6mm Pony Wars - First steps.

As it looks like we are finally coming out of Lockdown and the thought of face to face gaming draws ever closer, it gave me the impetus to kick start the Pony Wars Project.

My vision for the project and the choice of 6mm was to provide those sweeping plains as the cavalry struggle to pin the Indians and force them into battle but are ever conscious of the supports being left exposed to war parties.

My initial thoughts were to adapt Sharp Practice but base the figures in groups or sections, with a way to record shock and causalities. However I have one eye on the forthcoming Pony Wars Rules, resurrected from the 1980's.

The beauty of 6mm is you get so much bang for your buck.

First up the Indian Mounted Warbands, based in groups of 10 and their foot variants in groups of 6. Within Sharp Practice I am thinking about applying the Irregular Cavalry quality class, but that may change in play testing.

I envisage using the command base to double up as the shock and casualty markers and using the smaller Flames of War movement bases to make them easily recognisable on the table and minbits sabots to hold the dice.

The packs from Baccus contain enough to create 10 mounted groups and 12 foot groups, more than enough for a standard Sharp Practice game.

On to the US cavalry and enough to create 4 troops of cavalry from the initial single packs.

I wanted the Cavalry to have a long tail on the table top with ultimately wagons and wood cutting parties etc, which tie down the better armed troopers trying to cover too much ground.

The US cavalry will be in groups of 8 for the mounted sections, converting to 6 figures when dismounted. In the same way Big Men will be represented by an officer, guidon and bugler.

 

The difference for the US cavalry is I will have casualty bases to capture shock and kills.

Each troop will have on table an accompanying mule train, which I will be using to record low ammo and horse holders which will need to be protected.

I am not sure the right idea was to base them all in one go, the fumes from the super glue plays havoc with your eyesight after a while.... :-)

But good to get them out of the packs and on to the bases to see the size of the initial project.

I am hoping that it will be relatively easy to get them to the table top once the prep work is done with filler and sand, A few more 28's to finish first as I suspect the switch to their smaller cousins will take a few days to get my eye in on the paint table.