We Played a Game

 On the new table and everything!

The rules were Command Decision:Test of Battle and the scenario was a very simple meeting engagement; a real introduction with limited capabilities.

It was fun, but definitely more learning than anything.

 

More to follow as we game more regularly.

Requirements, Stories, and Miniature Wargame Rules

Requirements - or what do I want anyway.

I am looking for the right set of WWII wargame rules.  A fool's task, of course, but at least it's an excuse to read some rules and play some games.

When I was a young software developer I was taught to start with requirements; after all stating what you want makes it far easier to get it.  So, what are my requirements?

• 
  A game that I can play with a small group of friends at my home in a day  -- which means of course that it has to be a game my friends enjoy.  One day is important because while my cat is very tolerant of my hobbies, I do not want to tempt her too far.

• A game that I can take to a convention and present to a group of boardgamers and have a fun game wrap up in four hours including setup, teaching, and teardown.

• A game that uses my existing kit.  I have an extensive 10mm collection for late war east front and while it might be fun to extend it to earlier periods or to add the western allies, I cannot afford to throw it all over to re-invest in 3mm or 28mm.  And that's not just the money but the painting time.  I do have a huge (5'x8' more or less) gaming table and enough Hexon terrain to cover the whole table, so hex grid based games are open to me.

• A game that tells a story that is useful for the solo campaign I am planning.

Story?

I believe that the history books that wargamers enjoy provoke our desire to game, not because they show us the truth of the progress of human history but because they tell stories that connect to something fundamental in humans; and that we have to find a way to express in something we do or make.  OK, your mileage may very, but that is always the urge that events large and small have provoked in me.  Judging from the number of dedicated trekkies, reenactors, and roleplayers around, I am not alone. 

The campaign that I am planning is a fiction.  Not a novel, but a secondary world to use Tolkien's term.  A secondary world can be shaped with all sorts of content, including ordinary fiction but also false histories and encyclopedias, maps and myths, and propaganda and straight up lies.   By using hypertext to tie it all together, I think that I can produce something a little bit different,  Will it be worth it?  As long as it entertains me I will be satisfied.

Of course, it's one thing to write fiction; the challenge is writing something that other people will want to read, and to keep writing it until it's done.  If that was easy I would probably have done it.  But the tool of a game with its cycle of scenario design, setup, play, and battle report provides a library that can inspire threads of narrative when I am out of fresh ideas.  

So what rules?

Right now I am looking hard at three sets.

War Stories: A World War 2 RPG is a game of the Year Zero Engine family.  Those games have excellent combat mechanisms and being RPGs are not just skirmish games.  No, it's not a wargame but instead it droves to the sort of detail we find in frontline soldier's memoirs,

Command Decision: Test Of Battle is a set of rules where one stand equals (more or less) a platoon.  Decision making is quite granular, using both proximity to command units and issued order that can go to a stand level.  This is the level that can cover some of the small unit actions we find in history books.  I CD have enjoyed it in the past, but I have some concern about using it as a convention game.  

My backup plan right now is either Fist Full Of Tows or Battlefront but everything needs testing.  The pleasure of this level is that it can involve some detailed tactics that resemble a lower level while covering more ground.  A realistic mix of unit types is easy to achieve.  I have played a lot of Blitzkrieg Commander but it has left me cold.  A fast, fun game but if you play enough the dice will deliver too many frustrating activation fails.

Panzer Korps uses an approach that I have not tried.  The fundamental unit of operation is the battalion.  It is represented by three company stands that illustrate the base type and up to four company attachments.  All of these stands remain together act act as a single formation.  At 1cm = 50m I can use my table to represent a divisional attack such as Juno Beach.  I will be testing those rules in a couple of weeks.  My only real problem with them is that they are in desperate need of editing; but I can work through that for a good game at that level.

It is not quite alone at that scale, but the only one I have at hand, Rommel (one square is 1km, so on my table with my Kallistra hexes 1cm =100m) reminds me very much of a board game.  Not so much the hex map as the fact that all information is really on a scrap of card with the  miniatures merely providing decoration.  It might be more interesting to "jack up" the representations of Panzer Korps to a higher level and even use a hex grid with that scale.

Next?

In this line of investigation, testing -- with a plan to blog the results in detail as battle reports.  I am also still working on the economic model for the campaign and I will be investigating platforms for presenting the campaign results.

  

Making a model from a map

 I have been reading some quite brilliant new(ish) books on World War Two.  I especially recommend The Wages of Destruction: The Making And Breaking Of The Nazi Economy by Adam Tooze and Kiev 1941: Hitler's Battle for Supremacy in the East by David Stahel.  Both books aim for maximum myth busting, Tooze focusing on the “Speer production miracle” and Stahel digging deep into the communication within the German high command and the post war blame shifting.  Both look very hard at logistics. 

Stahel looks (among other things) at the wear rate on German trucks which steadily de-motorized the supply system. If you are used to games win which the limit of logistics is to trace a supply line, his analysis is quite a revelation.

Tooze (an economic historian) works at a high level and uncovers the real constraints on the German economy during the war.  I had especially not realized the extend to which food production – and starvation – drove so many decisions and limited German options.  I think, coming from North America where we export food, that it’s hard to have a visceral feel to how food production can be a key factor in strategic thinking.  

Thanks to that reading, I want to put together production and food supply models for my still unnamed campaign.  Step one is counting a classifying hexes.  So looking at the Blitzkrieg map lets enumerate the terrain features.

First we have the map itself

Category	Type	Notes
Hex	Clear	In most games this is treated as unremarkable open land with uniform road development presenting unremarkable military opportunities or obstacles.   This is not fine grained enough for me for the economic model or for differentiating terrain for the gaming table.  I think that I can get a finer granularity by including adjacent terrain as a modifier.
Hex	Desert	To be precise, the Great Koufax Desert, included in the game for players with Rommel fantasies.  Oh, and the original Blitzkrieg had a couple of 60s pop culture and wargaming names for the geography.   I’ve been arguing with myself about this one because it’s unrealistic.  But seriously? It’s just for fun.
Hex	Mountain	But how high and rough?  My current thought is to select some European range such as the Carpathians as a standard.  I note that mountain to mountain hexsides have been highlighted on the map.  Mountains surrounded by mountains might be special.  And gaming mountain warfare would at least be a challenge.
Hex	Swamp	What it says on the tin
Hex	City	There are some hints at relative size.  The multi-hex cities of the original version are missing.
Hex	Forest	Very dense woodland, with low population density, little arable land, and occasional settlements linked by logging roads.
Other	Road	Mainline dual track railway. Also, an indicator of development, so hexes near a mainline might be more developed in some way.
Other	Beach	A yellow line on the coast indicates beaches which can be used for landings.  But is all the Great Koufax shoreline also beach? A decision to make.
Other	River	Navigability is a detail that most be sorted out.  River monitors are not in the rules but are an interesting detail.
Other	Port	Labels some cities, a few actually inland on rivers.

and then the points from which more details can be drawn

Type	Adjacent to	Effects
Clear, Forest	Mountain	Somewhat hillier than normal, on the level of the Ardennes (forest) or the Alberta foothills (clear)
Clear	Road	Better communications, improved agricultural development, higher population density
Clear	River	Slightly higher agricultural productivity
Clear	City	Higher population density and some industrial buildings especially along roads.

Also, thanks to JSTOR and a professional historian friend who pointed me in the right direction I was able to download Arnold Daniel, "Regional Differences of Productivity in European Agriculture" (Review of Economic Studies, 1944-1945, Volume 12,  No. 1 pp50-70").  In addition to an interesting discussion of the reasons for differences which can lead to cultural backstory for a worldbuilding, he has productivity for key crops in Metric tons per hectare for the countries in his study.  So count hexes, determine scale, attach a factor for the terrain and the country, convert to calories per hex per harvest, Bob's your uncle.

I think that next I will look at scale, which will be an interesting problem since how scales work will determine how strategy translates to the table.  I am thinking right now or some for of nesting of time and distance so  the pace of the game and the strategic/operation/tactical interfaces feel "right" without worrying about everything being mapped 1:1.

More Solo Campaign Thoughts

 What interesting problems can I investigate?

I have been listening to Prit Buttar's books on the Eastern Front -- currently The Reckoning.  This has left me wondering how the loss of men and equipment affect how units are used, and how home production is fed into front units.  While board wargames can portray some parts of this with techniques like step reduction, I don't think that they do well at how units are rotated out of the line or rebuilt.  That's not a horrible flaw as far as the games go, but if I want to look at what happens to combat effectiveness in detail I will need are quite fine grained model.  Doubly so if I wish to look at production factors.

The Map

I am starting by picking a map.  Maps contextualize strategy. Since this decision will be with me for a while it has to stimulate thought and enthusiasm.

Frankly the map of Middle Earth leaves me cold. 

This version is optimized to increase scale by excluding sea space.  

The problems are:

(1) The map, especially Eriador, is virtually empty.  That makes sense for the Third Age, but by the time industrialization has bee accounted for and human populations backfilled it is all enormously different.  That's both a lot of work and obliterates the feel of ME.

(2)  The strategic problem boils down to control of the Gap of Rohan.  No matter who is fighting whom, the small number of choke points is frankly frustrating.

The only things I lose from abandoning Middle Earth are a cool campaign name and the idea of the Numenorians with their racist backstory being the Nazis.

Instead, I have decided to use a game map from the 1960s, heavily modified half a century later, called Blitzkrieg.

This was my first wargame, giving it a sentimental attachment.  The fan upgrade has far better art and better granularity.  I won't be using the rules, but the map itself is a good starting point.  It has enough details at a sufficient granularity to direct action, while at the same time leaving space open for imagination.

So it's no longer Panzers on the Anduin.  Name to follow, I suppose, alone with a lot of systems design work to tie make a usable game.

 

Throwing off the balast

 If you used to follow one of my blogs that has now disappeared, sorry, but they are never going to get worked on again and have (in my mind, who else has a say?) no ideas that are super worth retaining.  Most of what I have kept is because I think that the ideas are worthwhile.

So What's The Plan?

When I moved I swore that I would have a normal living room.  In practice, this lead to a lot of wasted space.  I don't really sit and watch a TV and when my friends come by we stay at the dinner table. So here's the new game space:
                  

Fully Cat Approved.  A cat picture, because internet.

Current back burner

I have a nice army of Imaginations for Not The Seven Years War, which should regularly see action in the new space.  No particular plans to enlarge. See Enlightenment Imaginings

• In 28mm
• I am assembling a nice little 28mm force or two for Lion (and Dragon) Rampant and Clash of Spears.  Two interesting rules sets with very different approaches to the same scale and period.
• Lets not forget the ongoing 28mm late-C15 Italians; probably Art de la Guerre.
• In 15mm, my 15mm Italian Wars army for Impetus.  Deserves some love, and eventually it will get it.  Pictures eventually.   Mostly painted by a friend but I think that I can step up to it.
• The less attended to but still high potential projects
• Imjin war at sea.  If you don't know what that is, it is well worth a look.  Related, my 16th Century Mediterranean galleys.  And maybe an Indian Ocean meet-up? 
• My very tiny pre-dreadnaughts
• 10mm Italian Wars of Independence.  ACW tactics without slaveowners.

Nothing above is going to get a new blog; news will be posted here. For now anyway.

Panzers on the Anduin

Ever since I thought it might be fun to do fantastical (but not magical) World War II, that phrase has been bouncing through my head.  So the plan is to use the rules for the Columbia block game Victory, knock them into shape for a fifth age, industrialized middle earth, and use my WWII forces for tactical combat.  Still inchoate, but it will get it's own blog if it really starts to roll. 

My Roleplaying Experiments

I have worked through at least five rule sets for campaigns in renaissance Italy and now third century Rome.  The most recent games are ongoing, and I think it might me worth a blog to record and reflect on the whole experience.

But...

It is traditional at the point to apologize for the paucity of blog posts and resolve that there will be regular updates in the future.  Let's be real BUT I think it would be good for me to do something every week on at least one blog, and I have recently been doing things that are good for me.  We'll see how it goes.

Progress

A cat

My new boss, Hildigard von Katzen










And an 8x5' gaming surface

Two posts in one year; I feel so smug.

As usual, I have too many projects.

1. For the Enlightenment lads, I will be sorting out the table-ready figure inventory and start getting games going this month or early next so my retired buddies and I can game without having to accommodate working people.  Nothing need be done except the making of a list.
2. For WWII, I think I will change rule sets, probably something of my own devising  -- or more accurately something cobbled together out of other systems.  Now, do I want to re-base or not?  Current direction is "not" -- the bases I use are not huge.
3. Still running Magnifico, now on season two using GURPS.  Season three  will be derived from Cypher System, which is a bit more rules light.  For developing and selling a session they have a far more inviting business model and people I respect like the rules.
4. I have now acquired a a 10mm Italian Unification army which I plan to use with Fire and Fury,  The draw is ACW kit and tactics without slave owners.  If that works well I will do more periods using it.
5. I'm getting a cat.  Some nice senior cat from the shelter to drag me out of bed every morning and give me someone to look after.  I seem to need that somehow.
6. There are 1:3000 pre-dreadnoughts that need my attention.  I have everything I need but time.

If I start listing all my other unpainted or barely started projects I will just be sad; I am planning on staying at home until spring rolls around so  there will be lots of cold winter days to get work done.

Eternal Project Reset

My last, badly mis-dated, post told of plans for the first few months of industrious post retirement hobbying.  Nothing, of course, works out as planned.

What's worked:

• I am retired.  I like being retired.
• I have traveled to London and Florence as well as trips to Toronto and Ottawa.  Lots of traveling to come.
• I have helped run an actual prize winning game at Cangames in Ottawa! 
• I have completed Objective One from my last post.  I am indeed running a GURPS campaign set in 15th Century Florence  -- it's called, uncleverly, Magnifico.  Great fun with happy players and lots of laughter.
• And most important there is a wonderful new person in my life.  Fortunately for my projects, she's a busy writer and artist so I have to keep up my game!

So instead of listing dozens of Objectives lets classify and prioritize:

Writing

I want to work from Magnifico as my own campaign to Magnifico as a setting.  This presents some interesting challenges, the most significant being "how do I write about history without writing a history book?".  Most RPGs leverage the common cultural stereotypes  -- a feedback between fantasy books, bad history in movies, and video games endlessly recycled.  I think -- and at least some of the material I see getting YouTube views and the like supports the hypothesis -- is that some RPG players and GMs do care about historical accuracy and at least consistent settings.  

So, a timed, measurable objective:

• By September  2019, complete a useful draft a setting for an Italian hill town with historical details, characters, and adventure hooks.  The setting will be system-neutral but will have guidance for using at least GURPS, 5e, and probably Savage Worlds or Fate.  If I am satisfied that I have the text I need, I will move on to commission art, produce graphics, produce a book and self publish on a PDF platform such as DriveThruRpg.

Minis

I have quite a few unfinished miniatures project.  I have resumed painting so I am no longer completely frozen.  The projects I plan to push ahead with, with no particular deadline

• 28mm figures for Magnifico play.  I have quite a few painted, and if I can plod on at half a dozen a week I will soon have everything I need for quite elaborate games.  I am considering developing another set of rules, working title "civic violence" for gaming full contact politics in the Italian Renaissance city.  This would be fun at a low level of complexity as a convention game.
• In connection with that, I have the tools I need to build XPS foam models of building for a miniatures game.  I have been quite inspired by my trip to Florence.  A few test pieces needed followed by a plan for a modular system.
• 28mm Old School Napoleonics.  I have picked up a reprint of the Charge! rules -- the first mini game I played -- and ordered the figures for a full "regiment" of Austrian infantry.  I am not sure I will ever use them, but they will look lovely in the cabinet.
• 6mm Italian Renaissance for Impetus.  Fun rules, and 6mm is not that hard to paint.
• And I will get those 1:3000 navel figures done, because they too are just plain good looking.
• I have other concepts in 10 and 15mm but they will wait until at least some of the others are on display.

Boardgaming

I seem to have ended up with a mishmash of Europa games that need to be sorted, some of which truly belong in the hands of my friend Martin.  Europa players seem to like to put everything in the same box so I have a LOT of sorting to do.

I also want, as part of my non-wargamer life, to spend some time board-gaming with my friends; the "German" style games are good fun and I no longer feel as abashed by hobby as I once did.

And of course...

I have no intention of ceasing to enjoy my "normal life." We have trips planned, I still have my charity and choir to keep me busy, I have an enormous reading list, and life needs to be lived to the full.

Impending retirement

Sorry, but there was some sort of crap embedded in that post.  It's dead now (I hope).  Off I go to play Hunt the Wumpus with possible other cases.

A resource for refugee sponsorship in Canada

Sorry if this is kind of spam, I don't want to loose track of it
http://www.peianc.com/sitefiles/File/resources/refugee_sponsorship/rstp_five.pdf

Well, the sorting and stacking worked out.  No miniatures parted with, but over 60kg of junk to the landfill and the room in a state where the cleaners are able to keep it reasonably dust-free.

I have not since returned to gaming, although I am looking at painting a couple of 28mm figures over the next few weeks as a form of relaxation.  If I do, I will post the results here.

Most of my free time has shifted to work at the church - Saint Vincent de Paul, choir, Alpha - and spending time with friends.  My reading is almost all a slightly more literary fiction (lots of Tracy Chevalier; but all detailed on my goodreads page).  I also spent much of last fall baking bread, and will probably return to baking when the weather cools down here again.  I've also found a great hummus recipe!

I have continued to pursue my studies of Renaissance history and over the next week or so will try using yet another blog page to organize my notes and references.  Not a perfect tool for the purpose, but readily available wherever I am.  The 6sided blog pages seem to has disappeared, but I had little enough there.  The other hobby pages I will leave linked for reference, and because who knows when I might  return to them?

Boy, its been a long time

As you have probably guessed, my interests have been very differently focused since June of 2013.  I will probably not blog much about that, since really it is from a very different place than the audience of the few folks who do visit these pages.

I am making these notes as an aid-memoir for myself.  It is time to clear out the dead projects.  Not that some might not com eback to life, but so I will have a bit more space for - well, not so much active projects as a saner life. 

The objective:

• All retained materials in conventional out-of-the-way storage.
• No new storage furniture or space - I will fit it in the space I have, except for a few things that make sense elsewhere.
• No under-table storage in the new world order.

The method:

• Make material to be re-stored evident.  Out from under the tables it comes!
• Clear easy wins - I am keeping some candidate storage containers surplus to needs, that sort of thing.  Ditch all that.
• Tools in the garage.  Since I am not actively crafting, they can go in a storage bin elsewhere.
• Clear expired stock.  Eliminate all but basic supplied of paint, brushes, etc.  When I can take the time to go back to miniatures, I will be able to buy new supplies.
• Compress.  Get stackable bins and fill them TIGHT with the stuff that should be kept but will not be re-accessed until I go back to miniatures. 
• To a good home, the projects which will be retired for good.  This includes all 28mm except the one totally painted figure, all the non-Renaissance 15mm, and 10mm besides not-SYW and WWII.  I will keep the 6mm FPW just in case,but clear out the unpainted 10mm FPW.
• I will ALSO downsize the library; military SF and fantasy are especially vulnerable.  I will need to reorg the large bookcase (it is big enough for boxes) to be storage instead.  There will be double-shelving!

 Lets see how it works.  I'll check back in in a couple of weeks.

Back from Vacation

My dear wife and I have just returned from a week cruising the Danube.  Great fun, we were well looked after and got to see a great cross section of Hungary, Austria and Bavaria.

Vienna is now going to be the main target of our next vacation.  I have never been more comfortable in a city of more than a million, and I have been to a couple. 

This was not a military-oriented vacation, but I do include for your amusement a sample of 40mm or so toy soldiers seen on castle hill in Budapest.

I'm writing more about the tour, as a guide for disabled travelers as much as anything, on a separate page.  I'll make an announcement here when that is ready.

SF wins for a week (or two)

OK, the rotation in 3-day units thing is not flying.  But I am making progress on the SF front, re-opening processing of the star database to refine out mass data for my future history project.

My first weeks rotation was...

almost a complete week of being sick.  Really annoying and still not back to 100%.  After a couple of days out of line. my blood sugar is back where it needs to be so that much is good.

Trying a rotation

I have not been finishing very much lately, or really more than getting a few things started.  I want to change that; so here is my plan:

1. Make progress on one project from a core list at least every second night
2. Spend no more than two nights in a row on any one project

The core projects will be:

1. The Renaissance - one of novel, background for RPG (and novel), 15mm basing or 28mm painting.  Any of these will count, but just reading will not.
2. WWII - produce a plan to complete organization, re-base units that should be on smaller stands, and in general get going.  
3. Science Fiction - work on the data or game models for an SF campaign, or on an SF novel set in the same future history. 
4. Any of FPW, spaceship gaming, 6mm or 15mm SF gaming, 10mm not-SYW, or just reading what takes my fancy (but with a blog entry about the book).

On the personal side, my radical new diet has let me bring my blood sugar under control for the first time in ages so I might actually have the energy to follow along with this.
 

Scattered all over the place

So what I am up to now?

1. Still working on the mystery novel.  Really, it is more accurate to say that I am working on the research - quattrocento Italian social history is absolutely fascinating.  There is an amazing amount of work available especially Renaissance Florence.  Not just art but building, dress, political administration, medicine, funerals ... the whole nine yards.  I am going to have to find some way both to organize what I know, and them somehow drag a plot and characters ouut of some other part of my brain.
2. Pithead has recently released 75mm Soviet regimental guns.  My brave Don lads have been waiting for theirs for a long time.  I have no idea when I will get back to the period, but I must get in the kit!
3. Ross has been steadily delivering painted 15mm Italian wars from my huge backlog.  I will get back to basing them shortly.
4. Another plan I may come to regret - I have been slow to push ahead with painting my 10mm Franco-Prussian war figures for my Mars-la-Tour project.  I will be ordering a couple of packs for Heroics and Ros 1:300 French and North German infantry to see if I can get them on the table at good speed and if I like how they look.
5. I am still going to Italian lessons; we have covered all three regular conjugations in the present tense, but mastery is far off.  Still, since Dadi & Piombo  is now available in pdf form so I bought an issue and am working to plod my way through with dictionary, grammar and verb guide.

All in all, life is going well. My dear wife and I have just had a festival of the first six seasons of the  US cop show "The Closer".  The characters are interesting and it often managers to be a pretty good "fair" mystery as well.

A drastic change of direction

I've been interested in the Italian renaissance for a long time (in fact, since about 1976 when I played in a large scale campaign set in the period).  From time to time I Have read quite widely in the period -- economic, banking, social and political history as well as well as military.

So where is this leading me?  Well, I want to digest the inchoate mass of data and re-express it as some form of entertainment.   There is too wide a range her, I suspect, for a campaign game; and I can't expect anyone to read  great mass of background just to play a role playing game "correctly."  Popular history can be fun, but I really don't have any sort of hook for non-fiction and I think that to do it right needs more scholaly training and experience than I will ever have.

Fiction, then.  Right now, I am thinking of an historical mystery set in Tuscany somewhere about 1470.  The period and place are well documented and academically popular so research is not a hardship.  I already have a good library on the subject, and the local university libraries are also well stocked.

I am starting by trying to get a grip on factors that shape people - birth, education, careers, death.  In order to move beyond the focused-but-casual reading I have done in the past I have used the old method from my student days: a tub of index cards and short, well-filed, and referenced notes.  I find the simple act of writing helps with my retention, and gives me something to order later when I am trying to filter out anachronism.  I want to write about quattrocento Italians,  not 21st century Canadians in fancy dress.

This will take a long time, so we will see how we do.  It is at least cheap.  And in a century where self-publication is so easy I can at least be certain that if I finish it will be available for people to buy and read.  If they will or no is another matter.

What I've Been Up To

I've been focused on work and family for the past couple of months, but I have not been entirely without bloggable activities.

• My dear wife an I discovered we both like Commissario  Montalbano.  Twenty-two almost-two-hour episodes in a row we are now in withdrawal.  The series has interesting mysteries, an exotic (for us Anglo Canucks) location and culture, and interesting and likeable regular characters.  Yes, there are English sub-titles.
• We also like Commissario Brunettei.  This is a Bavarian TV production; they are (my wife assures me) faithful to the books but, after watching Montalbano, I find the German actors less convincing than I did at first.  Subtitles; you don't so much notice that they are speaking German while you are reading them but when you head to the Kitchen you suddenly notice how they are speaking.  
• I've started taking intro Italian lessons.  Notice the common theme here.
• I've also been reading intensively on the Italian Renaissance.

 So, little of direct gaming relevance but all good fun nonetheless.

At work, I have learned the basics of a scheduling product called Control-M that is definitely new-to-me.  I've also started programming in Perl, which in the role of a "next step up" scripting language is great fun and very easy to use.

Love, Hate and twenty-eight (mm that is)

As I posted on my renaissance blog I am working on my first 28mm figures in a very long time.  As a result they are hard work; which gets me wondering if they are worth the effort.  Slow to produce, had to transport, all sorts of downside.  But two things recently are making me think they are indeed what I want to start next.

1. Most have my friends have at least one 28mm (or larger) unit in their display case, and they look great.  Quite frankly, I want to be in the club.
2. I am considering an (OK, two, can't have a game without two) Italian armies for about 1480 (the year the Turks held Otranto).  The very best 15mm figures for this period are Mirliton.  But once you factor in price including postage, for orders less than $100 they are running over $1 a figure; similar economics apply if you order from their UK dealer.  And that does not factor in HST which I will not be able to dodge for registered mail -- both vendors demand that for large orders, and I cannot say I blame them.  But at these prices, Perry Plastics start to look quite economical.  Because they have sane postage on orders around $40 I can bring in a few at a time.  I am not rushing, so I can paint them as I get them.

So, why not?  As long as I am not in a rush, I can collect Perry figures (and 28mm from other vendors) and slowly accumulate the army I want.  And, honestly, I wonder at seeing 28mm as large, since I regularly play 40mm games with Ross.

Anyone out there still play 28mm ancients?