We played a game with my Great Northern War collection yesterday and I’ve gotten into the habit of painting up something new for each game. In this case, it was a squadron of Swedish cavalry and a 6Pdr gun, also Swedish.

Nyland Horse:

Figures are from Reiver, with the squadron leader’s horse (the falling one) from Front Rank.

And the 6 pounder battery:

The gun and bucket man figures are from Foundry, the other two figures are Reiver.

These have been painted a while ago, but I only got round to basing and photographing them just now. Here are the final two squadrons (the first two are here):

The flag is of course totally ahistorical (I don’t think the cavalry units tended to take their standards along on campaign and this flag is obviously seriously over dimensioned), but that’s a bit of wargamer’s license I’m totally comfortable with :).

Figures are Wargames Foundry, painted in two layers.

The great equipment drive is continuing apace — here’s the current status:

Since last post, I’ve constructed two extra powder carts and an extra one horse cart. Some have been primed (I’m using black gesso these days — I’ve given up on finding a good matt black spray paint at the local DIY shop), and painting is underway on two of them. I’ve decided to use a full two-layer paint job on them (which is as high as I go these days, painting quality wise) instead of a quick dry brush job which I usually do for equipment and scenery. So all this will take me a bit longer to paint up :)

So I’ve been steadily working on some horse and musket armies, notably Great Northern War Swedes and Russians and Napoleonic Bavarians. The past few days, I’ve turned my attention to what might be termed their support infrastructure:

That’s only just the start. So far, there’s a Hovels Dutch wagon with two possible loads (I’ll make a third out of coffee stirrers), a Foundry cart and powder cart and two Old Glory wurstwagen. The latter have either Foundry crew (for the one without horses) or Old Glory crew with Foundry Bavarian heads transplanted (ouch). Still to come are another cart and powder cart, some caissons (they’ll be French crewed) and limbers and horse teams. Obviously, some of these will be more suitable for the Napoleonic than the GNW collection, but there will be a fair bit of overlap.

These bases can be used as baggage train, to generally doll up the battlefield or to provide some ‘meat’ behind a deployed artillery battery.