Frankish Casualties - 8th Painting Challenge Entry

Due to lack of enthusiasm I didn't paint as much as I should for the challenge. I hope this gets better now as I attended to TACTICA in Hamburg this weekend and came home with literally thousands of new ideas.
Meanwhile I can show you my newest submission to Curt's "Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge". This time the fortnight thematic bonus round was all about casualties.The poll is still open so make sure you pop over and nominate your most favourite amongst some really stunning entries. Meanwhile here's my entry for you to enjoy:

TACTICA Hamburg 2014

After a weekend full of hobby goodness at TACTICA in Hamburg I'm back at home. For all of you not beeing familiar with TACTICA it's the biggest wargames convention here in Germany. With its 1602 visitors it's maybe not as big as SALUTE in London or CRISIS in Antwerp but the atmosphere is fantastic.
Plenty of fantastic gaming tables and figures as well as lots of dealers. Unfortunately this year Comitatus didn't show up so I couldn't buy all the Gripping Beast and Musketeer stuff I had in my mind for expanding my Frankish and Late Roman armies. I of course found some other ways to spend my hard earned cash and bought loads of goodness from Wargames Foundry and quite some terrain pieces from Stronghold Terrain and a great Roman Temple in 28mm from Lasermodellbau.

This year also saw me on the gaming tables having lots of fun. Both games were based on the very enjoyable Triumph & Tragedy rules. The first game was hosted by Jan (aka Lt. Hazel) of "At the Mountains of Lead" fame and his friends. Me and my dear friend Chris (aka Axebreaker) pitted Jans masterfully painted Romans and Goths against each other. As always I fielded the might of Rome. My mission was to bring a cart full of riches into safety while Chris had to stop me. As always I lost the game in the end but it was big fun and we both had a great time. Therefore many thanks to Jan and friends.

The other game took place on sunday morning and I had the pleasure to play with Björn the author of T&T. In remembrance of the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the great war he hosted virtually two games. The one was a game set in the very first days when the Germans attacked France.  Beautifully painted Germans were crossing the borders and were greeted by colorful French using their Hotchkiss LMG's to maximum advantage. The table in my opinion was great and really captured the feel of the early war of movement.
For his other game (the one I played) he turned on the wheels of time to a point when trench warfare had all the western front in his grip. Again the figures were painted absolutely to my liking and the trench tiles really made me think to start working on my own again. I played the Germans while Björn took command of the not so contemptible little (british) army. My objective was to break into his trenches and search for goods of value in two hidden dugouts. Exceptionally I won the game when my troops almost wiped out all his troops and by sheer look found the barrels full of valuable oil in the very first dugout they entered.

I took quite some pics and wasn't able to decide which ones to show here so I hope you don't mind to click through them all.

The WW1 trench warfare game I played

Dark Age Franks - 7th Painting Challenge Entry

At the moment there's not much going on here painting wise due to some busy days at work. So I was happy to get these four minis for the "Hero or Heroic Group" fortnight thematic bonus round of Curt's Painting Challenge done. The poll is still open so make sure you pop over and nominate your most favourite amongst some really stunning entries. Meanwhile here's my entry for you to enjoy:

 

Continuing my journey into the Dark Ages I painted the leaders for my Franks. I intended them to represent Childeric and his entourage. Note: What follows is only my interpretation of some rather inaccurate bits and pieces of history and myth.

Again a mixed bag of WW1 & WW2 - 6th Painting Challenge Entry & Vehicle Bonus Round

The third fortnight theme bonus round  of Curt's Painting Challenge is all about Vehicles. The poll is open since sunday so make sure to head over and vote for your favourite entries among a whole bunch of outstanding interpretations of the 'Vehicle' theme.

For my submission I went for a Daimler Mk1 armoured car for my Red Devils paratrooper force in beeing. Originally I intended to do a Churchill AVRE tank but decided it wouldn't fit my plans for the force.

A mixed bag of WW1 & WW2 - 5th Painting Challenge Entry

This time I'm back to historicals again:

As I finally decided to let my Great War games take place on the eastern front I ordered a pack of White Russian Officers from the Copplestone Russian Civil War range.These were intended as a test what colours to use and if they fit the bill. After all I'm rather pleased with the outcome and probably will stick to the range for further reinforcements.

Freebooters Fate Goblin Pirates - 4th Painting Challeneg Entry

I hope you'll forgive me but this time no historical stuff. Instead some quite fanciful Goblin Pirates from my 2nd Bonus Round Challenge Entry:

Dark Age Franks - 3rd Painting Challenge Entry

As enough time elapsed here's my 3rd entry to Curt's Painting Challenge:

Being a rather slow painter I finally managed to get the figures for my next entry done. These Saxon Gedrith will feature in future games of Dux Britanniarum and Dux Bellorum. I intend to use them as Franks as I want leave the British Isles story wise.

                                     

  

Short round up of 2013 and a Happy New Year!

Well, with the long dreaded arrival of 2014 imminent it's time to make a short round up of the year gone by.
Therefore it's probably useful to  look what I was planning to do in 2013:

• First of all I definitely will be completing my late romans. I'm not that happy with my output over the last weeks as I was hoping to get these guys done in 2012. At the moment there are still 24 footsloggers and four men of cavalry left.-Fully achieved, in fact I did a bit more-

• Second I'm planning on doing some 28mm crusaders for IMPETUS. As I already have some plastics knights and footsergeants from Fireforge Games the headstone for the project has already been placed. With my decision to do base these for IMPETUS I'll be leaving the solid ground of single basing my miniatures for the first time. On the other hand by using multi bases it will be possible to tell a little story with every unit I think. -Big Fail. I did exactly two figures and decided to sell the stuff-

• Third  there are some 15mm Germans and Americans waiting for beeing painted. These guys will be single based again as they will (hopefully) see battles using Bolt Action, Battlegroup Kursk and (or more likely) upcoming supplements as well as Agis Neugebauer's Victory Decision. Why using 15mm for all this? Over the past months it became more and mor obvious to me that I'll never be able to paint up as much 28's for WWII as I would need in order to play the rulesets mentioned above as they need too much time to be painted up to a standard I'm happy with. -Epic Fail. Infact I had to admit I'll probably never get rid of  my addiction to 28mm.

• Fourth I'll maybe (a monstrous maybe) dive into the American Civil War as it's a very interesting setting to me. -Well what else could I say then failed? I did four figures before deciding to turn to other projects.

• Fifth I would like to start a small late WWI german army perhaps using the great 15mm miniatures from Bluemoon Manufacturing. -I'd say success. I didn't go for 15mm but purchased quite a bunch of well painted 28mm figures and am still adding some stuff.

• Sixth there are some Perry Normans laying around for some time now, waiting to complete my norman warband for SAGA. -Fail again. I think they'll probably won't see daylight for quite some time as my interest in Normans suddenly faded.-

• Seventh I'm planning to replace my plastics saxons from Gripping Beast in my saxon SAGA warband with some Westwind saxons and goth/ germans from Musketeer Miniatures as I don't like the look of the plastics any more. -I wouldn't say success but I did some figures and will paint some during 2014 to get them on the table for Dux Bellorum.-

Well, you see... most of my goals for 2013 were abandoned somewhere along the road. But I'm sure most of you will know this problem called shiniytus :-)
All in all I did manage to paint some 179 miniatures. This number includes infantry, cavalry, casualty markers, Artillery pieces armoured cars as well as some tanks. So I think I can be quite happy with what I did in 2013.

What am I planning to do in 2014? 
I have to confess I'm not too sure about it yet. But there are two or three things I really want to do.

• First and foremost I want to get all the stuff painted I prepared for Curt's Annual Analogue Hobby Challenge. This includes some Fallschirmjäger, British Paras for Bolt Action (500 pts. worth of), some more early Saxons, some republican Romans and some odds and ends.

• After the challenge I want to add to my Late Romans and the Early Saxons in order to have two well sized forces for Dux Bellorum and later on Impetus. Actually I think I could already field a 32 pts. Roman force for Dux with 5 or 6 points of allied Saxons. Though there are so much nice figures out there...

•  And as my second big goal I'm aiming at completing a Great War Russian Army to fight my Germans. As an aside I want to use the Russians as Whites to attend to Partisan-Con in 2014. That's a small RCW/BoB Con in Mannheim Germany. You can find some nice pictures from the 2013 Con *here* (text in German).

So you see I'm not as ambitious as for 2013.
Now there's nothing more to say than:


I wish all my followers and fellow bloggers A Happy New Year and may 2014 see you completing all your goals!

Impressione: Saga 'Clash of Empires'

Last week Chris (Aka Axebreaker) and me had a game of SAGA. He pitted his new Early Saxons (using the Viking Battleboard) against my Late Romans (using the Anglo-Saxon Battleboard). We played the 'Sacred Ground' scenario from the basic ruleset. In this scenario you have to accumulate as many victory points (VP) as possible. These you gain by the number of troops you have on the three terrain features and of course by killing the troops of your opponent. For the Warlord on the terrain you gain three VP's, every Hearthguard warrior gives you one point and every second normal warrior or levy generates one point.

A Wicca Priest as guardian of the holy grove  .

Dark Age Civilians - 2nd Painting Challenge Entry

For the first bonus round I frantically rummaged through my lead mountain as I couldn't remember if I've ever bought any civilian-like figures. The first thing I came over was a set of carts from Gripping Beast unfortunately lacking the drivers. Some time later I discovered these three gentlemen.