The Tibetans go hunting fish and chips

 Just after Warfare last year almost 40 people congregated in the heart of Torbay for the Brixham Classic ADLG competition, including a rarely used Tibetan army under my somewhat ham-fisted control. 

The plethora of cataphracts concerned had been consigned to a Bisley drawer for many years so a chance to bring them blinking and screaming into seaside wintertime daylight was an occasion for celebration, and for these 5 video match reports of how they fared against the Conquistadores, the Goryeo Koreans, the Khushan Empire, Ilkhanid Khanate and finally the Tupi Indians of Brazil  

There are also some slightly disturbingly animated pictures of the losers prizes from the event 

WW2 coastal batteries also make a brief appearance too

But mostly it's about me talking through how the 5 games went for the Tibetans on a series of short YouTube videos

I'm Spartacus!

 I've finally given into the inevitable and started painting a Spartacus Slave Revolt army that I won (in a raffle) at a competition in Rome way back in the summer of 2019 

They are 15mm, mostly Strategia et Tactica figures from Italy supplemented by some Forged in Battle chaps and no doubt all sorts of odds and ends from the bits box too by the time the army is done.

My intention was to do mostof them with a black undercoat and then try a zenithal (ie from above) white spray to try and pick up highlights before actually painting. 

The zenithal spray didn't really work as planned, I suspect because a can of spray paint doesnt eject the paint fast enough to "miss" the undercuts. This meant that they ended up part highlighted and partly undercoated in grey - probably an airbrush would have been better.

To compensate I added a white drybrush to them to really pick up the highlights so I could then aim for a mostly Contrast Paints approach

This is the first test batch taken to completion - I think I have (at last!) managed to make a half-decent job of putting faces on the little blighters as well, with a Darkoath Flesh undercoat and picking out the noses, chins, cheekbones and brows of these well-cast figures with a normal Vallejo skin tone flesh paint.

There are however many more to do... so watch out for them over the next few weeks and months!

Homeric Poetry in Linear Motion - Warfare 2022

 After freezing our nads off at the Ascot racecourse last year, the 2022 edition of Warfare turned up the heating significantly with a trip to the desert in a Biblical-themed competition at the all-new Farnborough venue. 

That meant the Linear B tactics of an improved and enhanced Mycenean army got to have a run out in five games of L'Art de la Guerre, all laced with dreadful poetry, terribly inappropriate speech-bubble captions, almost no tactics and even a smattering of your best quality American Ska-Punk in a series of reports punningly now known as Homer's The Silly-iad.

The Review of 2022

It's now very much 2023, but I've seen a number of "What did I get up to in 2022?" posts recently so thought I'd try and do the same before everyone has consigned 2022 to the dustbin of history.

So, in 2022 I manged to achieve the following:

Painting:

Most of the painting I've done has seemed to be bits and pieces to add into existing armies, with the most notable additions to the painted lead (and plastic) pile being:

• 10 1/700th ships for Black Sails
• A full 15mm Carolingian Frankish army for ADLG
• Some 15mm 3-D printed Etruscans, making up almost an armys worth 
• Quite a few 28mm Medieval Spanish, including some 3D printed infantry, Knights in both metal and plastic, and some Fireforge Almughavars too
• A 3D printed 28mm Macedonian elephant (so I do have to make and paint the rest of the army now!)
• A 3D printed 15mm fort 
• 3 Armoured Elephants in 15mm
• Some 15mm African Kingdoms cavalry, upcycling some Han chariot horses in the process
• Refurbishing, rebasing and adding to a large 15mm Hittite army    

Gaming

I also managed to fit in a few games - OK, more than "a few" perhaps! 

In fact, I played in..

• 14 L'Art de la Guerre competitions
• ..10 of which were in the UK, the others being in Spain, Germany, Portugal and Italy
• ..in total those events saw me playing 63 individual games
• ..using 13 different armies
• ..and playing against 51 different opponents throughout the year

The range of armies I used was eclectic to say the least - starting with the peasant rabble of the Peoples Crusade, contrasting with the small but tough mounted army of the Medieval Hungarians, the shooting power (and heavy metal armour) of the French Ordonnance, the inestimable Swiss doing what Swiss do best, a pseudo-Roman Palmyran army with bolt shooters and cataphracts, the endless shieldwall of the Dark Age Rus, some well-padded elephants and dangerously explosive artillery in the Delhi Sultanate,  a double-helping of Khurasanians (playing singles and doubles), the mounted archery, Immortals and hapless wallpapered battle towers of Cyrus' Achaemenids, their predecessors the Assyrians in 28mm falling like wolves upon the flock, the Rolls Royce-like combined arms spectacle and colour of the (28mm) Ghaznavids, the Homeric Heroics of the Myceneans and finally (and probably least succesfully!) the high Steppe fully armoured horsemanship of the Tibetans to round out the year.  

Outside of ADLG events, I've also played club and friendly games using O Group (in 10mm), Chain of Command (20mm), ADLG Renaissance, Cold War Commander (6mm), FoGR (15mm) and Blitzkreig Commander (10mm). 

 

Other Stuff 

2022 also saw the Madaxeman media empire churn out;

• 32 blog posts on this blog (aka new items on the front page of Madaxeman.com) 
• Half a dozen episodes of the Madaxeman Podcast, 
• The Podcast also saw 4,500 episodes downloaded during the year
• The most popular Podcast episode was one entitled "Oh My Aachen Nuts!" where we talked about a road trip to a competition in Germany. This was downloaded 477 times in the last 12 months.
• The Madaxeman YouTube Channel had 12,150 views in the last year, adding up to 1,600 hours of watch time (!!) 
• The most watched video of the year was a report of games at the Beachhead competition, which totted up some 1,675 views and over 300 hours of view time.
• I somehow also managed to send 994 Tweets from the Madaxeman Twitter account (!!)
• ..and make 56 posts on Facebook as well.

Not bad eh...?

Lets see what 2023 brings !