This not much to post

Well, the title says it all.  I am still around and not doing much of anything.  I am still reading for the most part, but not as much as before.  To date, I finished reading 32 books for the year and listen to another 26 audio-books.  Needless to say, the bulk of the books were non-fiction, 46 of them total.  

I joined GoodReads (https://www.goodreads.com/) a while back (mid or late 2016) to start keeping track of what books I have read, or listen to, over time.  I also use it to keep track of how many books I have read each year.  As I started keeping track of what books I read on this blog back in 2014, I was able to back date them as well.  The only bad thing is that for my 'pages read' count, I can't separate my actual reading vs. my audio books without dating when I listened to them.  It really does mean much, but I like to see some times how many pages I read over a period of time.  Example is that currently it is showing that I read 13,635 pages for the year, but I only read 7,324 pages and the rest were from my audio-books.

I was also able to go back and marked "read" for all of the books that I could remember reading over all of my years.  I am shocked that I have read 693 books over my life.  I know that there is at least one book that I read which is not included in that number as I can't remember the title, which is okay since it was horrible (I still remember that).  I am sure that there maybe a few others that I have forgotten over time too.  Also, I was shocked to see about 38% of the books I read over time were fiction.  That is a higher percentage than what I thought it would be.  But looking back, I did read a lot of fiction in my pre-teens and teen years, mostly for school.  I have also listen to a lot of fiction audio-books because of the voice acting as I love radio plays and these are close to that.   

If anyone else is on GoodReads and wants to look me up to see what I have been reading, I will be under "Joe Collins" with my dapper Gentoo penguin avatar.  Just let me know that you are asking for a "Friends" request in my comments section below so I know who is sending it. If I don't, I will not "Friend" you on GoodReads.  Sorry, I am a little bit protective.

Be seeing you

Sapper

Last month I got to play in a game vs Blake at Glenn's house.  It was a 25mm fantasy game using Chainmail rules (yes, those Chainmail rules from Gary Gygax in 1971).  This is the second game that I played using these rules and I think that this might be the the second or third game that I played this year (!).  I just never got around to posting these pictures.  I didn't think to take pictures in the previous game and that is why I never posted up anything about it.  

Glenn's first game, I played a mixed group of orcs, goblins, and trolls trying to breakthrough Blake's dwarven defense to the green grass beyond.  I barely did it, but took heavy losses to sprites in that game.  So, this game saw us switching roles and I was the dwarves trying to stop Blake's orcs and goblins.  This was not the same game, but similar.  I lost, but I made the green skins pay a heavy toll for their win (with a little help of a third party werebear and druid.)  Below are some pictures from the game.

The lay out towards the beginning of the game after a few turns of moving.  I am the three units on the lower half of the picture.  The two flank units were melee only and the unit in the middle had bows in addition to their melee weapons.

 My left flank beating up goblins with an orc unit waiting to follow up the assault.  Because of the last game with the sprites being massive killers, everyone was scared to enter the woods so that why this was a major chockpoint.

 A bit zoomed out view of the picture from above.  I already either routed or crippled one of the two goblin units.  If they were still around but just out of the picture, they routed shortly later.

The goblin unit that attacked my left flank retreated to the center and the orcs charged my flank.  My right flank was now getting bloody by the orc archers.  I was going to try to charge them but they kept my unit pinned until they were killed off by arrows.

My left is gone, but the werebear is going to get some payback. 

Well, not that much payback...my archers charged his orc archers and just rolled bad.  The second goblin unit is routed off the board.

Still Alive, update and pictures

So, it really has been a long, long time since I posted anything on here.  I really have been busy with work and having no social life except every once and a while.  I think I might have got a miniature wargame in this year, but no more than three for sure.  I know that have not really got anything painted, but I did recently send a box of figures to be painted by a painting service.  They are many more 28mm Russian Civil War figures for the winter fighting (i.e., winter clothing) and some other winter related figures for other skirmishing games, like Inuits for some Pulp action goodness.

I am hoping to have another box of figures going to be painted in a few weeks too.  This will be mainly for a different 28mm project. That new project is 1950’s Atomic Horror, which will be a tribute to those classic 1950’s movies and to the movie, “Six-String Samurai”.  I plan to use Killer B’s rules, Invasion X, but will play with a couple of others; Crooked Dice’s, 7TV 2^nd Edition, or Osprey’s, In Her Majesty’s Name.  The bulk of the figures will be the (hopefully) growing Killer B’s line for Invasion X, and Brigade Game’s line, "Atomic Café '57".  Some other figures will be used, mainly for giant critters.  I am really tempted to see if my painting service thinks that they can do them in the glorious gray scale to reflect the B&W movie theme, but I will probably stick with boring Techno-color, especially since I would have to paint everything(!) including the flocking, shrubs, and trees into the gray scale.  After this project, I am going to start sending figures for either my 28mm Back of Beyond project or the 28mm Banana Wars project.

I am doing another re-evaluation of my gaming hobby / collection.  I am really starting to realize that as I am starting to make a real effort to get miniatures sent off to be painted, and storing them in my basement, how little space I really have for storing painted stuff (along with buildings, etc. for that project).  So, I am going to line up the boys and tell them that this will be a fight to the death on what projects I am going to keep and make a hard decision and trash stuff. I might trade some project for a smaller scale (either in figure scale, # of figures, or both). 

Now, after saying that, I feel guilty in showing my new 10mm Russo-Turkish War project.  I bought these maybe a year ago off of eBay and finally got around to re-basing them.  I don’t know what rules the original owner had for them, but I am sticking with the basing, but adding a 3mm base underneath them to make them easier to pick up.  The basing is a 1" front and either a 1/2" or 1" depth.  I originally was thinking of popping the figures off of their metal bases and mounting them to bases for the rules that I was planning to use them with in the future.  But they are really hard to pop off, so I gave up for now.   

I am planning to use them for Neil Thomas’, Nineteenth Century European Wars, rules or his, One-Hour Wargames, rules, and Dan Mersey's, The Men Who Would Be Kings.   In the first rules, the bases are 40mm front with four bases being a unit, in the second each unit is 4" to 6" frontage, and in the last, I can use twelve 1" bases to represent an infantry unit.

I was thinking of using them also with Black Powder, as I got the Black Powder's unofficial Russo-Turkish War supplement and the number of figures are very close to what is need for two forces.  But I decided that I probably will not do Black Powder. I did lay out the figures in the below pictures for Black Powder. In that system, I will have for the Russians: an infantry division, a start on a Guard’s regiment, an artillery battalion, and a start on a cavalry brigade.  The Turks have an independent infantry brigade and an artillery battery, but I still need a cavalry brigade (there were no Turkish cavalry in the collection.)  In the pictures below is probably 85% of everything I want to get for that system.  But for the rules that I am going to stick to, I probably have too much stuff, except for cavalry on both sides, Russian Guards, and replacement Turkish artillery to replace the broken stuff, which I will need to order some more.  I am still sitting down trying to figure the best way to utilized the balk of the collection without having too much unused stands.

This picture is the overall collection as is.

This picture is a sort of a close up of a Russian infantry regiment of three battalions for Black Powder.   Several Russian artillery battalions can be seen in the back ground.

This picture is a sort of a close up of a Turkish infantry regiment of four infantry battalions.  Again, using the suggested strength for the Black Powder supplement of 24 figures for a battalion

This picture is a Russian artillery battery deployed for firing.  As an artillery battery took up about the same amount of frontage as an infantry battalion, I was figuring this would be cool for representation of the actual frontage.  The blank stands in between the guns will be flocked and might get some extra things, like artillerymen or boxes mounted on them.  

This picture is a Russian artillery battery on the move.

This picture is of a Turkish artillery battery.  They had less guns compared to the Russians, so they are smaller for frontage.  As you can see, not everything made it safely in the shipping.  Luckily, there was very little breakage, but both of my Turkish artillery bases got stuff broken. 

The last two pictures are the battalions deployed.  The first one they are in line formation and the second is in an assault column.

Cheers