Upstairs Downstairs

There may be a few readers who are wondering what happened to the Square Brigadier and my plan of playing at least weekly card table or portable wargames over the winter. Have I given up on them or perhaps been playing them in secret? No and no. The new wood stove and heat pump have made my upstairs hobby room a cozy place to be even in -20C weather which has changed the dynamic a little but I still need to spend more time down in the family room. No, I have been pondering the answer to the dilemma posed by the mis-match between the size of the grid and my figure basing .

ACW troops based wider than the grid and jostling for position. 

I cannot imagine what the Bleep! I was thinking when I made the new grid 3" when the units I was planning to use were mostly on an 8 cm frontage, but there we are. I don't really want to redo the board and in any event a board designed to fit the size requirements but using a larger grid would mean fewer squares and the success of the fall games was due in part because of the increased number of grid areas (120 vs 64)  which allowed room for more maneuvering and more units allowing more complex scenarios. But, I also don't want to rebase a lot of figures. Luckily, the success of the MacDuff games  has reinforced the idea of maximum differentiation between parts of my collection which means it would be possible, even advantageous, to have separate upstairs and downstairs armies, preferably in different periods.

Basing and organization of my early 20thC armies is still up in the air but I don't mind that they don't fill a grid area anyway. So they are one contender whether as Russian Civil War, WWI or more fictional stuff. I would as soon not confuse my ACW armies so will leave them as is, designed for full table non-gridded Hearts of Tin games, after all, I can always squeeze them  in or use 1 stand units if needed and have enough figures on hand that I could do a small second set of opposing portable armies if desired.

   Again 8 cm wide units jostling bt the 6cm one looks quite comfy.

The big surprise for me was that I enjoyed using my 25mm ancients/medieval troops on the card table. That was not part of my original plan. The 8cm bases don't fit but the migration to them hasn't gone very far and I still have numerous troops on 6cm bases or based as singles. Enough for a test game anyway and it works, I have no real reason to not just slip back to the traditional 60mm bases putting possibly 3 ranks of 4 for OS heavy infantry.

A test card game layout  of the Grant version of Platea.
I am using 2 x 60mm units for each of his 40 man units.