It's a scene that the old man in me feels is played out all too rarely across modern day America. These days, what with Amazon Prime and "Federal Express", one can acquire virtually anything from across the globe and with enough money, can enjoy it's appearance on their doorstep in less than 24 hours. This, however, is not the case with the American Civil War miniatures in 15mm.
The funny part is, I'm not totally sure that I mind this.
At the beginning of this venture I knew that I would need miniatures, and lots of them. Due to the fact that I don't personally know anybody who is as yet involved with this particular field of nerd-dom, I figured I would initially have to coax opponents to the table by providing everything needed to play and would thus have need of two armies. Easy enough.
A quick Google search reveals that there is no shortage of models available to represent all manner of Civil War participants. Generals, foot officers, surgeons, supply wagons, wounded, signal towers and even souvenir hunters are all available by a wealth of different companies. So, after running the numbers and doing a fair job of convincing my wife that her husband wasn't finally going off the deep end, I took the plunge and invested in Stone Mountain Miniatures. They have a great selection of miniatures with some great sculpts for the size. For the noob like myself, they also have a section of 'brigade bags' that are light on the wallet and make it easy to have a good-sized force from the start.
However, the great price comes with a downside. In order to keep costs down, Stone Mountain keeps a very small inventory and most of the orders are cast on receipt which means there's usually a two week wait and for a large order like mine, three weeks. Although these days, three weeks can seem like forever to wait, it wasn't all that long ago that you had to wait (brace yourselves, kids) FOUR to SIX weeks for just about everything that wasn't from the Sears catalog. For some reason, this really seems to fit my impression of historical miniatures gaming. A sort of 19th century, gentler pace, you know?
So, only a few more days to wait. I figure since I've put this off for 30 years, what's a little bit longer?
That's not to say I haven't been productive! About a year ago, I purchased a box of 25mm Civil War infantry on a whim so in the name of testing paint schemes I painted a few of those up and even managed to win a couple of eBay auctions Look for details of this excitement in the next few days!
Until then, I'll be taking a couple of days off from work because I've decided that it's interfering with time that could be spent waiting for the mailman.
