"Vorwarts!" Additional Prussians

"Vorwarts mein kinder!"

A mysterious box arrived in the mail last week,  just before my birthday. It was very light, with the return address from Meeplemart in Toronto (it's the biggest, closest, decent gaming store that sells more than 40k and MTG cards). Inside was an unexpected birthday present from my friend Patrick, a box of the Warlord Games Prussian Dragoons cast in that lightweight bendy resin that is letting companies use their rubber spin casting moulds with a cheaper material. 

So, with Russian Grenadiers done, these leapt onto the painting bench. The resin is a weird material to work with, but the extremely thin fetlocks on the horses didn't break, which is a complaint I'd heard about the metal castings, although some of the horses do have curiously bent legs. The flash was hard to remove too, being very bendy. 3 of the troopers were sculpted still drawing their sabers and the officer is cocking a pistol, both of which seemed at odds with the rest charging with sabers drawn already. Fortunately I only need 8 figures for a Sharp Practice group, or 4 stands for General d'Armee, and Black Powder doesn't care. It is a personal dislike to have figures all doing different things unless the unit is skirmishing. This is a major sticking point I have with Old Glory figures, for example. A nice value added was a metal guidon pole taped to the back of the "Packed by" card, and an insert with 8 full colour guidons to use.

Fortunately Prussian dragoons have a very simple, practical uniform. My biggest headache was determining how to paint the baggage slung on the backs of their saddles. To get the medium blue I used Tamiya airbrush paint over the white primer, so I didn't do my usual all-over brown undercoat which caused me some issues getting coverage in recesses, which slowed me down. After a week of painting, including a marathon 3 1/2 hour paint and chat over Zoom on Friday night, I now have this spiffy new addition to the order of battle. 

Last weekend Mikey B., who's announcement that he was liquidating his non-War of 1812 28mm Napoleonics prompted me to get a shifty on, came over with a box of things I was interested in. He said he had "half a dozen Prussian generals." I think I actually squealed with delight when I saw that it was 6 Wargames Foundry figures, including Blücher himself. After a bit of thought, I sorted them into two individual generals and then two bases with a general and an ADC to act as higher command or Deployment Points for Sharp Practice. That's a lot of supervision for 32 Landwehr, but more Prussians are on the way.

Marshall Vorwarts with ADC

The others are all named on the Foundry website, but not so you can tell who is supposed to be who

If only I had the same command levels for my much larger Russian contingent!

I got some other things from Mikey, which I will show you as the summer continues.