Turning negatives into positives. A day off...

I- like many others - are getting fed up with steemit at the moment.
The glitching, the 'stickiness', the losing posts, inability to upvote comments etc etc.

So rather than slowly feeling my brain melt into another day of seething resentment in the direction of a website that appears not to give a shit, I decided to do something else!

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I joined steemit to promote war gaming ( hint is in the name- patriot wargamer)

After joining and getting sucked into the time vortex that is steemit, my focus changed from the game to writing posts about other subjects, and steering away from wargaming.

My tabletop 'escapades' have been progressing at roughly the pace of a snail with severe crawling disabilities. This being mainly due to a demoralizing lack of supplies to build up my armies with – and the steemit time vortex of course.

My intention, on the war gaming side, was to offer cheap alternatives to the very expensive start up cost of making armies.
A very real, and practical barrier,to entry, into a fantastic hobby.

It is indeed hard to justify spending $600 (and more - very easily), to then find you then don't like the it !

(although in fairness, if you like games, and not the hobby, the fault is in the mechanics of the games you choose, and not the game itself – It is the best game in the world – scientifically proven to be true apparently -chess with a thousand pieces – somebody once called it).

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So, never letting problems get in the way of my enthusiasm, I started making – yes making – my own armies.

I can now make a Napoleonic, 15mm war gaming armies, with rules and terrain, houses, and roads - all painted up – for something in the region of $40-50 !

As opposed to a minimum of gazillions of dollars.

War gaming is all about rules and aesthetics – that's it, fundamentally.

The problem was how to achieve an aesthetically pleasing tabletop.
(the rules are not a money issue.) It is the time and effort to buying and painting your armies that is the problem.

I built up armies to fight the American civil war, Napoleonics, and ww2.

-This took me 7 years! Yes 7 years of buying painting, constructing.
(before my traveling days, obviously).

Only some one with the immense passion (or incredibly stupid) would embark on such a thing.

So, the conundrum is to built affordable armies, and terrain, for people to get the full 'aesthetic experience' of tabletop battles, and campaigns. (campaign are a series of table top battles,connected together)

And here we go.........

From this....

....to this - and hours of my time....

These figures are 15 mm high. A very H.G. Wells's little wars look.

While obviously these figures don't possess the details of individual moulded metal(or plastic) figures, I found that it's not that vital
The detail is lost in the unit, if you will.

Coming from a war gaming background, and having played countless games, I can tell you - - unequivocally - these boys do the job to fight battles and 'get into war gaming'. !

In conjunction with decent terrain features -as you can see in the photo's – aesthetically pleasing war games can be fought. - without the costs.

I would be the first to advocate buying 'real' figures, and painting them up – but I also understand not everyone is as passionate (crazy) as me, and just want to 'have a war game'.

The photo''s shown here are the uniform of Napoleons Imperial guard ( they were hard bastards).

Anyone knowing anything of uniforms will see, and recognize them.

The hand painted flags, are 'real' flags of the units, as are the colors.

I have a real army to play with!

I am using another profile for all my war gaming things, so I'll let you know when I have that set up.
(I want to get the armies fully painted, with terrain, to present as my 'introduce yourself' page.

I am going to sell them fully made up for $50.

I would actually prefer to sell all the component parts, including paints and glues (for $33) and let people make, and paint up them up there own armies, but again - I realize not everyone wants to spend 2 weeks doing this, just to play a war game.
(although once painted up, you have years of war games available from that one army)

Yep- I would make a few dollars profit for 2 weeks work! (And very happily, btw.)

Getting young adults into this hobby, away from computers -thinking- and having a rewarding, educational time, is something I would happily help along !

I also got my website started.
(One of those free one's)

I HOPE to get some enthusiasm growing on here, and build into something...not sure exactly....time will tell.

The spell of the steemit time vortex is broken!!!