How do I count 6mm miniatures on my score sheet?

When I started this blog, I started trying to keep a tally of the miniatures I'd painted each year. Mostly that was accurate, but mostly I was painting 28mm is my guess. Or if I was doing 6mm, I was doing scifi and most were tanks, so one 6mm tank is its own mini.

Now with doing the 6mm Napoleonics I'm wondering if perhaps each strip of 6 figures should count as one mini for the scoreboard. In some ways it's still quicker to paint a strip of six than it is to do a single 28mm mini, as my current sidetrack to 28mm Naps and 28mm wild west minis (forthcoming blog post about those) will attest.

Do I count a complete stand as one, which has two strips of six on each for infantry? Or two artillery? Unknown how many cavalry at this stage will be on a stand, but maybe three or four.

It feels like cheating if I count each individual troop, kind of like counting a 32 page comic book toward your total books read for the year. :) haha 

Is there a scale? One 28mm mini  = 1 point? A 10-15mm mini = 0.5 points? A tank = 3.5 points?

One 6mm figure would be 0.25 points? So a strip of 4 would be equivalent to 1 point? And Irregular minis which come on strips of six would be 1.5 points?

That would mean my epic ACW figures, which are 10 per strip and 20 per stand would be 10 points per stand? I mean, it takes me a long time to paint them, but maybe that's too high.

Maybe 10-15mm figures should be 0.25pt (per individual), and 6mm could be 0.1? So ten of them would be the equivalent effort to painting one 28mm mini? That feels a bit better. So my stand of 12 of them would be 1.2 points.

I don't know. What are your thoughts?

Am I overthinking it? Should I just write up a reference sheet and link it to my scoreboard so people can gauge how I do it?

Maybe that's the best. Thanks for listening and talking it through with me.

I Stumbled On Bloody Ground

Watching videos by 7th Son on the chubes, I found a flip- and play-through of On Bloody Ground, a pair of wargames by WIP Games & miniatures. 

They have one game based on the Norman Conquest and one on the Reconquista--the latter being the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula by the Christians against the Muslims. While I have a lot of other periods I'm trying to focus on, I am  quite scatterbrained, so these are kind of piquing my interest. I'm going to get The Norman Conquest book first. The other is called El Cid and the Reconquista. 

Sidenote: Hilariously, they do a bundle "deal" that's not a deal. ie; buy two books for the price of two books, which is the sort of move Games Workshop pull. Still, in WIP's favour is that their rulebooks are very cheap and they are a small 2-man band, so they're cool.

What is actually sealing the deal isn't so much the period, but the rulebooks themselves. 

I know it might seems weird, but I really (really) love clear, well spaced text, easy to read fonts, non glossy paper, where the reading experience isn't burdened by graphical multi-coloured backgrounds. I want my rulebooks to be rulebooks. 

Do you want email alerts for Pants of War?

 I've been looking into email subscriptions to Blogspot blogs (they used to have it as a feature, but this got turned off in 2021) and even looking at alternatives if it comes to that.

But based on a recommendation from an internet rando, Feedrabbit is a way to subscribe to the site's RSS feed for free.

If you use your own RSS/Atom reader, then you will already be familiar with how to do this.

You have to create a Feedrabbit account, but here's what you get on their free plan:

You just visit their website: feedrabbit.com, and enter https://pantsofwar.blogspot.com/ in the bar and hit Subscribe. 

I think it's best to create an account first before subscribing to something because after I did the above, I got an email confirming my account creation, I put in a password, then on my dashboard I couldn't see any subscriptions so had to resubscribe.

This is what my subs dashboard looks like after creating an account and subscribing:

Note the handy wee unsubscribe button if you think it's rubbish. :)

This post is also acting as a test for me to see how well it works. If it all goes well, I'll add Feedrabbit as a widget in the sidebar to make it obvious.

Give it a crack if you'd like to follow along and let me know what you think of it.

In fact, I think I might add a few other Blogger blogs onto my subs.

Sunday painting 28mm Napoleonics

 A few days ago I had the thought that, for me, 6mm would be my go-to scale when I want to get an army on the table and 28mm (or what I often refer to as 30mm now because I can't figure out the whether 28mm or 32mm are what we're playing with and that every manufacture seems to measure things differently) will be the scale for taking my time.

But after pulling out some unfinished 30mm Black Powder Waterloo minis (they came in a Waterloo starter box set with the rules), I'm finding that I'm instinctively trying to take shortcuts. 

My normal method of painting would be base colour, wash, base colour, highlight, but this time I wanted to try dark base colour and a couple layers of watered down highlights. I've used this method a couple of times successfully and watering the paint down a lot means the highlights blend in with the layer underneath. But sometimes you have to do a couple of coats of each layer as the changes can be very subtly.

And they were. So subtle in fact, that even though I use magnifying glasses for 30mm figures, I still couldn't distinguish the parts I had just done. Frustrated by the fact that I had based most of the figures 2x2, I sometimes struggled to recognise which figures I had and hadn't done.

So I thought I'd just skip ahead to a lighter layer and see how that turned out. Shown here are the pants done in this method, and you can sort of see the bedrolls done that way too. Everything else on these models is my original paintjob from when I bought the box--ie; skin, coat, facings, and cuffs + washes.

I'm not terribly happy with how they're coming out, but I've also realised I'm just too impatient.

Further Napoleonics.. almost done 2 divisions

Well, things have been progressing very quickly. I've almost completed an entire division each of the French and English in 6mm.

I'm really happy that they're so quick to paint and get table ready. Because of the rank and file and strip nature of these figures, I can't base them until they're painted, which means I can't play until they're painted. It's the same problem I have with starting a new Warmaster army or Black Powder Epic ACW. 

After finding the trick to quickly painting these figures (something I'll now be able to replicate to some degree in 10mm and 15mm), I'll be able to actually get them on the table. Other than one game last month, I haven't actually played a wargame for a couple of years. Partly because of things going on in my life, but it got frustrating with 28mm figures taking me so long to paint.

This has actually done wonders for my mental health. I am enjoying and can focus on painting better than I have for years because I'm seeing actual progress each day. It's wonderful!

So here's what I've done since Saturday (it's Thursday evening now):

And for some progress pics getting to this point...

My first forays into Napoleonics

 I feel a little scatterbrained with all the games I've been convinced I'm going to focus on over the last couple of weeks. But there is a madness to the method.

It started when a friend showed me his copy of Warhammer The Old World. I borrowed it, read it, and we played a game, but the figures I used were a mish-mash of Chaos Warriors and Beastmen, the former which were from Age of Sigmar.

I didn't have a complete square based Warhammer rank and file army, or enough models to make one. Certainly not a 2000 point army.

So I looked around my shelves and found an unopened box of Kings of War Goblins. I had put together and half-painted the gobs from one of the starter sets, but the megabox was still untouched. And I had the Kings of War books, so there was more than enough to get me going playing a complete game (even if it was going to be 1000pt to start).

The goal was to play a game without spending any money, or as little as possible, because I've been unemployed for 6 months now, and I've had to sell a lot of things (including my car) to stay afloat. 

I started building the goblin force, being a big fan of multibasing and moving an element rather than a block of individual troops, this is the one I felt would stick. This would be my focus.

But my brain being what it is, I started looking online at other games too. I got a copy of Kings of War Historical so that I could play with some of my other minis--I have 28mm & 20mm Greeks, 20mm Egyptians (damaged in a quake a few years ago so will need a rebase and maybe some replacement minis), and 20mm Romans. I don't know why I have so many 20mm minis, because it's my least favourite scale, but it is what it is. Oh and I have a couple of DBA forces worth of 15mm Romans and Goths. 

Going through some of my other minis, I found the western figures and buildings, one of which I put together a few days ago. 

And maybe it was stumbling on a Youtube video, maybe it was something else, but I remembered that I had bought some 6mm Napoleonics from Irregular a couple of years ago during lockdown. A division each of French and British infantry. And I had only just undercoated the French line infantry. 

Made a wild west building today

 I've been digging through some of my piles of unbuilt and unfinished projects.

Among them I found some Wild West Exodus MDF buildings (28mm), a couple of 15mm ACW buildings, and a few miscellaneous bits.

I decided to build up the WWE (hmm, not the wrestling) Distillery. With a few superglue mishaps, gluing a fingernail to a finger, and some drops on my jersey, the building came up nicely.