Aircraft photos from RIAT 2017

The Royal International Air Tattoo is one of the world's best airshows.

The weather this year wasn't great, but I still managed to get some half-decent photos of some of the aircraft:

 Belgian Sea King Air Sea Rescue

Italian Tornado

Patrouille Suisse - F5E

Apache

F22 Raptor

The USAF Thunderbirds

Two Armies, Two Podcasts...

With two L'Art de la Guerre podcasts now firmly under my belt it feels like an opportune moment to release them fully into the interweb by actually telling people that they exist.

Ideal to listen to whilst painting your own figures, in these two Podcasts (also available on YouTube, with pictures) are where you can learn from people who are far better players than I am about how to design a Ghaznavid or a Sassanid army list for L'Art de la Guerre.

The Podcasts are available to listen to via Podbean, also iTunes (honestly!) and are linked to from my L'Art de la Guerre page.

Massive Heeds, Sausages and Tie Fighters - ADLG from the NEC.

With this year's BHGS Challenge taking place in the galaxy-sized open spaces of Birmingham's NEC expo centre, the first army to be dropped to the planetary surface was also a brand new to the table outfit - the much-trailed Sassanid Persians.

Resplendent in their new livery, the "Sausages", as they have been affectionately known to generations of wargamers were certainly Feeling the Force as they deployed an army built around a massive Death Star, surrounded by horsemen with Massive Heeds (or those 'lightbulb' hats to be more precise).

To find out what happened, the best bet is to see if your local protocol droid will help you translate each of these 5 match reports into something sensible.

You can also listen to a podcast at the end of Battle Report # 4 to help you learn how to build a good Sassanid list in ADLG - which is much easier than having to ask a couple of favours from some guys who look just like Tuskan Raiders...

May the Sausages Be With You..!

Saga - the return...

Having not played Saga in just over 2 years I wheeled out the Vikings (in a no Cross & Crescent allowed) event in Reading today - and demonstrated how important it is to practice, finishing with nul points out of 3 games.

Admittedly there were times when I didn't have the rub of the green - facing Jomsvikings and their movement-denying Wrath tricks in a scenario where you had to move your troops around to occupy table quarters, and then a previously unseen internet-only Anglo-Danish monstrosity which had three units of un-killable fully armoured Warriors who I had to try and cut through to Kill the Leader...  although forgetting I had the option to re-roll 29 dice in one attack also played a part!

Anyway, the mostly-Foundry figures got out of the foam padding and onto the table, so that bit was a success.

Here are some photos of the boys in action (click on any image to see the full size version)

15mm Indian allied contingent for ADLG

Having flirted with the idea of actually using my Classical Era Greek Successor States armies on many occasions, and now discovering that the Indians (in their Kushan incarnation) also work well with the Sassanids I decided to refurbish a Classical Indian allied contingent.

These are troops who had been languishing in a drawer for many years, so they were delighted to be brought out into the light and converted into L'Art de la Guerre DBE double based elements to make up an allied contingent with essentially all of the useful options.

You can see the finished collection here