The rest of the Chinese Crossbowmen

With 48 figures to play with, the Chinese Crossbow Painting Marathon has created lots of opportunities to pad out a number of armies (of course that does mean working on the old "WRG 6th" principle that there is kinda only one Chinese army, and that clothing styles changes little in over a thousand years, but hey...) and here are the full results to follow up on the previous blog post:

Two ADLG units with Pavise on the left, and then a handful of single-based crossbows painted up to match the uniforms of existing single-based halberd and spear armed infantry I already had, allowing them to be deployed together as mixed units, or for these chaps to be used in pairs as crossbow-only units that are colour coded to match the swordsmen-only units in the same army.

Yes, that  lurid dayglow green is a colour scheme on some of my troops - it's donkey's years old, and has even been on table before in some match reports. If I were painting the halberdiers these chaps go with now I probably wouldn't go with it again though...

I've had a load of these pavises lying around in the bits box for years, so finally they get some use. The designs are not wildly inspiring, but after toying with the idea of trying to go for a dragons face for all of, oh, half a second I opted for something easy.

With 48 men to paint, there were spares for a couple of Light Infantry units

Here's the full lineup of double-based Warring States and Han infantry, with Essex in front and Museum behind.

And, finally, from the rear... 

All of these pictures and more are to be found amongst the 3,273 photos of 15mm troops which are currently to be found in the fully-searchable 15mm Figure gallery on my website

What's in the Bag? The Salute 2016 Podcast !

In this latest Podcast episode I'm joined by Ian, Gavin, Jeavon, John and Stan all from Central London Wargames Club in a "straight to live" recording made in the beer garden of the Fox pub at the ExCeL Centre, London.

The Fox may not be the most salubrious of locations, but the Audacity software I used has cleaned up almost all of the pub-background noise when recording the podcast so the sound quality is surprisingly good for what was the resting place for weary and thirsty gamers escaping from the mega-show that was Salute! 2016.

In this episode I ask the question "What's in the Bag?" of all of my guests, and with some added liquid lubrication the discussion then rambles onto subjects as diverse as the pricing of 15mm figures, packaging strategies (blister pack or baggie?), how much would you pay for a boardgame if you lived on a submarine, and just how many 1/3000th scale ships are "too many"?

To get the full experience it may be best to have at least 3-4 pints yourself before tuning in !

Spring Showdown - Malifaux match reports

4 more almost incomprehensible Malifaux battle reports, with a big pink flying baby with a bad case of piles, hot chicks in leather with big swords, re-animating snipers in a childs playroom and a cast of thousands of mechanical spiders all creating confusion in deepest Essex.

The only thing you will probably recognise and understand is the crushing incompetence, the bitter taste of defeat and the withering analysis from Steampunk Hannibal

Warmodelling/Fantassin 15mm Ancients Photos

..now in the Ancients gallery, with a review, size comparison shots vs Essex, Old Glory, Xyston and Corvus Belli.