The plan
This project is designed to fill the role of systems like DBA and give me an excuse to prepare some armies for the table and play with them without having to commit to a huge number of miniatures for each and the time and expense that would entail. I am planning to produce about four (maybe more) armies to play Neil Thomas' One Hour Wargames. These armies consist of six elements drawn from a pool of ten so I shall be assembling and painting all ten options (and some extras, more on those later). The Army
The Elizabethans are another fairly standard army for these rules. Their four infantry units are pike and shotte, they have two artillery instead of reiters, two swordsmen and finally, two warbands instead of cavalry. For the front rows of the infantry bases I'm using some Foundry personalities and some drummers and standard bearers from The Assault Group.
Next up, the shooting 'wings'. These will be a mixture of mainly muskets with some archers mixed in. All the miniatures are from Foundry.
I decided to base the archers separately from the muskets so they can be used as a unit of archers if needed.
Here are the muskets that form shooting wings for three of the four infantry units. Next up are two units of swordsmen. Again, these are all Foundry miniatures.
The final infantry units for my Elizabethans are two warbands of nine miniatures each.
I want my Elizabethans to represent the worst sort of English tourist abroad so they must have lots of flags to wave at the foreigners. One of the miniatures is holding a pike and I drilled the hand of another to fit a second flag pole. After base coating the miniatures, I decided two flags wasn't nearly enough so I drilled out every available hand that could conceivably hold another banner. This gave me a total of six flags between the two bases. Much better!
Artillery finishes off the troops for this army. I have two sets of Foundry crew and a Foundry gun that they came with. I swapped out the second, identical, gun for one from Gringo 40s just as I did with the Conquistadores for some variety.
Commanders
My army commander is Edmund Blackadder (with Percy and Baldrick) from The Assault Group. I have a 'morale' base of Mary and an executioner to remind the troops what happens to those that displease Her Majesty. The executioner is a Wizzkids model and Mary is a resin model from eBay, the first non-metal miniatures in this project. Finally I have another Assault Group set, the Faerie Queen containing Elizabeth and Dudley with an aide. Some photos from the first two games I played with my long-term opponent Mark. We played the first two scenarios from the rules. Each was completed in under an hour with the Landsknechts winning the first and the Elizabethans winning the second.
The rules are simple to learn and give a satisfying game. Success! I've added an Ian Weekley artillery tower to my Renaissance scenery. This is a later, resin version from Magister militum and is very heavy. The door is very small so I made my own from coffee stirers and matchsticks. Because i added the door I've based the tower on some platicard.
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2023 Expanding the army
The English are going to have eight new units to bring them up to eighteen. I'm going to do four archer bases and four cavalry bases. All the miniatures are from the Hoka Hey Border Reivers range from Timeline Miniatures. Here are the archers. I was going to have six miniatures to a base but decided this wasn't enough so I ordered some command figures from Casting Room miniatures.
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The cavalry are also from Timeline Miniatures.
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