Kicking Bird and Wind in his hair

A very good friend of mine is an absolute nerd in regards to native Americans. Especially the Plains indians. He knows every tribe, reads all the books there are, watches all the movies and is just generally quite obsessed with the topic. He’s not a wargamer at all but I recently introduced him to a game of Altar of freedom. A spectacular game by little wars tv member Greg Wagman which lets you recreate battles of the American civil war. My friend was quite taken away by the looks of the game. He wasn’t even aware, there are people doing „stuff like this“. 

„Where would you even get that stuff? What the…?!“

So I decided to get us both into plains wars. Him with his knowledge of the history and me with my knowledge of gaming would make a good pair. He’s overjoyed (me as well) about the world we are creating. I even let him paint some bison. They turned out quite good. For scenery we want the whole package. Beautiful Sioux camps, a cavalry fort and a wonderful table to maybe even fight a kind of campaign. We were thinking about red clouds war. Quite an interesting conflict. The only war the United States actually lost against Native American peoples, having to sue for peace in the end. Eventually it was still a loss for the natives, yet the war was won. I took a huge amount of inspiration from a British blog called Dust, Tears and Dice where they kind of did the same thing. I’d love to be able to do a similar thing. So far I painted a bunch of cavalry up and started on the natives. I scratch built a fort as well as camps for the natives, which is really giving me momentum. Loving it. I didn’t really like the options for purchase and haven’t built a lot lately. So I took it as a challenge. I think it really turned out nice. I’m not very good at creating scenarios and campaigns and might need a little help. But we’ll get to that. Stuart from the Dust, Tears and Dice blog apparently uses Sharp Practice 2 by Two Fat Lardies, a mainly napoleonischen skirmish set of rules with some tweaks for the Plains wars. I quite like the approach and might try it out. An alternative, which I have read quite a lot about is the rule set Yellow Ribbon. Seems to be a classic and the best choice for playing with the natives which of course you have to control somewhat different than the whites. Maybe I’ll try that as well. Then there is of course the re-released Pony Wars Rules. These are released by a 6mm miniature company called Baccus, where I got all the miniatures from. Sould be interesting as well, but the key thing is that we are just two players and yellow ribbon as well as Pony Wars seem to be aiming at an experience for clubs with a lot more Players. Not sure yet. Maybe we'll just have to try all of the options.

Some pictures of the work in progress:

I scratch built everything which i'm quite proud of. I used cardboard for the Stockade and building roofs. The houses were 3d printed (very roughly) years ago just as a test and just sat there. They only provided the very basic shape of the buildings after I had trimmed the second story off. For the Teepees (or is it Tipis?) i used a very thin plastic sheet which I had lying around for quite some time. I figured it might be quite durable in the end. Mixed in were some various other materials like paper clips, toothpicks and 2cm mdf- Bases as a basic structure for the forts towers. I just threw together what i had around.

Here's what i've finished so far. I hope you like it!

I of course took special joy in finishing off the tents in various designs. Had a lot of fun there. I know historically not every tent was painted to this degree, but it was fun!

I'll need to make more photos of the fort. Maybe i'll create a scene in the future featuring finished units, the fort and the Teepees. I hope you like the outcome just as I do! Looking forward to completing more. This is really enjoyable.