The Game’s Afoot (3)!

I’m still not getting any minis painted, even though I’m getting a lot cleaned up and prepared! So this is more of a post to say “Sorry All, I’m still here, you’re not getting off that lightly”! There’s nothing interesting in this post so don’t feel compelled to read any further!

It has been nearly two years (!) since I posted stuff about my 1880s Afghan army (you can see the last post here). I haven’t finished any more figures for it but I’ve made progress with preparing and organising them. In the last post I thought I’d got all the minis I needed cleaned up and stuck on MDF bases but then Osprey’s The Men Who Would Be Kings colonial wargames rules came along and I had a re-think (as you do). I decided to switch over to those rules with my Boxer Rebellion armies and was so pleased with how the rules worked that I decided to use them for all the games I play for the period 1880 to 1914. This has meant some re-organisation (but not much) and overall no significant increase in models has been required (I slightly scale down the number of troops in TMWWBK units to fit what I generally use anyway).

The bulk of reorganising has been spent on my Chinese forces and I’m happy with where they are heading, so I thought after that it was time to look at my Afghan forces. I’ve then followed that up by adding base texture to most of the unpainted minis and then priming them – you can see them in their box below (the previous post shows the minis displayed as individual units).

As far as changing units is concerned I’ve worked more around TMWWBK Afghan army list, dropping tribal cavalry and increasing the number of tribal infantry (“tribal” in the rules refers to the composition and fighting method of the units rather than their ethnicity). I’ve kept in the camel gun unit because I like it and it’s different although not an “official” unit and I’ve left it unprimed at the moment because it will probably be the last unit to be done. I still have the tribal cavalry minis stashed away, along with some extra figures to increase the unit size in line with TMWWBK, and I might do them in the future although, as you can see, the box is pretty full (I could get round that by maybe moving the oxen limber to another box).

Speaking of the limber, it is now based and primed properly along with the gun (blu-tacked in position here).

The picture above just shows some of the primed troops in a bit more detail (cavalry at the top, Highland Guard lower left and tribal infantry lower right). To get the troops I need for TMWWBK force ready I need to paint about 30 of the figures in the box, the other figures then giving me optional units or forces for larger games. Fortunately I have British Empire forces I can use along with some scenery so I just need to knuckle down and get some figures painted now!