Testing Honours of War rules for the Seven Years War - 1 The armies

I have never really played any Horse and Musket period stuff but I have friends who do.   They recommended trying Keith Flint's set in the Osprey rules series set - Honours of War.  By coincidence I saw a copy at a big discount a couple of years ago at Joy of Six and bought them on a whim.  Then did nothing with them other than read them through.  Then a couple of days ago in one of those Face Book things that goes around another friend listed Barry Linden as one of his favourite films.  That got me thinking about the period again and I dragged the rules out for another look.

Although the rules look to be lightweight don't be deceived they hide a lot of period flavour while still being easy to master, which is ideal for big games with a lot of units.  I tend towards big historical battles with lots of troops on the table so that was a big plus.  However, I didn't want to splash out on figures without testing the rules and period first so i turned to paper soldiers.  I looked for some on the web and the ones that I liked were from Junior General's site.  These are top down images and are rather nice as these things go.  The only problem was that they are scaled to match 28mm and I (of course) wanted 6mm or thereabouts.  I couldn't import the original images and resize them so I drew up the figures I wanted in MS Paint at about 15mm size and resized those once I was happy.  For test playing a game or two they will do nicely.

Each square is 2cm - These are Line Infantry

The whole thing took me about a day and was actually quite enjoyable, plus all it has cost me is two sheets of printer paper and some ink.  That has generated six Battalions of Line Infantry, two of Light Infantry, three of Grenadiers, three artillery units and three Squadrons of cavalry for each side.  On top of which are command stands for four Infantry Brigades and one Cavalry Brigade and a Commander in chief for both sides.   They don't represent any particular nation or actual unit.so I suppose I have entered the world of imagi-nations. I will stick the printed troops to some cardboard or mounting board salvaged from other projects and Bob is your Mum's brother or Dad's as the case may be.