Big Game Preparations

A view of the preparations at Schloss Seewald

Things are getting fairly hectic around Schloss Seewald these days as der Erbprinz of Hesse Seewald gets his forces ready for their next encounter with the Gallian (French) army of Marshal de Broglie, somewhere on the road to Minden in western Germany. With one week to go before the Big Battalion Game on October 13, 2007, I have ceased all painting of figures and am now concentrating on getting everything based in time for next weekend's game.

And boy do I have a lot of figures to base! By my reckoning, there are 3 battalions of 60 figures (2 Prussian and 1 Austrian) to individually base; plus 24 miscellaneous foot figures to fill out some understrength battalions and 12 more Black Hussars. That's a total of 216 figures. I have already glued them to metal bases and covered the bases with a layer of brown paint in order to hide the "metal" color of the base. Tonight I will start mixing up jars of spackling compound and brown paint and hopefully get half of the figures terrained tonight and the rest of them tomorrow night. Then Saturday will be devoted to making new movement trays for the figures, afterwhich I will be finished with the basing project. That leaves me with a full week to organize boxes of terrain and figures, create battle maps for the players and take care of other miscellaneous administrative details.

As of this afternoon, we have 18 people signed up for the Big Battalion Game. With 9 players per side, I'm estimating that we will have 3 cavalry brigades and 6 infantry brigades per side. I will have to do a little bit of "cyphering" and determine whether or not there is enough table space for all of these figures. While I believe that there is, one can never overplan or be too careful.

I have included a map showing the location of the Marriot Lincolnshire Resort in Lincolnshire, Illinois, for those who are attending the game either as participants or on lookers. For those of you who are flying into Chicago O'Hare airport, you will want to drive north from the airport via the I-294/I-94 Illinois Tollroad.

We will be setting up the terrain in the "Illinois-Indiana" banquet room on friday night, October 12th and then gather together for an informal dinner either at the hotel or at a nearby restaurant. More news on that as it becomes available. The actual game will start at 9AM, although the doors will probably open around 8AM. The game will then run to the noon hour, during which we will stop for a lunch break. Lunch will be catered and brought into the banquet/game room for the players. The game will resume around 1PM and probably run until 5PM or 6PM, with a short snack break during the afternoon.