Comics Imagi-Nations - Syldavia & Borduria

With my work life on the verge of a revolution, I've put a big hold on my gaming spending. And I could sure use this break in the influx of new miniatures to actually paint something and make a dent in my mountain of unpainted lead. But of course I just keep coming up with new cool (and entirely unrelated to any already existing project) ideas instead...

As most of my ideas this one involved several existing "meh" concepts (an entirely subjective concept of course) suddenly clicking together into something exciting! Like that whole "Quar infantry + All Quiet on the Martian Front vehicules + Memoir 44 rules = Awesome" business...

In this case it went:

• I don't like historical gaming: I view actual history as too much of a constrain for what I want to do with my toy soldiers... I like to buy miniatures based on an entirely irrational "shiny, me want" factor, not because I have a bunch of boxes to check to complete a strict TO&E. Also I like campaigns and story telling in my games, something I find hard(er) to fit within actual History (or elaborate fiction universe with lots of canon for that matter). Let's say I play a Waterloo 1815 game and the French win (big surprise there)... Where do we go from there? What's the next game going to be? Do we write an alternate history? Didn't we just actually stop doing historical gaming and started doing something else entirely ? If so why did we bother in the first place?
  
• This one is kind of sub-concept of the above one... Some periods, and factions, are "sensitive" and while I certainly don't subscribe to the whole "playing and/or collecting WW2 Germans = being a (closet) nazi", I don't mind a good layer of fiction between my toys and for example Nazism. I'd rather tell family and friends that I'm playing with toy soldier in the world of Tintin than I'm playing with Nazi toy soldiers! If only for the sake of having to explain/justify less.
  
• There are plenty of  WW2 (and other historical periods) rules out there that I wouldn't mind giving a test run but don't want to go the trouble of adapting them to sci fi (my drug of choice)! To name a few: Crossfire, Troops Weapons & Tactics, Chain of Command...*
• I've got nothing against historical miniatures and some of them do have that "shiny, me want" factor. And just has I don't want to be forced to buy a given miniature by a list, I don't want to be stopped of doing so by something as trivial as "I don't have a use for it"!
  
• Being Belgian, Tintin various fictional countries are familiar (if only in name) to me and the above mentioned family and friends (and just about anyone I might end up having to explain my hobby to).
  
• Those fictional countries hit my personal sweet spot of detailed enough to fire up my imagination but not detailed enough to kill it...

So long story short (yeah right)...I'm going to use Hergé's Sydavia and Borduria to both have and eat the historical wargaming cake!

* Of course Hergé isn't even remotely politically correct either, so I'm probably just biting myself in the ass with that whole line of thinking!