Lestrades_Game

 A first for this blog, some miniatures review! Over the past two months I have gotten into miniatures. Prior to this I had stuck to board wargames largely for cost and transport reasons (I have moved house often and did not want to haul minis around). However I do have a strong game designer urge within me. I am always writing RPG material, most of which is never used. So moving over to minis will allow me some space to exercise my creative side in researching and writing scenarios. I want to do skirmishes in the French Indian War of the 1750s. This conflict only had one really sizable pitched battle with most of the action being skirmishes of a few tens to a few thousand men in the forests and river valleys of Canada and the then Colonies. I will be using the Sharp Practice rules at least initially.  I read around and then spent ~£70 on minis from Matchlock. Matchlock are 15mm metal minis sold by Cavalier books, who also sell the minifigs range. The Matchlocks had good reviews else w

 I ran a game at my local wargame club this eve for the first time. I've posted some comments on the A and A Game Engineering ruleset 'Tsushima' before. It's a good game, a notch above beer and pretzel in terms of complexity and rather traditional in that it uses tables and modifiers etc.  I don't have quite the order of battle for the Yalu River battle of the Sino-Japanese war but my fleet is fairly close. I am missing one of the two better Chinese Battleships and about 3 of the Japanese cruisers. The fleets themselves are the right size as I have a few extra gun boats and light cruisers as substitutes.  Still the setup is quite easy. The Chinese deploy between two islands at the mouth of the Yalu, the Japanese approach from the south west. Taken from Wikipedia I had four players and gave them 2-3 squadrons each. I skipped the scouting phase as I wanted the battle to play out in around 3 hours and the table size was a bit smaller than the recommended 6/4. This was