Warlord Games Generals WIP 2

I was hoping to finish these up this weekend, but ran out of time.  The mounted Roman general is done, save for basing.  The Germanic chief (from WG Celtic Chieftains) and his standard bearer (BTD I think) are awaiting their final coat of Army Painter to dry, before dull coating and basing.

Animal Chase

We play a lot of games in my house. My son is three, and I was getting pretty tired of Chutes and Ladders and Cooties.  He loves animals so I put together a quick card game about collecting a herd of animals and leading them back to a zoo to score points. Players need to tempt herbivores out of hiding with berries, and keep predators from eating their herbivores by sating them with salmon. We're still tweaking it, but it's a pretty nice, light game we all enjoy.

Wargames though, are going to have to wait.

Warlord Games Mounted Roman General WIP 1

A quick snap of Warlord Games Roman general (it's the mounted "Hold The Line!" fella with the running dog). The finish on his armor looks way rough in this pic. I don't know if it was the ambient light set up, or if his armor really does look that crummy up close.

There aren't too many photos of this particular model painted up. I cobbled together a paint scheme from a few sources, in particular the grimy bronzed armor I saw used by another painter. (Man, the finish on his armor is so much smoother!)

Armor: I started with a grimy mix of Vallejo green brown mixed with metallic gold, washed with Devlan Mud, highlighted with gold, and with details and trim picked out in silver.

Red Tunic: A mix of the Citadel red foundation paint and Vallejo Carmine Red, washed with Devlan Mud, and highlighted with Carmine Red.

Leather: Vallejo Leather Brown and Game Color Beasty Brown.

Will probably tackle his horse tonight, but I'm dreading it. I've painted hundreds of humans, but only six horses. I stink at horses.

My Weeping Wallet

I got caught up with several projects in April and stopped checking developments in the world of miniatures for a bit. Catching up and I find there's a ton of great stuff on the way.

• Hail Caesar Army Lists II.  I have yet to tackle any medieval figures, but I've been eyeing the medieval Scots from Claymore Castings and toying with the idea of picking up some SAGA warbands.  I'll probably pick up the new army lists just to get a broad overview on the full medieval period, even if I won't be gaming it for quite some time.
• More plastic Romans! Holy crow, some pics from Salute show Warlord prepping some plastic Caesarean Romans and Victrix doing the same for older Republican Romans, both right up my alley. I'm sure I'll be dropping a load of cash for several boxes of each.
• Cheap cheap plastics from Wargames Factory. WGF have put their Persian infantry up for sale at something like 25 cents a figure, which is insane! I am having a lot of trouble not picking up a few dozen, even though I have no intention of painting a Persian army.

All in all, lots of great news. I'm going to have to redouble my efforts to lighten my lead pile so I'm ready for these new arrivals once they hit the market.

Quantity has a quality of its own

Finally! My second box of Wargames Factory Romans is painted and based. I have a few tips and thoughts I hope to post soon, but I wanted to get a log of my final completion up. I think I'll be tackling something a little quicker next. I have a Roman and German general primed and ready to go. It's been two years since I've painted a single figure, so I'm looking forward to the change of pace from the mass production of figures to "table standard".

Norman Bel Geddes, Wargamer

This story popped up on the internets today about Norman Bel Geddes, an obsessive modeler (among other things) who created miniature games and dioramas, including the 1939 World's Fair "Futurama" exhibit. You can read the entire article (which was sounded so preposterous I was sure it was fake), but what really caught my eye was the gigantic wargames he ran, with dozens of participants over a 24 x 4 foot table playing out a fictional WWI game. 

"The board was twenty-four feet long and four feet wide, its surface a varnished relief map of the coastline of two imaginary countries. It represented twenty thousand square kilometers, approximately the size of the Western Front. There were a dozen layers of land above sea level, each measuring an eighth of an inch vertically; the water had three measured depths. One journalist reported that nine thousand cities and towns, along with every mountain, valley, tunnel, bridge, and river, were delineated with fictitious names. Pins of various colors, sizes, and shapes (twelve thousand to twenty-five thousand of them, depending on whom one talked to) stood in for forty-plus types of military units. Each pin had a different kind of move, and each occupied the approximate amount of space on the map that its equivalent force would occupy in the field or at sea. There were at least four thousand on the board at all times."

It sounds like the participants would play a few turns each night, with campaigns lasting years! I thought that might be the end of the story, with the records, rules and material from those games lost to the ages, but it sounds like some of the records and rules made into the collection of the University of Texas at Austin. I'm not too knowledgable of the "old school" wargames scene, but I've certainly heard of the contributions of H.G. Wells, the Kriegspiel days, and Donald Featherstone, but this permutation of wargaming was completely foreign to me.  I'm hoping more details from these games comes to light... I'd love to read over the rules from what sounds like an impossibly complex and detailed game.

Back with some spring cleaning

Haven't posted in a while, but after a busy few weeks, I've started back into painting as well as clearing out some of my games and miniatures that have been on the back burner for far too long. I had designs on playing some 15mm sci fi games about 10 years ago, and had picked up bits and pieces over time, but had forgotten about the whole project until seeing trade post looking for sci-fi minis in that scale on TMP.

I took a few pics of my lot to post after the jump instead of cluttering up someone else's inbox with them.