..and being very, very careful with my typing as well.
Yes, the Black Seas starter set that arrived the Christmas before last (I hope it wasn't before that!) has finally started, with a test build and paint of a Brig.
..and being very, very careful with my typing as well.
Yes, the Black Seas starter set that arrived the Christmas before last (I hope it wasn't before that!) has finally started, with a test build and paint of a Brig.
Bob Dylan once famously sang " With God On Our Side..." but he probably wasn't referring to The Peoples Crusade and it's somewhat over-optimistic efforts to secure an unlikely victory by sending a load of inexperienced pasty-faced ill-prepared northern Europeans to the furthermost shores of the Mediterranean.
But, that description would in fact work perfectly to sum up the latest Madaxeman match reports - as a Early Crusader Peoples Crusade Army sets off for some highly unfeasible combat in the Alicante ADLG competition in a first post-Lockdown overseas trip for the CLWC posse.
A quick bit of just-finished painting today, in the shape of 3 fully-padded-out armoured elephants.
I believe the two outrider ones are Museum, and the one in the middle looks like a Minifigs casting to me.
Yes, that deeply punnish headline does indeed herald the release of another fistful of competition battle reports, this time from the massive Warfare ADLG event at the end of last year.
Competition gaming in the UK to all intents and purposes was rendered illegal in early 2020, and did not return (barring a few rule-bending 'private social events' held in back gardens, all of which are probably best brushed under the carpet!) until July/August 2021, meaning my regular updates on the state of the UK Ancients competition scene have been somewhat thin on the ground over that period too.
All of the various Ancients rulesets competition circuits have however surged back to life over the second half of 2021, with events taking place across the length and breadth of the country and feeding into various ranking systems.
This has in turn allowed me to produce a rather truncated (and inevitably as a result even more meaningless than usual!) part-year snapshot of where things stand as of today across the UK in terms of player numbers and engagement at UK competitions held in 2021.
As usual, this data has been assembled from rankings and results published by the leading lights of each of the rulesets themselves, and further checked against event results shared online across various forums and social media. All of the numbers are for "players who've appeared at an event in 2021", with any comparisons being made against the equivalent "calendar-year" numbers for 2019. There were a handful of events pre-lockdown in 2020, but they were so few in number, and inconsistent across rulesets I've just gone for a straight 2019-2021 comparison for simplicity.
All of the official ranking listings are consistent in that if an "event" hasn't been promoted or discussed online widely enough for people to notice it, it doesn't get included - so, intra-club events, invite-only gatherings, or get-togethers between groups of friends don't and won't make the cut, and so the definition of a "competition" is an event where the entire community has the possibility to enter, and where results appear online afterwards also.
I've also - somewhat debatably - left out the online event played over a number of weeks by the TTS! community on Tabletop Simulator, as the main question to be answered here is "are people getting back to face to face events?". Clearly an online tournament does indicate an ongoing level of activity and interest - arguably more so than sets which didn't get around to doing something like this themselves - so there is a clear case for including it, but I've opted to do so by it being "honourably mentioned in despatches" rather than putting it into straight into the other numbers.
In looking at UK vs Overseas players I've (inevitably) had to make some potentially uninformed calls on who is an 'overseas' player, so apologies in advance for any errors on that front - the numbers of overseas players this year has been so low that it seems unlikely any mistakes end up being particularly significant - but if you spot any, please let me know and I'll fix them (as I've already done having somehow missed the 2 TTS! events held last year first time around!).
So, on with the business...
Competitions Staged
From July to the end of the year 49 competitions took place across the major Ancients rulesets, compared to 107 in the last comparable "full" year of 2019. The well-organised and keen DBM community were quickest off the blocks, managing to squeeze in a very impressive 2/3 of their normal annual schedule into the last 6 months of last year - a feat equalled by TTS! with their two face to face competitions compared to three in 2019.
Whilst not approaching the efficiency of DBM, the UK ADLG community were also very keen to get playing again, running just over half of the prior year's full roster. The other 4 rulesets in this survey staged around 1/3 of a normal full-year circuit.
Players Not Yet Returning in 2021
Over the festive break I managed to do a bit of painting whilst avoiding getting myself any more wargaming stuff (there are 3 armies in the paint queue already...), and also fit in a trip to Guernsey.
The end result is a rather random mix of WW2-themed photos for your delight and delectation!
First up is a pair of Sdkfz 251/9 engineer vehicles in 10/12mm scale from Redders at Red3. These complement the rest of the German force I painted up last year, and give me some guys to jump out and blast their way through any field defences I might encounter in BKC or O Group.
OMG! I've just found out that some people do actually leave reviews on Apple Podcasts and other platforms for the Madaxeman Podcast!
I'd always suspected this might be the case, but had never looked them up or stumbled across them before until a new stats package came along :-)
And, as well as the, well, just quite "nice" comments, there are some absolute solid gold belters in there too - here's just a few of them.
Another 5 Madaxeman L'Art de la Guerre Battle Reports from The Devonian Classic, a competition in the west country that was straight outta Brixham - a small town in Devon, packed full of pasties, pirates and, erm.. pubs ?
But, more importantly home to an eminently rentable community hall, plenty of cheap off-peak off-season accommodation (and of course the new venue for the fabulous Steve Price Towers), and more fish and chip shops than you can shake a stick at - all making it an ideal location for hosting an ADLG competition of the large but perfectly formed variety!
To this event the newly-minted Spanish army of Sertorius came, singing sea shanties and burping chorizo and garlic at all and sundry, towing behind them the legendary BURNING CART OF DOOOOM!!!.
These five resulting L'Art de la Guerre match reports are your chance to see how an Iberian army does against the Early Arabs, Seleukos, the Mitanni, the Might of Rome, and the rest of the Successors in 5 full-definition, seagull-targeted battle reports full of the usual stuff and nonsense.
A rather lightweight painting session to share this time, as a set of the rather lovely Xyston Theban Generals and Leaders pack finally makes it onto the internet, based up here as some close formation infantry for various non-Theban armies.
These figures are really animated nicely, and having swapped them with Dave from The Podcast some time ago I'd been trying to work out what to do with them as I was reluctant to lose them in a wall of hoplites. Eventually I settled on basing them as close formation infantry to act both as dismounted Companions, or as Alexanders Hypaspists (both in their Heavy Spearmen incarnation in ADLG).
This did also allow me to justify using a couple of Xyston mounted officer figures I had kicking around too, and, more importantly, to have yet another go at a multi-layer, grey base + white top layer "triad" type paint scheme to see if I could make white look, well, "interesting".