The goblin horde

     I think this post needs to start with an apology to Michael Awdry for putting you to shame with the speed I am getting my painting done at the moment. I can only say it won't last and its only because of quick, easy colour schemes.

     Carrying on from that though, here is the last few bases I needed for the standard sized Hordes of the Things army. Another 3 bases of basic spearmen, my hero and a behemoth, simply because it's a fantasy army and I can.

      So, this is what it all looks like ranked up, not bad for a quick bit of painting after work, in front of the tv. It really does show what a limited palette colour scheme can achieve. I just can't wait to get them onto the table top now for a game.

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And now for a different horde

      Going through the lead pile (which in my case is mostly plastic), I stumbled across an old Warhammer Fantasy starter set from a few years back, that Games Workshop actually paid me to take away (a long story), just sitting there collecting dust, as I didn't have a use for anything in it. A quick count of the contents and I had a brain wave, could this be the cheap (free?) Hordes of the Things army to use down the club I had been looking for?
       The box was The Battle For Skull Pass, night goblins vs dwarves. There didn't appear to really be enough dwarves to make a decent HoTTs army from, but the goblins were a different matter. As long as I was willing to use 4 goblins with spears to a base as proper spearmen rather than 5-6 to a slightly bigger base as a horde, I would have enough in the box to get just over a minimum army. Other than the warboss, all the figures are single part models, I just have to cut the tabs off their bottoms, and with a quick paint job they should rank up really quickly.
       So here are my first 10 points, of a planned 24 point army, that I painted up over a couple of nights. I am going to add another 3 stands of spears, a warboss (hero) and a behemoth in the form of a troll.

     The other decision I made was to put 3 archers to a base rather than my club's accepted 2, as I felt goblin archers would be so bad the extra guy might just mean they do as much as normal archers, and it also made the base a bit fuller and more in keeping with the horde nature of the army.

      I got another few metal zombies painted up while I was doing these, so hopefully I will have a really good zombie horde for this Sunday's deadline.

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Hordes of the Things

     The go to game for anything regiment based, be it fantasy or historical, at my club is the DBA adaption Hordes of the Things, HOTTS, and somehow I have managed to avoid playing a single game of it. Chatting to the club chairman, Neil, I mentioned in passing that the dark ages are my favourite period of history and I really wanted to do a big dark age army, which then set off a series of events that led to this:
   

     192 points on each side of dark age goodness. As I have only really been dabbling with historical gaming for the last year or so, neither of these were my armies, the figures were a mix of Neil and Chris' collections, but I took my part of the Saxon army and got ready for a bit of shield wall action. Starting from the left and going round clockwise; the Viking armies were controlled by Neil and Chris, the Saxon armies by John and then me.

      At the mid point in the game I was going to take another photo of the whole board, but because the whole of the two armies on the Saxon right flank were still lined up staring at each other, I instead focused on the Saxon left, where 3 turns of combat had already been fought. Between the second and third photos another 5 rounds of combat had been fought and in realistic shield wall style, the casualties hadn't been decisive, it was just grinding the opponent down by pure attrition. It was really interesting to see a game whose mechanics mean you need to try and keep the line of combat straight, the weird steps that appear as you win or lose combats ultimately weaken you, so even if you are winning the majority of the combats, sometimes the clever move is to retreat certain elements to strengthen your line again.

The game was set up slightly too late into the evening, hence no scenery and the fact we didn't get to finish, but it gave me a taste of what I was missing out on. So now armed with a copy of the hordes rulebook, a gripping beast catalogue and a list of base measurements, I am ready to start my own army.