The Great Redoubt

Keeping a blog up to date is very hard. Hats off to those who have the discipline to put up quality posts on a regular basis. I am not one of those people…

Anyway, I hope 2025 has been good to all of you. A lot has changed since the last time I posted and I thought I’d share a quick update.

The biggest change is that I’ve moved to a new house! We are now empty nesters and built a new home in the southwest Twin Cities metro area suitable for the way we want to live that will also allow us to age in place. From a gaming perspective I have a new, dedicated hobby room that is large enough to hold my painting table, all of my wargaming supplies and host a permanent game table as well. I plan on building a new table or set of tables that will allow me to have at least a 6′ x 8′ gaming space and possibly larger. I have my painting desk set up but everything else is still a jumble of boxes right now. Getting that in order is my fall project once we sell our old place and finish the main floor decorating.

Beyond that, I’ve continued gaming on a regular basis at a friend’s house, focusing on 15mm WWII, 15mm ACW and other games on a rotating basis. We’ve played Chain of Command 2 in 28mm a few times and really enjoyed it. I may look at doing 1940 Germans and/or Brits to go along with another local gamer’s plans for it.

For my personal projects, I continue working on grand plan for big battalion 28mm Napoleonics. I’ve amassed a decent-sized French army now with 13 battalions of painted infantry and a 6-pd foot artillery battery ready to go. I have some light cavalry in the painting queue and plenty more infantry to work on after that. I’m glad I have a backlog to work through as the current US administration’s tariff plans are throwing a wrench in the miniature wargaming business with many UK manufacturers pausing sales to the US until the new customs setup crystalizes. An unfortunate situation that is hopefully temporary.

I plan on experimenting with slap chop and similar techniques to produce more infantry units quickly. I have enough French to run a decent game but need opposing forces. A local gamer has some Austrians he’s working on and I will either augment that or work on some Russians.

I also have a small number of units for the Great Northern War in 28mm. I have two Swedish and two Russian infantry regiments right now and am planning on using “Beneath the Lily Banners” or possibly Simon Miller’s new “Lust for Glory” rules once they are available.

Finally I caved and bought the latest Warhammer 30K starter box and hope to build some troops to play that. The new FLGS in my area is very GW-focused from a miniatures perspective so I would like to find some other locals to play with. 30K is “almost” historical wargaming so maybe I could find some converts along the way. 🙂

Anyways that’s it for now. If you’re in the Twin Cities, MN area and are interested in any of the projects I mentioned, do get in touch.