Setting My Next Course

Now that Enfilade is done, it is time to start thinking about my next project. While I'll probably be taking a little time away from miniatures projects to work on some other items, there are a few things that I'm looking at working on. Note: I'm still planning on posting updates to the blog, so there will be new stuff here.


Possible Project 1
The first project I'm thinking about is some 15mm Age of Sail stuff. In general I'm more of a steam-age kind of naval player, but I have always had a soft spot for frigate and smaller ship actions. So the project I'm thinking about now covers the US Navy action against the Barbary Pirates and the War of 1812 lake battles (including actions in Chesapeake Bay). I have always found the actions against the Barbary Pirate interesting, especially the attack on Tripoli on August 3, 1804, And over the few years I've become more interested in the War of 1812 stuff.

The good things about these actions is that they are relatively small and they are different than the usual Age of Sail fleet actions.

The bad things about this project is that there aren't a lot of miniatures (mainly ship types that represent the historical ships in the actions) in 15mm available for the battles and I haven't found a set of rules that I want to try (suggestions and recommendations are welcome, just leave a note in the comments section). The main miniature providers I know of are Old Glory Shipyard (ships), Thoroughbred miniatures (ships and crew), Sailpower (ships), and GFI/Minifig (crew and a couple old Limies and Slimeys ships). There are several rule sets out there, but I just don't know enough about any of them to feel comfortable ordering them without a little more information.

Possible Project 2
Kevin (my Thunderboats hydroplane racing game co-conspirator) and I have worked together on several WWII coastal forces actions for various conventions and game. One of the projects we have talked about doing as an Enfilade project is Operation Chariot, the raid on St. Nazaire. This is a pretty interesting operation and could certainly capture the interest of a lot of people. We are looking at it primarily from the naval aspect, but our plans do include the land component.

The good thing about this project is that the ships in the action are available and most can be used in other games. Also, we (mostly me) think we can pull it off using David Manley's Action Stations rules, with maybe a few modifications for the land actions. For the land troops, we will probably use 1/600 scale infantry (and maybe some vehicles) from Pico Armor.

The bad thing about this is that to really make it fun (in my opinion) we need to make the town look right for the action, which means a lot of work to get things right. Skytrex makes a lot of dockyard accessories that look like they are from St Nazaire, which will be helpful, and I've picked up a couple boxes of the SkyWave European Buildings kits for the city. We also need to make sure the game is interesting for all the players, so we will probably borrow some ideas from the old Avalon Hill game "Raid on St Nazaire" and make the game one in which all the players are on the British side.

Kevin and I still need to determine how much of the city we want to show for the game and if we want to put this together for Enfilade 2011.

Diversionary Project

Another friend, Paul, approached me about a possible diversionary project for the summer. Paul plays a lot of DBA and came across a set of DBA naval rules called De Bellis Navilibus. While I don't really want to spend a lot of time or money on this project right now, it might be a fun summer diversion (assuming I can find some cheap miniatures to use).

What will I do?
I will probably do a little work on all of these projects during the summer, assuming something else doesn't pique my interest. But if I really want to finish one of these projects, I'll have to decide where to focus my efforts.

Dave S.