Fatigue/Casualty Markers

Inspired by Sidney Roundwood (pop over to his blog, it really is excellent) I knocked together a couple of quick Fatigue markers for SAGA. Of course, they can also be used as casualty markers for other games.

The miniatures are Gripping Beast casualties. The sculpts are a little rough but certainly adequate for this job. I glued them to 40 mm round MDF bases from the great people at Warbases, and then carved the dice holders out of pink styrofoam. After this photo was taken I realised I had used a big 12 mm dice as a template instead of the micro 7 mm I intended. It was however very easy to shave off the styrofoam and start over.

I used Windsor & Newton mineral texture gel to blend the styrofoam holders into the bases. This stuff smells absolutely vile, kind of like ammonia, and is a quite fiddly to get into the hard to reach spots (eg near the miniatures). It turned out just "OK" in the end, with some visible gaps around the figures, and it don't think I will use the gel for this kind of work in the future.

After the basing gel was dry I undercoated the markers black and painted them in my usual way. Finally I applied a coat of gloss and then matt varnish, before finishing them off with some grass tufts.

Here is a close up of some of the markers. For easier identification, I painted four of then red and four of them blue. The micro dice are from The Dice Shop – great prices and very fast shipping.

As always, thanks for reading!

Two Dux in a Row

 It surely is great time to be a Dark Ages player these days. Not only does SAGA continue to be much played and talked about, but there are two upcoming rules for the time period slightly before the one SAGA covers (the so called "Age of Arthur") – Dux Britanniarum by Too Fat Lardies and Osprey's Dux Bellorum.


I really liked my first game of SAGA, but at times it felt somewhat "abstract" (which is both a good thing and a bad thing depending on my particular mood). The more detailed, roleplaying elements of Dux Brit intrigues me, as does the campaign system – something I find sorely missing in SAGA.

Dux Bellorum on the other hand, is aimed at larger battles than both SAGA and Dux Brit handles (both of them being large scale skirmish games) which is also something I'm keen to try out.

I have preordered both of these rules and look forward to get some more Dark Ages gaming going. Of course I have to (yes, yes I know) paint up a new army as my vikings and anglo-saxons are for a later time period, but I have devised a cunning plan that will get me a force to use in all the three games mentioned above. More on this later ...

I'm a Painting Machine

Unfortunately it's just the walls in our apartment I'm painting at the moment ...

There's no way around this, I have to come clean and say: I've been a bad blogger, a bad bad blogger. Sorry for not updating for a whole three months!

The original plan was to update once a week, but as you can see that plan hasn't exactly been working out. However, I have been very productive (by my standards anyway) during my blogging-absence, and as I've received some not so gentle prodding from one of my two (!) followers I have prepared a couple of posts for the coming weeks to get me back in the game.

Speaking of games, last month I finally got to try out SAGA. It was a very close fought 4 points vikings vs anglo-saxon game, using the Homeland scenario. Despite losing (I played the defending saxons) I had a blast, as did my victorious opponent. I managed to snap some shots that will be in the short AAR I'm planning.

Thanks for reading!