Good day today

First off I want to thank those of you who are following this blog already, despite there being little more than inane waffle here so far.

Today was a productive day. Before lunch I started preparing the horses for the cavalry and assembled the German 77mm guns. After lunch Jonesy came round and we had an enjoyable and productive figure painting session with first The Four Feathers (1939) and then Gunga Din (1939) playing in the background. J0nesy finished off the Germans I'd 80% completed, started on a second unit and quickly drybrushed the Design 28 Miniatures "Iron Men" for the "Evil League Of Evil" army, while I slogged away at two units of Parroom Station "Masked Minions" for the same. Another couple of hours ought to get the Masked Minions table ready, so I can get back to working on the British Guardsmen.

I've been thinking further on the possibilities of the Portable Wargame with the Heroscape terrain, and its inherent disadvantages. For 20th Century games in 15mm, I think most vehicles will be too big for the Heroscape hexes. This rather rules out the Russian Civil War, VBCW or other interwar games, unless I switched to 1/200 or smaller. The other option would be to go for a set of Hexon terrain with 10cm hexes, with which I could just about fit an 8x8 grid on my coffee table. I am giving serious thought to rebasing all my individually based 15mm 19th century minis into 30mm elements to make them more suitable for use with Heroscape. The downside is that this would make them less suitable for other games I use like Soldiers' Companion, The Sword And The Flame or GASLIGHT. But I'm leaning towards playing those games in 28mm as they were intended, and saving 15mm for the mass battles/compact battles using The Portable Wargame. Otherwise I'm going to be collecting to be able to run similar style games (large skirmishes with individually based figures) in two different scales. And that's highly inefficient.

The final bit disadvantage of the Heroscape terrain is that it's highly biased towards green tiles. There are precious few sand coloured tiles in the set. I feel the need to buy another full set and repaint the hexes to allow some decent sized desert battles.