Refurbished 1/300th scale tanks

A couple of months ago I was gifted a huge collection of 1/300th scale tanks by brother, most of which I'd actually painted and some of which I'd owned way back when we were both still at school.

Other than the sheer amazement as to just how dammned many of the blighters there actually were (and being mind-boggled that we managed to even play a single turn either of the old WRG modern rules, or the even more complex and marker-tastic Battlegroup moderns with quite so many AFVs on table..), it was also a challenge to see how easily it would be to upgrade some of them to a full set of CWC Middle Eastern forces.

None of them were based, and more concerningly a significant proportion of them were suffering from some sort of evil metal rot/fungal plague as well.  The internet provided some help, and I ended up buying a large amount of Dettol to act as a paint stripper - and smelling out the house in the process with a rather different, more medicinal small than I usually do (with paint...)!

The end result is four full A4 trays worth of based 1/300th AFVs, and at least as much again that will go for sale to clubmates or on eBay in the new year.

Here are pictures of the Israelis, and also some of the Brits as well:

Israelis and some extras for other forces in the storage tray. This is an A4 plastic paper storage box from Paperchase lined with steel paper for the magnabased AFVs top stick to. 

A layer of bubble wrap will sit on top of them and hold them all in place when the lid is shut, allowing them to be stored upright alongside the rules in a bookcase. 

British command stand

Israeli command stands

British Challenger AFV's, command and Warrior IFV's. 

The basing is magnabased card, with sand glued onto it, stained with Rustins woodstain and then drybrished in pale grey and the old standard of Bleached Bone 

The metal rot!  I guess I could have just left them as-is and used them for FWC ...

Dettol, an old toothbrish head, and a bad smell ... 

M60's post-soaking

 

British recce units

Skytrex (I think) Centurions

Set of three Israeli tanks

The Russian-supplied kit, and a USMC desert-MERDC battlegroup will be posted soon..

Oooh-err Missus! It's a B.I.G. Abona !

Way back in the mists of time in a far flung corner of this sceptred isle a band of well-muscled 25mm army-carrying wargamers gathered together to celebrate the Roman era of British history (and, more pertinently, how it was portrayed in Carry On films - of course).

The end result was the BIG Abona Festival, a 2-day, 4-game 25mm ADLG event with a theme of all armies valid at any date during the Roman presence in Britain.

To this esteemed gathering I elected to take the Vikings, who just about squeaked in with a dateline before the end of the Sub Roman British list. Just.

Many months later the four reports of the Viking's exploits are finally published for your delight and delectation, as the Norseen take on the Mongols, Ancient British and two very different sets of Roman soldiery in full widescreen technicolour.

Read on for the usual mix of poor puns, comedy captions and expert analysis - this time with added rubbish rhymes!
 

Avignon ADLG Lists - more than half the top 10 !

Having just returned from a weekend in the South of France taking part in a 1-list, 200 AP tournament at Villeneuve Les Avignon, I'm pleased to be able to post the lists from the players who finished in 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, 9th and 10th.  Or, put another way, my list, and the lists of my opponents all of whom finished above me in a 30+ strong field!

• 1st- Kushan
• 3rd - Ugarit
• 5th - Alexander  
• 7th - Galatian 
• 9th - Carthaginian
• 10th (My) Assyrian and Sargonid

As usual, match reports to follow at some unspecified point in future...

(Update 5/11/19 : 4th place Mycenean list (minimal chariots!) now also added to the Wiki)

10mm Downsizing : WW2 Americans on eBay

With space running out in the Madaxeman bunker, a small effort to pretend to downsize sees a 10mm BKC force make it's way onto eBay: See them on eBay now!

Infantry

• 12 x Infantry bases (48 men)
• 2 x Engineers (10 figures)
• 5 x HMG / LMG bases (10 men)
• 1 x Observer base (artillery or air support) 

Armour and Vehicles

• 1 x M10 Wolverine
• 5 Shermans (including 1 x Jumbo)
• 4 M3 Half tracks (including quad AA mount)

Air Support

• 1 x P47 Thunderbolt (drilled for wire flight stand) 

All painted and magnabased, perfect for BKC or other WW2 Company / platoon scale rules. The models are a mix of manufacturers including Minifigs & Pendraken - the P47 is a plastic kit.

It's worth over £50 in unpainted lead, based on current Pendraken prices, but starts here at just £5.
10% of all bids also go to SSAFA, the UK Armed Forces charity

See them on eBay now!

More New Malifaux

A few more "wargaming standard" Malifaux models have made it through the painting pile. They are OK on table, but these close-ups are a tad unforgiving. 

First up are Joshua Fitzsimmons and his Saboteurs - M&SU agents who focus on the Union's more, ahem, "destructive" goals and are in the Backdraft box set thats now been sort of replaced in M3e. 

Joshua has a long scarf and a bit of a mad look about him, so a Tom Baker-style Dr Who colourscheme seemed about right. 

The pair of Saboteurs could easily have been quite dark, but I went with a green khaki coat to give them a bit of the "1984" about them. One is modelled with long flowing hair, so she's ended up with some radical anarchist style purple locks as well to keep the theme going.

Fitzsimmonds has a placard too - mine borrows the placard imagery from the seminal 1986 Billy Bragg "difficult third album" Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, drawing obvious parallels between Fitzimmons ideologically indistinct place in the Malifaux MS&U pantheon and the 1920's radical Russian Poet Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky's equally ambiguous and troubled relationship with the emerging Soviet state. Or something. 

Ferdinand Vogel and the Beast Within round out the set.

Unambiguously a rip-off of the Jeckyll and Hyde classic pairing, but with Wyrd Games own IP.

Newline 28mm Assyrians - the test batch

Lacking a 28mm Biblical army, I've been dithering about picking up an Assyrian army for some time now, on the basis that it is a decent list which I've used in 15mm with some degree of success, and more importantly that it's small, so hopefully not too expensive.

With multiple hoverings over the Foundry website failing to convince me I wanted the army enough to spend Foundry prices (£22 for a chariot! Ouch!), whilst browsing the traders at at the recent Attack! show in Devizes I stumbled across Newline Designs, who I'd mostly associated with 20mm ranges in the past but who also have a substantial range of 25/8mm figures as well.

They had a great value Assyrian Army pack (2 chariots, 9 Cavalry, 80-odd foot for about £75 from memory), with a special show offer of 20% off as well on the pack and any extras.. so a sub-£100 Assyrian Army was immediately bought!

So far I've only painted up a few figures just to see how they come out (the whole army will be a more production-line project), and I've also taken the "same army, different scales" principle to it's logical extreme by painting them up exactly the same as my 15mm Assyrians !

And here they are, next to the Museum 15mm Assyrians, and also some Foundry Commanders that I use in my 15mm army.

They are still a WiP project - I've not even done a full MF base of 6 infantry

The Newline figures come with figure-metal spears which I plan to replace with wire ones - like this guy. The sword is also from the bits box - all the Newline guys come with spears.

Here they are with the Museum 15mm figures

Same shield patterns - not too difficult to be honest...

The Armoured Slingers are over-supplied for ADLG armies in the Newline army pack, but the handful of spares will fill in as back rank figures in bigger units of Line Infantry

A generous three poses of bowmen - here's two of them.

This is the Newline chaps next to some Foundry Officers - a great match on size and body mass as well. The Newline guys look a bit shorter here, but their bases are lacking in magnabase so they are a little shorter due to that reason, not figure height.

Here are the Newline slingers and some more Foundry officers with equal height basing. A near perfect match - apart from on price!

Once the spears arrive I'll get cracking on the Assyrian production line - even these 28mm Chariots will end up with scaled-up versions of the same "wallpaper" I used on the earlier, smaller 15mm versions.

The Fire Golem!

A bit of variety now, with one of Malifaux's biggest models, The Fire Golem.

This one is from the M2e Backdraft box set, which means I'm short of a couple of apparently so-so extra minions but I do instead have Saboteurs and Fitzsimmons as well (which are all in the painting queue as we speak).

He wasn't the easiest model to paint as the flames go in all directions, meaning there isn't a clear orientation to allow you to start with pale white-ish flames and then shade it through to red and even sooty black

As a result I wasn't really happy with him until I did several more layers and more drybrush-style highlights than I might normally do on a flaming model.

The basic technique was to start with a series of very pale and thin yellow washes using watered down paint, and then start adding highlights in progressively darker oranges and even reds until I was happy with the overall look.

Managing to pick out all of the bits of brazier holding him together was also not the easiest as the metalwork does rather blend into the mass of flames in a way which makes black-edging it tricky.

In the end I ended up with a bit of drybrushing of gunmetal and pale grey onto the brazier elements, and then blacklining them where I could to finish it off. Here is the guy with Kaeris' totem the Eternal Flame.

This is from a dayglow orange Kaeris box that I won in a draw at a competition a couple of years ago. I had a metal Kaeris and so hadn't painted this guy as I wasn't really sure how he would work in M2e - but he's more useful (and free!) now so time to get him done.

All of the orange bits are the original plastic left unpainted

The rest is gunmetal and Peat Brown ink over a black undercoat, apart from the gears on his leg joints which were a pale sandy colour which I know responds really well to Peat Brown ink

I did also pin him underneath as I really wasn't convinced that glueing his very small feet to the base would be secure enough to hold him in gameplay.

The Golem is HUGE - he he is next to fellow firestarter Bansuva.

Late Theme ADLG lists from Britcon 2019

All of the "late" period army lists, as well as the 25mm lists from this weekend's Britcon event are now published on the ADLG Wiki on Madaxeman.com.

That's 44 different army lists covering the following 28 armies:

• Anglo-Irish
• Berber
• Bulgar
• Burgundian Ordonnance
• Communal Italian
• Condottieri
• Free Company
• Ghaznavid
• Hundred Years War French
• Ilkhanid Mongol
• Indonesian and Malay
• Jurchen-Chin
• Low Countries
• Medieval German
• Medieval Hungarian
• Medieval Polish
• Medieval Scots
• Medieval Spanish
• Mongol Empire
• Normans in Sicily
• Ottoman Empire
• Samurai
• Siam
• Swiss
• Timurid
• Tuareg
• Wars of the Roses
• Yuan Chinese

The 'early' lists were published earlier later this week.

Britcon 2019 - ADLG Army Lists on the Wiki

All of the "early" period army lists from this weekend's Britcon event are now published on the ADLG Wiki on Madaxeman.com.

That's 19 different army lists covering the following armies:

• Achaemenid Persian   
• Arab Conquest   
• Assyrian Empire and Sargonid 
• Burmese    
• Christian Nubian  
• Classical Greek   
• Classical Indian   
• Early Imperial Roman  
• Early Successors   
• Han Chinese   
• Hindu Indian   
• Kushan    
• Maurikian Byzantine   
• Nikephorian Byzantine   
• Ostrogoth    
• Republican Roman   
• Romano-British    
• Seleucid    
• Sumer et Akkad  
• Tamil Indian   
• Thematic Byzantine   
• Vedic Indian   
• Warring States   

The rest of the lists will be published later this week. 

28mm Landsnechts & Swiss - in GW Contrast Paints!

You know those painting projects that seem never to die? They just drag on and on, staring at you and each time you start trying to move them along the sheer quantity of painting ends up crushing your will to continue?

Well, for me that was a big winged-Keil of Landsnechts in 28mm, bought for FoGR in a series of bring and buy used-figure bags - and then supplemented by a pack of Old Glory arquebusiers.

I had even made a couple of half-hearted attempts to sell them as a part-painted project - but then suddenly realised that they were the perfect project to try the new GW contrast paints (as even a so-so painted unit is better than a unit that never gets painted or put on table, right?

See the full effect in this photo-article..

ADLG Worlds - Al Shearer rides into Rome !

The World Championships somehow managed to shift across Europe, moving from a shed in Birmingham into a 5-star hotel in glorious Rome this year.

That of course means another overseas extravaganza for Team CLWC, and for yours truly another chance to try and craft something out of yet another of the Arab-flavoured armies I have been working through this year.

The Khurasanians - basically a poor man's Ghaznavid/Abbasid hybrid - were the lucky chaps to make it out into the hot, hot Italian sunlight this time, where they took on 6 different enemies drawn from the US, Mexico, France, Spain and somewhere else using Mongols, Han Chinese, Carolingians, Alexandrians, French Ordonnance and the Seleukids.

To track the games (and the food, and the swimming) there are many thousands of words spread across six fully illustrated, (unusually) map-annotated, kawasaki-riding battle reports in which Geordie General Al'Shearer lands yet again in the commentary position.

Guarantee yourself a Big Night Oot and read away (the lads)..