Taking Maneuvers on Maneuvers

 

       One of my friends is currently stationed near El Paso Texas. The few gamers in his unit are mostly 40K players and he has been trying to interest them in historical gaming. One of the guys in his unit mentioned an interest in the Thirty Years War after seeing a book on Joe's shelf. He is currently a 40K player but said that he would love to game in the Pike and Shot era.  Of course the Army isn't much interested in providing soldiers vast amounts of storage for toys so any gaming set-up would have to be seriously conscious about reducing volume.

            Joe mentioned this in conversation the other day and I asked if he had his copy of Tercios with him, he stated that he did . I told him that I could get him set up to play in short order by printing out top-down views of units and sticking them on base-sized rectangles of matte-board. I promptly popped over to Junior General and copied a bunch of top-down views of units. A little tinkering gave me representative views of most of the units found in a typical Thirty Years War army which I then printed out and glued to heavy matte-board

nowhere near as cool as the picture at the top of the article but it gets the idea across

        Having produced a couple of armies worth of units I did some screen grabs of villages in Austria from Google Maps which I printed out and mounted on heavy card stock to provide a town or two (four actually). I dug around in the Vault and found some spare sections of Eco Rug that were leftover from my gaming mat production and cut them up to make hills. A bag of lichen to make forests and things were pretty well finished.

 

the EcoRug hills and flat cards aren't as eye-appealing as minis but concessions had to be made

 (I am betting that Joe can find an O.D. blanket or shelter section to act as a playing mat underneath everything)

 

something I would never do with minis; stacking pike formations on top of one another

       In the off chance anybody would like to emulate my example I will attach some of the units I made. All of the graphics come from the Junior General site and the units that they provide are excellent and entirely usable as they are offered. All I did was rearrange things a bit to fit on the bases used in Tercios. I strongly recommend a visit to Junior General they have top-down and side-view minis as well as a bunch of free simple rules that are great for introducing newcomers to the hobby

 

 

musketeer company 

 

Cuirassiers/heavy horse

 

 

artillery

 

generals

 

later infantry battalion  2/3 musket, 1/3 pike

 

weak early battalion 

 

full strength early battalion

 

light horse

       The method of making these was quite crude (I refuse to pay money for a graphics program that I will use only once or twice a year). First I went to the Junior General website and located the top-down images for the pike & shot era and grabbed a bunch of screen-shots that I opened in Paint (on my ancient computer). I then cut and pasted bits of grass to make a large field of just green.

 

        Then I downloaded some images of pikemen and musketeers, mind you there is nothing wrong with the units portrayed on the Junior General website, they just don't match the dimensions of the Tercios bases. I then cut and pasted the desired soldiers to another part of the image where I could organize them to match Tercios rules

       Once I was satisfied with the look of things I dropped them into my Apache Word Possessor and then adjusted the margins until the image was the correct width. After that was sorted out I then copied the image several more times and hit print. Once they were done printing I cut them out and glued them to thick matte board and gave them a spray of clear matte.