Another for the Challenge

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A welcome return to Steve Burt, with his first entry of the year: some 1879 Zulu War British infantry. Steve has entered the Challenge every year since it started, making this his seventh year of entries.

There have also been lots of additional entries from those already registered for this year. Some lovely work here:

Celebrity Wargamer!

And last, but by no means least, an HG Wells character figure from John Haines.

I’ll be updating the Scorecard at the weekend.

Keep them coming!

A Couple of January Sales

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I don’t often post this sort of, er, post, but worth mentioning I think a couple of January sales that are currently underway.

First up, those of you who have seen my Sumerian and Hoplite figures from Museum Miniatures will be pleased to hear that they are currently running a 25% off everything sale.

This is a proper sale, with a decent reduction, so well worth seeing if you can take advantage.

Some of my Museum Miniatures Sumerians

The second sale that caught my eye was that of Arrowhead Miniatures, producers of a great range of 1/44th kit, including WW2. Arrowhead are offering 20% off everything they do until the end of January, and although 12mm isn’t my scale, their stuff does look very good.

Here’s a picture of their Hummel SP gun.

If there are any other manufacturers who are having a sale at the moment, drop me a line and I’ll post about them as well. Address is in the sidebar on the right.

One More For The Challenge

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I’m quite enjoying these shorter but more frequent updates to the Painting Challenge, timed for each time someone sends in their first entry of the year.

Today it’s the turn of Joe McGinn to return, with a very fine set of 28mm King’s German legion for Sharp Practice:

Also today we have entries from three Lardies already signed up for this year. First we have more 6mm Roman buildings from Lloyd: the big building is apparently a trireme shed!

Also Roman, but bigger, is a terrific 28mm scale watchtower from Travis:

Mind the Step!

Finally, today, Andrew Helliwell sends in two more entries from the Helliwell Home for Distressed Gentle-Figures. Here’s one of them: some Norman cavalry rescued “for a song” from a local flea market. Some very nice work on the horses.

More soon!

More ECW Horse

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There do seem to be an awful lot of “Swedish Horse” units required for my first ECW army: the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Montgomery (the sample scenario in the rulebook).

Here’s another unit finished:

The figures above are all 15mm Peter Pig.

I also needed some “Gallant Gentlemen”: the For King & Parliament equivalent to heroes in To The Strongest. Here are a couple of mounted GG’s: both 15mm from Essex.

Three More For The Challenge

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Another three first entries for this year’s Painting Challenge.

The first of today’s returnees is Carole Flint. Carole has entered the Challenge every year since its inception, and thus starts her seventh gallery with some lovely Portuguese Napoleonics:

Another six year veteran of the Challenge is Mark Luther, king of the 6mm IABSM After Action Reports. He starts his seventh year with a mass of 6mm tanks and aeroplanes:

Our third returnees is Chris Cornwell, just beginning his third year of Challenge entries. He’s into the Italian Wars at the moment, and here’s one his pike blocks:

Finally today we have a second entry of the year from John Haines. Some Samurai and, as shown below, a very familiar set of 28mm Napoleonic British Riflemen:

Keep them coming!

IABSM AAR: A Late Christmas!

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Here’s a rather nice battle report from Alex Sotheran covering a game played just before Christmas last year, and taken from Alex’s excellent blog Storm of Steel.

The action is once again set in Malaya in late 1941, and covers an action very similar to the encounter at Slim River.

Click on the picture below to see all:

Two More For The Painting Challenge

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Two more “first entries of the year” today.

First up we have the return of the Hat, Lloyd Bowler, for his sixth year running. Lloyd starts the year with a bang with two entries: the first some more of his magnificent Aztecs; the second some 6mm paper buildings that look very fiddly indeed to me! Here are the Aztecs:

The second is Ralph Plowman, extraordinarily fine painter of 15mm sci-fi figures. Ralph has entered the Challenge every year since its inception in 2014, so starts (for those of you who have had too many scalpel-related accidents whilst prepping figures) his seventh season. Ralph’s first entry of 2020 is a very nice planetary exploration team:

Finally today another honourable mention for Travis who has already submitted his third and fourth entries of the year: more dwarves and a team of, er, contractors, shown below:

All entries are available to view in the individual galleries, which can be found in the 2020 TFL Painting Challenge folder in the navbar at the top of the page.

First Painting of 2020

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If you’re a regular visitor to this page, then you’ll know that I have recently built a 15mm Sumerian army using Museum Miniatures’ superb “Z Range” of CAD-designed figures.

I was browsing their website wondering whether to go for their Z-range Classical Indians when I noticed that they had also released some Z-range Greek Hoplites. Now I need at least another three Hoplite spear blocks, each 48 figures strong. I actually have 48 figures from another manufacturer waiting to be painted, but doing two of the blocks towards the end of last year (i.e. 96 Hoplites) had quite put me off painting them. Those cuirasses take ages to do properly.

So I had a look and noticed that Museum produced a set of Hoplites with no clothes on and another with only a little kilt to cover their, er, dignity. Ideal: Z-range figures with no cuirass to paint! One odd thing: the Hoplites come in mixed packs of kneeling, thrusting and standing i.e. you can’t buy 48 of the same pose. Maybe I could have rung up and seen whether I could have had some custom homogeneous packs run up for me, but I thought I’d give the mixed unit a go.

Hmmm…not sure.

Good points: easy and quick to paint up, nicely animated, shield transfers from Little Big Man Studios are superb.

Bad points: I prefer my Hoplite blocks to have all the same pose, and somehow the kilts made me paint everything in prime colours instead of varying the crests and kilt colours more. At least my daughter likes my “rainbow Hoplites”!

Feel free to let me know what you think. I still need another couple of Hoplite blocks, and the Museum Miniatures ‘nearly nude’ range does make it easy to do…

An Afternoon of "To The Strongest"

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Second weekend of the year and I’ve managed to get in an afternoon of “To The Strongest”.

Bevan and I managed two games. The first was a grinding clash between two quite similar armies: I played the Akkadians, Bevan took an Athenian Hoplite force. Each side had a core of a number of deep blocks of close-formed infantry (Spearmen for the Akkadians, slightly superior Hoplites for the Athenians); but the Akkadians had their veteran four-onager heavy chariots plus Royal Bodyguard axe- and bowmen versus a mix of low quality cavalry and lights for the Greeks.

As mentioned, the game was a truly grinding clash. The Akkadian chariots, out on their right wing, threatened to curl around the Athenian left flank, but began the game seemingly unable to move. This meant that the Greeks could come forward and join a general line-against-line engagement that slowly started to bow the Akkadian battle line backwards.

But somehow the Akkadians held on. The Royal Bodyguard axemen did stirring work, the line began to straighten slightly, and then the heavy chariots finally got going and smashed in from the right. In the end, this was a colossal victory for the Akkadians, who didn’t lose a single unit and managed to capture the Greek camp. Here are some pictures:

For the second game, I took the Ancient Britons, with Bevan playing the Sassanid Persians.

The Brits had a huge chunk of (somewhat unwieldy) warriors in the centre of the field, and large numbers of light chariots/cavalry and infantry on each wing…so many lights, in fact, that (much to Bevan’s surprise) his all-horse Sassanids were matched in terms of scouting points.

Looking at the set up, I was confident of victory: there was no way his incredibly small force was going to beat the Ancient British steamroller!

Unfortunately, Bevan and the Persians begged to differ, and what followed was the dissection of my army with surgical precision. First my lights were stripped away unit by unit as I struggled to get my warriors moving, and then enough of those warriors that did move were beaten for me to lose (given that I’d lost a lot of coins through my lights). It was a superb demonstration of how to use a horse archer and cataphract based army.

Fortunately I did manage to kill at least one of his units, so technically the afternoon as a whole was to my advantage, but the way my Brits were annihilated didn’t make it feel so!

Here are some more pictures:

Last Painting of 2019

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Here’s the last painting of 2019: a couple of things I haven’t had time to photograph until now.

First up is another unit of “Swedish” horse for my English Civil War army:

These are 15mm Peter Pig figures painted with GW Contrast paints. I do like the Peter Pig figures - they have a lot of character and paint up nicely - but I do wish you didn’t have to spend so much time getting the horse stands to actually stand up.

And here’s a close up:

And finally here are a couple of figures that I painted up literally to hit the 2,000 point mark! They are two Onslaught Beserker figures from Nuclear Shrimp Games’ Brute range. Although the range is technically 15mm, the idea is that they are huge mutants, so the figures themselves are a good size 28mm.

Two More For The Challenge

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Two more of the regulars to the Painting Challenge are back for another year!

First up, we have John Haines, just starting his fourth year of entries. He opens the batting with a nice selection of Samurai figures:

Next we have veteran Challenge-r Andrew Helliwell with the first of his entries for his sixth year of submissions:

Andrew pops in some more ACW figures in 15mm and this rather nice MDF ruined factory from Warbases.

Book Review: "Sand & Steel: A New History of D-Day"

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One of my favourite Christmas presents was Peter Caddick-Adams’ new book Sand & Steel: A New History of D-Day.

As the title suggests, the book covers everything Overlord from the background to the invasion, the training and preparation for the day, and then the action on the day itself and after.

I very much enjoyed PCA’s previous book about the Bulge (Snow & Steel) and am pleased to say that this work is as good if not better. It’s very, very detailed, and a well-balanced mix of military history fact and personal accounts: one often complementing the other.

It’s also huge: over 230 pages or, in the hardback edition I have, 2½ inches thick! Some military history books of that size would be a nightmare to wade through, but Sand & Steel reads almost like a novel in terms of the way each section draws you into the next. In some places, particularly when dealing with the beach assaults, it is un-put-down-able.

The other problem one can encounter with detailed military histories is the difficulty in identifying how what you are currently reading about fits into the action as a whole: it’s easy to get lost or confused. Again, not a problem here: everything is ordered and laid out very clearly indeed. The beach landings, as above, are dealt with very logically: I actually found that once I’d seen them once, I didn’t have to refer to the maps scattered throughout the book a second time to work out what was going on…very unusual for me and the late war period!

So a “highly recommended” for this book. The price is fairly hefty (ratecard is £35) but you can get it new on Prime at the moment for about £23. Well worth it.

IABSM AAR: Rumble in the Jungle

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Here a nice little after action report from Alex Sotheran, taken from both the IABSM Facebook group and Alex’s Storm of Steel blog.

The game was Alex’s first using I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum!, and involved a solo game set on the Malay peninsular at the time of the Japanese invasion in December 1941. Although knocked together by Alex himself, the scenario resembles #02: Ban Sadao from the Fall of the Lion Gate scenario pack.

Click on the picture below to see how Alex got on:

TFL Painting Challenge: More First Entries

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Chris Kay slams back into the Painting Challenge with a huge first entry for 2020: clearing the stash of 28mm vehicles that have been hanging around on his painting table for some time.

That’s 108 points for six 28mm vehicles:

Sons of the Scorpion!

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Here’s a bit of my painting left over from last year’s scramble to get over the 2,000 points mark for the 2019 Painting Challenge: some 15mm Sons of the Scorpion from Splintered Light Miniatures.

The figures come in three parts: the scorpion body, the scorpion tail, and the human body. They glue together really easily: the tail is provided with a pin that neatly fits into a hole in the back of the scorpion body; and the human body sits in a little cup at the front of the scorpion body. Both bits show that someone has actually thought about how the average model maker is going to build this figure.

The figures are painted for the most part using GW Contrast Paints. One coat of Wyrdwood for the main scorpion body, then one cost of Darkoath Flesh for the human bit. Really very simple indeed and look really good.

The Sons of the Scorpion figures are part of a large collection of fantasy Egyptian figures available from Splintered Light, including: Sons of Anubis (Jackal-headed); Sons of Horus (da Bird!); and the Sons of the Scarab (dung beetle humainoid types). I must confess that do rather fancy a Sons of Anubis army to fight my “normal” Egyptians…a few other projects to finish first though!

TFL Painting Challenge: Another First Entry of the Year

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It’s John Emmett’s turn to make his first contribution to the TFL Painting Challenge 2020, with a rather magnificent 1/48th scale model of a Citroen motor car.

And, not to be outdone by anyone, Travis has already submitted his second entry of the year: dwarven command and the aptly named Gandalf the Field-Grey!

IABSM AAR: On the Northern Shoulder of Kursk, Fight 6: German Assault on the 1st May Collective Farm

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Here’s the final episode from Just Jack’s incredible “On the Northern Shoulder of Kursk” series of battle reports.

Here the Germans launch a last-ditch attempt to take the 1st May Collective Farm is the face of the usual determined Soviet defence.

This is another truly epic report (146 photographs plus plenty of text) so well worth a look. Click on the picture below to see all:

Check out Just Jack’s blog by clicking here.