A fistful of 15mm Swiss

With a one-day Late medieval themed competition looming, it seemed a good time to upgrade my handful of Mirliton Swiss pikemen into a L'Art de la Guerre Swiss army capable of taking to the table.

With the Mirliton ranges no no longer being available in the UK, I decided to try a different manufacturer to round out the 5 pike blocks I owned already. After a bit of browsing I settled on the perhaps unlikely choice of QRF/Freikorps, on the basis that they looked to be a similar heft and body shape to the Mirliton figures, and also as they too had open hands for separate weapons.

The QRF figures are a smidge more frail, and are less "frilly sleeved" than the "a bit frilly" Mirliton figures, but with a good selection of flags downloaded from Alex Flags, compatible basing and similar paint schemes they look pretty decent at tabletop distances to me.

These are 40x40 bases with 12 figures in 3 ranks - an  ADLG Kiel

I chose to blackline these figures - not a style I usually adopt, but with the blocks of adjacent colour on the Swiss and my reluctance to ink-wash a set of figures with so much white on them it helps to make the limited palette of contrasting colours pop a little more 

It can of course end up looking like Mondrian was their official uniform designer.

The bases are painted in a Homebase testor pot - nice and cheap !

The Mondrian effect is very visible from the back

As I've probably posted before, making sure to paint the edges of the flags to remove that unsightly white paper line along their edges is really important and makes a huge difference to the overall look and feel. If you don't do this your eye is automatically drawn to the (white) edges of the flags, breaking the illusion of the figures.

Here are some of the QRF/Freikorps guys next to the Mirliton figures (LKM on the right)

I also based up some halberdier units - these are pretty flimsy and I can see some casualties in the halberd-blade department as soon as they take to the table in battle conditions

Another view of the two types - Mirliton on the left, QRF on the right.

 Halberdiers again.  Not that great close up, but these are painted for tabletop distance viewing.

 Mirliton in the foreground, QRF from Berne behind them

Yuan Chinese - The Worlds best 2-list ADLG list?

Three of the last four World Championships have now been won by Yuan Chinese armies, admittedly in the hands of three different players, and using different list designs each time as well.

But, even so that's a stunning record - so what does this list have to make it so great? 

This latest episode of the Madaxeman.com Podcast fearlessly takes on this knotty issue with the help of special guests Peter & "Aussie" Simon to chew over the strengths and tactics needed to make this list really fly.

Yuan Chinese - The Worlds best 2-list ADLG list? (play or download via this link)

Some day my Ninja will come...

June 2019 - The NEC, UK Games Expo and one of the bigger UK events I will manage to get to this year. So, why not take an almost legendarily unusable army into a theme where it is certain to meet opponents it struggles to deal with?

Well, if that army is a Samurai force that hasn't seen light of day since it's almost-win in Burton last year, the answer is of course a resounding YES!!!

The end result is five full match reports, packed to the sushi-tasting gills with pictures of Samurai figures far better painted than I could ever hope to manage myself, as well as all of the usual videos, jokes, witty banter (some of it from headless ex-warriors serving as markers), and half-baked tactical theories.

In fact, there's even a herd of cows. What more could anyone want in the height of BBQ season eh?

Read on to find out how the Samurai fared against the Song Chinese, Sicilians, French, Ottomans and a properly colourful Samurai Civil War as well (just one) in these 5 fully ninja-tastic reports.

It's A Lightbox!

Having take thousands of photos for this site over the years against various very basic backdrops, usually with an angle poise lamp for lighting I finally bit the bullet recently and bought a mini lightbox (affiliate link) on eBay for just over a fiver - and frankly I'm already wondering why on earth I didn't do so ages ago!

It is roughly a 10" cube with one open side, with the lighting powered by a usb cable from my PC (which drives a line of LED's at the top of the box facing back into it). The one I got comes with a couple of backdrops (white and black - but it will be easy to make more), and folds away quickly for flat-pack storage.

If you want to have a look on your local eBay, this affiliate link will take you straight there (I get a teeny kickback from eBay if you buy one as well using this link).

Here's a load of (un-retouched) photos taken with my usual cheap camera, firstly of some of the Khurasanians I'll be taking to The ADLG Worlds this coming weekend, and then some of the Samurai who were in action at the BHGS Challenge a week or so ago so you can see how the pictures pan out.

What's for Desert? The Egyptians @ Campaign 2019

The Campaign team event has become a bit of a regular feature on the ADLG circuit, and this year I ended up driving a newly-rebased and refurbished New Kingdom Egyptian army in a tightly themed competition against 6 other extremely similar armies.

The Egyptians fought Bedouin Camels! 

They fought an artistically licensed army of Egyptian Undead ! 

And, most of all, they fought Egyptian Civil Wars

These 6 match reports chronicle the complete biblically epic weekend for the NKE, in a widescreen spectacular that only the presence of Charlton Heston could possibly improve!