FoG has landed…

After a certain amount of confusion with the status of my Amazon order, I arrived in work yesterday to discover that my copy of the new Field of Glory rules plus the first two army list books had arrived.

First impressions are actually very good . The quality of the publishing is nothing short of excellent – I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised given that it’s published by Osprey, but that is never a guarantee – anyway, it’s full colour throughout with lots of colour illustrations from various Osprey books, plus many photos of models.

The rulebook is firmly aimed at the new gamer – as well as the rules themselves, there are several sections about collecting and painting armies, along with tactical advice for those new to wargaming.

Each army list book gives a summary of the various armies detailed – again with illustrations and pictures which can aid in painting. My first impression of the army books were a little disappointing – they are very well produced, but they contain more lists and pictures and less ‘fluff’ than I was expecting.

However, I’m reserving further judgement until after I have played a couple of games – look out for the review on the podcast.

Kudos to Empire Games Store

Following on from my current Napoleonic painting exploits, I’d been recommended to use Vallejo Black Glaze as a good way of shading 6mm figures.

I almost picked up a bottle of this at Hammerhead, but then didn’t. So, I was looking around the web for a UK company that sold Vallejo paints and came across Empire Games Store. Not only do they sell Vallejo paints for only £1.60 a bottle, but they offer free postage on orders over £9.00.

As I previously noted, I’ve just bought some new paint brushes, but I was unable to find any small detail brushes. Empire sell Vallejo brushes (which I’d been recommended by a mate) and so I decided to try out a couple of these as well.

I placed the order on Tuesday afternoon, and it arrived first thing Wednesday morning.

Superb service!

My first 6mm figures

Well, I’ve just finished painting my first few strips of 6mm French.

I must admit to being somewhat disappointed with the outcome so far, though I cannot quite put my finger on why.

Maybe it’s because I’m not used to painting the scale (still too geared towards what 28mm figures look like?), and I know that you can’t really completely judge a figure until it’s based and finished, but I do know that I’m not happy with the result at the moment.

Having had a conversation with a friend, I have decided that I needed a new set of paint brushes, and so the weekend saw me purchase a set of Windsor & Newton brushes – only the Galeria range – but this company has a very good reputation, so I am looking forward to seeing how they perform in comparison with the brushes I have been using up until now (primarily Games Workshop).

Getting under way

Well, the second painting project of the new year is under way, as I’ve finally managed to put paint to metal.

Capitalizing on my enthusiasm from Hammerhead last weekend, and the Marechal de l’Empire game on Wednesday, I decided to crack on and start painting my Baccus 6mm French army.

So, I opened the French Army bag up, grabbed all the line infantry, several lolly sticks, some PVA glue and got sticking. The lolly sticks are big enough to fit 5 strips of Infantry onto, so I decided that each battalion would occupy a stick, and my command strips would all be painted together.

Next job was to wait for the glue to dry and then out with the spray paint (on a cold and windy day – not the best prospect for spray painting: frozen fingers and paint going everywhere except where it’s supposed to!)

So, after just over an hour of cleaning up, sticking and spray painting, my first batch of French Infantry is ready for painting: 200 infantry plus 40 command figures – it still seems the start of a large mountain to climb, but I’m currently reciting the mantra from Peter Berry – “Paint the unit, not the man!”

More Eureka Samurai

Well, my order from Fighting15s arrived last night – which completes my HOTT army, or so I thought.

A quick look through the figures, and then a check of the invoice revealed that I’d forgotten the mounted Army General – argh!

So, it was back to the website, but I couldn’t just order a single £0.80 figure, could I? So I ended up ordering the Oriental Dragon from the 10mm Eureka Fantasy range too.

So, that leaves me with 24 foot figures, 6 mounted figures plus 2 command/hero stands and the BUA to paint. Surely this can’t take very long, can it?

6mm Napoleonic madness!

Having played a couple of games of Polemos Napoleonic rules from Baccus I was sufficiently impressed to look at buying an army.

Baccus produce a wide range of 6mm Napoleonic figures – so the first thing was to decide what army to play. Given that my opponent already has quite a large painted British army, I decided to go with French (at least it means I will always have someone to fight!)

I ordered a French Army from Baccus, and picked it up from the Hammerhead show at the weekend. I’m not sure if I was prepared for exactly what I received.

This army is HUGE! Admittedly, I’ve ordered some extra packs of Infantry and Cavalry to make the army viable for the Polemos army lists, but the number of figures to paint is quite daunting, even in 6mm.

• 1000+ Infantry
• 200+ Cavalry
• plus Artillery guns, teams and Officers

As an extra factor, I’ve never painted anything smaller than a 25mm figure in my life, so this should be interesting!

HOTT Samurai revisited

Well, we’ve had many problems with getting this campaign off the ground. The primary one was simply getting hold of all the figures that we needed. Although we placed a large order (over £300 worth) for Two Dragons figures with Caliver Books, we only ever received the character figures – the rank and file samurai and ashigaru simply never turned up.

With credit to Caliver, this wasn’t their fault, but rather an issue with Two Dragons. After several months we cancelled our back order with Caliver and got a refund for our outstanding order.

So, we were left with having to find a new set of figures. After some searching around, we eventually decided on using Eureka’s range of Samurai – these are slightly bigger 15mm figures, but are very nice.
The figures arrived, but by this time most of the original enthusiasm for the project had waned and so they sat in a box doing nothing.

Fast forward to a conversation in the pub last week – several people are starting to think that they are playing too much Commands & Colours Ancients of late, and want something else to concentrate on as well. The Samurai campaign is mentioned, and suddenly we are back on.

 I looked at the Eureka figures against the Two Dragons figures, and they really are in a different league – far superior in my opinion. So, I decided to replace my original Two Dragons character figures with ones from Eureka, and placed an order.
However, Eureka don’t produce everything I need (Ninja, for example) so I’ve ordered a few figures from Freikorps as well. Hopefully they will turn up in the next week or so and I can get painting

Command & Colors Ancients – Repbulican Roman Army: Introduction

Playing Commands & Colors: Ancients, the board game from GMT Games, with figures rather than blocks has really proven popular at Scimitar wargames club, so much so that we decied to put together a Punic Wars ladder campaign.

Now, most of the club members already have Ancients armies for DBM in either 15mm or 28mm, and so it was decided to play with these figures, and use the camapign rules written by Don Clarke, which use the DBA army lists as a basis for each army (12 elements).I decided to play Republican Romans, since these are a fairly “standard” army in C&CA, and give a good mix of troops.

The Republican Roman army of the period is based upon the Polybian Roman DBA army list is made up of the following:

• 2 Units of Light Infantry
• 6 Units of Medium Infantry
• 2 Units of Heavy Infantry
• 2 Units of Medium Cavalry

It has no options within the list.

We were using the standard DBA element sizes, which meant that each unit of Light Infantry consists of 4 bases of 2 figures each, each unit of Medium & Heavy Infantry has 4 bases of 4 figures each and each unit of Medium Cavalry consists of 3 bases of 3 mounted figures. A quick bit of arthimetc revels that I need the following number of figures:

• Light Infantry – 16 figures
• Medium Infantry – 96 figures
• Heavy Infantry – 32 figures
• Medium Cavalry – 18 mounted figures

I very quickly decided that putting together an army of this size in 28mm would be very expensive – in excess of £150 – and so I started looking at alternatives. Even in 15mm, the army would cost a fair amount – and then I thought about using plastic troops.

Andrew Lawrence in our club uses plastic troops for all his ancients gaming, and I’ve previously played C&CA with a couple of his armies. The figures (1/72nd or 20mm) have a good visual impact on the board. What is more, plastic figures are very affordable, and as an added bonus are very light, making a sizeable army easy to transport.

A quick visit to the Plastic Soldier Review website, and a chat with Andrew, confirmed my thoughts and I put together a list of what I needed for the army. The main choice to make was how I was going to represent the difference between the Medium and Heavy troop types, and in the end I decided that I would use Hastati for the Medium Troops, whilst the Heavies would be made up of Princeps and Triari. The figure box sets from Hat Industries seemed to fit these requirements pretty well, and so I made these my troops of choice.My final shopping list looked like this:

• 3 Boxes of Velites & Hastati
• 1 Box of Princeps & Triari
• 2 Boxes of Roman Cavalry
• 1 Box of Roman Command

The box of Roman Comand was to provide the figures for the Army General, and to give some officer figures for the units. The really good news about these figures were that after routing around, Andrew had some going spare, and so I picked these up cheaper than normal. The entire army came to no more than £24.00!

 All that was left to do was to buy the bases for the army, and these were bought from East Riding Miniatures, as they do an excellent range of pre-cut MDF bases, ideal for element based wargames and very reasonably priced.

Welcome!

Hello and welcome to the new Meeples & Miniatures blog.

So, why a blog?

Well, I’m in the process of redesigning the Meeples & Miniatures website – trying to bring the whole thing kicking and screaming into the 21st Century – and so I thought that I would spilt the content into 3 seperate sections.

The Website will host all the articles – reviews, picture galleries, painting guides, OOBs etc.
The Podcast archive will now be solely housed on libsyn.com, and I’ve updated that website accordingly.

This blog will be the host of all my day-to-day posts, projects etc.

And of course, the forums are still hosted at The Guild at www.boardgamegeek.com

I hope you enjoy the content of the new blog!

Cheers,