More for the Challenge

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Another six year veteran returns for his seventh outing on the Painting Challenge: Andy Duffell. His first submission of the year is goblins, ghosties and a couple of menacing looking statues. Featured here is the Goblin Ninja, if that is a thing!

Andy’s first entry of the year is accompanied by lots of second, third and even fourth submissions from other participants. Today we feature entries from Carole, Chris Cornwall, Joe McGinn, Mark Luther, Steve Burt, Bluemoose Ken, John Emmett, Lloyd “Aztec Hat” Bowler, and Mervyn Douglas.

Something from each is featured below, but I’d recommend visiting their galleries for the full portfolio.

IABSM AAR: Blenneville or Bust! #02: Avaux

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Great little I Ain’t Been Shot Mum After Action Report from Rob Goodfellow covering a game played using the second scenario of the Blenneville or Bust! scenario pack.

After an American recon force drives off its German opposition, British armour tries a thrust through Avaux..but the Germans are waiting for them.

Click on the picture below to see all.

And Another For The Challenge

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Doug Melville is back! Another long-term veteran with entries in every one of the six years since the Challenge began.

Doug has been building jungle, enormous amounts of jungle. To be exact (in inches) 20 x 12 x 6 (in 3 full & 1 ¾ full box so 3.75 boxes)  =   5,400 cubic inches. In metres, about 8.43 cubic metres.

I have scored this as fifteen pieces of terrain, so lots of points: but worth every one as I know how much time and effort goes in to creating this stuff!

We also have new entries from Melvyn, Ralph, Travis, Mark and John, some examples of which appear below..but I’d encourage to visit the individual galleries to see everything that’s been done.

Scorecard will be updated at the weekend.

New Grudd from Onslaught

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Ages since I’ve painted any 15mm sci-fi, but a good way to start the new year is with the latest release from Onslaught Miniatures in their Grudd, or space dwarf, range.

The new releases consist of a two-man “gun trike” and a one-man bike. I’ve painted them, as with the rest of the Grudd, in metallic paints, although the different coloured “armour” didn’t turn out as different as I wanted them to be i.e. the bikes are a dark shade of metallic blue/green (Nautilus car paint from Halfords) and the riders are standard metallic blue (Tamiya).

I do, however, like the contrast between the metallic bodywork/armour and the matt tyres.

Anyway, a couple of recon squads for the Grudd, and I see that Onslaught have announced more releases are on the way.

One More for the Challenge

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Sapper makes a welcome return to this year’s Painting Challenge. This is his sixth year of participation (he missed out on year one) but with an average score of 2,129 per year, I think we can forgive him for that.

Sapper’s first offering of 2020 includes a rather smashing unit of 28mm pikemen:

Also adding to their scores today are Carole, Travis and John. By now you should be able to recognise their painting styles, but I’ll caption the photos just in case!

Incidentally, this post means that I have posted something every day in January. That may not sound like much but, given that I’ve never been able to do a whole month complete before in the six years that this website has been going, that, to me, is quite an impressive achievement.

I’m fairly sure that I can’t keep it up, but do promise to bring you as much great new content as I can manage, so keep checking back on a regular basis. I’m also very happy to receive AAR from any company-sized Lardy games (IABSM, CDS, Q13) or anything else that fits in with our general theme. Submissions to the website address on the right.

PS Actually I’ve managed to post every day since December 20th!

IABSM AAR: More Arras from the Weekend

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Yes, I know we have had two lots of Arras already (three if you count the 15mm game from a couple of weeks ago) but here is another set of photographs taken from this last weekend’s Salute-warm-up Arras game.

These are all by Phil Turner, one of the players in the game, and are lifted from the IABSM Facebook Group.

I would recommend a look at these, even if you think you’ve “seen it all before”: there are some cracking close ups well worth gander!

Click on the picture below…

Three More For The Painting Challenge

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Three more entrants for the Painting Challenge today.

First up we have Bluemoose Ken (Ken Eckhardt) returning for his third consecutive year. Ken always has a wide variety in his offerings, and today is no exception: we have some Spanish men and a donkey.

Next we have Fred Bloggs, returning for his sixth year (he skipped 2017). Fred’s entries are always an eclectic mix, but here are some pretty normal pikemen from Newline Design.

Finally in newbie-ville we have Mervyn Douglas, who is only a newbie to this year’s challenge as he has actually entered every year since we began. That makes this his seventh year and, with an average points total of 2,198, six good years under his belt so far as well.

Mervyn starts this year’s challenge with some figures for Mortal Gods:

It’s also been a busy week for two other people. Joe McGinn has sent in some more of his lovely Napoleonics; and Travis has been painting naked Celts…

Keep them coming!

IABSM AAR: Arras: Another Run Through

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Here are more great shots of Michael Curtis and Friends’ Arras Counter-Attack demo game planned for Salute this year.

This was the second run-through of the weekend, with a slight change to the British start position to see whether that would speed up the “action” part of the game.

Click on the picture below to see all.

ECW: The Battle of Montgomery

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I’ve been playing the Ancients rules To The Strongest for some months now, and really enjoying it as a fun, fast-play, grid-based game that gets plenty of figures onto the table and avoids most arguments about whether one unit is 33mm or 35mm from another etc. Looking for some army lists (free to download), I noticed that BigRedBat also do an English Civil War variant to TTS called For King and Parliament. I’ve never really played Pike & Shot before, but this sounded like a good way to start, so I bought a copy and started working out what figures I would need.

Conveniently, there’s a sample scenario with OBs in the back of the rulebook covering the Battle of Montgomery, 1644, so I used that as the basis for the start of my collection. As those of you who visit this website regularly know, the Christmas holiday provided time to paint enough troops to field the Parliamentarian side of the battle, so when John offered to bring round his collection, we were ready to give FK&P a go.

Setting up the battle is simple. Royalists are up on a ridge. They outnumber the Roundheads with two cavalry brigades and two infantry brigades. Parliamentarian infantry, one brigade, is on a hill opposite, with a cavalry brigade next to them. Off table is another brigade of cavalry which is currently out foraging.

view from the roundhead right

Parliamentarians

Cavaliers

The Battle

As I was badly outnumbered in the centre, my plan was to win on my left flank, hopefully helped by my returning foragers, and then roll up his line from the left before he could beat me in the center and on the right.

I had the first turn, and therefore concentrated my efforts on my cavalry: my infantry remaining still. One regiment of cavalry swept forward and charged one of their opposite number. Unlike TTS, multiple combat cards are regular in FK&P with, in this instance, five going down. Result: three hits, not enough saves, enemy cavalry destroyed. This was a good start, but the same thing happened to me on the Royalist go, so after one turn we were honours-even and no sign of the foragers.

Fortunately his infantry were obviously still having their hair done (Royalist fops!) so hadn’t moved towards me.

Second turn, same sort of result as the first, but disastrously my Commanding General had (somewhat foolishly) joined the cavalry charge and was killed in the melee. This cost me a serious number of victory coins as, in FK&P, losing officers is really painful, and that’s in addition to losing their command abilities. Worse, this time some of his infantry were on the move. Things were looking a bit grim.

Third turn, however, my foragers arrived and tipped the balance on the left. Now here’s the real fun of FK&P compared to TTS: if you charge on the flank you don’t get a measly one extra attack card: you get double what you’ve earned for a frontal attack!

Here’s two shots of my returning foragers hitting the right flank of his cavalry:

And here’s all the lovely attack cards I got to play!

Note that despite the huge numbers of cards played, a couple of cavalry units did survive being hit in the flank…but not when they were hit again and again.

End result: a cavalry victory…but would it be enough bearing in mind what was happening in the centre?

No more Royalist cavalry to fight!

The Infantry Battle

By now the advancing Royalist infantry had cleared away my Forlorn Hopes and had just engaged my main battle line. By this time, I was suffering from a bad loss of victory coins: one more lost unit and that was it! You can see the cavalry melee just finishing in the background, so I wasn’t getting any help from them yet, and the only high point was that the Royalist infantry (pike heavy, so at an advantage in combat) were attacking piecemeal as they hadn’t been able to co-ordinate their attack.

Royalists coming up the hill

But wait, I hear you cry, what’s that other unit in the distance, by the bridge. well that, my friends, is the Derbyshire Horse: an untried regiment that had passed its first test and already seen off a partially blown enemy cavalry regiment.

The Derbyshire’s charged forward gloriously and, just as my left hand infantry battalia was about to crumble, smashed into the open flank of the enemy infantry assaulting them.

Huzzah for the Derbyshires

The enemy infantry were smashed from the field, relieving John of the last of his victory coins: Parliament was victorious!

Aftermath

A very successful game that literally came down to the last action. Had the Derbyshire’s not done as they did, I would likely have lost that last one unit: the red-clad infantry battalia was on its last legs.

John and I both agreed that For King & Parliament gives a great game and will be fighting other battles of the English Civil War soon. For me, as well, it’s back to the painting table to add some more units to my forces, so the old credit card is about to take a hammering!

My only regret: I have a horrible feeling that I shall be missing all the attack cards next time I play TTS!

Robert Avery

More Swedish Horse for ECW

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I’ve almost got enough figures now to field the Parliamentarians at the Battle of Montgomery, 1644: the sample scenario that appears in the For King and Parliament rulebook.

Today’s contribution to the total is a couple of units of helmeted Swedish Horse accompanied by two Gallant Gentlemen on foot.

The cavalry are all Peter Pig figures, the foot are Essex. All are 15mm and mostly painted with GW Contrast Paints.

I’m very pleased with the horses. As I couldn’t find a good horse-brown straight from a Contrast pot, I decided to experiment and buy the Contrast thinner and then see what happened when I did a 50/50 mix with Contrast Cygor Brown.

My main concern was what to mix them in, but then daughter number two gave me a little pot that she bought from the art shop for doing exactly this, and the problem was neatly solved. In went half a centimetre of Cygor Brown, in went the same amount of thinner, a quick shake and the brown you see on the models above is one coat of the mixture with no highlighting over Wraithbone primer. All I did do was paint the manes, tails and lower legs in undiluted Cygor Brown. Very quick and very easy. I shall be trying this sort of thing again…once I work out the best time to nip into my daughter’s room and steal the rest of her mixing pots!

IABSM AAR: Arras (a different game!)

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Michael Curtis and friends are putting on a demo game of I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum at Salute this year. The scenario chosen is the Arras counterattack of May 1940.

Demo games need a lot of preparation, and a good few run throughs before they are ready for public consumption. Click on the pic below to see this one:

Those of you who regularly visit this site will know that we had a different Arras battle report last Tuesday. Here’s the link so that you can compare the two.

A Somewhat Bigger Model!

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I don't often post about my other hobbies: this is, after all, a site devoted to wargaming.

Yesterday, however, I fulfilled a long term ambition and added a somewhat bigger model to my collection of figures: a muk yan jong or wooden dummy.

For those of you wondering what on earth it is (or, considering the state of mind of most Lardies, where the batteries go!) it is a wooden dummy for practicing wing chun kung fu, one of the several martial arts that I study.

It , or rather two large boxes, were waiting for me when I got back from training yesterday. I should, of course, have waited until both daylight and the weekend before building it, but obviously just couldn’t. Practically killed me: as I should have added “and for someone to help” to the list of things I needed before construction began.

For a start, it’s oak, so the body bit weighs a ton. Then, of course, you have a to work out how to bolt the base and the body together given the different shapes and heights off the ground involved. Not easy, particularly when you are lining up five six-inch bolts into hard-to-see holes!

But I managed, and very fine looking it is too. All I have to do now is learn how to use it!

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: