The 16th lancers charging Sikh troops
I've been thinking about wargaming the Sikh wars since I first read about them in Ian Hernon's book "Britain's Forgotten Wars". There's something tremendously compelling about the situation of a kingdom so divided against itself that it's court conspire against their own army.
It reminds me about reading about the later years of the New Model Army or the Roman Army during the Crisis of the Third Century. An organisation that became so mad with power that it became ungovernable and ended up either being bought off or destroyed. That coupled with the fact that the Sikhs are a fascinating people combining asceticism, excess, warrior glamour with an exotic locale - I'd be a fool not to give it a try.
Files boxes, notes and bags and bags of figures.
The plan is to wargame the four main battles of the First Sikh War using the Colonial Campaigns ruleset against my old foe the Welsh Wizard. We've already played Naushera and Jumrud from the Sikh-Afghan wars.
I had been picking up figures from the excellent Newline Designs range of figures and have most of what is required for the First Sikh War. Now, I made the listen of reading John French's excellent book on the British in India from Foundry which includes a raft of details on different units, some of whom were wearing shakos rather than the more usual peaked cap.
At the moment the challenge will be finding figures for the Ghurkas both in Sikh and HEIC employ and for those British infantry units that wore shakos rather than peaked chaps. Irregular do some Sikh war British infantry in shakos, but they are bell topped rather than covered.
I'm still debating how punctilious I want to be about this, as I mainly just want to get the game on the table, but then again - I will know if I get it wrong and sometimes that's enough.
Figures for painting, sorted into bags and marked with a label.
There was a lot of gathering and sorting and lining up with the various orders of battle I want to cover. Realistically, if I want to get this project to the table in a decent amount of time I am going to have to subcontract the painting for a fair amount of it. But having thought about this seriously, my time for painting is very limited with a young family and a demanding job, so needs must where the Devil drives.
More Storage
I've been building up a collection of jungle trees, palms, exotic vegetation, elephant grass and so on for a while now. But up until recently, it all lived in a number of different boxes scattered around the War Room. I picked this box up in Woodies (a local DIY shop) for a tenner. It's robust, clear plastic (which means that I don't need to worry about labels) and will stack with others. I'm beginning to think that I may start using these for the majority of my terrain collection as using smaller boxes is just not working very well.
