Gripping Beast (& others) Dark Age Horse

To round out two armies (don't ask...) for the upcoming event in Devizes I picked up a box of Gripping Beast plastic Dark Age cavalry recently, and added a few more figures to them as well. Here are the results:

Three Gripping Beast cavalry. They go together well, but you can't help feeling they have missed an opportunity to really load up the sprue with different weapons and arm poses - a bit like the Roman Infantry set I did a couple of years ago.

A mix of round and oval shields. Some of the arm poses are a bit ungainly, and I had t cut the base of one arm to get it to work at a reasonable angle. 

This base has a Warlord Games Romano-British cavalryman added in the middle. Its not a great figure to be honest, but gives another guy with armour on the base to make them more obviously Heavy Cavalry, as all of the GB ones are in tunics. 

The horses have that slightly weird "seahorse" neck of the GB horses in this set, but once they are charging straight at you it's not so obvious.

 Another Warlord figure. They are all mounted on metal horses, as they didn't mix and match at all with the saddle shapes on the GB figures.

They do take an ink wash extremely well.

I also picked up these Alans/Huns unpainted in a bring and buy.

I think they may be Foundry, but could also be Old glory due to the variety. They are split at the waist. 

If you look carefully you can see some heads attached to the bridles...

And finally a fortified camp made with kebab skewers

A bit of baggage from Ainsty Castings 

And a General - I think this one may have been from Warlord.

Wiki Flurry!

With temperatures rising across the country, here's a perfect excuse to stay inside - a load of army lists added to the ADLG Wiki.

As well as all of my opponents from The Worlds recently, the wiki now also features the lists of the players filling the upper reaches of the final placings with Yuan Chinese, 100YW French, Ghaznavid, Seleucid and Arab Indian all featuring.

There are also lists from both Cry Havoc in Bristol (Classical Indian, Southern Dynasties, Rajput Hindu Indian, Ghaznavid, Nikephorian and Arab Conquest - including 3 of the top 4 placings) and from Conclave in Limerick there's Carthaginian, Sea Peoples, Later Achaemenid, Ptolemaic, Graeco-Bactrian and my own Han Chinese - meaning that all of the top 3 places are covered.

Alexander The Great plays ADLG at The Worlds 2018

Salamanca, Charleroi... and to that roll of honour and glamour is now added Birmingham next to the M42 in a big steel shed.

Yes, Alexander's army makes yet another outing as I hadn't really gotten round to picking an alternative, and takes on all comers in an open, 5-game competition to determine who is the best ADLG  player in the whole wide world!

That sees the exploring Macedonians travel to the ends of the earth as they visit China, Italy (twice!), India and Byzantium in some pretty intense time-travelling battlefield action.

 

There are victories, defeats, wins and draws along the way as Alexander and his merry men chew up the green tablecloths and burp up last night's curry in equal measures as they try and add navigating the Solihull one-way system to their already impressive list of achievements.

The Myceneans are done..

Only 6 months after buying them in the Museum Miniatures January sale (for only around £50) a full L'Art de la Guerre army of Myceneans (including units I will probably never use) is now finished and on the tabletop already!

There are plenty of pictures and also a video (of the pictures) on Madaxeman.com right now

This lot fits on an A4 sized piece of paper - not bad for a full army !

Persians on Campaign

The annual Milton Keynes fest of wargaming saw the Persians of Cyrus take to the field in 5 ADLG battles - see how they fared on the swings and roundabouts of life in this series of geometrically accurate reports from Campaign 2018 

See how the Persians fared in a Civil War, against the Lydians, the Medes and the Babylonians (twice!) together with the usual mix of videos, comments and rules hints  

Bank Holiday Pavisiers

With a long weekend in prospect I've had an opportunity to finish off a few odd units which have been hanging around the painting table for a while, starting with these Medieval Crossbowmen with Pavises, from Donnington's New Era ranges.

The "German" designs were done mostly using up some of the smaller "eagle" images in a set of LBMS 25mm knightly heraldry

The "Fleur de Lys" are very old Veni Vidi Vici waterslide transfers.

This time I remembered to turn the loading man around. He comes with a pavise, the other three pavises I bought in a separate pack

I didn't find enough of the fleu de lys designs to do all 5 pavises on the base, hence the rather incongruous "board head" on the rearmost pavisier.

The kneeling chap is exactly the right height to shoot through/round the notch in the Pavise - well done on that bit of clever design Damian!

Whether its worth paying a point for a Pavise in ADLG is debatable, but if you have a spare point left its a good way to spend it up. They also do look really cool !

Both are based on tidy 40x40 MDF bases from Warbases. 

And here they are next to some almost-pavise-free Donnington and Essex crossbowmen.

Border Reivers - 28mm

A couple of years ago I bought some 28mm Border Reivers from Alan at Hoka Hey - partly because they were nice figures, and partly because he's simply such a nice guy as well that I felt it only right to give him some of my hard-earned!

The figures have sat languishing in the "to be painted" pile for far too long, so I recently managed to give them a fairly quick and dirty paint job to get them table-ready - nothing special, but much better than bare metal.

I'm actually not sure what they will be or what I got them to be - probably the closest thing they can be used for is to appear as some sort of "Brigands and Coutiliers" or "Hobilars" or something from a late Medieval English army in ADLG, as even though some of them have pistols, with just 6 mounted and 6 (matching) infantry they are still a very long way short of being a 28mm FoG unit.

 

The figures are the "Broken Men" pack from Timeline / Hoka Hey - Alan sells several similar sets of "families" of men.

Perhaps one day Saga will end up reaching into this era and they will make the heart of a great warband !

Myceneans

I bought a Mycenean (and Assyrian) army earlier this year in the Museum Miniatures sale (25% off every January!), and after spraying most of them in a flesh-coloured undercoat I finally got round to doing a couple of test bases to see how the planned colour scheme works out. 

With flesh undercoat they are very quick to paint - so they could all be on the table very soon.

I'm a big fan of Museum for the Biblical period, as the slightly over-stylized look and limited number of poses seems to work really well in this theme.

Take The ADLG Survey

Following on from an earlier blog post about "Who's Playing What" Ancients set in the UK Competition circuit, Martin from Vexillia has set up a short survey on his website to add a bit more depth to the why's and wherefores of the popularity of L'Art de la Guerre right now - so if you are an ADLG player why not join in and take part?

Martin has a proper real-world background in consumer research, so he can cook up a mean survey - and a short one as well, which is always good. Its only about a dozen questions asking :

• Why you play ADLG and how often.
• What you think about the rule book.
• Your thoughts on playing the game.
• Your overall impressions.

It is intended for those in the UK but if you're elsewhere and want to join in go ahead. 

Saga - > ADLG, the Light Foot Sabot Basing Trick

With a mostly-plastic Gripping Beast 25mm Arab army in the planning phases, I've been toying with what to do with my 25mm Saga Arab army.

After dithering about rebasing them all into an ADLG force, the new edition of Saga persuaded me to keep them as a Saga army and duplicate quite a few of the figures for the new ADLG army - after all, plastic figures are pretty cheap and paint up easily too.

But, even so, having so many duplicates is still a little irritation, so I have been casting around for some 60x30mm sabot bases to at least get dual-use out of some of the "based on a new, magentizable 2p piece" Saga figures to use them as Light Foot in ADLG as well.

After emailing Warbases they pointed me to the ideal thing, a "2x1 Regiment Tray (2p)" which was hidden away on their site and listed without dimensions (erm...why do that for rectangular bases?)

And here they are, together with Rare Earth magnets (the bases come with pre-drilled holes for them) to hold the figures in place, and some sand/wood stain/drybrush & static grass to match the rest of my basing scheme.

These are the rather wonderful Perry Miniatures metal Naffatun figures (much nicer than the GB or Footsore ones I think, but they do come in a 6-pack which is quite a few more than you need..)

You can see just how strong the rare earth magnet is, as I'm able to hold them up by just one figure (but shaking them around is probably out...). For plastic figures like the GB bowmen and javelin-armed infantry I will use for other Arab Light Foot they will be even better.

Having ordered these I'm now considering whether a similar 60mm x 60mm base would work for holding 4 infantry as a "Javelinmen" unit in ADLG - perhaps I should have thought of that sooner and saved on postage!