Tribes of Legend

Well, after some delay I got hold of my copy of the new Wargames Foundry Tribes of Legend rules by Jake Thornton.  I ordered from Amazon which meant I paid just over £14 rather than £22, which was well worth the slight delay in shipping.

I bought these, of course, for my new Argonauts project but also for some other Greek mythological games inspired by the numerous new, if rather clunky, Foundry figures.  Some of these are quite nice whilst some are truly horrible (like much of Foundry's recent output) but I am hoping that at least some of them will paint up OK.  Looking at some of the faces I wonder if they aren't modeled on some of the Copplestone Caesarian figures.

Anyway, this is a nicely presented set of hardback rules with nice touches such as marbled (appropriately) endpapers. There are 114 pages with colour photographs of their new models on nearly every page.  Indeed, some of the models included haven't actually been released yet (although there was another batch released today).

Essentially, what is contained in the book are three separate sets of rules all dealing with different types of mythological combat.   

Firstly, there are the Tribes of Legend Rules.  These contemplate small armies of figures with several troop types available to the different armies available.  These are City States (hoplites), Hillmen (Thracians), Amazons, Centaurs and Satyrs.  No unit can contain more than 16 figures and some units, like the centaurs, can only have six figures.  For me, this a very good start!  Units can either be formed or loose, with things like shooting ranges always being calculated from the leader figure.  Units are activated in turn and can either: move, move into contact with the enemy and melee, move and shoot once or not move and shoot twice.  This regular back and forth between the players units can be changed by deploying one of three Hands of the Gods cards which you draw at the beginning of the game.  These can, for example, allow you to move two units in one go, get an extra action or stop the other player doing something.  Moving and fighting are all very familiar from Warhammer type games.  In fact these rules only cover four and a quarter pages. They look designed for a short, brutal game.  Any unit (with some exceptions) that goes down to half its number is routed and is removed with no chance of rallying.

Next comes three pages on the major Greek Gods but given that they have no role in the game this section is a little pointless.  

After this, there is the first of a series of painting guides.  In fact no less than 41 pages of the book are painting guides by a number of different painters.  Most of this is very basic stuff but, as ever, Mr Dallimore's section gave a couple of useful hints I hadn't tried before.

The second set of rule is called Ancient Heroes and is for bands of five (no more, no less) figures really designed for four players.   There is only one scenario: based around a hill containing a temple which the bands need to occupy.  Combat is based on a normal pack of playing cards with dice only being used to resolve ties.  Distractions can be vineyards (there is a lot in these rules about alcohol distracting some of the forces) or lurking nymphs, wolves or skeletons.  Again the rules are only about five pages long.

The final set of rules is a solo set, Trials of a Demigod, based on the 12 Labours of Heracles.  Again, the rules are three pages and the scenarios total another twelve.  These rules are less about combat than husbanding and using resources and are dice and card driven.  The models and scenery are almost irrelevant but they could lead to an interesting campaign.  More importantly there are enough scenarios that you could devise others using similar formats.

I quite like some of the new gods and goddesses.  It's just shame they don't have a role in the game.

At the end of the book is an article on making rivers (the second set of rules, Ancient Heroes, requires a stream on the table) but nothing on any other scenery.

Now, I'm not one of those people who can read a set of rules and say "ah this means X".  I would have to play them first.  They look very simple (are they designed for children?)  They would make a much simpler introduction to wargaming than Warhammer, for example.  I would have to play some games to see how they work; especially the card-driven Ancient Heroes which looks to be the most interesting set but I would need another couple of players.

As far as using them to recreate the search for the Golden Fleece, I think that they could work by using a mixture of all three sets of rules.  However, I am a little disappointed in them as I think they have wasted too much space with unnecessary painting guides and not given enough thought to making the rules more complex.  I would have liked to see a bigger role for the individual gods, for example, and more individual stats for named heroes and monsters.  These may either come, I suppose, or you could write them yourself, but if you have to do that you might as well use something like an adapted set of Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings.

All in all, a few basic rules with a lot of padding.  There are lots of big, coloured photographs but actually many are too big for both the standard of sculpting and the standard of painting, which is workmanlike rather than brilliant.  So, I will give them a go but I am glad I only paid £14 not £22 for them!

An unexpected parade

We  just popped into Esher this morning to get Guy a haircut (his CCF officers were starting to complain) and found the whole place somewhat en fête for a march past by 7 Parachute Regiment Royal Horse Artillery personnel returning from Afghanistan.  

13 pdr gun

Sandown Park race course is just up the High Street and it was Royal Artillery Gold Cup day so we also had members of the King's Troop, Royal House Artillery, The Royal Artillery Band and the Royal Artillery Pipes and Drums. It was all rather stirring!

Quite a few of the gunners in the King's troop were ladies: they were first accepted into the unit in 1996.

The L118 105mm light gun as used by the parachute and commando regiments

It was good to see a fair crowd out to support them and even some Union flags being waved by the little ones.  At least it shows that not everyone living in this area are American or Japanese bankers, foreign footballers or Russian oligarchs!

Charlotte is showing a horrible interest in attending Edinburgh University.  I told her that she would have to get used to the incessant skirl of bagpipes.  Unfortunately she is one eighth Scottish (on her mother's side) and appears to actually like bagpipe music, tragically!

The salute was taken by the splendidly named General Sir Timothy Granville-Chapman and the Deputy Lord Lieutenant of Surrey.

Charlotte watches as the Honourable Artillery Company parade back up the High Street.  I see this lot around the City a lot but hadn't seem them so far from home before.

Tanks for the Memory...or Sex, Thighs and Measuring Tape. Life as it was thirty years ago: a Valentines Day special

Matchbox Char B and Airfix Matilda go into action

I have just been hit by a wave of nostalgia for a period three decades ago caused by finding some old stuff at home in a veritable time capsule.

I was back at my mother's house this weekend, looking for some books for my daughter, and picking my way carefully around the loft.  It doesn't have floorboards so you have to leap from beam to beam to ensure that you don't go through the ceiling below, as my father did, memorably, on one occasion. After moving a fold-up bed and a pile of old suitcases (when they have stickers on which say RMS Berengaria you know they are old!) I found two tea chests in a far corner I hadn't reached for years.  You never see tea chests any more but when I was younger, before plastic crates had been invented, everything was stored in tea chests!

Caroline Dell from December 1969

Inside one, buried under a pile of Look and Learn and a few Military Modelling magazines were a heap of old Mayfair magazines from the late sixties and early seventies (which were my father's) and some Men Only magazines from the late seventies and early eighties (which were mine).  An excellent find and all in very good condition.   At the time I prefered the girls from Men Only (hormones being more powerful than intellect at the age of eighteen) but, in retrospect Mayfair was a better magazine with regular, interesting, military-themed articles.

The December 1969 issue carried an article on old pipe tobacco advertisements and I was very taken with this one from 1900 which demonstrates very clearly how those nasty Boers don't like it up'em.  How times have changed.  I can't imagine you could advertise anything now by showing our troops skewering Afghans, for example!

Many of these magazines were actually bought for me by my then girlfriend at college who was what would now be called a lipstick lesbian (although I don't think the term was in use then).  C was into stockings (when all the other girls wore tights), vintage lingerie (decades before burlesque brought it back into fashion), Pre-Raphaelite paintings, Renoir nudes and calligraphy.  She used to write imaginatively erotic letters to me during the holidays in her impeccable script.  I used to do a lot of drawing years ago (I actually won a place at art school but went to university instead) and she was my first nude model.  Also in the same box were all the letters I wrote to my mother from college so I know that it was C who took me along (rather than the other way round, as I thought happened) to join the Oxford University Dungeons and Dragons Society.  We went along regularly every week for a year but I stopped going when she went off with a weedy chap from another college who would go on to be a wine writer (and got sent down for fiddling the cellar system. Heh! heh!).  You were allowed to take individual bottles from the college cellars provided you replaced them with an equivalent standard vintage of the same wine.  Taking a 1970 Bordeaux and replacing it with 1972 (a vintage which damaged the reputation of Bordeaux winemakers for years) was not done.  There was no wine at Dungeons and Dragons as they were all scientists and drank real ale. Indeed, another reason for leaving was that the DM ensured that without A level physics you would never solve any of  the dungeon puzzles he set. 

Fancy a bath, Legatus?  Oh alright, you talked me into it, again!

C was a star lawyer at college.  Every year we had something called principal's collections, which was like a school report but oral.  You had to walk the length of the hall to high table (where you had to stand not sit) whilst your tutors gave an oral report of your perfomance to the principal (not you).  The Chaplain was also there, presumably to lend comfort if you broke down in tears.  Much to my amazement my principal's collection was entirely about, as they put it, my "intense relationship" with C.  Essentially they told me to stop seeing her as I was taking her mind of her work.  I was shocked.  And stunned.  C thought it hilarious and was immensely flattered by the whole thing.  They made the same suggestion to her but she was rather more forthright than I had been in her repudiation of the idea.  Immediately afterwards, and within earshot of the tutors, she suggested we went and had a long bath together instead of her doing her essay, just to spite them.  A girl of great character!  Even though we both went on to other partners during our time at college we continued to "interact" for the whole three years.

Box of delights

All this is relevant because in the other chest, along with some unbuilt Tamiya kits, was an old writing case full of old photographs of, and letters from, ex-girlfriends which, for some reason I kept (maybe because some of the letters were absolutely filthy). In amongst the endless photographs of lady rowers at Oxford (I was official photographer for one of the ladies' colleges - which was as dubious as you might imagine), pictures of my own artwork and photos of ex girlfriends were just two of a wargame I must have done in about Easter 1982 (judging by the other photos in the set).

This then is a rare flashback to the time when most of my gaming was WW2 and was played with my friends Jimbo, Cess and Bean-Kid from school.  This must have been a holiday get-together as we were all at different universities by then.  It was a France 1940 game, as you can see by the Airfix Matilda and the Matchbox Char B and Renault.  Somewhere in the background is a vehicle with a D-Day star but we weren't that bothered about such things.  Indeed we weren't bothered about painting our figures either but these tanks were my handiwork and I still have them up in the loft.

I used to do all my painting and modelling at the little desk I had in my bedroom at home which has long since gone.  I kept all my paints in an old biscuit tin (which amazingly I still keep many of my paints in) in the bottom drawer.  The desk had a lift-up top where I kept my glue, cutting mat, bits box etc.   In the writing box in the loft I found this photo of it.  I used to keep my paintbrushes in the ski-ing-themed (I used to love Ski Sunday!) square pot on the left.  It's nice to find a picture of my original workbench! Somewhat dominating the picture in the forground is another girlfriend from Oxford who was also a C.  In fact I had three girlfriends with the same name during my time at college which was useful as they were being run simultaneously, so no danger of calling them by the wrong name in a moment of passion!  Fortunately, they all went to different colleges.

This C was a first year (and hadn't had a gap year like I had) when I was in my third year which meant that she was four years younger than me, which seemed like a huge amount at the time.  I had a shock when I went to my daughter's school this week as C's name was up on one of the prize winner's boards for winning a scholarship to Oxford, which I hadn't noticed before. How strange to find pictures of her two days later!  She was the first really fit girl I had come across (so to speak) as she was a rower and in the swimming team.  She had thighs like velvet coated steel hawsers and a magnificent posterior.  Being a pacifist English student, the daughter of a clergyman and  much enamoured of Siegfried Sassoon poetry she did not approve of wargaming at all so I wasn't allow to buy soldiers or model tanks when she was around.  This didn't matter to me at the time as she went like a bomb (vicars daughters, eh?)

There was a very good model shop in Oxford, Howes, which is no longer there, sadly, and I bought a whole load of ESCI North African theatre tanks like Valentines and Semoventes for a project that never materialised.  Howes closed in 1996, after more than thirty years on the site, but still exists online and in Kidlington. 

I bought a few Tamiya 1/35 AFV's including this Stug III which I photographed in the snow we had in the winter of 1981/1982.  I've no idea where I got this strange colour scheme from!  It had been mounted on a scenic base at some point, I think. Outside of studying I was doing a lot of drawing, when not entertaining girls (the two often, happily, combined), so never built most of these kits and most are still in the loft I think, although I sold one of the Fiat-Ansaldo tanks for over £25 on ebay a few years ago.  

The lovely J

After I left university I moved on to a girl whose name didn't begin with C but  who I had known at college (where she was someone else's girlfriend).  In fact J was often confused with C (number 1) as they both had long auburn hair.  I was having a very Pre-Raphaelite phase at the time. J was a lovely girl (she still is, as she is the only one of these ladies I still see regularly) who went on to become the first woman in the world to drive a nuclear reactor.  She used to wear white boiler suits at work with fabulously expensive and intricate Italian lingerie underneath.  She worked at a nuclear power station in Somerset and I used to drive down to see her, crossing the battlefield of Sedgemoor as I did so.  I was amazed to see an article in this month's Wargames Illustrated on Sedgemoor where someone had built models of the Westonzoyland and Chedzoy churches I used to drive past on my way to see J.   Since then I have always wanted to game Sedgemoor (especially as it is the battle at the beginning of Captain Blood) but it really is one of those battles where you can't really use the figures for anything else.

V. another very, very passionate girl indeed

After J came V who was situated much closer to home.  We went on a touring holiday in the Loire Valley which engendered a lifelong interest in Loire wines, especially their under-appreciated reds, and another unrequited interest in regional French regiments of the seventeenth century.   There were complications with V in that she was a friend of J and, indeed, both came on this holiday (with another male friend).  I couldn't persuade J to join V and I in the bath in the splendid hotel room we had in Montreuil-Bellay but somehow, oddly, the invitation dissipated any tension. Montreuil-Bellay, we discovered, was the then source of Sainsbury's Rose D'Anjou: V's favourite.  She didn't have the most sophisticated of wine palates (my sister called her a "Niersteiner" - which was a lot better then the other name she had for her) but I adored her and we got perilously close to getting engaged. 

I spent so much time  in extremely athletic physical activity with V that I didn't have time to paint tanks any more.  Anyway, she quite wore me out. She didn't so much go like a bomb as an an asteroid impact. 

My drawing of S.  She's actually got clothes on. Most unusual for one of my drawings!

I moved on to working in the City and found some more lovely girls in my firm including S who I unexpectedly discovered in the jacuzzi at my gym.  Seeing her in her flowery bikini certainly made me see her in a new light compared with her sober suits at work.  She had the most wonderful walk: talk about poetry in motion.  In the City I discovered another good model shop in Middlesex Street and started, for reasons to do with a book I had read, building models of post war US Navy aircraft.  I stopped anything to do with wargaming or non-aviation modelling for over ten years.

In the box with the magazines I also found a very few copies of Military Modelling.  I thought I had got rid of these years ago.  I was pleased to find this one featuring an article on the Sudan!  I tend to remember MM as a large-scale AFV focussed magazine but I was surprised how much wargames content was in it.

Although finding all these splendid magazines, passionate letters and photos of lovely girls was wonderful the real find was at the bottom of the writing box.  It was my old wargaming tape measure which I hadn't seen for thirty years.  This is the one I used when the school wargames club won the trophy at the Model Engineering Exhibition three times running.  I will now replace my nasty B&Q one with this proven battle winning one instead. 

There is an ironic corollory to this.  Although we played as a uniform (literally) team in external events there were two factions in the school wargames club: mine and one led by R.  I never beat R in a game (mainly because he had written the house rules), so I wanted to try something different from WW2.  This did not go down well with R (I think we wanted to have a go at ACW) and he wound up some of the others against us so we went off on our own and started organising our own games out of school (one of which, of course, is illustrated in this post).  After we left school R, who I never liked, started pursuing a girl from the school next door.  They were friends but he wanted to be more.  She regarded him as more like a brother, much to his frustration.  Anyway, I found out, in one of those rambling post-coital conversations that girls insist on having, that of course it was C (the fit girl with the sculpted thighs) who was the object of his unrequited love.  He came to see her at college (from Cambridge which tells you everything you need to know about him) in her first term. When they arranged the visit I wasn't on the scene but when he arrived at her room in college he found C ironing my shirts.  Apparently he nearly had an apoplectic fit when he discovered whose they were.  She insisted on bringing him around to my rooms (I was living out then) as she thought I might like to see an old school friend. I remember him having to be nice to me (through gritted teeth) as he didn't want to upset C.  He was even more upset when she wouldn't go with him to the bus stop to see him off to Fenbog, as she was staying with me that night; as she happily told him.   Ah, revenge!

So, a whole lot of memories in a couple of chests (oh dear now I am thinking about V again -hers was magnificent).  I think I better go and lie down.

Jason and the Argonauts!

 Atalanta, Zetes, Jason, Cepheus, Herakles and Argus

Well, this year's skirmish project will be Jason and the Argonauts using the Steve Saleh sculpted Foundry figures.  I have finished six now and have another five on the way.  I had already painted Herakles and Atalanta but the other four have been done in the last week. 

Cepheus

The story of the quest for the Golden Fleece is set, of course, in the Bronze Age.  I intend to have my Argonauts in classical Greek armour with iron swords, as they have been gifted by the Gods.  Their opponents may well be more Bronze Age in appearance.  Or not, depending on how I feel!  Most of the new Foundry Greek mythological figures seem to owe more to the classical period than the Bronze Age. 

Zetes

This is my first fantasy force outside of the Lord of the Rings.  The latter, however, is almost like an historical period, given the painting guides, rules and attributes of the figures provided by Games Workshop.  With the Argonauts I will need to create more stuff myself.

Argus

Inevitably there will be a seperate blog for this project and indeed it is here, although there is very little on it as yet.

Jason

I have ordered The Foundry Tribes of Legend rules from Amazon but there seems to be some delay on them.  I am enjoying painting these a lot so far.

Playing Favourites - my 300th post

Several estimable people, led by the author of the Too Much Lead blog and followed by others, including Steve the Wargamer, Trouble at t'mill and Grimsby Wargaming, have set down their favourites in a number of wargaming related categories.  Now, as ever, I have arrived at this much later than everyone else (I always post on The Miniatures Page two weeks after everyone has finished a thread) but it is an excellent way to produce a post without having to have painted any figures (although I did finish two today!)  So I will follow the same structure as the others.

I have just noticed that this is my 300th post on this blog.  Imagine how many more figures I could have painted if I hadn't written all those posts!

Period

Some of my Steve Saleh sculpted Foundry Romans -painted for Fishbourne.  If only this range had been completed!

Oh dear.  This is where it all falls down.  Given I paint more than I wargame my ongoing "armies" cover everything from prehistoric cavemen to World War 2.  I have no idea how many periods or armies I have figures for but I think I did calculate once that I was building over thirty seperate WAB armies at once.  Needless to say, I don't have a single completed (if there is such a thing) army.  When I first started playing with my unpainted Airfix figures it was Napoleonics but this is an impossible period for a dabbler. What my favourite is now varies from week to week but if I had to get rid of all my other figures and just keep one army to work on it would be... Early Imperial Romans.  From my first Airfix figures through to my Warlord plastics it's the Romans that inspire me most.  The biggest frustration for me is that I don't think there is a really good range of figures for this period out there.  There are loads of EIR Romans but I can't say that I am really happy with any of them, for various reasons.   Other than Romans it would be the Colonial period or Dark Ages.  Or English Civil War.  Or Hoplite Greeks.  Or Lord of the Rings (the only fantasy gaming I do).  Or...

Scale

One of my Gripping Beast Early Saxons

28mm only now.  Fifteen years ago I was painting a lot of 20mm plastic Napoleonics but I was never very happy with them.  It was my first visit to Salute and the Gripping Beast stand that gave me my first sight "in the lead" of modern 28mm figures.  I literally put all my 20mm figures into a box in the loft the next day.   Lots of people use 15mm at Guildford but the anatomy of these is mainly awful and they are too small for me to paint, although I do acknowledge that en masse they can look very good.  The problem is I will never have an army en masse so prefer to paint individuals to the best of my (limited) ability.

Rules

Not being a regular player, the easier to understand they are the better for me. I don't play often enough to learn any of the tricks or wrinkles in a set of rules. I remember playing a Zulu wargame at the club using a set of rules that were so complex I totally gave up trying to understand them at all.  So I like WAB (although I realise its many limitations) and I don't like DBX or its derivatives.  I'm not interested in replicating command and control.  I just want to push pretty models about (that reminds me of a story involving a famous supermodel but that is off the point). Probably my favourite rules are The Sword and the Flame.  Simple but elegant (rather like the supermodel).

Boardgame

I can't abide board games of any sort these days.  When I was small we used to play (but only at Christmas) Monopoly which I only liked as we could stay up late, eat twiglets and drink cider as the game went on for hours.  I never played the likes of Risk or, my wife's favourite, Cluedo (too much thinking involved).  For a period, when I was about 15, I had a few of the Simulations Publications Inc games (I still have them somewhere) such as Musket and Pike.  I didn't have anyone to play against so I had to play the games solo.  I remember them being not too bad but one I had (I can't remember which) was very much more complicated than Musket and Pike so I gave up on them.  I do remember that as soon as you seperated the little counters they started to fall out of the box every time you touched it.  Basically, I am not a gamer!

Figures

I  painted a whole box of Uruk Hai!

Although I think Perry Miniatures are the best figure manufacturer when it comes to a combination of range coverage, anatomy and accuracy I don't enjoy painting them that much as they are too fiddly.   I will pretty much buy anything Mark Copplestone does and I also really like Crusader Miniatures and Musketeer Miniatures for paintability.  I don't have a strong view on plastics one way or the other. Some are disappointing (Gripping Beast Vikings) some are excellent (Perry Ansar).  They key thing for me is that I have never painted more than a few plastics from each of the many boxes I have bought.  The exception being Games Workshop's Lord of the Rings plastics.

Club

I'm in every picture but, more importantly, so are my figures!

I joined Guildford Wargames club some years ago having found it through The Miniatures Page.  Technically I'm not a member any more and haven't been for over a year.  I used to go more often but I lost the habit when I was travelling a lot and couldn't commit to a date.  I also used to get quite stressed by everyone else knowing the rules really well and so I felt like a beginner every week.  There are some very clever people who are members of the club and I started to find it a bit scary! The real reason I didn't go, however, was that I really only like playing with my own figures and as I don't have any completed armies...  Still I have been able to join in some bigger games with my Wars of the Roses, Dark Ages and ECW figures.  One enjoyable club project I did participate in was a two day exhibition game at Fishbourne Roman Palace in 2005.  We interacted with a generally fascinated public and the event even managed to convince my father-in-law that wargaming  was a worthwhile activity.  We got a positive write up in the local paper too, although I think I annoyed the many long-standing members of the club by being the only one who got name-checked in the article (the result of flirting outrageously with the very pretty reporterette).

Opponents

A very much younger Guy three years ago as we set up a Lord of the Rings game

I always had enjoyable games with Dave, Keith and John at Guildford.  The person who recruited me into the club was Mike Lewis of Black Hat Miniatures and he was unfailingly patient with me and gave me my first game there (Darkest Africa - I lost, as usual).  My son Guy enjoys the occasional Lord of the Rings game and last time we played Darkest Africa. We are talking about having a go at Saga next.

Inspiration

Film

Well, when I was younger there were three main cinematic inspirations.  The first were the endless films about the war in the Pacific that seemed to be on  on Saturday afternoons; The Halls of Montezuma springs to mind immediately.  These got me recreating these battles outside on our rockery for many happy weeks over the summer holidays.  The film The 300 Spartans got me into ancients, even though there were no plastic Greeks in those days! Then I saw Waterloo which got me playing long refights of said battle with my hundreds of unpainted Airfix Napoleonics (all in Charles Grant suggested battalions of 48 figures).  Nowadays nearly any military themed film can get me thinking about getting a new range!

Book

Although Terence Wise's Introduction to Battle Gaming (as so nostalgically illustrated on Too Much Lead's entry - mine lost its cover decades ago!) got me playing my first games with proper rules the book that turned me into a painter was The War Game, which was stuffed full of wonderful photographs by former Penthouse director of photography Philip O Stearns of Peter Gilder's Hinchliffe figures on magnificent terrain.  The reason I still hanker after doing Agincourt (which is palpably insane) is because of that book.  It's also the reason that I have a thing about Thermopylae.  

Art

Although I too love Angus McBride's work (and I own one of his original paintings) the first military picture I responded to was Philippoteaux's Charge of the French Cuiassiers at Waterloo which I got as a postcard during a visit to Les Invalides back in the early seventies.  I used to get Look & Learn magazine every week too and I loved Ronald Embleton's work for that, especially his Rogers Rangers series.  I did bid on one of his paintings of a page from the Wicked Wanda strip (literally) he did for Penthouse last year but gave up when it reached £700.  I have seen it advertised at £3,000 since!

Music

I don't think others have put this section in but music is very important to me when I paint. Currently I am painting some Foundry Argonauts and am listening, naturally to Bernard Hermann's soundtrack from Jason and the Argonauts but also Laurence Rosenthal's Clash of the Titans as well.  I always try to find appropriate music for the figures I am painting. Oddly, the first music I associate with wargaming is Dvorak's New World symphony which I always used to play when setting up my big Airfix ACW games.  It still reminds me of lots of blue and grey figures and the distinctive smell of evergreen twigs which I used to cut off trees in the garden, before sticking them in plasticene, to use as trees on my wargames board.

Internet

I discovered The Miniatures Page quite late on but it must have cost me thousands of pounds in stuff I have bought which I would never have known about otherwise.  It is my home page but I don't post very often.  It can be annoying, sometimes, but then I find nearly everything can be annoying these days!  I can't remember whose site got me blogging (Giles Allison's, probably) but my entry into that was originally designed to focus me on one period.  This, of course, has failed totally.  I now have around twenty wargames blogs and four more under another identity which focus on my other great interest: naked women.  Somehow I don't think I will ever get the 200 followers and 2.5 million visits I have had on one of the latter on any of my wargames sites!

So, thanks to Too Much Lead for an excellent idea.  Now I really must try and base a few more Argonauts!

2012 Plans and 2011 Review

My Darkest Africa British force: completed last year

As is traditional (and as I haven't managed a post for some time) I will post a quick review of the year and my plans for 2012.

I only managed 144 figures this year, which is four less than last year but most of these (98 figures) were Darkest Africa ones done at the beginning of the year.  None of the other contingents reached double figures with Zulus and Normans the most numerous. Frustratingly, I have around 30 figures nearing completion and I might have a chance to do some this weekend.  Sunday is my main painting day but latterly they have all be taken up with the childrens' various rowing, shooting, dancing, fencing and Duke of Edinburgh activities.  My wife also has a new part time job which has landed me with more domestic stuff on top too.

 

Darkest Africa was supposed to be my main activity for 2011 and the other area I wanted to progress was the Indian Mutuny.  I have painted a lot on a 20 man unit but haven't finished them yet. Given that my painting time is so restricted I think I might do more character pieces for skirmish games this year and at present Argonauts are looking likely, given Foundry's new figures and their forthcoming rules, Tribes of Legend.

The mighty Heracles and his doner kebab

I finished a Foundry Heracles yesterday, the first figure I have completed for some months, and started some more Foundry Argonauts today.  Although their armour is wrong for the pre-Trojan War quest for the Golden Fleece I have decided that the Gods have given them armour from the future or, perhaps, designed armour that will later influence Classical Greek styles.

I have bought quite a lot of figures this year, although most have been for armies I am already collecting. I did buy some of the Warlord Thirty Years War Plastics but haven't painted any yet.  The Perry plastic Ansar are very nice indeed and actually nicer, I think, than the metals, in some ways.

On the rules front I bought Hail Caesar, Clash of Empires and Saga, all of which look interesting.  I am interested in getting the new Warhammer gladiatorial combat set too.  I watched the two Spartacus TV series which were, on the whole, very silly but painting gladiators is pretty quick so I will dig a few more of these out.

Figures I like the look of but haven't bought (yet) inlcude the John Jenkins Portuguese conquistadores, the Crusader late Crusaders and the new plastic Teutonic Knights from Italy's Fireforge.

Not too many new periods were started but I did enjoy painting the Copplestone 15mm fantasy figures.  With The Hobbit now on the horizon I am tempted to start some new Lord of the Rings characters. I don't have the full Fellowship painted so a Gimli is probably next.

I have now realised that I have far too many unpainted figures and I am starting to offload them on eBay as I am desperate for the space.  First to go are all my Warhammer figures, of which I had far more than I realised!  Next to go will be Foundry Ancient Egyptians.

My international travel was much more limited this year, I am glad to say, with trips to Ankara, Istanbul (twice), Singapore, Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur and Paris (three times). I am getting really frightened of getting on planes now so prefer to travel by train if at all possible.

I did very well at losing weight in the second half of the year (well over a stone) but I have put some back on as I am having difficulty exercising due to a leg injury.  Never mind, got back on the bike a few days ago and am looking forward to the Olympic road cycle races coming past the end of my road.  As for the Olympics I am also going to the fencing, the rowing and the mens 1500m final in the stadium.  Sadly, I didn't manage to get tickets for the womens beach volleyball.