Sharp Practice - ACW for Pennies on the Dollar.

Hi everyone,

Last summer I spent a lot of time war gaming – mostly Silver Bayonet and Fantasy Battles. In between I tried out several games, and one of them was Sharp Practice by the Two Fat Lardies.

I had the rules but I never played the game.  My friend had two ‘Indian Mutiny’ forces and I played a few games with him.  I have to say I enjoyed the game a lot.  I feel it is a game for mature players, but my friend was only 18 years old.

It has been mentioned often on OTT, that movement in Sharp Practice is a pain in the butt and there is truth to that.  My friend and I overcame this by adding extra movement dice.  This resulted in faster games, as the groups made better headway.

Therefore,  I decided to build two forces myself. At first I was going to do Napoleonics, but I was already playing and painting Silver Bayonet. Since I had bought several boxes of ACW in 1/72 scale from a car boot sale several years ago, I decided to paint them up.

I have never played in this period, so it was something new to delve in.  Also they are super easy to paint up.

Below is a quick summary of how I go about painting these miniatures.  The most time consuming aspect is the cleaning.  Some of these models come from the mid-eighties and the mold designs show their age pretty well.

There is a lot of mold lines on some of the miniatures, especially the Stretlets and Hat models. Therefore I recommend using a very sharp hobby knife to remove them.  The plastic is soft and can easily burr if sanded.

I will paint the army up in batches of 12 figures at a time, since the paint schemes are very simple: two tones of blue for the Union and a grey and two brown tones for the Confederates.

That is all for now.  I will post some short updates as I go along.  I will also be building some terrain for this period since I have none.  I will have to order some though, as I have never wargamed in this period.

Until next post stay safe and have fun.

NR