Yeah, I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about it or explaining it. I’ll just try to do better.

But it has been a busy gaming year. One of my biggest energy expenditures has been moving Enfilade to a new location. In December we got word our long time home at the the former Red Lion in Olympia was purchased by developers and we would have our contracts for 2024-25 voided. That left me in a frantic scurry to find a new home for this year. We settled on the LaQuinta Inn and Suites in Tacoma. It is an imperfect site, but I’m hoping we can pull off a solid convention for this year and make decisions about the future after May. More another time.

All photos are from the initial Camerone playtest in October.

I’m hosting one game at the convention this year. It is Camerone. Mark Waddington and I have conspired to produce a beautiful looking game of Captain Danjou’ s last stand with his detachment of Foreign Legion in Mexico. I’ve tried doing Camerone several times using different sets of rules. We’ll be using the Howard Whitehouse “The Wooden Hand of Captain Danjou’ rules. I devoted most of the fall months to wrapping up the figures needed to play. For the French I used the Old West French Foreign Legion and Filibusters figures by Wargames Foundry. The Mexicans are a mix of Gringo 40’s and Foundry figures. The game looks nice, and we’ve done a couple of play tests. It would be nice to get in one more, but the timing doesn’t look good.

While speaking of Mexico, I have two Mexico-related projects I’m currently working on. One is the remounting of my entire Aztec project. I’ve been picking at for most of the last six months or more. Re-mounting is not one of my favorite things. I’ve found ways to re-mount that is not a physical danger to knife-wielding re-mounter, but it is resource intensive supplying new bases and quite time consuming. There are also about 400 figures to re-base to my beloved 3-2-1 system so it has taken a while. I’m hoping I could be done by Enfilade. But maybe not.

The other 28mm project I’m pretty focused on is wrapping up the figures for my Maximilian in Mexico project. Camerone uses a lot of figures for this, but the complete project is much larger than just Danjou and his mates fighting off a bunch of Mexican infantry. This is a Rebels and Patriots project. I’ve completed all the Juarista Mexicans and all of the Maximilian imperial forces. I’m just down to completing the French. I wrapped up a unit of French hussars and a second unit of Chasseurs D’Afrique. Just down to painting line infantry at this point. I’m excited about wrapping them up. Note: After some reading I’m intrigued by the idea of adding a couple of units of Austrian Legion by Gringo 40’s (24 figures) and some additional Contra-Guerrilla figures for use with a different set of rules.

These are the 46 or so ACW ships I’ve painted or rebased since November. Acrylic bases by Litko. I’ve focused on Union ships so far.

I’ve also focused on some ship and aircraft projects. Just a quick digression here and I’ll come back to these topics in future posts. I’ve collected a sizable number of ACW ships over many years. They are based using a variety of materials on bases of various sizes. I’ve decided to tackle some of them and am re-basing them on more uniform bases. It makes storage so much easier. I’ve also added a bunch of 3D printed ships. I’ll spend some more time on this next week.

Royal Australian Air Force Kittyhawk 1A’s (P-40E) by C in C. Ki-43 Hayabusa (Oscars) by MSD games.

Finally, I’ve devoted time to painting some 1/300 scale planes. This is another big topic that deserves its own post. I promise to do that. I’m currently focused on a gigantic Pacific War project. Planes have been difficult for me. It was a genre that I exclusively did with Daveshoe. We were great partners. I was primarily the painter while Dave was the brains of the outfit. It’s not that I couldn’t conceive of interesting scenarios, but Dave was just so good at developing the tools for a great game that made play so easy. I’ve recently downloaded and printed the updated version of David Manley’s Airwar 1940 rules. I’ve also started building a collection of usable tools for the game based on Dave’s work. I also have a plan for my first Kevin-only game. More on this to come.

I’ve gone on long enough. My goal is to share regularly (weekly?) on what is happening here with my game groups as well as what I’m up to. Thanks, as always, for reading.