Goings on at Maison Broom

Sometimes good things can come out of bad - which is an unusually glass half full kind of thing for me to find myself saying…but it’s true. 

See I’m a bit light on the whole hobby dosh thing at the mo (US TRANSLATION - I’m on skid row / I’m a bum and I ain’t got no money) since the wife’s 60th birthday and our 40th wedding anniversary will unfortunately not pay for themselves - and it’s forced me to delve deep into my lead pile of shame. 

Some of us accrue a lead pile with the certain knowledge that its contents will be turned into table ready masterpieces within a rigidly preplanned production schedule…(coughs)…isn’t that right Jon, while some of us without the gift of purpose and planning lose interest in a project almost as soon as the miniatures arrive - put off by the enormity of the task that suddenly lies ahead. 

You can guess which category I fall into. 

After a while the lack of any finished product from such profuse and carefree spending becomes a matter of internal guilt and shame - definitely something to keep out of the view of curious wives and their desire to establish “how much did all this lot cost, then”. As a direct consequence of all this - for the last two years most of the East Midland’s chief export has resided in my special cupboard of mystery - to which only I have the key.

Working on the assumption that I must have seen something in these jolly little bags of lead at some point and baulking at the prospect of buying something new from my currently scant resources I resolved to dig deep into the pile to see if something within might be worth revisiting.

The first step was to isolate the still half finished stuff, with its accompanying taint of failure, (I’m looking at you Elizabethan 10mm) and make my way down to the deeper strata of things I don’t even remember buying and which, it seems, have never been touched. First out were some tripods from Tumbling Dice,  (I know, I know…always with the Victorian sci fi…what is it with me and that sort of stuff ?) models which look much nicer than the scratch built ones I cobbled together over the summer and probably require early deployment.

Tumbling Dice Tripods - with wavy tentacle additions by moi and some blurry 2mm infantry both for scale and potential opposition. FYI the left most one is sort of crouching down menacingly.

At the same semi Carboniferous level were other goodies from TD - an entire project in fact - from a past fixation of mine that never left the planning stage. Until now.

I thought I couldn’t do stuff smaller than 2mm, but I was wrong. Welcome to the world of 1:2400 scale pre dreadnoughts. Ships designed, constructed and employed at the height of the belle époque.

I have two small fleets, one French one Austro Hungarian, a set of rules written years back and a sh*t ton (or its metric equivalent) of blue hexon tiles…so I think I’ll have at it. 

Waddya reckon? 

Austro Hugarians, led by the battleship Habsburg. Dead quick to paint up as you can tell. All the ship info is on the underside of the base since I find it more pleasing to the eye that way - flying in the face of convention I know, but hey don’t box me in with all your rules daddyo.

Amiral Cecile, Friant, Charles Martel and 3 Jeune École style torpedo boats - ready for action despite being in peace time colours. I suspect there’s going to be some trouble in the Mediterranean quite soon.

Two generic merchant ships. A troop transport and a collier. I took the lazy way out with the bases and sprayed them with a texture effect blue spray quite close in colour to the hexon tiles. Anything for an easy life.

It might get me out of playing against this guy for a while…

Major Clanger - views the battlefield at a recent 2mm refight of Cheriton inspired by Jon Freitag’s battle marathon over at Palouse Wargaming Journal. The Major (playing as the Paliamentarian faction) beat me handsomely. As usual. He’s done nothing but crow about it since.

Toodleooh.