Considering the next project

As the St. Nazaire project comes towards an end I need to decide upon my next project. The choice I have:

1. Painting my remaining plastic Seven Years War Spencer Smith figures with the aim of playing a few games from the book "Scenarios for Wargames".
2. Painting my old Minifig Samurai figures and recent secondhand Minifig purchases (S Range I believe, but not sure).

The advantage of the SYW project is I will be adding to existing units from my French Indian War units and the troops will get to the tabletop quicker for a game. My aim is to create units with two stands of 10 figures and a command stand with a mounted officer, foot officer and flag bearer (something like the photo below). The existing French Indian War units are single bases of 10 figures.

Before painting my old Minifig Samurai I will have to strip off the old paint first and clean them up. I also have to figure out how to deal with the slight difference in the Minifig ranges. Both are 25mm, but one has a much more bulkier look.

Old figures and recent second hand purchase.

Both ranges are 25mm

One figure is much more bulky

Right now on the painting table are a couple of Hinchliffe ECW hand-drawn powder carts.

More plastic Spencer Smith figures

Late this week a parcel arrived full of Spencer Smith plastic figures. The opportunity to purchase these figures came last month from a fellow Blogger who was helping a family sort out and deal with  a wargaming collection of figures and books.

The majority of figures are from Spencer Smith's 18th Century figure range, but do include few Napoleonic cavalry which will provide useful additions to my Napoleonic armies. The infantry are a mix of traditional looking Spencer Smith figures and their Connoisseur Figure range.

Here are photos of some of the collection...

71 Grenadiers (some will be destined to be Austrian Grenadiers in my Napoleonic armies)

A few of the cavalry which came in various poses. In all there are 77 cavalry.

133 infantry both shooting and at the ready

12 Napoleonic cavalry including these hard plastic figures of unknown origin.

61 command and officer figures

This collection, particularly the cavalry, allows the expansion of my Seven Years War French Indian War collection to include European battles (eg the Battle of Minden). In addition some figures will be used to add the odd unit of cavalry and infantry to my Napoleonic forces.

For the moment though I am carefully sorting and storing these figures. I have to first complete painting my English Civil War figures.

Next Project

Now I have almost completed my target number of units for the 19th Century Imagi-Nations armies. Two infantry units were completed this week and the final cavalry unit is on the painting table (Lancers one of my favourite miniatures). I am pondering what my next project should be.

The final two infantry units completed

Final cavalry unit on the painting table

One project I do want to start this year is to finally paint my old English Civil War Hinchcliffe miniatures. I started to collect these when I was about 13 years old until I was 15. It is not a huge collection (maybe 250 in all) but they will be a bit of an undertaking to prepare. I need to strip off a layer of two of paint from my previous attempts at painting them.

I have a number of Spencer Smith plastic Seven Years War figures obtained in a swap of figures earlier this year. They also include some Indians and frontiersmen. Just over 200 figures all together.

As I have really enjoyed painting my 19th Century Imagi-Nations Spencer Smith armies. I though this would be a good sized project to paint these up as French-Indian Wars armies. So after Friday night after spreading out all the available miniatures, it looks like I should be able to field per side:

• 6 line infantry units
• 1 grenadier units
• 2-3 frontiersmen units
• 1-2 indian scout units
• 2 artillery units
• 1 howitzer unit

Two tidy armies for some large skirmish style games.

Planning how to organise and base forces

Plastic Indians (Spencer Smith?)

Frontiersmen

Artillery