Thoughts on 15s...

Last Thursday at the Uni Austin and I played a game of Black Powder, a generic Peninsula scenario with a British rearguard making use of a good reverse slope position, and bags of Jonny Crapauds coming on 'in the same old style' - no news there then...except we dusted off my old 15/18mm collection!

And this is emphatically not a Batrep! When one is a sad old buffer of my ripe years and are playing a bright young law student, trust me you don't have the time or concentration to spare to take photos of the ensuing action!

So these were taken before the game started, hence you may notice a certain theme emerging! The bulk of these are AB from Eureka, but there are some Minifigs and Eureka in there too...

However it has struck me that I have all too few photos of my 15/18mm collection, small as it is, and it was time to remedy this and perhaps even show them off to the blogosphere!

Like most wargamers, I have found it hard to stick to one scale religiously, and the advent of cheap but beautifully sculpted 28mm hard plastic figures from the likes of Victrix, Perry and Warlord, and the wide open spaces available for gaming in more spacious Australian homes and public spaces has meant that 28mm has really been the focus of my gaming recently...

Which is pretty bloody daft actually. When it comes to Napoleonics, well any genre really, I find it hard to control my incipient megalomania - the bigger the better in terms of scenarios and battles! Which should lend itself to the smaller brethren, to be able to stage a bigger battle footprint on the same table space.

And of course, metal for metal, 15/18mm is far cheaper and more portable - weight is a real concern when you insist on staging unfeasibly large games and provide the bulk of the figures! Nonetheless, there is little room for logic when it comes to my toys, and I guess until some brave entrepreneur embarks on producing hard plastic 15/18mm Napoleonic, 15s will remain a backwater for me - even though the talented Mr Anthony Barton MBE (well its only a matter of time, surely!) has thankfully taken up sculpting his amazing AB range once again for the Waterloo 200th...

How did the game go? Harrumph! Well since you ask, I was on the ropes as the attacking French pretty much throughout the game, but managed to claim a draw on the technical grounds that we didn't get time to play through the agreed 8 moves...