A Delightful Delivery!

Today's mail brought a bounty of items of interest for wargaming.

First off on our list is Battlegames magazine issue 10, which has taken a little while to make its way to my US seller, and thence to me. But as ever, it's well worth the wait. I'm already particularly intrigued by Henry Hyde's siege rules, and also by the Boxed Sets ideas put forth by Stuart Asquith. I'm pondering the possibility of taking some of Charles S. Grant's Tabletop Teasers and working them into WW2 scenarios and possibly other periods as well.

Next on the list is a new book, Panzer Commander, the memoirs of Colonel Hans von Luck. A German officer, von Luck served through a wide variety of World War 2's battefields, including a considerable amount of time under Rommel. I've already been captivated by some of the writing this evening, enough so that I'm rather later in posting this than I'd intended. :> And best of all, I received the book free. In theory at least. In practice, the cost of the book to me is the cost of shipping for a book I'm sending out for free to a different party. And all of this is occuring through a service called Bookmooch. The basic premise is that you list books you're willing to give away, getting one tenth of a point for each listing. For every book someone mooches from you, you get a full point. It costs one point to mooch a book from someone else.

The best, however, I have saved for last. I've been sitting upon a secret, waiting for the mail to finally deliver it, and it has at last arrived. In one of those random 'coincidences' that make you think perhaps God is just doing something nice for you and remember to say thank you, I found myself staring at a photo off of one of my online searches of a set of painted Spencer Smith plastics for sale. I sat with dread waiting for someone with deeper pockets to come in and snap them up before the deal closed, but that terrible fate was not to be. The deal was closed, the figures shipped, and I present to you the full array of over 60 figures. Two of the muskets are broken off at the shoulder, but that hardly matters to me. One can accept a little battle damage in such august old campaigners.

(click on a picture for a larger view - warning, huge files! I'll try to shrink them a bit later.)

Frontal view


View from above


Infantry close up


Artillery close up


My present thought is that these will likely form a Freikorps in Hesse-Engelburg service, but we shall see if I stick with that. They will certainly have their rightful place amongst the troops, at any rate.

There is a certain reverence which only the collector personality understands when one first unwraps an item of significance, recently acquired. These particular figures may never have been touched by the hand of a wargaming great, but one can see their brethren marching proudly at Mollwitz in Charles Grant's The Wargame, and feel a certain measure of awe to possess a set of figures perhaps even older than yourself.

There are some figures loose from their bases, and one or two missing bases. I took advantage of the latter to set one beside my RSM95 Musketeers, and was quite pleased to find that they are quite compatible in height. The Spencer Smith are slightly taller on close inspection, but near enough to be more than adequate when viewed together.