Moroccan Bound

Its hard to believe that three months have passed since I got all excited about the feel and flow of a test Atlantica game and surprised at a wash of nostalgia, but there was Huzzah, both getting ready and then afterwards putting some thought into next year, then this Privateer thing and well here I am, finally back at it.

It may not be apparent from the picture but my room is in a bit of disarray at the moment as is my table itself. (Yes that's the bottom of a piece of it.) However, neither this nor a host of other gardening and renovating chores have completely  kept me away from picking up on where I was.

I was taken by surprise by the nostralgia I felt after the Treacle Creek game in March, especially since it was at least partially triggered by something about the look of the 3 figure stands like those above.  The nostalgic, Old School, attraction I have to single figures is largely borrowed.  It has more to do with the pictures in Little War than my personal experience. I tend to think of my standard basing/rules style as stands or elements with infantry based 2 deep but really these were a development from the late 80's, before that my armies were all based 1 deep, usually with some elements split to allow figure removal, surely the least efficient system of all? (Esp in 15mm) However, I never based in 3 figure elements so why did something about that look strike a cord?  The answer surprised me but a quick look through clippings confirmed that  the bases reminded me of various AWI pictures in Gene McCoy's Wargamers Digest. Huh! How about that?

However, the basing was only a small part of the "feels right" feeling. More important was the pace and feel of the game and the over all look of the `armies' of smaller footprint units on the table. The last Atlantica game I played before Huzzah actually rolled back some of the decisons from that Treacle Creek game, including cutting the test bases to allow for figure removal but I didn't like the feel of that game as much as the two previous ones so its one step back to units of 4-6 stand which is pretty much where HofT began.  As a result, in between other things, I have been  experimenting with exact base dimensions and considering what it would cost to order yet another wave of precut bases vs what it would take to do homemade ones.

One material I did not consider initially were the Moroccan Orange crates that I use for all sorts of wargaming terrain, movement trays and so on. However, they are cheap, easily available, easy to cut and tasty to empty.  The prototype is a complete success and only took a few minutes so we are On the Road and like Webster's dictionary,  we are Morocco bound, just wood not leather.

If the plan works, I will have my room sorted enough to get the 5x6 table ready for a game on Sunday.