Columns from the East.....More Perry Russian Napoleonics

Marching out of the painting pile, I have a host of Russians (plastic and metal Perry figs) reinforcements for my 'General du Corp' Russian Army. As mentioned before these rules are convention fast play set by Doug over at Dots of Paint blog.

Hoping to one day have enough figs of my own to host a game I long ago decided to aim for enough figs for '3 corp'....ish.  Looking at the OOB of the battles makes me realize it's very helpful to have friends contributing....I am often impressed by Doug's wisdom in his approach to gaming.

Above are the old style grenadier with the 'busch' style plume (pipe cleaners I think some call them). 

The remaining 5 bases are regular line infantry.
I FINALLY used the flags from the plastic box set. I can see with future expansions (if any) that I'll need to score some more flags to avoid duplicates (or use the plain white regimental flags a lot more.



These fellows are my 'lazy line', as the standard bearers have shouldered their kit. Even the drummer and officer are taking it pretty relaxed. The standard emblems have an unfortunate tendency to fall off and didn't make it into the picture prior to repair.

The final base with a single metal fellow wiping his brow. Painting is hard work!
 

All Units Engage - Basic Infantry Operations Review

Thomas of Peabody games has put out a free intro for all units engage (wargame vault link). At nine pages, including a roster, this is a nice tight package which isn't too demanding of your printer ink. It's very much an intro with a single basic mission and uses 5 models per side (AUE calls each independently activated/moved 'thing' a unit so in this case it's 5 single model units).

Having seen some of the beta versions of the full rules I have some extra insights, but I'll try and limit myself to review just this document.  It's important to recognize that AUE is positioning itself to be a generic set of rules that is very easy to adapt to your setting/figures/era of modern and forward (near future, sci fi, post apoc, etc). There should be additional books released that help flesh out various settings/eras and give example stats. I know that Thomas is very keen on getting the post apocalyptic setting ready to serve his own current gaming tastes.

TL;DR Summary:
I'm looking forward to seeing more of these rules. While superficially simple they end up yielding a surprising depth of tactical decision making. It wasn't uncommon for my opponent and myself to ponder on how we were going to setup for the next turn or even how to make our plan work the current turn. In turn 5 of our game my opponent noted that I had  pre-empted his own planned series of reactions to achieve his goals.

Considering this is free and will take up about 2-2.5 hours of your time including setup and reading the rules there's no reason not to try it out. Go ahead, the link is right here.