Napoleonic's: French Fusiliers

After a gap of probably 30 years, maybe more, I've started back into one of the first periods I must have played as a youngster. At the age of 48 it may be too late for me to start collecting and painting the 1000's of models you need for an army to do the age of the big battalions proud so I'm dipping my toe in with a skirmish level game.

After looking around for a set of rules I've settled (for the moment) on Shakos & Bayonets which is the Napoleonic expansion book for Muskets & Tomahawks 2 by Studio Tomahawk.

Like their very playable SAGA game you get a book with the base rules in and then Universe books to cover the individual conflicts. The Universe books contain the army lists and troop details as well as any extra period specific equipment and rules. I've not played the rules yet so cannot say anything about them but having had a flick through they look much more crunchy than the SAGA rules.

In order to get myself started on the path back into Napoleonic's I had thought about doing something from the central/eastern European theatres of 1809 or 1812 with Bavarians who have a lovely corn flower blue uniform, sadly the plastic Victrix models aren't yet released. I also have no terrain for that theatre but do have plenty of Spanish style buildings from Blood & Plunder so I opted to go for the war in Spain first of all.

Having purchased a fair few boxes of Perry British and French I've started with the French Fusiliers and will leave the Grenadiers, Voltigeurs and Hussars for a little later. The Hussars in particular are famous for their fancy uniforms so will no doubt tax my eye sight and steadiness of hand.

The Fusilier was the basic French line infantry man and I've painted mine with a orange pompon of the 3rd Company. The French don't seem to have used different facing colours for different regiments so all the Fusiliers had red facings.

Shakos & Bayonets uses D10 with the numbers ranging from zero - nine with rolls needing to equal or exceed the target to succeed. So the lower your target the better you are at a task, with our Fusilier we can see they have around a 30% to hit with their muskets, which presumably is pretty average. The cost of 10 points a model is also presumably pretty average but I'm sure these things will become clear as I paint up different troop types and play some games.

So that's the first eight men off the production line and I have another 16 Fusiliers and then some officer types to paint up before I start on the more elite troops.