Some More 10mm Bavarians and Prussians for FPW

10mm Bavarians and Prussians for the Franco-Prussian War. Figures from Pendraken.

After a round of science fiction painting, my brushes have gone back to historical subjects.  Here are more 10mm castings for the Franco-Prussian War.  There are an assortment of Bavarians - infantry, officers and artillery, and some Prussian Dragoons.  These 10mm figures are all from Pendraken, purveyor of the finest 10mm figures I have ever come across!

Bavarian infantry regiment - I went with yellow facings on these fellows.

Pendraken sculpts are fun to paint.

View from the rear of the line...

When I love a period or a setting, I am apt to start painting it in multiple scales. Yes, I know this is bonkers...but what can I say? I love the 28mm figures because you can enjoy the many fine details on the lovely uniforms of the period.  But there are limits to 28mm when it comes to playing out the battles of the period - they were large, corps-level battles and I'll never have enough 28mm figures, table space or time to run something like Spicheren, Froschwiller or Gravelotte-St. Privat. To play even portions of those engagements, I'll need a collection of smaller figures so the gang can try out some of these bigger scraps.

Bavarian artillery - Krupp 4-pounders, steel breech-loading pieces that greatly outgunned the French artillery.

Another view of the gunners.

Different rules can give you different options in terms of table representation with these smaller figures.  I really want to try the "1871" rules by Bruce Weigle, and these rules have some flexibility in terms of unit scale/representation, but for the basic level, the figures you see in the photos here would provide one regiment of Bavarian infantry (with each stand representing a battalion), four batteries of Bavarian Krupp 4-pound guns, a Bavarian brigade commander (single mounted officer on a base), a Bavarian division commander (two mounted offers on single base) and a Prussian dragoon regiment (each base representing about two squadrons of cavalry).

These figures could be used for rules systems too of course - certainly "Black Powder" is almost infinitely flexible, and could be used for figures at this scale. These figures could also work for "Polemos", the rules from 6mm figure manufacturer Baccus. 

Prussian dragoons.

Even in 10mm, the Hussars are the glamour-boys of the cavalry arm, with their lovely finery and silk-bagged head gear.

I struggle to paint artillery in any scale, it's always a big stumbling block for me, so it's particularly great to get this group of batteries out of the way.  These four batteries will provide a divisions' worth of guns to my initial Bavarian contingent.

Bavarian command bases.

The single officer will lead a brigade, while the stand with two figures will serve as a division commander.

I started messing around with Pendraken's 10mm range a couple of years ago, and I was blown away by the quality and completeness of their offering.  I've been puttering away at a 10mm collection ever since! I have one specific battle in mind to start - the Battle of Wissembourg.  Using the level of representation described above for the , I have calculated I will need 88 different bases all in, including all of the infantry, cavalry, artillery and officers.  This is for one of the smallest battles of the war (at least for the "Imperial Phase") - and still that's a fair amount of kit to get painted.

I just need to paint these figures, and I can run my first 10mm battle...hoping to get through these during the Quarantine Challenge.

Those kinds of goals can seem so far away. And yet...progress has been made over time! In fact, I'm almost sort-of within striking distance, so I am going to try to do that during our quarantine period of the next few weeks. Of course, I'll be my own worst enemy as I will suddenly feel like painting more Titans or panzers or FPW stuff in another scale or who-knows-what else at any given moment...but hopefully I'll be able to stage the Battle of Wissembourg in 10mm by June. And, of course, I hope we could actually get together for a game in June...

Thanks for looking and visiting - hope you are having a good, safe and healthy day, wherever you are!