. I used to adore Power Grid. Conceptually I don't even hate Monopoly. This was good. It played in a little under an hour. I would gladly play it again. Also and this seems minor but, its kind of pretty. I looked at the back of Wabash Cannonball. That game is not pretty. I think it may be the ugliest board I own actually. This isn't, so kudos to that.  

1 Seti 

Originally this post was just going to be "top 5, Seti, Just Seti." I did not want to want Seti. Another Euro I thought. Blah, I said. I already have Euro at home. I even bought the metal coins for Kutna Hora. Brian from one of the game groups said it was great. I found it on sale. Brian was right. 

SETI is just another Euro dripping with theme but you know what, its great. I won't bog down in it right now but the short version of what sold me on it so well was that your primary scoring conditions appear on the alien races that don't show up until players collectively discover them. Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence. Those aliens have neat game mechanics and sub systems that interact with the game in neat ways. The actual puzzle of what to do on a turn is engaging, the long term planning is there but importantly its the kind of game where you say "I would like to do a thing, how do I get there?" then work your way backwards until you've puzzled your way to the goal and I love that. 

Briefly I also want to shout out Czech Games Edition and Tabletop Merchant. I needed a replacement card for SETI because the sleeve holding the cards ripped open in transit. They have an awesome parts replacement program and it came very quickly. Tabletop Merchant was the only shop that I could find that had both Bebop and Shuffle and Swing in stock. The order shipped quick and came with a hand written note talking about bebop and telling me to enjoy. That's pretty cool to me.

I have about a 1000 figures to base next and then we can resume some drip feed wargaming content. 

Top 5 "New to Me" Boardgames of April 2025

 April has been a super slow month for gaming for me. I've actually gotten a ton of painting done, more on that at the end of the post. Between that and the house getting sick a couple times, gaming itself has been slow.

Honorable Mentions

Empires End

This is a strange one. I was initial very excited to give this game a try. It was described to me a bit as a "reverse engine builder" which fascinates me as a concept. Your engine runs fine at the beginning but you bid to avoid taking on disasters that will smash your engine. It's in theory all about carefully choosing when you can handle taking on the problems. I compare it to Arkham Horror in terms of how it feels but being competitive instead of coop, there's no shared misery as things break or go wrong. It plays much like Space Base (also from this designer). In the end I liked it but it wasn't "fun." I don't think I feel the need to get a copy but would probably play again.

Top 5 of April 2025

5. Skara Brae

This month is all about Kickstarters delivering. From Garphill games I got the Skara Brae and the Anarchy KS in. This is a resource shuffling game with the twist that there are debatably too many resources to manage. I thought this was interesting as I love the shuffling back and forth this style of game delivers but I want more plays to make a final judgement. Its probably my least favorite of this publishers games but I've become a bit of a Garphill fanboy lately so that isn't to say its a bad game. 

4. Deep Regrets

The main praise for this Kickstarter has to be given to the transparency from the creator of the game. He has been straightforward and up front about every issue and decision that went in to the campaign. The game itself is sort of a push your luck eerie fishing game with a cthulu theme but I was impressed that there was more depth than I was expecting. I'm reserving as bit of judgement for now as we only played once and out play took significantly longer than anticipated due to baby but the art work and components are 10/10

3. Minecart Town

This is the second (of 3) resource shuffling games to make the list this month. This is a little game from japan. Another Kickstarter, this one was described to me a bit like Furnace with the added wrinkle of logistics. Though I think that is an accurate description, the end result was a bit lighter than I was expecting. Its a cute, one-step-above-filler game I can see myself playing quite a bit more of. 

2. Hadrians Wall

The third and final resource shuffler is actually a roll n write. Well a flip and write technically but a bit of a resource shuffler nonetheless. I had heard this was similar to a full blown euro game just distilled down into a roll and write format and to be honest that's a fair assessment. I'm not normally a huge "... and write" fan but this one swayed me. It feels like a good high score chaser, with a theme I enjoy. The smartest move as many before me have mentioned is the inclusion of physical resources which make the tracking from box to box much less cumbersome and add the tactility I feel the genre is missing. I'd like to play through most of the solo campaign before I move on to The Anarchy but I have quite high hopes for that title as well. 

1. Tether

Oddly, both my most played and favorite this month is a short little two player only card game. One player plays runs vertically, the other horizontal. The cards are flipped on each side. So one side might say 17, the other 71. On first play I wasn't smitten but we managed 7 plays of this last month and with each game I feel the strategic depth growing. One particular thing is the game has three end game conditions. Whether the largest configuration reaches 14 cards, the draw deck runs out, or one player leads by 6 points. It feels like each time we play this one I can see new strategic wrinkles to the system. An obvious one maybe but if I play the 17, the 71 is out of the pool for me. Real simple but a lot of fun.  

On to the check in, We managed to play a game of Halo Flashpoint. Photos of painted figures soonish. The game is ok. Typical Mantic fair where I think the game is fine but nothing spectacular. I decided after we played, I'd paint what I had but was not going to preorder the other large box coming out. 

I've also been hammering away on 3 different historical projects that I am excited to share with you all pretty soon.

Top 5 "New to Me" Boardgames of March 2025

 This is probably going to be a reoccurring thing if that wasn't clear.

So March saw me fall just a bit shy of the pacing I've had for the year so far. I think were still fine for the total goals at year end because there should be more gaming this summer. I played 27 plays across 22 different games. Of those, 12 were new to me not counting new expansions for games I've already played. 

Honorable Mentions

An Age Contrived

 This was played at the monthly "lets play those kickstarters" game group I've been attending. Same place we played Last Light last time. I could best describe this one as "a euro game with ameritrash sensibilities." I have this game on my wishlist but to be honest I haven't decided if I will actually pull the trigger because I haven't decided if I actually liked it. I'll republish the texts I sent to a friend that sum up the experience pretty succinctly. 

"It would be like if I told you to make a cake and instead of giving you a recipe I just told you what every individual ingredient tasted like. So you taste the raw flour and rightfully spit it out and that's the moment I tell you well, that ones there for structure not flavor. So you smash together some version of a cake based on all the cake youve eaten in your life and its bad and only then do I tell you that you needed specific quantities of each ingredient"

A bit hyperbolic but it summed up our first game well.

World Wonders (Mundo expansion)

 

Last year we played our way through the legacy game, My City with some friends of ours. In short, My City is a tile layer with tetramino shapes and requires some spacial awareness. About one or two games in my wife as well as one of our friends were over it. 2 of us loved the experience until about the final 6 games of the campaign. We all thought by the end that the game overstayed its welcome and the consensus was "I'm over this genre" 

Depsite the wifes protests, I picked up the spacial awareness tile layer World Wonders and its Mundo expansion at Origins last year. I'm glad I did. There are some neat twists to the formula in the open shared market, the "buying out of the round" that comes with purchasing wonders and the actual spatial puzzle. Many of these games work by asking you to fill the grid out more or less completely but this one doesn't. I'm also obsessed with nice Chonky Wood parts. 

This is an honorable mention because we've played the base game a few times but just added the expansion in recently.

Apiary 

Apiary makes the list because I would play it again but it didn't leave a solid first impression. Unfortunately I blame that on the starting faction I drew at random which pointed me towards a specific resource that was difficult to get and shoehorned me into thinking I needed a specifc strategy to compete. This is the most points I've lost a game by with this group probably full-stop. I'd play it again buy I did take the expansion off my wishlist.

Top 5 of March

5 - Power Vacuum

 This was a kickstarter that just delivered. Billed as a trick taker mixed with social deduction. I don't think that's quite what delivered but the game is super unique. We only got one 3 player play in and I would be very excited to play this one again. There are some twists to the formula wrapped in a nice production that make it a good fit for the shelf. There is a much larger discussion on what hidden role and social deduction does for a game but in short, adding a mechanic that allows you to reveal your hidden role early makes for its own subset of mechanical interaction that is super interesting to me.

4 - Black Forest

 

I liked this. I mostly want to talk about the resource "clock."  This is a euro game about making glass. Every time you recieve a basic resource (the resources to the right of the top facing "clock hand") you slide the token representing that resource one space clockwise. You'll notice the number tracking quantity around the center of said clock. Whenever there is an empty space to the right of the clock hand (i.e. there are no tokens in the "0" space) the clock hand must be moved over. This has the effect of increasing the resources to the left of the clock hand while simultaneously depleting all the resources to the right. This happens automatically and is mandatory and will happen mid action. You either understand what I said and it sounds neat or you didnt and this game is probably not for you.

The meat of this is wrapped around a sort of worker placement type mechanic and involves you trading the resources back and forth to have the right resources to buy what you need at that moment. My only complaint so far is that those clocks are dual layer and curled right up. I was the most into the game in our group but I don't think anyone hated it.

3 - Hands in the Sea (2nd ed)

This is A Few Acres of Snow rethemed to the Punic wars. I adore Few Acres so this was a natural fit for me. I think the changes and additions of things like the naval combat and the event deck make it different enough that if you enjoy one there's room for both. I think Few Acres is slightly more polished and is arguably more accessible. 

2 - Joyride Turbo

I have a lot of car games for someone who spent a long long time self describing as "not a car guy." Briefly; Thunder Road, Formula D, Heat, Rallyman GT, Rallyman Dirt, Downforce. Of these, I've become obsessed with Heat for my racing fix. Rallyman is solid though more simulationy and less hollywood. Thunder Road captures the chaos well. 

Joyride is really fun. It brings enough to the table to make it worth keeping. It is ultimately a mario kart style game with the win condition being the race part. It isn't as easy to teach as thunder road but it isn't as hard as something like a wargame like Gaslands. I had been itching to get into gaslands again but this is much easier to table.  

1 - El Grande

Area Control. I love it. I like dudes on a map games. I like twists to genres. This has everything to make me feel like it is a "classic" game even from play one. The actual mechanics are easy enough to follow but the Castillo and accompanying rules add just enough rub to make the game stand out. It wasn't long enough to overstay its welcome but had more depth than a filler game. Just a super solid game all around. I was incredibly disappointed in Ethnos last month but this was a welcome surprise hit.

 

For housekeeping. Were close to a wargame post. I'm nearly done with the Halo Flashpoint starter. After that I've got some Flashpoint Wave 2 to paint and then I've got my eye on something historical for a little bit. I've been painting a bit here and there but need to do a day of just basing soon to actually finish this stuff off. 

 

 

Top 5 "New To Me" Board Games of February

 I've been hammering away on playing the unplayed games in my collection and wanted to highlight a couple of the better ones in a post. 

Honourable Mentions

Fellowship of the Ring: Trick Taking Game

    We play a lot of trick taking games. (My current favorite is Fishing). FoTR:TTG is a co-op trick taker similar to the crew. It has a campaign that introduces new mechanics slowly. We played the first 4 chapters in one go. Each chapter has you playing a relatively basic trick taker with the catch that each player has specific objectives. As an example you may need to win a specific number of tricks or not have won the most tricks. Its quick, its snappy, the art is great. 

Rallyman Dirt

    I will do a full write up some day on the Rallyman games but I really adore them. Push your luck racing games that offer a fair amount of strategy and a non-overwhelming amount of luck. I do see a place for both Rallyman GT and Rallyman Dirt and I quite like some of the additions to Dirt from a bookkeeping Quality of Life perspective. Solo mode works great but without a "par" track time I have no idea if I'm doing well unless I play a race multiple times. I prefer this one with people but the staggered start times make me want to put GT on the table instead. 

Top 5 of February

5 - Hansa Teutonica

    Hansa Teutonica (acquired through that collection) is more of a "dry euro" than what I tend to table. On the surface it's a route builder like something like Ticket to Ride, though theres a lot it brings to the table that make it a much meatier game. Each route will contribute points and help with a players overall strategy but specific routes will allow players to upgrade their player boards to make each turn more effective. Couple that with a super simple but effective "route blocking and player bumping" system as well as a scoring system that rewards players for being near the action, this is an incredibly interactive game for its looks. This did not go over at all with my usual group but I'd play it again in a heartbeat with players into this sort of thing. 

4 - Wayfarers of the South Tigris

This is one of the Garphill Renegade Games Historical "Worker Placement" Games I've become very obsessed with. Our 10 x 10 includes the ...West Kingom Trilogy this year but this is the first of the ... South Tigris set. Mechanically this is quite the step up from our last foray of Paladins of the West Kingdom but I found the game super interesting. It's effectively a tableau builder with a game timer of a central board that includes a sort of "race to the finish." Your turn consists of placing a single die, placing a single worker, or resting to recover your played dice. It has the usual Garphill feel of passing the same tokens back and forth but I found this one considerably more involved than Architects, Raiders of Scythia or Legacy of Yu. I'm excited for the expansions as well as the other two in the serious (which i believe on bgg have even higher weights.)

3 - Last Light

Last Light is a 4x with a promised play time "a fraction of Twilight Imperium." I've never played a board game 4x but I have some familiarity with the genre. After watching How to Play videos I was worried the game looked quite uninspiring on the table. The board is quite bland and it has quite the "pile of plastic" look to it. 

In practice the game was a heck of a lot of fun. We played twice in a row. The game is simultaneous (which frankly I don't like at all) but it capture the essence of a "big game" without all of the hassle of getting a "big game" to the table. I think of the headache of tabling the Blighted Reach Campaign for Arcs and some part of me just wants to put this on the table instead. 

All of my positives of this are what I love about gaming, the puzzle, the trash talk, the comradery, the physicality (the board literally spins around the center at differing rates) and the shared experience and emergent story telling. 

All of my cons come down to the same time play. I quite literally had no idea what the player on the other side of the table was doing until it was too late. I would love each player to say what theyre doing but it all just sort of happens and then its too late. The scoring is incredibly tight and it has some ability to recover from a bad start. I was the one who hit the 20 points to trigger endgame and I ended up losing by 3. It does "suffer" a bit from "bash the leader" mechanics but I think the right (communicative) group can over come this.

I played a friends kickstarter deluxe copy but already have the retail edition on my shelf of shame from last year which means I don't need to run out and get this one haha.

2 - Slay the Spire

Aside from having to sleeve 500 cards before I could play, Slay the Spire (the boardgame) mimics Slay the Spire (the less board game) so very well. Adding a coop mode as well as rebalancing the numbers a bit to make it a bit more accessible without needing to bust out a calculator makes this a great table presence. I enjoyed it a bit more than my non-video game playing wife did but I think it was a solid enough deckbuilder that she enjoyed it enough to start act 2. I really am impressed with how well the game translates to the table and am looking forward to playing more. The unlocks and upgrade system are solid and seem to allow for a full reset which I appreciate. The components are wonderful and the core gameplay loop is fun. I really really love roguelikes and roguelite games so to see it translated so well is just wonderful. I felt similarly about Dorfromantik but this really takes the cake.

1 - River of Gold

This reminds me a lot of when I first started board gaming and all I knew was big Fantasy Flight component heavy monster games but I didn't yet know there was a lot more to the hobby. I mean that positively I think as I remember those days with a fond nostalgic glimmer. River of Gold sees players sailing down a river based of a die roll and either building new buildings, moving their ships, or deliver orders. The single roll of a die each turn means your options are limited but not in a way that made me feel that my decisions were locked. The components are really lovely and although the iconography was a bit dense at first it clicked pretty early on. There actually a lot of meaningful decision making but the turn by turn choices are not overwhelming at all. I definitely want to play more of this. It was on my wishlist but out of stock everywhere when I tried to pick it up late last year, so when I saw stock I jumped on it. 

I have not done much in the way of painting this month or non board game hobbying. We did a fair amount of cleaning and reorganizing this month though and I partially blame that. I did paint crossbones for MCP and got most of the way through Clea. I also got most of the way through one of my first Display Kits for the year, a Troy McDevitt Dr. Doom figure. I did pick up a couple of historical things in the form of Nam 68 and a few 3d prints from 3D Breed as well as some stuff for Chicago Way.