Wargaming Armies on the Cheap.

 Another project, for which I have been gathering resources for the last couple of months. Creating wargame armies on the cheap. I turned to the good old game of 'Risk'

I wanted a set which had six colours, red, blue, green, white, grey and yellow. The later sets only offer five colours and one of those is some hideous lilac type colour! It is a pity as they did have troops wearing shakos. This particular edition, the troops are wearing tricornes.

The five boxes cost me just over £50 including shipping, the figures in two of the boxes are still in their factory sealed bags, never played with.

Next up was the bases and I turned to Warbases here in the UK. 25mm square mdf bases with rounded corners and 25mm circular bases for leaders. They actually cost slightly more than the five games did. I now have all I need to create six decent sized armies. Total cost approx £110.

I shall be basing them as below, with four infantry to a base, two cavalry, a single cannon and one cavalry figure on a round base as command.

Each box contains 40 infantry, 12 cavalry and 8 cannon per colour. Multiply that by five, and well you get the picture.

Now I have a whole heap of glueing to do. I will not be painting the figures nor do I plan to flock the bases, but the latter may change once I see how they look.

Epic Pacific War

 I have some excellent WW2 Pacific War games in my collection. Each is great in its own way, but being a tinkerer, I wanted to incorporate, what I consider to be the best bits from each, into an epic version of the Pacific War.

Starting point is Axis & Allies Pacific 1940 with its map and miniatures.

The beautiful map is just too good not to use for the overall picture. However, I wanted some of the smaller islands to be big enough to place troops upon them.

Conquest of the Pacific is another fine game, its map is very abstract, but does make the islands big enough to fight over.

See here, the Solomons, Gilberts etc. Ideal for my planned purpose.

However, the map, though cleverly designed, is far from accurate enough for my liking. My plan is to create separate map boards to keep off the main table to fight those individual battles. I can easily redraw the islands, plus a few more, place them in plastic wallets with a cardboard strengthener and the job is a good one.

I just recently managed to snag a copy of this very hard to find classic from 1999, it is the final piece in the puzzle to create my epic game. I like various rules from all three games and intend to integrate them into my own concoction. I have plenty of miniatures, so no problem there.

I now need to create those off board maps of the different island chains, work out starting positions and strength of units on the main map. A modified finance system to allow for further purchases etc.