The Army Painter Project

This May is the yearly Huzzah! game convention. I've enjoyed this convention immensely in the past. The games are typically well designed and beautifully presented and the players are generally friendly a fun. I think it's overall the best gaming convention of the Northeast.

This year I thought it would be fun to run a scenario from Commands and Colors Napoleonics for the event. I enjoy the C&C game system and it's really a miniatures game at heart so adding figures sounded like fun. The game involves unit of soldiers moving on a hexagon map and there's no official figure scale. Now ever since I was introduced to Warmaster I've had a soft spot in my heart for 10mm miniatures so this year's project became building two 10mm armies for use with C&C:N's.

I chose to run a part of the Battle of Salamanca. I decided that each unit of troops would be composed of two stands of figures each with a width of 40mm. This would create some nice sizable masses of troops standing in two rows. It was only later that I started to do the math. There are eight unit of French infantry, each with two stands. Each stand has twenty soldiers. Therefore, solely for the French line infantry, I'd be painting three hundred and twenty figures. The armies also include skirmishers and cavalry and they're comparable sizes so the total figure count comes in at more than seven hundred miniatures. Huzzah! indeed.

At this point I decided to try the Army Painter line of products. This included a set of spray paint primers and a "dip" which brings out detail in figures. I realized that there were still going to be a lot cuffs to paint but maybe the Army Painter gear would prove as good as it claimed to be.