Late Romans

First project of 2013 is a Late Roman army in 28mm starting with heavy infantray. These are Foundry, very nice sculpt by the Perrys, who are my favourite. Beautiful figs, just a joy to paint. I have another 2 units of unarmoured foot, and will likely order some archers and cavalry for my birthday later this month to round them out.

 I also experimented with some different basing materials, I used Woodland scenics ballast for the ground, cork for the rocks, and GW tufts for the grass bunches. I also based everything on 60mm frontages since they will be used for either WAC/WAB using casualty markers or element based games such as Dux Bellorum or DBA.

El Cid complete

The last unit for my October Games Day is a squad of Christian militia crossbowmen, I now have ~2500 points per side for the big game.

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I also did a few Celtic chieftains for a WAB game next week. These guys are great, real characters:

And I am very proud to present the first few models (GW LOTR we picked up at a swap meet) painted by my daughter Sasha (age 9). Her favorite is Arwen. We also played through the four intro scenarios in Mines of Moria and she successfully won them all!

El Cid- almost done....

A few remaining bits and pieces for Christian Spanish, including some jinetes, mercenary command, a few archers and a priest:

North Africans and Military Order Spanish for El Cid

Getting close to finishing the El Cid project for WAB. Figures are all Old Glory, here are some North African skirmishers, zebra pattern shields:

Knights of the Order of Santiago, founded in 1170, with crossbow-armed retainers:

I have just a few peones and jinetes left to finish.

Sudanese and a new project: The Great Northern War

I finished a combined bow and spear unit of Old Glory Sudanese for the El Cid project- I am close to finishing the Almoravids and just need to finish off a few units of Christians.

And on a trip to Banff last week I stopped in at the Compustore in Red Deer where Will was having a big 1/72 sale. So I bought his entire Zvezda Great Northern War range to start a new project for Maurice. I'm starting with Swedes, here are the first batch of figs which I think came out very nicely. Mark wants to use 40mm frontages, which in my opinion will work better with 6 figs per base, double ranked. I based these first few figs 4 and 6 to a 40mm square- what do you think? Remember that a unit will be made of 4 bases (either 16 or 24 figs)?

Mercenary caballeros and jinetes

This week I repainted a bunch of 28mm mounted figs that I picked up in the MayDay silent auction. There are a mix of caballeros and jinetes in here that will be good for mercenaries for my Ed Cid game I hope to run in the autumn. I think there is a mixture of Gripping Beast and maybe a couple of Old Glory in here I think? Some of them I stripped and some I just retouched or added a shield transfer.

Muslim reinforcements

A combined unit of 10 spearmen and 10 archers, figures are from Old Glory crusades range, flag is by LBM. The Old Glory crusades range is excellent, I like these guys.

Rodrigo Diaz and more Spartans

I chiseled away at the El Cid lead pile this week, here we have Rodrigo Diaz himself, mounted and on foot, with his vassal Alvar Minaya, also mounted and on foot.

These are nice and chunky Crusader 28mm, I really like their dark age ranges. Have done a lot of their Normans and Huscarls.

I also finished another battlegroup of Spartans, this is a mixture of the two Zvezda box sets, the new Spartans and the older mixed hoplites. I think Zvezda are my favourite 1/72 manufacturer, love those Corinthian helmets.

Scott and I completed our WAB campaign last night, and what a strange finale it was. In the past few games Scott's large Norman knight unit had it's way with my warbands, so I decided to counter by fielding a single warband of 64 warriors to absorb the blow and flank it with nobles and viking pirates with 2-handed axes to close in for the kill. I also tooled up my king with a steed and 2-handed axe to challenge the Norman Comes to a duel at the beginning of the battle. I reckon that could have gone either way, similar stats but he had a lance and heavy armour on warhorse against my highland pony and thrusting spear, but I also had 3 wounds to his 2. If I went first, I would probably win, but if he went first it could have been tight...

In any case, Scott declined the challenge which gave me d3 (rolled a 3!) points to use towards battle resolution in the game.

This photo shows the Norman Comes with his minstrel (singing Brave Sir Robin, I believe) declining the challenge to face Chief Angus McLovin

These 3 points hung over Scott's head like a cloud for the rest of the battle, proving to be decisive. Basically, his large knights circled my large warband and would not risk a charge. In the meantime, my vikings and nobles chased his other units all over the board getting brutally pincushioned by bows, slingers and crossbows.

They went thataway!

I eventually forced a small unit of his knights off the board (fleed a charge too far) and ran down another unit of foot knights that fled from my vikings (fleed a charge not far enough) and that was enough points for a Scottish win.

Hooray!

But really, it was kind of a non-game. Scott never had a winning position to launch a charge (with the -3 outcome differential sitting over his head) and I never got a decent charge chance. The battle that wasn't, we never fought a melee.

Next up: 15mm Dacian DBA army on the bench in preparation for MayDay.