SYW Convention Is This Week

 

The annual Seven Years War Association Convention will be held this week at the convention center in downtown South Bend, Indiana. Games start on Thursday afternoon and continue on through Friday and Saturday.

I will be running my Trenton game on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning.

I updated my terrain and tabletop layout yesterday, switching from a 12 x 5 feet table to my 15 x 6 feet table. This gave me considerably more space to work with and so I had to adjust my terrain placement accordingly.

Originally, I had the Trenton layout on the smaller 12 x 5 table and my Spanish Sharpe game on the 15 x 6 table. So I decided to swap the tables. This took me about 3 to 4 hours to remove the terrain from the Trenton table first, place the Trenton pieces on the Spanish terrain table; then once the Trenton table was cleared of everything, I had to move all of the Spanish terrain to the former Trenton table. Finally, with the former Spanish table cleared of terrain, I set up the Trenton game layout on the larger 15 x 6 feet table. This was grueling to say the least. And stupid too, but I wanted to see how Trenton looked on the larger table.

Here are the pictures of the new table layout. I decided to use some of the extra three feet of table length to put in a representative section of the Delaware River and set up the Washington Crossing the Delaware vignette.

UPDATE: I deleted a rather snarky comment that someone left in response to another reader's comment. I am sorry that I was not able to do so until today, having just returned from the convention a short while ago.

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Introducing the Rall Grenadier Regiment at Trenton

Hessian Rall (not von Rall) Grenadier Regiment at Trenton in 1776.
Fife and Drum Miniatures figures in 1/56 scale (approximately 28mm)

Click on all images to enlarge

I have been very busy with my Trenton 1776 Project, accumulating a lot of painted Continentals - ten regiments as a matter of fact. At an average wargame figure size of 30 figures per regiment, that is 300 figures in my newly painted Trenton Winter Army. I decided to paint entirely new American and Hessian armies for Trenton and base the stands in Winter snow, rather than using my existing armies with their green grass bases.

A couple of weeks ago I finished 20 Hessian Jagers and while there were only about 60 Jagers in total at Trenton, I decided that the Hessians needed a few extra figures in their wargame army so that I could have at least two Hessian game players versus four (maybe five) American commands. As a result I painted 20 Jagers which equates to 200 men using my standard figure to man ratio of 1:10.

Rall Grenadiers (top) and American Continentals )bottom). 

Next I turned my attention to the Hessian regular regiments. The army will have the Rall Grenadiers, (50 figures)  and the von Knyphausen and von Lossberg fusilier regiments (40 figures each). Poor Colonel Rall apparently didn't qualify for "von Rall" status, just "Rall".

Grenadiers are more interesting to paint so I started with them:

The Rall Grenadies pose in the town of Trenton. I have ten figures on each stand.
Buildings, trees, fences and roads were made by Herb Gundt.

Fife and Drum Miniatures Hessian grenadiers in firing line poses (first and second ranks).
I use a deeper base for firing line units to protect the extended muskets. 60mm deep by 80mm long.

So as of today I have 20 Jager, 50 Rall Grenadiers and two 6-pound cannons, each with four crewmen. I can swap out the cannons for Prussian 3-pounders. I don't want the artillery on both sides dominating the tabletop game.

And finally, I finished the personality and command stand for Colonel Rall.

Colonel Rall at Trenton.  I used the von Knyphausen personality figure and the 
Hessian Jager officer holding a telescope for the command stand, which is 
approximately 40mm round. We are looking up King Street towards the Continental
artillery in the distant background.

For my fusilier regiments I plan to paint one unit marching using the Minden Prussian fusilier figures and one unit of fusiliers in a firing line pose. The latter will be conversions using AWI torsos and SYW fusilier heads. If there is enough interest, I might add the Hessian fusiliers to the Fife and Drum figure range.

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Trenton - My Historicon 2026 AWI Game

 

The Battle of Trenton - 1776
Hamilton's American battery rolls round shot down the streets of Trenton
Fife and Drum Miniatures

So I have established that I am going to Cold Wars in November 2025 to run my 28mm or 40mm Napoleonic Peninsula War in Spain game.

My Historicon 2026 game will recreate the Battle of Trenton. The Historicon convention theme will be the 250th Anniversary of the AWI and so I think that my Trenton game scenario is appropriate.

Here is Don Troiani's take on the Hessian general Rall receiving his mortal wound at Trenton.
I think that this one of Troiani's best paintings ever.

Here are some pictures of the Trenton game that I ran several years ago. All of the figures are Fife and Drum Miniatures. I have noticed that on many Facebook forums, people seem to forget (or fail to mention) that yes, there is another figure manufacturer out there called Fife and Drum Miniatures that makes a very good range of AWI figures. So if you happen to be on a website where someone is asking for figure recommendations for AWI war gaming, then I would be most appreciative if you would give Fife and Drum Miniatures a favorable "plug." Sigh...

An overhead view of my town of Trenton. All of the terrain was made by Herb Gundt.

Herb Gundt built winter trees and, roads and the frozen Assinpink Creek for this game.

Hugh Mercer's brigade on the march to Trenton.
Fife and Drum Miniatures

Here is another overhead view of Trenton that shows the frozen Assinpink Creek. Sorry, no boat models in this game.

Trenton and Assinpink Creek

I don't want to let too much of the cat getting out of the bag, but in conjunction with the 250th Anniversary of the AWI, Fife and Drum Miniatures will be adding new figures to the range that will be completely compatible with the ones sculpted by Richard Ansell. Look for these towards the end of this year.

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