Wargaming for the Small 2: bring on the gun-men

So part of the appeal to me of the boys playing agin each other with four arrow-men a side was that they could set-to and leave me in peace to paint my own toys. Peace is a relative term of course- they were only 3 metres away and it did not take long for voices to be raised and violence offered.

The main project I had on the bench was a regiment of foote for my 28mm ECW Royalists, or at least the musketeers thereof. Now the lads started to suggest that these fellows, now called "gun-men"(do not try to alter nominative destiny as assigned by a 6 year old- "they are called musketeers" "why?" "because they have muskets" "no, they have guns" "these guns are called muskets" "why?" and so on to madness...)  should join in the fighting. The appeal of this course of action increased as the gun-men moved from their uniform covering of brown undercoat to flesh, uniforms and detailing - like butterflies emerging from cocoons.

So the gun-men were added to the order of battle while they were being painted but before basing on multi-figure 'element' bases for DBR/FoGR.

The rules for gun-men are as follows. Gun-men move and shoot like arrow-men, except that they
cannot shoot if they moved this turn and when they do shoot, they add +1 to the total number of figures shooting. IE four gun-men shooting have a final score of 5 plus the die roll.

I also introduced the idea of an objective, typically the top of the hill. The winner is the player whose troops occupy the objective.

Well this went down a treat, and as intended the boys had some hard lessons to learn about timing their attacks, massing firepower and seizing objectives.

Next installment- Pirates!