Cohorts of the Damned

I bought Eric Wood's The Last Samurai Rebellion  supplement for The Men Who Would Be Kings  some time ago, but never really got round to doing anything with it. Partly it's because I never actually did up any Satsuma Rebellion armies: if I were to do enough to cover the sample forces for the six scenarios at the back, let alone offer additional variation, I would need to do up a little over 200 more figures, which seems like a task best left for another time. However, it only recently struck me that that doesn't mean the scenarios are somehow rendered useless. While framed around particular happenings of the Satsuma Rebellion, there's nothing so specific about them that means they couldn't be transposed back a decade to the Boshin War. So that got me thinking. After flipping through, I decided that Scenario 4, 'Inspector Ikebata and the Dead Man's Diary', would probably be best as a first dip into it, given that it involves the fewest number of special r

Following my  last post , which covered the Indian infantry on this project, I've now rounded out the naval forces. These make up one of the smaller portions of the overall force, consisting of one unit of Royal Marines, a unit of Naval Brigade, and a gun crew. The plan originally was to do only a small handful of sailors, but earlier this year I decided to do a participation game at the Overlord show in Abingdon based on the 1864 Shimonoseki Expedition. A photograph by Felice Beato showing one of the British naval brigades – and a few stray Marines in the foreground? – in possession of a Japanese coastal battery at Shimonoseki in 1864. To do that, I decided I would need two units of Marines, two of British sailors, and one of French. When I started the process, however, I somehow completely failed to do any research into the kit worn at the time, which is why my Naval Brigade are all wearing sennet hats rather than white caps. Similarly, for the Marines I went with troops with sha

For reasons I can no longer really work out, I decided, just as I was starting to build up some decently sized Japanese forces for the 1868-9 Boshin War, that a fun additional project would be doing some British and French expeditionary forces. Should I ever finish the British one, it alone will probably number almost as much as both my Imperial and Shogunate armies put together. Logically of course, that means the latter two ought to be enlarged... Questionable decisions aside, it's something that I've made fits and starts on in the last year, and that I now feel I ought to make a more determined push on. So, this first post will document the one complete element of these forces so far, that being the Indian infantry, and hopefully that spurs me on to get the rest of these finished in the coming months. The decision to field Indian troops in this force was made for three reasons. Firstly, why not? Secondly, the hypothetical structure of my expeditionary force was based on a sl

Hello! This will be the blog where I post about various wargaming things that I get up to. At the moment I'm juggling three projects, all in 28mm: The Boshin War of 1868-9, also known as the Japanese Civil War; An 1860s British force for alternate history scenarios relating to the above; and Feudal Japanese forces. These are helpfully quite interlinked, but chances are something completely different will start intruding soon enough.