Tuesday, 12 March 2013

Peltastoi WIP


I finished painting the above peltastoi.  They are now in a holding pattern, waiting for their agemata colleagues, with whom they will be brigaded, to be painted.

Saturday, 9 March 2013

Primed guards

A brief footnote to yesterday's post; the weather is finally good enough, for priming!  Here are the agema, showing how well the Polemarchs, with their enlarged crests (left) match the equivalent Foundry figures (right, with shields).


Friday, 8 March 2013

Starting the guards


Above, I've mostly the figures that will be the peltasts for my guard phalanx, and below are some Polemarch figures who I've lightly converted, and who will join some similar-looking Foundry Successors to form the agemata.  Chap on the front right, is a Foundry Perseus; note the winged sandals!

Monday, 4 March 2013

Soldat Lagide


I received this book by Stephane Thion, on the various Egyptian Macedonian armies, in the post at the weekend.  Stephane is a French author and gamer, with whom I've occasionally corresponded; he seems like a very nice chap.  The book has 64 pages and is and packed with simple but beautiful colour reconstructions of Ptolemaic uniforms, from the founding of the kingdom to the arrival of Caesar.  Many of these illustrations are taken from grave stelae (handily naming the deceased under each drawing), and others are hypothetical.  I found the colours very useful, in particular there's one chart showing the colours from the grave stelae, all together.

Everything is there, from the agema, through the phalanx, to the exotic Galatians and Sudanese.  There are even some cavalrymen with horses and riders fully covered in textile armour... which I recall described in an old Slingshot.

There is a good deal of text, in French.  My reading French is poor and it will take me quite a while to work through this, but I'd recommend the book on the strength of the colour illustrations, alone. They are beautiful, and so very useful to a gamer/painter.  I bought my copy on Amazon.

Wednesday, 27 February 2013

After the battle


We played another game between Caesarians and Pompeians, tonight, using the rules I'm developing (with lots of help from friends).  These shots are of the devastated battlefield at the end of what turned out to be a particularly bloody battle (especially for the Pompeians!).  The game lasted about two and a half hours, and the mechanics worked very nicely, although the elephants were a little pedestrian and need to be "sexed up", somewhat.  Of particular note is the iPad; this was the first time I've ever run a game from one, and I must say it worked very well, indeed.  Also of note are the two empty wine bottles, which lubricated proceedings.  A jolly session!


Saturday, 23 February 2013

Forming up



The 96 miniatures required for my first two (of four) "white shield" units now have their shields, and are all "piked-up".  This stage of the process of building a unit is always the worst, as the figures look awful viewed from the side, rather than the front, and un-based.  The night is darkest just before the dawn, they say...

Monday, 18 February 2013

New Jenga phalanx WIP


A quick WIP shot, of most of the phalangites for the 4th and 5th pike blocks for Raphia, mustering on their Jenga painting blocks.  Most of these were painted (very nicely) by Raglan, but I needed to replace his pikes with my blunt pins, re-base and repaint most of his crests from black to the red I'm using for my phalanx.  I spent a very long evening yesterday, painting the 60-odd required pikes.  Yawn...

In other news I've been plugging away with my draft set of Ancient rules, which are now 9,300 words long.  I reckon that they will be more than twice that, when finished.  I managed to work out how to upload them onto my iPad as a pdf, and they are now stuffed to the gunnels with hyper-links, so it should now be possible to navigate around them easily.  I'm going to try running tomorrow's game from the iPad... 

Out of curiosity, does anyone use iPads or laptops at the wargames table?