Preparing for Blucher

When I saw the post on the Mad Padre's blog about Blucher availability, I found it wasn't on sale in Australia and so ordered it from  J&M Miniatures.  Excellent service and saved me a heap (the Canadian maple leaf being close to the gum leaf in value), but postage via moose was the killer and even a second mortgage couldn't cover it so sadly I took James' suggestion and cancelled.

But I had to have the rules!

I got the PDF download from Sam Mustafa's site.  Hmmm, 170 plus pages in colour.  Cost me $14 or more just for a black and white copy to be printed.  But at least I had them.  I also now found they are available from Eureka here in Australia.

First impressions very positive, but playing with cards ain't going to work for me.

For my 15mm figures based for Napoleon's Battles, there is a very good fit to a 3 by 2 inch base.

My first idea was to make some movement trays from old CD cases (the soft plastic kind).

They worked okay, but it was a slow process, so I tried making some out of card.  Just cheap card left over from cereal boxes etc.  I recall making myself stuff when I was a kid this way, but then it was sellotape, now I have PVA glue.

I got a bit carried away painting the bases (they needed it to cover up the packaging artwork).

Then I thought, why not use coloured card.  It was cheap enough and this green, while bright in the photo, I believe will be a good match for the table top.  For artillery I will use two guns, I only just had one handy for this picture.

The other thing I've done in preparation for my first game using the Along the Danube scenario, was to give the formations names which I picked up from the Wagram OOB.  I've remade labels to this effect.