Dark Ages Welsh 9

The penultimate unit in the Dark Ages Welsh project to be finished is the mounted Combrogi. Not much to say except that painting cavalry took more time than I expected (since you're really painting two miniatures at once). Also, as I wanted to make sure the riders didn't fall off their horses, I decided to pin them in place. But oh, how I hate pinning! I just can't seem to drill the holes straight and so the riders tilt in all directions making them look like quite drunk. Which is only appropriate for a bunch of Dark Ages warriors I guess ...

Anyway, here are some pictures of the finished cavalry:

I went with very dark horse colours to set the riders off and experimented a bit with different markings to not make the mounts too uniform. Overall I'm quite pleased with how they turned out.

As usual, the miniatures are all Gripping Beast and the shield transfers are from Little Big Men Studios.

As you can see the standard bearer is missing his flag. I thought I had some suitable transfers in my stash but obviously not. A mistake that's now been rectified by a new order from LBMS. As I probably won't get these transfers before Christmas, I will have to wait until January to finish off those last details on the project. I'm also in the process of making some custom movement trays to use in Dux Bellorum. These should be finished in the beginning of January as well.

It's pretty close now! Just eight more miniatures and this whole thing is done. (Well, except for the banners and the movement trays that is.)

Thanks for reading! Have a great weekend everyone.

Dark Ages Welsh 8

With the Vikings out of the way it is time to return to the last stage of the dark ages Welsh project. As usual I find it hard to keep my focus during the final parts of a largish project such as this, and inevitably start dabbling with my next one (or worse – start thinking up a whole new project!). But this time I'm determined to see it through to the end and not lose my focus.

To get going I decided to start with the final 8 archers. As I've already done the first 4 to use in my Anglo-Saxon force in the Dux Viking Age campaign, I kind of "knew" the miniatures and found them easier to paint.  The only hiccup occured during varnishing when I accidentally dropped one of the models. Of course his bow broke, and I had to attach a new one and then paint it and repaint the hand holding the bow. Still, it was a fairly quick repair job and it could have been worse I guess.

That's enough waffling for now, here is a picture of the finished models (as usual, click for a close-up).

The miniatures are all from Gripping Beast.

And with "the first of the last" finished it's on to the second – the cavalry.

Have a great weekend!

Vikings

Here are the finished Vikings for Saga I began a while ago. Actually they've been finished for a week or so, but today I finally managed to get some shots of them. As my previous photos on this blog haven't been very good (to say the least) I've been experimenting a bit and hopefully found a way to take better pictures. The only downside is now you can see all the mistakes much easier. Oh well ...

First off we have the hirdmen:

They are all from Crusader Miniatures and the shields are LBMS transfers.

Next up are the bondi:

These are all Artizan Designs models. I think maybe I should have glued the shields on a bit different for some of the miniatures, but I'm too lazy to go back and redo them.

Now all that remains is to get gaming with them.

Finally I'd like to say a big welcome to danmer. I hope you will like the blog!

Liebster Blog Award

My good gaming chum Dalauppror very kindly gave me the "Liebster Blog Award" for which I feel very honoured and humbled. This is his motivation:

"For having put up with all my different gaming project the last time, my quite newly found gaming friend Jonas need´s a puch for his excellent blog A Conflict of Interests, a blog with too? many inspirational pictures and posts."

Thanks mate for your kind words! It's certainly a pleasure "putting up" with all your projects. :)

I've seen the award on various blogs over the last week or so, and it's a very nice way to bring attention to the less known bloggers out there. The rules for the award are simple enough:

• "Copy and paste" the award on your blog, and talk about it a bit.
• Select for the award your five favourite blogs with less than 200 followers, leaving a comment on one of their post to notify them that they have won the award. You need also to list them in your own blog.
• Enjoy the moment, knowing that you have just made someone's day. 
• Of course, there is no obligation to pass the award, but it is a good deed really.

Now on to my five selected blogs. It was pretty hard to single out only five, but the ones I choose are great blogs, very inspirational and could to with some more followers. Here goes:

Merseybooks
Dan Mersey, author of several books and games about the Age of Arthur/Dark Ages as well as other periods own blog. I really like Dux Bellorum and I'm looking forward to his new game, A Lion Rampant. Very interesting reading.

Nowhere to Lead Soldiers
Lovely painted models from Ni. Tchirititch from Canada. Check out those shields!

Metal Mountain
More lovely painted goodies. This time from Olddorg, based in England. I particulary like the Claymore Castings miniatures painted for the battle of Otterburn 1388.

The English Civil War in 6 mm
Pretty much does what it says on the tin. My own adventures in 6 mm have ground to a halt, but seeing all Lee's great looking units makes me want to pick up the tiny troopers once again.

Wargamer Blue
Lots of inspiring projects from Beccas "down under".

Now off you go and read – and follow! – the above blogs (if you aren't already that is).

For those of you still here, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome my new followers: StugG, rousell68, sgt.steiner and Jehan. Thank you very much for joining me, and I hope you will enjoy the blog!

Dux Viking Age AARs

As I'm sure many of you are aware, Dalauppror and I have been playing a mini campaign in the Viking Age using the excellent Dux Britanniarum from Too Fat Lardies. The original game pits the invading Saxons against the defending (Romano-)British, but in our campaign we just swapped them for Vikings, commanded by Dalauppror, and Anglo-Saxons, commanded by me, respectively.

Second game: The Vikings, set on plundering the Saxon village,
are repelled by the Saxon Lord and his elite thegns.

The changes to the rules were kept to a minimum – in fact we only changed one thing: In battles, but not in raids, the Vikings were allowed to form a shieldwall. Of course, we could have spent some time to develop new rules for berserkers and what not, and make period flavoured Fate cards etc, but I think the game worked fine more or less out of the box. Also, our relaxed approach allowed us to get gaming straight away, with minimal hassle, which is always a good thing in my book.

Third game: The Saxon archers keep watch in the old Roman fortress,
as the great fyrd is standing by ready to crush any Vikings who dare show themselves.

Anyway, I won't post any lengthy AARs here, as Michael has already done such a smashing job over on his blog. (Even though the reports are to be regarded as Viking propaganda!) Instead, I wanted to collect the direct links to all the different AARs in one place for easier reference for myself in the future:

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4

Fourth game: The brave greater fyrd make a um ... "retreat" back into the fortress
as the Viking horde tries in vain to capture any of the Saxon nobles.

Oh, and if I were you, I'd keep my eye out for the upcoming Too Fat Lardies' Christmas Special ...

Vikings WIP

These past weeks have been very busy with "real life" issues as the end of my paternity leave looms closer and I'm getting ready to go back to work (I still have all of December off as well though). As a result I haven't managed to take some pictures of the finished Wild West posses. What hobby time I've managed to scrape together have been spent painting some reinforcements for my Viking warband for Saga to bring the total points up to six. As I haven't had any luck with the tricky Anglo-Saxons in the league I'm playing in (four straight losses and a place firmly at the bottom of the list), for my last couple of matches I have decided to try the more straightforward Vikings.

Here are some WIP shots of the two new units: one unit of Hearthguards and one unit of Warriors. As usual – click for bigger pictures. A word of warning though: They are even more speed-painted than usual, and so look quite sloppy up close. 

Hirdmen/Hearthguards

Bondi/Warriors

Bondi/Warriors

The Hearthguards are Crusader Miniatures, and the Warriors are from Artizan Designs.

I'm working on the shields right now, and then it's the usual last steps before the models are completely done: varnishing and some tufts etc for the bases. As I want to get back to painting the Welsh I'm quite keen to get these vikings finished as soon as possible .

Before I leave you this time, please let me welcome my new followers: Barks, Captain Richard's miniature Civil War and EinarOlafson.

Many thanks for joining up, and I hope you'll enjoy reading about my various projects.

Wild West Posse 2 WIP

Here are a couple of WIP shots of the next posse for the Wild West project. Actually "WIP" is stretching it a bit as they are all but finished: they just need a quick "dusty" drybrush to dirty them down a bit, some varnishing and finally have a tuft or two added to their bases before they are done. 

As I wrote in the comments to the last post I didn't feel very motivated to paint these up. But thanks to your encouraging words, dear readers, I soldiered on and in the end they turned out quite nice I think. However, I couldn't be bothered to come up with paint schemes for them, and so I more or less copied the ones on the Foundy site. Also, there are some areas that I'm less than happy with and which I planned to go back and redo, but to be honest I will probably leave them as they are.

To the right are some close-ups of the models (click for bigger pictures). The more astute of you have of course noticed that the outlaws have been infiltrated by a sheriff!

All models are once again from Foundry, except the sheriff which is from Black Scorpion – he's a bit taller than the others, and slightly thinner, but I think he fits in quite OK.

I tried a new thing with these models which worked out pretty well: I always find it a bit boring to have the bases left to do after I've finished the models themselves. So instead of saving the bases to last, this time I started with them. It was actually a quite nice little trick to boost the painting morale, and I think I will use it in all my projects from now on.

When these are finished I will post some pictures of all the Wild West models in action. After that, it's back to the Dark Ages.

Thanks for looking!

Wild West Posse 1

First of all a warm welcome to my new followers: Anibal Invictus, DFlynSqrl, laughingferret, Philip Wright, The Angry Lurker and Ubique Matt. Don't hesitate to drop a question or comment or two!

On to today's business then: As some of you may remember I bought the big starter pack for Foundry's The Rules with No Name way back in January, with the intent to get som Legends of the Old West games going. I managed to finish the first of the two posses, apart from the bases and varnishing, sometime in March or April (can't remember exactly when). The plan was to paint up the other posse as well, before finishing off the bases and so on.

As it happened, I only got the second batch primed and the first layer of their skin painted before this whole dark ages business got in the way during the late spring. Since then they have been put aside, patiently awaiting my return. This whole time I've been determined to finish the project before the end of the year, even though I don't think I will get any games going in the immediate future as my interest in this period has dipped quite a bit to be honest.

Anyway, with the first stage of the Welsh project finished, it's now time to revisit these fellas. Finishing the first posse was easy: A couple of quick and sloppy drybrushes on the bases to make them look suitably dusty, some varnishing, some tufts and they were done. Nice and fast.

Here they are in all their righteous glory, ready to bring the outlaws to justice (i.e. the gallows). The miniatures are all Foundry – nice enough, with a lot of character for sure, but nothing that justifies their (still) exorbitant prices.

Now on to the second posse – the outlaws! I started them last week but time was short as I was away for the weekend. There's a bit more work left on this posse, and I won't get much painting done over this coming weekend either. However, hopefully they will be done before then.

Dark Ages Welsh 7

Well, today I finished the final miniatures for my Welsh starter force for Dux Britanniarum. My, that feels good! As usual it consists of: 3 units of 6 levies/pagenes, 2 units of 6 warriors/combrogi, one unit of 6 elites/teulus, one unit of 4 archers, 2 big men/lesser lords and a lord and his champion.

I couldn't resist mounting them on their movement trays and arrange them for a quick snap, although the archers are missing in the picture above. As usual, the image quality isn't the best (to say the least) but I'll try to get some better shots later. For now, here's a close-up of the lord and his champion (love that model by the way), flanked by the big men.

Actually I have a couple of more miniatures finished, and at the moment the standing for this "multi game project" is as follows (SAGA/Dux Brit/Dux Bell):

Teulu 4/6/18 – 10 done, 8 remaining
Combrogi 16/12/18 – 18 done
Combrogi, mounted 0/0/6 – 0 done, 6 remaining
Pagenes w bows 12/4/0 – 4 done, 8 remaining
Pagenes w spears 0/18/6 – 18 done


To sum it up, what remains to be painted are 8 teulus, 6 mounted combrogi and 8 archers. However, as I also want to be able to field the mounted combrogi in SAGA I will paint another 2 for a total of 8.

As I'm now getting a bit tired of the Welsh, and as a reward for myself, I will take a break from them for the rest of the month and paint some other bits and bobs I have laying around. I'll be sure to post some WIPs later.

Thanks for reading!

Anglo-Saxon Reinforcements

Last night I attended the second round of the SAGA league at Dalauppror's club. As my decision to participate came rather late last week, I found myself once again having to reprioritize the painting: From the last two Welsh miniatures in my Dux Britanniarum force to the final seven Anglo-Saxons that would bring my warband up to six points.

A few days of frantic painting saw me finishing the miniatures a couple of hours before the games would start. All in all I'm quite happy with these, but as I was in a hurry they are a bit sloppy as there were some misstakes I didn't go back and correct. Not that you could tell because of the bad photo ... The miniatures are all Gripping Beast and the excellent flags are from Little Big Men Studios.

My first game in the league (and my second game of SAGA ever) was against Ulf and his Vikings. Some crappy tactics, further worsened by abysmal dice-rolls, saw me thoroughly thrashed. In the end, after six rounds, all that remained of my force was four levies – the rest, including the Warlord, had been wiped out. The final score was something like 26-12. Ouch.

I'm still learning the game, and also find the Anglo-Saxons a bit tricky to use. But then maybe my force composition is not the best. Last night i used 2x4 hearthguards, 2x12 warriors and 1x12 levies with spears. Next time I think I will field the hearthguards as one unit of eight instead, to make them less brittle, and later on maybe swap them both for warriors and/or (missile) levies. Or maybe not! The league allows you to change faction for each game if you wish (and have the miniatures of course), and I'm close to having six points of Welsh which is rather tempting to use. Also, I have four points of Vikings, and it should be an easy thing to paint up another two units.

In next week's round I will probably face Björn and his dreaded Jomsvikings. I watched one of his games last night, and it looks like I'm in for another thrashing. Well, better to have it over with I guess!

Oh, and about the Welsh: As I said there are only two miniatures left in the Dux Britanniarum starter force, the Lord and his Champion, and they are nearly finished. All that remains are varnishing and finishing off their bases with tufts etc. I didn't make my deadline of October 8th, but they should be done by tomorrow evening which is OK by me.