A game of 'Battle Cry', Space Marines & some Vintage figures!

An odd mix in the title there I know, but it's just what's been occupying my time and my thoughts this week so here we go!

To begin with I played my first full game of Battle Cry on Friday afternoon and enjoyed every minute of it. Rather than begin with the first scenario (which is 1st Bull Run) I simply put down some terrain tiles and then placed all of my units on the board, 25 infantry, 6 artillery and 4 cavalry so far. Probably too many units on the board but after a couple of hours play it resulted in a Union victory 5 to 3. I played the game on my painting desk where it was well lit so I took a few photos. I simply played both hands of command cards the best I could but I think that to begin with both sides were slightly hampered by the cards until I realised that I had not shuffled the pack to begin with! Once the armies became engaged - the forced march card is brilliant for getting units into the fight - then casualties began to mount up. The Rebs played the 'Fieldworks' card (I think it's called that) so could throw up three sections of hasty works which they did when deployed on a hill forcing the Yanks to switch targets. The cavalry 'Hit and Run' card was great fun and used to good effect. The artillery 'Bombard' card is a powerful card allowing all artillery units to fire twice that move. Unlike Commands & Colors dice are not reduced as units take hits in Battle Cry which took a bit of getting used to begin with. All in all a really good fun game. Set up and pack away was very quick and easy. From this week I'll start to play through the scenarios in order.

Space Marines! In exchange for this wonderful game AND the complete set of the Time Life ACW books (Oh yes), I'll be painting around 60 Warhammer 28mm figures and intend to make the very best job of them. Obviously it's something completely new to me but I do enjoy a painting challenge. More on this as things progress but yesterday I painted an initial test figure to try out a shade of green ( this unit are called the Salamanders), will no doubt need to make changes to the colours etc but it was good to get some paint on one of the figures and I'll be discussing things with David this morning.

Along with the game arrived a nice little extra gift from David, this wonderful set of 30mm 'Jason' ECW figures were part of the late Eric Knowles collection and will make a great little vignette for display, the castings are packed with period character so another little painting project on the cards.

Funny enough I also painted a group of 30mm ECW figures for Old John a couple of weeks ago which John tells me are by Hinton Hunt, interesting as I had not realised that HH made figures in this scale but again they are really nice figures.