My wargames weekend

My weekend has actually passed with a rarity for me, when a friend of mine bought a copy of Memoir '44 and (despairing of his girlfriend) asked me to join him for a few games. I went round for a "boys' night in" featuring pizza, beer plus about 7 or 8 games of Memoir '44. Excellent fun, and so much so that we have agreed to do it again! I had not played Memoir '44 before, and had low expectations of what it would be like. Certainly t was not what you would call 'historically realistic' in the detailed sense, but the game was a great deal of fun and gave a great flavour of things - I finally 'got' the game, after a year or two of thinking it sounded bad. What a turnaround! I may even be tempted to try it myself for different periods, so I shall be following the blog 'A Wargaming Odyssey' closely, as he has recently decided to try a Vietnam version of it (sadly I must wait as it's only one project among his many, just like any self-respecting wargamer!)

Back home in my own GHQ bunker, I've been doing a great deal of the 'donkey work' for my WOTR armies. I have worked my way through half of the boxes, clipping, glueing, and assembling eighty figures. I then glues eighty 1p coins to their bases, sat them all in a cardboard box in the loft (no small achievement in the freezing snow-bound cold) and spray-painted them a base-coat of black. I even took advantage of a trip to Ikea to get some storage boxes on the cheap.

I have now only just started out on the tricksy task of painting retinue colours on them, and my research largely consists of looking up other peoples' models on the internet plus a bit of Wikipedia. Here are my first set of liveried Retinue men, in a fetching blue and white. This should apparently make them lancastrians as these were (again apparently) the colours for Henry VI and/or the Duke of Somerset.

It's base-coat only, and I intend to dip them to get the finished result much improved. I'll paint up a lot more before I do that, however. For now though it's 12 down, 148 to go!