Roll Call Reports - in Video Format

 After the success (over 600 views!) of the Beachhead video reports, and also with a rather extensive writeup of the 4-day trip to the Braubach tournament in the pipeline I've decided to put my 5 games at Roll Call out as a video as well.

You can therefore see in rather over-saturated detail the Mighty Assyrians take on some Galatians, Romans, Classical Indians, Warring States Chinese and finally the Seleucid Empire in 5 HD-quality badly-narrated reports which are available now on the Madaxeman YouTube Channel.

 Yes, you can now spend just under an hour waiting for the theme tune to crop up and interrupt my inane ramblings as I try and graft some semblance of tactical nous onto the generally shambolic shufflings of the 28mm army of Assyria (which has also featured heavily on this blog after being painted during lockdown).   

As usual, the army lists are all in the Wiki, and in case you're wondering, the figures are from the excellent but oft-overlooked Newline Designs range, with dismounted generals from Foundry

More adventures in Contrast Paints

 Now the Arabs are starting to come together I've test-done a few infantry figures to see what difference undercoat makes to the GW Contrast Paints that I'm looking to use for this army.

These are WiP figures - undercoated either in matt white (Halfords car undercoat) or Army Painter Skeleton Bone, and then painted with the same GW Contrast colour.

This is Magos Purple

The guy on the right has a Sudanese head from the Perry sprue

Talassar Blue

Iyanden yellow

I'm pretty sure these are Perry metal figures

Space Marine Red

This is perhaps the most "solid" colour of the lot that I've tried

Warp Lightning Green

Iyanden yellow trousers

Aethermatic Blue

This is perhaps my favourite of the colours so far - but I have a fair few more to try! 

Back into (figure painting) gear...

After a month of sporadic holiday (and interior decorating-type painting) I'm finally now starting to think about getting back into gear for some proper painting with the start of my long-promised 28mm 'genric' Arab army for ADLG.

Its a real mix of metals and plastics, with a bit of half-assed conversion going on as well. Here are some of the figures in WiP:

These figures are I think a mix of the Fireforge Byzantine Infantry sprue, with some Gripping Beast Vikings as well to give me a load of armoured bodies to which I add Arab heads from the GB Arab infantry and cavalry packs. 

Here I'm using the trusty favourite of wood filler to create longer robes for them, building up over most of their legs and leggings and then adding in metal Dailami shields from Footsore so I can use the amazing Dailami shield transfers from LBMS for the couple of bases of "elite" Dailami infantry in a number of Arab armies in ADLG 

I will also be making a whole pack of GB plastic arabs, but like many of the recent GB plastic packs (Late Romans.. looking at you here..) they don't have all that much variety so I have added metal figures from North Star, Gripping Beast (I think) and Perry (in order of left to right after the plastic figures) to mix it up a bit. 

I'm also going to make a load of cavalry - these are the GB Gothic Elite Cavalry horses, which are the same as their Roman cataphract pack as well with three poses. Instead of metal armour I've used GW Contrast Paints as a base (with extra detail from normal paints) to create colourful horse barding for the elite horsemen. 

These are some of the GB Gothic riders with "arab" heads and bowcases added 

And from the other angle.. very much WiP, much of the detail isn't added yet.

More riders - one of these at least is I think a Fireforge Mongol body and arms.

Elite mounted bow cavalry!

Here are the Fireforge and GB horses from the Arab Light and Heavy Cavalry boxes which most of the rest of the cavalry will be mounted on. As with the 15mm Hungarians I did the horses all first. 

These have all been undercoated white, painted with a bit of a watered down semi-wash Coat d'Arms horse colour then inked with various layers of ArmyPainter browns and dark tones. 

More to come now I've restarted painting again post-summer!

Lockdown Podcast #9

As the landmark of a double-figure number of Lockdown Podcast Episodes rapidly approaches, and with almost 1,400 Podcast downloads in the last month under our belts the 9th Lockdown Podcast is now out on Podbean, iTunes, Spotify and (soon) the Madaxeman Youtube Channel. 

This week the team of intrepid wannabe gamers and by-now-obsessive painters luxuriate yet again in the riches of a combined painting queue that stretches all the way from the pyramids of Ancient Egypt to the tower stacks of Mega City One.

In the fleeting moments of the podcast that take place before we reach Andy's Quiz Music a wide variety of debates take place - the best board games for feuding siblings, using the type of garden feature which would raise eyebrows in a parliamentary expenses committee for tabletop terrain, genetic similarities between Vikings and Saxons, whether treatments for 10mm addiction could be made available on the NHS, how to sneak lead through domestic customs inspections, and in a newly trimmed version of the ADLG list discussion we all take a vote on who we think would win in a Jurchen Ch'in-Jurchen Ch'in face-off (hint - the Song Chinese always come off worst...).

There's also a whole load of discussion about how Tabletop Simulator (available on Steam) might actually be the solution we all didn't realise we were looking for to get some (virtual) lead on a (virtual) table in the near future - all of which gets crammed in before Andy's Quiz. 

(I promise I'll have some actual picture-led painting and gaming stuff out this weekend as well!) 

Newline Assyrian Chariots - the army is complete!

Finally, in this three part 28mm Biblical special, the Chariotry - the strike force of the army weighing in at a very reasonable ₤22/each.

I'd picked up four chariots, as that's the maximum number allowed in the ADLG Assyrian & Sargonid list. As you'll see here I used the near-revolutionary (yet still blindingly obvious when you think of) it technique of printing off some pictures from the internet and wallpapering the designs onto the big slab sides of the chariot boxes.

The four crew have plenty of room to walk around in the cab, so they four chariots could be posed in a variety of different ways - they sure aren't any sort of tight fitting jigsaw puzzle that only goes together in one formation, allowing you to put even more variety into the army by varying the poses.

There are loads more images on the main website of these chariots, together with the Infantry and Cavalry which you can reach via this link 

Newline Assyrian Cavalry - the 28mm Assyrians, Part II

OK, so here are the Cavalry. Not quite as good painting-wise as the foot, as I'm a bit lazy/unskilled on the whole "horse painting" front but the mass effect I think is OK.

The Newline figures themselves are also still great, as even with only one set of cavalry the three different poses in the pack, as well as separate shields and spears still give a decent variety.

These 12 horses are supposed to be pulling chariots - I made a mistake in mixing them all up on the undercoating table, and then compounded that mistake by mis-counting how many of each type of horse I actually had (15 "normal" ones and 16 "chariot pulling" ones).

By the time I'd realised I'd painted them up it was too late to go back and change them. It does mean these guys have some serious armour around the neck of each horse though, which is probably a win for them

(Mercenary Skythians)

The rest of the photos are at: https://www.madaxeman.com/main/28mm_Assyrian_Cavalry.php

(Chariots coming up when I upload the photos... )

Newline Designs 28mm Assyrian Infantry, painted

I almost literally stumbled upon the Newline 28mm Biblical ranges at the Attack! show in Devizes in Summer 2019.

Newline Designs were a company I had mentally pegged as just being a 20mm manufacturer (so I'd almost walked straight past them) but my eye was caught by a show offer on a 28mm Assyrian army, with a range of figures I had no idea existed.

I wanted/needed an Assyrian army for an event that was supposed to have taken place earlier this year, so checking them out the figures turned out to be really nice, and with the at-show discount an army worked out at a lot less than half the price of the same figures from Foundry as well (which I'd been steeling myself to fork out for at some point in time).

I bought them there and then, and of course subsequently bought a shedload more by mail order to give me more options in the army, and less than a year later here are photos of the infantry from this 28mm ADLG-based army:

(This is just a few of the photos - there are loads if you go to this link on the main Madaxeman.com site)

This is not the Pasty you were looking for.. Gepids in ADLG action at PAW 2020

For the first set of battle reports from events held in the roaring 20's the Gepid army assembles in glorious 28mm and then travels down the A30 all the way to the edge of Cornwall in order to assault the pasty-crust foothills and mountains of success at the 2020 PAW competition in Plymouth.

Will this complex and clever army of maniacally charging one-dimensional horse warriors manage to discover the meaty taste of success, or will they find that they have they bitten off more stewed vegetables of indeterminate provenance than they are able to chew?

One game against Trimverate Roman, two battles against the Seleucids and a final round playing the Sassanian Empire will show the answer in these  4 full-scale West Country reports.

May the Pasty be With You!

Assyria Uber Alles (scales..)

Over the last few days I've managed to get a few more of the Newline Designs Assyrians (that I only bought in July...) painted up for a Biblical Era L'Art de la Guerre army I plan to try and use next year, all of whom match the 15mm Museum Miniatures army I already have.

They are all infantry, which is down to me prioritizing them over the rather more important cavalry and chariots in this army - and here they are, along with some of their smaller brothers in arms!