LEGO The Hobbit 79002: Attack of the Wargs: Amazon.co.uk: Toys & Games

Lego Minifigures for LoTR wargaming anyone...?

Lego seem to be on a roll and are releasing ever-more wargaming-friendly sets of figures right now - apparently you can even buy  Urak-Hai army packs - ideal for use with GW's  War of the Ring ruleset I guess?

But the big question must be, Is this the ultimate end-point of the "Will plastic miniatures ever replace metal?" debate?

The wee Jocks come up a little short

Just finished the last game in the round-robin phase of our Club 650 points FoGR competition, and despite a heroic attempt my 1639 Scots Royalist army fell just short of qualifying for the knockout stages of the competition even after recording a rather tasty 67 points (in BHGS money) over 4 games, with a rather uneven mix of scores of the order of 19-25-1-22.

This chunky score placed me 3rd, behind two other players both tied on 70 (one of whom I lost to 1-24, and one of whom I beat 22-3 in the last game, when needing a 24-1 to overhaul him... shame about the 3 generals killed in combat or it could have been even closer!

The choice of army for each player was done on a sort of reverse seeding, so the more experienced players got "worse" armies - however what we seem to have proved so far is that in a tightly themed ECW period, a cool army is generally no match for experience !

The lists I used in this 5'x3' table 650 point competition are now on the FoGR Wiki

Museum Miniatures 2013 January Sale

Just got an email reminding me that Museum Miniatures 2013 Sale is on at the moment, with 25% off all figures and ready made armies. That makes infantry and cavalry only £1.88 per pack..

I used some of their chaps in a recent Battle Report as Hungarians - they are the knighty-looking blokes on horses in the two photos below. Nice figures!

A lot of the Museum stuff features in the Ancients Photo Gallery too on this site.

I suspect that the Museum sale ends in a couple of days if you are interested...

Lurkio added to the Renaissance Manufacturers Directory

Somewhat belatedly late, I've now added Lurkio to the Renaissance Suppliers Directory. They have a newly-released Nine Years War range suitable for all of the main nations, specifically Bavarians and Anglo-Dutch, and also Inca, Canari and Mapuche ranges from the Americas. Sold in FoG battle groups, "single bases" (i.e. according to DBx basing conventions) and some army pack sizes these are very nice little figures.

They'll also be appearing in one of the upcoming match reports from Godendag 2013 on this site!

Field of Glory Renaissance Battle Reports From Southern League Oxford 2013 - Game 1

In a blistering 10 day turnaround, three full and multimedia-rich Field of Glory Renaissance Battle Reports From round 1 of the Southern League in Oxford have appeared online already!

Marvel as the Hungarians get a bellyful of Ottomans, Mamluks and a very tasty Hungarian Civil War in this 3-game one-day competition with pre-set terrain.

See how an all mounted army performs in these three reports

More Scots..

This time to give some extra short-range firepower to the Scots, it's Peter Pig's rather dinky little Frame Guns that get an unveiling

 These also feature at least one Essex artillery crewman (the chap in the hat on the left of shot)

 A very by-now traditional Armypainter Dark Tone has brought them up very well. I also used brush-on Testors Dullcote as I didn't fancy getting a spray can out for so few figures.

I've done one gun in brass, and one in a more iron type metal - I suspect the real things were leather but metal looks a bit more, well, gun-like.

Will this be the year for Tankfest?

The power of Twitter has sent me a notification about Tankfest 2013, at the Tank Museum in Bovingddon. Despite having been to Aberdeen and Kubinka, I've never been down to Bovvy to see the UK museum... but this does look very tempting!

Anyone got any recommendations about this as a day out?

Those Scottish Cavalry are done...

As promised to my Facebook subscribers just after Christmas, I've been finishing off a dozen or so Peter Pig Scottish Cavalry to go with the infantry I finished back in November - and very pleased with them I am too.

This is the full unit - I bought two packs of 4, plus the command pack which only has three models in it, so I added an extra infantryman (who I think is from Essex) to round out the set.

The actual cavalrymen come in two poses, looking left and right

 These were all undercoated in white, and finished in Army painter Dark Tone to match the Scottish Infantry regiments I did earlier

 Unlike the infantry I also painted the straps on the back of each figure - the straps on the infantry were a bit thin and cast in a lower relief than these, and also I did the infantry in a bit of a rush to be honest.

 This chap in the middle is one of the officers and Generals pack (Pack 40 from the Regimente of Foote range "Scots Gens (3)")

 The pack also seems to have a chap in full armour - lucky devil really for the Scots of that era - unless he snuck in from another pack on my very messy painting table without me noticing...

Here is the final General, with a bit of a Puritan haircut and an Essex figure (I suspect from a Jacobite Rebellion range, but who's counting..?) to round them out.

The more of these figures I paint, the more I like them. The temptation to buy a whole army of them is growing stronger....

Reports from Warfare 2012

The Early Danes field more Cuirassiers than you can safely shake a stick at, and take to the field after a hearty fry-up (appropriately enough) in Warfare 2012 - a themed FoG:R competition - and take on Transylvanians, Swedes, Jin Chinese and some Austrians

The reports features two full-fat deep fried reports, one half-fat and a final lite version using only bacon flavourings instead of real bacon. 

You will also have the opportunity to order a range of tasty bacon-flavoured snacks from eBay to consume whilst reading.

Donnington Scots Pikemen in 15mm

Another Warfare purchase was 8 Donnington Scots Pikemen to go with my existing Minifigs Scots musketeers - Minifigs sometimes being a bit variable, and with no pictures on the website I saw these chaps who looked similar and so picked up a set.

Keeping Scotland thoroughly Protestant ...

Some basic tartan patterns using my Tartan guide from another post

Simple but relatively effective

The command figures are generic ECW ones 

And here they are with the Minifigs musketeers - marginally taller, but close enough for wargaming purposes - the style is pretty similar which is almost more important

The interest in painting up Scots is not only for our club competition, I've discovered a lot about them from this book I've been reading recently on the whole Civil War(s), which I'm thoroughly enjoying.

Happy Christmas - it's The Three Musketeers !

On a day when everyone gets presents they don't really want and then tries to slope off to think about what stuff they might buy online that they would have actually preferred to get instead of those socks, this post is intended as a timely reminder that whilst there are some figures you "actually" need, some you just, well, "need" even though you don't really have an army list drawn up to use them in, and some that you kinda think "well, I could probably find a use for them and they are quite nice, so as long as no-one notices....", there is a whole, separate class of figures that fall into an entirely separate "lets throw reason out of the window, I just GOTTA have some of those!" category.

And the latest contenders for the Gold Medal in this regard are very definitely the figures in Blue Moon Manufacturing's new Three Musketeers range.

In the French army from the early part of the Thirty Year's War, Field of Glory: Renaissance
allows you to field the Kings Musketeers as part of a tooled up (well, Superior grade) Light Foot unit armed with muskets. So, everyone wants 4 bases of them huh?

The Blue Moon figures however come in packs of 10 - 5 mounted and 5 foote. So, whilst somewhere in Madaxeman Towers a unit of 5 mounted and one pedestrian are being painted, some spare Testudo infantry were quickly pressed into service to add to 4 of the Cardinal's Guard to create the almost-useless unit of 4 bases of Superior LF Musketeers

The Testudo figures - here in the slightly blurred foreground - are a smidge
taller than the Blue Moon chaps, and also styled rather differently to the fairly cartoonish but eminently lovable Blue Moon - but its a very  good match at wargaming distances

Where the Blue Moon guys excel however is in their deployment of quite phenomenal Depardieu-esque moustaches ... (Testudo on the right here)

I actually bought the Cardinal's Guard set in preference to the actual Musketeers set as I thought they looked a lot more like the Hollywood impression of the Musketeers. (Testudo on the left)

"Have at you Sir!"   (Testudo on the right - although you'e probably picked up the style now..)

They truly are very loveable figures - and in the spirit of Hollywood-ization, my choice of uniform design for this unit was inspired by a classic Hollywood version of the tale of The Three Musketeers!

Blue Moon stuff is also available from Old Glory UK in the UK. 

Go on, you know you want some.... 

New - Donnington TYW Flags

As trailed in a previous news item, Donnington are about to release some new TYW flags, and Damian was kind enough to send me a set of the Swedish ones.

They come as part of a sheet of 16 different flags including both Company and Command flags for regiments in the army of Gustavus Adolphus during the Thirty Years War.

I quickly added a few to my (sorry Damian!) Lancashire Games Pikemen, who generally serve as Swedes in my armies, and this is the result.

The flags are printed on decent paper, and I stuck them together with my usual adhesive of choice, PVA Wood Glue - my carpenter brother-in-law once told me that PVA Wood Glue was stronger than the wood it joins, so that works for me.

The "rocket science" about Donnnington's flags is that they are printed with a larger-than-the-flag guideline, so you cut out along the guideline, stick them together and then snip off the excess on the three sides away from the flagpole. It's not rocket surgery, but it does mean you are gluing and folding a much bigger piece of paper, which makes lining up the two sides a lot less fiddly.

These are from the Red Regiment - which I suspect will be no great surprise to many of you TYW experts out there...The flags are printed with shading on them to suggest that the flags are waving in the breeze, which as you can see enhances what is actually some very limited "bending" of the glued flags in these photos.

The one I was sent was "Sheet 2", however I've been told that Donnington will be selling at least four infantry sheets and either or two cavalry sheets in this range. I did also paint the edges of the flags red once they were stuck together - because of the guidelines this was a lot tidier than with some other flags I've tried this on.

At £5 per sheet of 16, these flags aren't exactly cheap especially given the increasing numbers of free flags out there, but they are definitely better than the quality I manage to produce using my home printer, and are on better paper stock as well -and they may well see action in the new year!

Britannia Miniatures 20m British Leyland- DAF DROPPS Logistics vehicle

At Warfare this year I picked up a British Leyland DAF DROPPS Logistics vehicle from the lovely chaps at Britannia Miniatures - this is for fairly morphable use (as all lorries look alike, of course!) in some of the Force on Force scenario's that require a transport vehicle of some sort.

The shipping container on the back is a separate piece, so it may well also appear as a piece of scenery in it's own right - a useful touch. If you look carefully you can see where I added a strip of magnetic sheet to the bottom of the container, which helps it stick onto the thin bit of metalized card that I added to the opposite surface of the vehicle.

The vehicle was painted in a black undercoat, then roughly done in a thick wash of a Miniatures Paints Dark Sand.

The by-now-familiar to regular readers wash of Army Painter Strong Tone gave it a messy brown overwash, which was then highlighted with more drybrish layers of the original colour, and then some GW Bleached Bone.

The container was done in a similar technique, but I think I used Miniatures Paints Olive as the base colour, leaving the British Osprey helmet-ed crewman in a non-obviously British plain uniform and body armour combo so he could pass as an American if needed. The windows were done in the textbook "bard blue and then some stripes of progressively lighter blues in one corner" technique often seen on miniature houses.

I think it's a great little piece all in al - robust, useful and brushes up very well.

I've got a load more pages with links to all of the 20mm modern manufacturers I know (and an online voting/rating system for the figures) on my website here

NATO armour in 1/300th scale

Just to prove that I've not been doing Xmassy things relentlessly for the last few weeks to the exclusion of painting and gaming, here are some pictures of NATO 1/300th scale armour that I've been working on earlier this year and only just gotten round to photographing.

The Brits !

Leopard II command unit

Retro-style M60