The Seleucids in Beery ADLG Doubles Action at Burton 2020

Burton upon Trent, that double-barrelled city of beer barrels recently played host to a 24-team  ADLG Doubles tournament, which was an opportunity to use a recycled army list and a refurbished Seleucid army (with Maccabean allies) in 4 Classical era battles.

The rather unusual points total of 325 in force at BADCON 2020 saw the Successors take on Romans, Palmyrans, Vandals and Sassanids in 4 reports only briefly interrupted for discursive coverage of various beers, yet more pastry-covered meat products deplyed at lunchtimes, a hearty curry and some cockney rhyming slang.

Read on for these 4 full-flavoured and decidedly hoppy battle reports, and raise a toast to the King of Beers!

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!

1/300th US Moderns on eBay

The seemingly interminable modern 1/300th recycling/refurbishing project grinds on, this installment being a rather low-tech announcement of the sale of about half of the US armour collection which I've been working through.

They are on eBay now via this link

The set is suitable for Team Yankee (assuming you're playing in a proper scale for moderns!), Cold War Commander, Oil Wars, Modern Spearhead or other similar division/company/batallion level Modern or ultra-modern rules.

The models are all (I believe) Heroics & Ros, and are painted in a rather fetching Gulf War era MERDC 4-colour cammo scheme.

The set includes:

• 16 M1's
• 17 M60A3's 
• 2 M901 ITV TOW
• 27 LAV with 25mm turret
• 10 LAV with 90mm turret
• 1 LAV ITV TOW 
• 1 LAV Command
• 10 LTVP/AAV 
• 6 M2 Bradley 
• 6 Jeeps with TOW 
• 4 Hummers
• 1 M577 command
• 2 Chapparall AA missile
• 1 DIVADS M113-mounted 25mm AA 
• 1 Apache helos
• 2 Cobra helos  

Both helos come with plastic rotor disks - the disks are fairly old and have gone rather grimy and opaque but hey, they are still rotor disks and they're a little hard to find these days.

This lot would set you back around £80 in unpainted lead from Heroics and Ros if you wanted to buy them today (tanks are 75p, other vehicles are 65p each and helos are £3-£3.50 each according to their website), but these guys are good to go right now straight out of the packet - or with a quick wash with something from Army Painter and perhaps a drag over with a drybrush they'll really "pop" even more!

The models are packed and ready to be despatched promptly on receipt of payment. Postage is charged at Royal Mail small parcels cost, no markup for 'packaging' or the like.

10% of the sale fee goes to SSAFA the Forces charity as well.

Heres the link again to the listing 

2020 US Team Tournament ADLG lists published

One the the benefits of being list checker for the USTT is that I get to see all of the lists submitted by players - and here they are, as they have now also been added to the ADLG Wiki:

Folorn Hope

• Sierich 48 Etruscan : 25 Units 
• Shirey 108 Alan : 24 units
• Sikorski 187 Later Crusader : 23 Units
• Kelley 235 Burgundian Ordonnance : 19 Units

Midwest Muppets

• Jeff Herzog 19 Oman & Gulf States : 29 Units
• Richard Woolford 115 African Vandal : 25 Units
• Steve Roper 262 Siamese : 24 Units
• Al Ohtonen 235 Burgundian Ordonnance : 19 Units

Local Villany

• Paul Woolerton 17 Ancient Bedouin : 23 Units
• Jeff Robertson 107 Kushan : 22 Units
• Jeff Wiltrout 216 Jurchen Chin : 20 Units
• Mark Bumala  221 Medieval Scandinavia : 19 Units

Beltway Bandits

• Hazelwood 37 Spring Chinese : 22 Units
• McCampbell 121 Tamil Indian : 24 Units
• Zorick 184 Komenan Byzantine : 22 Units 
• Crotteau 243 Serbian Empire : 22 Units

French Connection

• Al Kaplan 23 Ancient Hebrew : 22 Units
• Nicolas Begue : 55 Carthaginian : 24 Units
• Tom Hazlett : 101 Romano British 25 Units
• Phil Gardocki : 235 Burgundian Ordonnance : 20 Units

Noodlers

• Hilton McManus 54  Early Cartho : 23 Units
• Steve Payne 79 Classical Indian: 24 Units
• Walt Burgoyne 121 Tamil Indian : 26
• Chris Johnston 227 Medieval German : 24 Units

Orphans

• Mark Cribbs - 64 Achaemenid Persian : 22 Units
• David Boor - 43 Ptolemaic Egyptian : 22 Units
• Dennis Shorthouse - 245 Late Byzantine : 24 Units
• Robert Nedwich - 224 Condottieri : 21 Units

Chuckleheads

• Bill Hawkes 8 Neo-Babylonian : 24 Units
• Mark  Kennedy 46 Graeco-Bactrian : 21 Units
• Kevin Swanson 172 Norman : 23 Units
• Walt Leach 238 Medieval Hungarian : 20 Units

A handful of 10mm French Old Guard

I've dropped a few photos of these chaps on Twitter already, but realised that they hadn't yet appeared here as well.

These are Pendraken French in Greatcoats & Bearskins, with only flock and flags to add to finish them off.

The bases are 40mm x 20mm

Here are some earlier WiP shots as well

Building Renovation Project

As part of the "desert modern" restoration project I've slowly been working through recently I came into possession of a large number of 1/300th scale buildings as well as the aforementioned hundreds of tanks and vehicles - in fact, far too many to use sensibly.

A number of these buildings have now been donated to the CLWC storage cupboard for club use, and the remainder I decided to mount onto hardboard to create a series of easily portable and deplyable towns and hamlets for CWC, copying the European buildings I already own (which are much nicer as they were pro-painted and made by Timecast).

In gluing the buildings to each small baseboard I managed (just about) to leave enough space on most of the edges to fit in a handful of my AFV's - all of which are based on 20mm wide and 30-40mm deep bases.

This allows a number of tanks to be placed in each town able to shoot out, but also makes it impossible to deploy a line of tanks in the cover of the BUA in that terrible 'wheel to wheel' style seen far too often on armour-based games.

Or, put another way, anyone using these towns is now forced to be sensible in how they put their AFVs on table !

 The ground is my usual builders sand, stained with woodstain and then drybrushed - given I also did the AFV bases this way they are of course a near-perfect match.

 My final sort-of clever idea here was to cut the bases for the town / village elements out of a single sheet of A4 hardboard, which means that they all now fit perfectly in an A4 Really Useful storage box when they are not in use... as this picture shows.

A Weekend in Provence! The Assyrians Go To France

No ADLG events since the 1/72nd scale whupping for my Vikings at The BIG Abona Festival back in June... by November I was starting to go stir-crazy (and not in a painting sort of way!).

Browsing the UK calendar had failed to cough up any events which coincided with a free weekend, but on the French part of the ADLG forum I spotted one event on a very specific weekend in November, and a last-minute plan suddenly fell into place... Avignon!

Air Miles subsidized the international logistics, Avis loyalty points chipped in with a gallic roller-skate-sized hire car and a list I'd already used saw a very small but relatively freshly painted Assyrian army packed into the world's smallest tin for a hand-luggage-only travel plan involving the smallest rucksack in my collection.

5 games later and there French meta has been well and truly tested to wine, beer, cheese and obscure local spirits type destruction in 5 games of mixed success for the Lions of Assyria.

Read all about the highs, the lows, the food and the drink in these 5 stunning match reports from sur le pont d'Avignon as Madaxeman.com goes all del Boy Trotter in trying to mangle the French language on the way to victory (and defeat).

The Assyrians take on Galatians, Carthaginians, Ugarits, Kushans and finally Alexander The Great in these 5 reports which come complete with an accompanying Podcast available in both Podbean Audio and Youtube Video formats.  

And, most importantly, see if I get away with deploying my French language skills as well !

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!

Something new, shiny (and tiny)... 10mm Napoleonics!

In a first for me (first time ever owning any Napoleonic troops - honestly..) here are some newly-painted 10mm Pendraken Napoleonics based up on 40mm wide bases for our CLWC club-standard basing for Bataille Empire.

These guys are undercoated in Army Painter blue spray, then inked in Army Painter dark blue ink before having the other colours added to them

These are a couple of test paints of standard sized 4-base units, for which I've used four 40mmx20mm DBx bases with two ranks on the rear base and one rank + skirmishers on the front rank base to set up the unit.

Bataille Empire incorporates skirmisher screens as a defensive factor in shooting rather than as separate units or bases, so these units are based to represent good quality French Line infantry, with the two shooting figures out front denoting infantry with a Skirmisher factor of +2

This is my first foray into painting Naps, and I thought that by doing them in 10mm not only would they get a good mass effect, I also wouldn't have to be too detailed on the painting of straps and the like. However, I did get suckered into adding coloured epaulets on these... against my better judgement. I also tried dark-washing the trousers of the main marching infantry, which came out a bit darker than I would ideally have liked, so I repainted some wioth another layer of white. The 2 shooting chaps at the front have uninked trousers at the moment for comparison.

I've not got any knowledge of this period other than at a very (very...) superficial level, so the apparently very important colour schemes for the pompoms and feathers in their hats and the like is somewhat ("entirely") beyond me. Grenadiers stick around the flag and have red pompoms, and everyone else has some sort of cllour that is only yellow in exceptional circumstances... is I think how it works?

The fun and easy bit is mnaking sure they look interesting from the back as well - here I've done different colours for blankets, backpacks and their other impedimentia. I was looking for that WW2 german style gas-mask holder, but seemingly they don't have those!!

If you prefer bigger figures my website has a review page with all of the 15/17/18mm manufacturers listed and rated to help you choose, and I also have pages that pull out all of the current listings on eBay for Napoleonics (separated into individual listings by nation) so you can go shopping there - but I think I'll stick with Pendraken and 10mm for now.