Two for Tea: Building 6mm AWI Armies

Bob Barnetson

www.edmontonwargamegroup.com

After finishing some WW2 microarmour in last June, I fancied painting something more colourful. Napoleonics has never interested me (a view reinforced by the Nap guys at my club never really liking any set of rules). But the American Revolution! Now that offers an easily comprehensible war for a horse-and-musket newbie. Only a two-dozen major battles, two simple armies to paint, straight forward tactics, and no uniform changes.
An order from Baccus yielded an American and British army pack, some additional troops, generals, Indian allies from the Brits and a Timecast village with the Polemos base-and-plinth system for about $150 CDN. Later, I supplemented this with two additional army packs.

The British painted up quickly and the red and white scheme was a pleasure to paint. I dithered a bit with the cavalry and cannons but eventually finished them. I preferred the Line Infantry (1768 Warrant) to those in the campaign kit for ease of painting but both turned out well.

The SYW generals had quite a lot of character. It took me awhile to get the nerve up to paint Britain’s Indian allies, but they also came out quite well.

And then the Americans. Oh, the endless hordes of drab blue and then drab but multicoloured militia. This is where the wheels fell off the painting. The figures are nice and it wasn’t that hard, I couldn’t get motivated. I eventually finished by doing them in little chunks and found I could knock off 2 paint sticks (totaling 48 figures) during a lunch hour. Seeing some completed everyday helped.

Baccus offers lovely flags for this era. I pulled some off the internet, reversed some in PC Paint to create both sides and then imported them into a Word table for printing. The flags are a “bit” big but I think capture some of the pageantry of the AWI.

I didn’t have a set of rules in mind when I started I based on 20x40mm metal, figuring I could double these up on a metal sabot if needed. Unhappy with the rules I looked through, I developed a Warmaster variant. You can read these rules in Issue 6 of Wargames Journal (with additional scenarios in Issue 7 and 8). The rules seem to capture the nature of combat in the AWI adequately. More recently, I’ve been miniaturizing the block-and-hex game Clash for a continent by Worthington Games

My next project is some medieval troops. A friend talked me into buying some inexpensive 1/72 plastics for the Days of Knights rules by Chipco. The gaming is good but the painting was really quite a hassle and the few figures per base doesn’t convey the sense that two armies are meeting. So back to Baccus it is!