FIW – Sharp Practice in 6mm – Part 1 – Roll a One

As I eluded to in an earlier post (link here)

Note: Since doing these I did rebase them using the 1-2-3 system (more here). I found this way of basing more playable – especially in 6mm.

French Indian War Skirmish in 6mm – I have some fond memories from this period and my dad read me the Last of the Mohicans about 3 times when I was little and when I was older we watched the movie with Daniel Day-Lewis together on more than one occasion. Dad left us far too early – this project is for him. I have ordered a fair few SYW/AWI from Baccus, including the new Compagnies France de la Marine and Canadian Militia. I also ordered highlanders, Indians, jaegers, continental light infantry, queens ranges and British line. This should be plenty to build a decent French and British force. I intend to use these with the Musket and Tomahawk, Sharp Practice and Songs of Drums and Tomahawk rules sets.

There is no major secret that I am fond of the 6mm scale for doing my big 6mm GNW battles and this is where the 6mm scale is arguably at its best. I did my “Saga in 6mm project” this year (you can start reading about it here if you are unaware of it) and took it to the Joy of Six in Sheffield to show that 6mm could be used for a game more commonly used with larger scales. The game worked really well and I replaced each miniatures with a 25mm square base of 4 to 10 miniatures. Following advice from the Welsh Wizard Mike Hobbs I did not change any of the rules and we just played them straight from the box. The ground scales are somewhat abstract in Saga and the only thing that in detail seemed a little bit wrong were Javelin distances.

For my next project I wanted to take yet another step and actually use individual based 6mm miniatures to do a skirmish game. I had seen some fantastic stuff done in this scale for the Napoleonic era and I thought it looked good. I decided to combine this with my itch to do something related to the French Indian war. Since then I have skimmed the three rules I identified above and decided that I would start building forces based on the Sharp Practice rule set (you can find more information here)

To date I have managed to paint one British and one French starting force, they are all based on a 9mm washer and are from Baccus Minatures (from their SYW or AWI range) with a small 3 by 0.5mm magnet put in the hole. I painted each force in an evening sitting and to buy them from Baccus was at a cost of £13.20-16.50 per force (and giving enough additional miniatures to at least double each unit) – what is there not to like? I boosted the British Regulars to get some “point” balance against the French Raiding Party. I have included some pictures below.

Next I will need to make the necessary markers and support list accessories, make some sabot bases, build some fences, buy some American style buidings and perhaps get some more troop options – I have already started a new shopping basket at Baccus.

British Regulars (1755) with additional Rangers and Frontier Militia Support

Leader, Status I

Leader, Status II

Three Groups of 8 Regulars, Muskets