Honour the fallen

After the success of our France 1940 campaign, which resulted in a surprise French victory (see WS&S 126), our sights have turned eastwards to the War in the Pacific. We'll adapt the lessons learned from our previous campaign to ensure it runs much smoother this time around.

One problem we have is getting the player balance right. We'll need an equal number of Japanese and Allied players, and currently, we have an influx of American, Australian & British players, but not many (or enough) players for the Japanese.  Part of the issue is the daunting challenge of collecting a new army - there are more players in the club, but none who are not able or willing to commit to collecting an entire force.

My friend Paul H and I started gaming the Pacific about twenty years ago. He collected a Japanese army, and I repurposed my Americans - I didn't have the resources at the time to collect another army. Sadly, Paul died in 2006 - I inherited his army, which has been unused in a box for about a decade.

His Japanese are old 25mm/28mm Battle Honours models, which were basically painted fairly quickly - probably for a game many years ago. The block painting is a little primitive but ok.

I've decided to do some simple touching up on the miniatures, to make them look better. The trick is to make any cleaning up I do fairly easy and quick. I want the miniatures to keep the characteristics of their original painting, and any touch-up work should be much quicker than just painting the miniature from scratch.

In my next blog, I'll dust off these old miniatures and bring them back to life. The golden rule is faces, bases and flags!

I think Paul would be happy seeing his miniatures being used, and his force gives us a valuable army of over 50 miniatures to lend out to players. We will now have enough players to run our campaign.