Barrage XXV, 23-24 September 2022

 It is hard to believe that the HAWKs reached Barrage 25 this year; it still seems like only yesterday when someone suggested at a club meeting that a game day would be a good idea.  We went to two days a couple of years ago, and this year we had over 200 attendees including club members.

Unfortunately for me, I had to miss the Friday events, as I was returning from a work trip to Utah over which I did not have schedule control, and didn’t walk in the door at home until 9:30PM on Friday.  I was signed up to run a Not Quite Seven Years War game on Saturday morning.  While I had spent the weekend before the trip organizing my flea market offerings, and ensuring that I knew where all of the Bronze Age gear that my son Norman was going to need was stowed, I did not have the NQSYW scenario materials pulled out.

Therefore, I got an early start on Saturday morning, pulled all the stuff up from the basement, and got it loaded.  It still wasn’t early enough to avoid a bridge closure due to a running event, but at least I knew that it was likely to be happening this year.  Carrying around a stack of boxes loaded with Charge! regiments in 40mm does leave me wondering these days whether I should be recreating the NQSYW in something a little more portable, such as 1/72 scale plastics …

Chris Palmer brought the North Polenburger army, so the scenario involved an attempt by the Northern Alliance, here represented primarily by North Polenburg, to hold a bridge long enough to allow an evacuation after nightfall.  The Pragmatic Coalition was represented by Schoeffen-Buschhagen, Wachovia, and the Imperial Free City of Wiegenburg, as usual. 

The North Polenburg 32nd Dragoons made an impressive display on their gray horses, as usual.

They fought well, although there was one moment when the lone Wachovian Hussar standard bearer fought off a pair of Dragoons and preserved the flag; a commendation is no doubt in order.

As the battle progressed, the Coalition left flank gradually pushed in the Alliance’s right, in a series of cavalry charges and countercharges so typical of the rules.  The Wiegenburg Regiment (center right) in their white coats (and leading their mascot into the action) suffered heavy casualties in a direct assault on the Alliance line defending the bridge and were eventually forced to withdraw.  A follow-on attack by the Schoeffen-Buschagen Adelmann Regiment, though, was more than the defenders could withstand, and the game ended with the Alliance forces being compelled to withdraw in disorder, seeking an alternative crossing location.

It was, as always, nice to have the NQSYW back on the table.  As I’ll discuss below, there are several reasons why that project is on the top of my mind right now.

Norman has been working steadily on expanding the Bronze Age 1/72 project since last year’s Barrage, and he staged an afternoon game of Egyptians versus a Sea Peoples alliance using his home rules (NURD: Norman’s Universal Rules Design) which looked like it went well.  He ended up coming up prepared to rebase a few of my Egyptian chariots on the spot, to ensure that the Egyptians had the numbers needed.

My flea marketeering went well.  I arrived with four boxes of stuff and returned home with two, plus  $370 in pocket, so I was pleased.  It’s no fault of Reaper Miniatures, but I sold off a lot of Bones 5 figures.  I have concluded that I am more interested in recreating (or perhaps just creating) the vision of fantasy miniatures I had in my youth, so I expect to be putting my effort into expanding my vintage 25mm collection instead of trying to keep up with the latest styles.  

Afterword:

I mentioned that there were a couple of reasons why the NQSYW was on my mind.  Back in August, right after Gen Con, my pre-ordered copy of Henry Hyde’s Wargaming Campaigns arrived.  As might be expected with Henry Hyde, horse and musket campaigning is front and center, so perhaps this will finally kick me over the edge into doing another NQSYW map-based campign.

Additionally, William, my second son and the originator of the Pragmatic Coalition’s Imperial Free City of Wiegenburg, has landed a job in the Washington DC area, and will be returning to this general area next week.  His appointment is for at least a year, so his brother and I have been considering some possible agendas for game days, especially since Norman’s basement, as seen  back in June is suitable for miniatures.

Recent Activities

  Norman wrote up a report on the “bracket campaign” for the DBA forums after our visit over the Memorial Day weekend, now three weeks ago.  My intention to blog about this sooner was completely overwhelmed by quotidian reality.

It was nice to see all of his painstaking pandemic painting placed in play.

While bad for blogging, I made the decision at the time to be “present in the moment”, and therefore did not take notes, nor too many pictures.

The following Friday (June 4th) the HAWKs met for the first face-to-face club game since this all started. Since our regular meeting location was not yet open to the public, we met at a member’s house, and we played a D-Day American paratroop scenario in honor of the date (or nearly so).

Irene and I then took a road trip to Michigan to visit my parents and my son in grad school.  It was good to see them, and we had a nice dinner out as a combined celebration of all the events that we missed over the past year. I got in a shopping trip to the Michigan Toy Soldier company and picked up a few things for Norman as well as a box of 1/72 scale Ultima Ratio medieval Italian civic militia, who may eventually appear in my solo fantasy campaign.  While I did take a hobby kit with me, the only thing I actually managed to finish was another settlement map for later use in my D&D game:

It was a (successful, I feel) experiment in using watercolor pencils to put some basic color on the pen and ink drawing quickly.  While I intend to do the next trial map with regular watercolors, the ease of putting down fairly precise colors with the pencils makes me think that will be the technique of choice for this work going forward.

There was another HAWKs meeting on the 18th (the day before yesterday…seems longer already), and I took my 54mm medieval skirmish game.  I had it out for ScrumCon last year, so it hasn’t been too neglected.  

Since it seemed to be a good week for gaming, my brother and I finally resolved a pending skirmish (using Dragon Rampant) in my solo campaign.  I had pulled out the troops and sent him the war band sheets months ago, but the game just never got played.  I decided that I had better keep the set up simple, so that it actually got done.

The situation developed as the result of an orc incursion near Wardenskeep, in eastern Darmis.

In accordance with my usual methods, I had determined that a skirmish was occurring, randomized an order of battle for the two sides, and then randomized a scenario.  Because I have not yet painted enough 1/72 scale orcs, and my son’s orcs (used for a previous encounter) had been returned to him, I ran this battle with 25mm lead figures, which are not in short supply here.

We ended up playing an ambush scerario.  The Darmish forces (consisting of a unit of axemen, 4 units of archers, and a unit of scouts) ended up as the ambushees.  Looking at the table above, their objective was to make their way down the road and exit at the end with the town, while the orcs entered from the sides, by the hills, and attempted to cut them off.  

The orcs sent their light wolf riders (with javelins) out to skirmish with the lead humans, but the archers out shot them.  The battle was fought cautiously by both sides…we frequently passed the play on a failed activation roll, but the (dis)honors were pretty evenly distributed, so it didn’t feel like either of us was particularly disadvantaged.  Eventually the Darmish commander’s guard (the axemen) stood off the wild charges of two bands of goblin berserkers before retiring from the field and leaving the fight to the archers.  The archers were equal to the task; eventually shooting drove off all the orc/goblin units.  Casualties among the humans were also heavy, though, and the game was pronounced a draw.

Again, I neglected to take enough pictures for a proper battle report.  At any rate, though, I’m glad to have that behind me, and will return to map maneuvers this week, as the first campaign season in the Northlands winds to an indecisive close.

I’ll leave this as a teaser:

Bronze Age Remote DBA Games in 1/72 scale

 

My sons and I got together yesterday on Google Meets (Hangouts is apparently dead) for a couple of games of remote DBA.  I hosted the first game, with the two of them playing, using my new Libyan chariot to command a Libyan army.  For those conversant with DBA, this is army I/7b, and I don’t have the figures done yet to provide any choices, so all the warriors were deployed as “auxilia” and there was a Sea Peoples stand rather than a second chariot.  There were up against later New Kingdom Egyptians (I/22b) whose only choice is whether to deploy the Sherden guard as “fast” or “solid” blades.  William was in command of the Egyptians and elected to make them “solid”.  A dice off for attacker/defender and for terrain left the Egyptians invading Libyan territory, so they were away from the water in a wilderness of rocky ground (represented by the brown cloth shapes) and a difficult hill.  Since we often have a hard time seeing things remotely anyway, we kept the terrain layouts pretty simple. If this were a convention demonstration game, it wouldn’t be hard to improve the table dressing. The Libyans deployed with most of their more capable troops to the left of the hill, and covered their right flank by deploying their skirmishers on the difficult hill.  The Egyptians were impeded somewhat by their need to carefully pick their way through the rocks and scrub.  They were deployed with most of their chariots out on their left flank in a bid to demoralize the enemy quickly by taking their camp.

 

Eventually the battle lines met at the edge of the rocky ground.  The Libyan swordsmen wilted under the hail of Egyptian arrows, losing one of two stands as soon as they were within range.  The usual DBA shoving match started, and the Libyans rapidly lost their fourth stand, ending the game.

I don’t know for sure what the screens showed at the far end.  For these family DBA games we have generally supplemented the  screen view with occasional cell phone pictures sent by text message, to clear up any difficulties in understanding the tactical situation:

We played a second game, with Arameans (I/6c) against Syro-Canaanites (I/20b) using Norman’s collection and board.

Unfortunately, however, for much of the game, it looked like that.  The Syrians (played by me) quickly rolled over the Arameans (William), aided by the fact that his general died in the first combat round in an attemtp to roll my army up from the flank before my chariots could make a difference.  As he said, in most games he’d have conceded right then, but we’d already be online for about two hours and I suggested that it would probably only take one more turn to actually decide the game by the rules.  I was right...

We wrapped it up after that.  I was glad to see my armies out; perhaps I’ll get a few more painted by the time we are ready for some face-to-face games again.

November Painting Summary

 

This is just a quick place holder.  November saw some painting done, though n ot what I expected, nor as much as I wanted.  I ended up working on a few things for the Portable Fantasy Game in addition to the Libyan chariot previously shown.  The Reaper “Sir Forscale” in the back row is not new this month; he’s just in for scale, as usual.

The fantasy campaign setting needs armies of orcs and elves, so I started by finishing up a couple of orc warrior samples from Caesar Miniatures.  The elves may get the tree things (more Reaper “Saprolings”) as reinforcements.  

Other than that, the merchant on the mule is from a Strelets Crusader transport set, and a Celtic Warrior Queen extra is doing new duty as a green-haiored dryad.  It’s time to put on a game featuring some of these things...

It’s the Libyans!

 I see that it has been a few weeks since I posted anything.  I actually took a week off from work back on the 9th, but my desk had reached this state...

...and it was therefore difficult to get anything done, except for one scenery piece.

I have been gradually working on improving my scenery collection, and decided a while back that I was going to build bases of trees and the like, to save wear and tear (at the expense of storage space, of course). As I worked toward the goal of staging a game with all-new pandemic era gear, I realized that I would need some walls.  These plastic walls from the Mantic Terrain Crate Kickstarter look reasonable, but are so thin that I can’t imagine how I would keep them standing on the game table. I decided that I would just go ahead and group them into a few permanent enclosures and base them on some of the irregular masonite bases I picked up last fall from an Etsy dealer.  There was some space left at one end, so I planted a few trees to make use of it.  The pictures above show the walls with a handful of the Prince August figures I’ve been painting.  When time permits, I have two more enclosures to go, plus a single spare broken down wall to enhance some other scene.

When that week was over, I had to clear the desk off to go back to using it as my work from home space.  When the next break started, I decided that I would depart a bit from my usual home desk procedures, by putting out ONE (and only one) thing to work on.  While there are plenty of Prince August figures awaiting my attention, my son has been working on DBA Bronze Age armies.  I have been one stand short of a complete Bronze Age Libyan army for months (I/7b, if you’re into that sort of thing), so I thought that it would be a good time to finish it.  I’ve had the pieces for a light chariot general stand sorted out since spring.  Our Bronze Age project is staffed by the beautiful and inexpensive Caesar Miniatures 1/72 scale plastics.  However, as extensive as their range is, there isn’t a “Libyan” chariot.  I built this one using an Egyptian chariot body, horse from one of their Mitanni chariots, and some of the Libyans as the crew and runners.  I thought about trying to jam in a driver as well, but it was looking too cluttered, so I didn’t.

This is what I ended up with.  

In keeping with the usual artists’ rendering of the Libyans (e.g., the New Kingdown Egyptian Osprey guide), most of my foot figures are painted with cloaks representing the hides of spotted cows with the hair left on.  I wanted to do something a little more upscale for the commander, so I went looking around for contemporary images, and came up with this:

I attempted to render the alternating lines of “arrows” and “eyes” from the second and fourth figures, and then echoed the same pattern on the chariot sides.  In the absence of evidence, that seems as good as any other possibility. 

With the completion of the command chariot, I now have all twelve DBA elements needed for my army:

My son has been pretty consistently building all the variable elements for his DBA armies.  For the Libyans, I could have a second chariot in place of the four man Sea Peoples blade stand, and three more “psiloi” in place of the stands of warriors (“fast auxilia” in the game).  I’ll probably build the chariot at some point, but I need to play some more DBA 3.0 to decide whether there is any reason I would choose to add three more psiloi to an army that already has five.

The next project on the desk will probably be fantasy rather than Bronze Age, but I do have a DBA army of Nubians sorted out, to give me another historical Egyptian opponent.

Since Gencon Online ... catching up

It has been a bad month and a half for blogging, and a rather middling one for hobbies.  Hence, I have decided to go ahead and catch up on what has been happening lately.  

Inspired by Gencon, my brother was kind enough to run a Chaos Wars game on the 8th of August, with Ral Partha elves vs. orcs.  Run remotely from his house, I took the elves, and for the first time in a number of remote games, the home player (i.e. NOT me) won the game.  Chaos Wars makes a reasonable remote game; it doesn’t involve a lot of units (usually) and it’s not too fussy about geometry.

(Screen capture from my iPad near the start of the 8 August Chaos Wars game)

It was my turn to host a game the following weekend, and Ross Macfarlane and Norman, my older son, took command of my collection of 40mm home cast Renaissance figures for an “imagi-nations” Civylle Stryfe in Ardenn game.  We used Scenario 22 from C.S Grant and Stuart Asquith’s Scenarios for All Ages.  Without actually looking it up, it’s called something like “Best of a bad lot”, and involves a tired column running into an army in camp, so that neither side would have chosen to fight under the circumstances.  

Ross ended up with the column, as Duke Frederick (the usurper; see As You Like It, by the historian Shakespeare), and Norman ended up with the camp (the loyalists, commanded by Italian soldier of fortune Mercutio). We were trying out a new variation of the Rough Wooing home rules designed for 40mm home cast figures using 1 stand = 1 company of ~100 men.  This turned out to be fussier than expected, and perhaps need a few more tweaks. On top of that, it was not a scenario we’d tried with these troops, so my attempt to implement the scenario conditions and impose a mechanical penalty for the tired attackers was perhaps too much.  So, a reasonable game, but it could have been better.  As the central gamemaster in a remote game, I ended up too busy following both sides’ orders to take as many pictures as I would have liked.

The camp’s defenses (to the right) have formed up to meet the Usurper’s tired troops

Screen capture from the central game server...

Theat wasn’t a bad weekend for games; I also finally set up and played a Dragon Rampant scenario generated by my solo campaign, which had been awaiting resolution for several months.  The nice thing about a solo campaign is that the opponent doesn’t get bored while waiting for the next move to be resolved.

I used some orcs borrowed from Norman and some of my general purpose fantasy/medieval 1/72 scale figures to resolve an encounter out on the eastern borders of the human kingdom of Darmis. I ran the “Into the Valley of Certain Death” scenario from the rule book, in which both sides have stumbled into some inhospitable territory.  In this case, I considered it to be an area of traps left by the elves, who are happy to wear down either or both parties.

The board is supposed to have 50% of the area covered in scenery, and any unit entering a terrain feature for any reason takes hits.  The units were, for the most part, able to maintain control and stay out of danger, so I was glad to be playing solo. I don’t think that it would have been too much fun as a regular two (or more) player game.

Captain of the Darmish forces (upper right) faces off against two companies of orcs

Nevertheless, it wasn’t a bad way to while away a pandemic era afternoon, and the path was clear to resolve the next month in the campaign.

Norman provided the fourth (and final) game of the month on the 30th.  He has been working on various Bronze Age DBA armies, so we tried out his Sea Peoples (a new army to us) against the Egyptians. We played two sessions, because my Egyptians were quickly smashed by the Sea peoples in the first session, and I wanted to see it it was bad luck, or whether my plan was flawed, so we just did a partial reset back to the starting positions.  In DBA terms both armies are “Littoral”,  which gives them the option of an amphibious landing on their first turn.  We both reserved troops for this; switchin up the actual landing locations for the two games.  I lost the second game as well, though by a somewhat smaller margin, but I am nevertheless forced to conclude that my plan was probably fatally flawed. 😕 

There hasn’t been a game yet this month, so that’s it for recent games.

I’ve gotten a little bit of painting done.  Inspired by Gencon, I painted two more relatively random figures for my proposed Urban Fantasy game:

Leon is a Reaper Bones Chronoscope figure, rebased, and Lucia is a Hero Forge custom figure.  She’s a fae character of some sort, with faun legs and big ears, though dressed in imported human styles.  That’s hoof polish, by the way, not pink slippers.

The next time I sat down with a brush, I ended finishing up a stand of Hordes of the Things “beasts” for the Portable Fantasy Campaign, consisting of a Caesar Miniatures elf sorceress...

... and two Reaper Bones “saprolings” as tree creatures of some sort.  This is the second (of two) of these stands.  The first was finished back in March.  

For my most recent micro-project, I stayed with the 1/72 scale fantasy theme with some baggage and a camp follower/NPC.  While cleaning up recently, I found a group of figures I had washed prior to priming some months ago.  Included in the group was a small flock of sheep, which I had started when I did a campaign battle last October, for which I had needed three baggage train items for an escort mission.  I had two, and filled in the third with a mounted Maid Marian from the Airfix Robin Hood set.  The sheep are from the Pegasus farm animals set. I decided after I had started them that I wanted a shepherd of some sort, so another Robin Hood set figure was drafted for the purpose.  For figures the Plastic Soldier Review lists as having been released in 1964, they hold up very well considered alongside some of the modern manufacturers.  The pregnant woman came from the Linear-B/Strelets Roman transport set.  The review notes that her costume isn’t particularly accurate for Roman times, but she fits right in to the generic fantasy themed collection.

I’ve got several things on the painting desk this weekend, so I shall hope to finish something tomorrow.  I have been using the desk as my work at home space, and I will need to be cleared off again by 7:30AM on Monday.

 

Death on the Nile, in Remote DBA

During the current  difficulties, I have been keeping in touch with the hobby by playing games remotely.  Happily, years of practice left us ready for this.  Yesterday, my sons had their turn, as I hosted a game for the two of them, separately remote.  Since younger son William acquired DBA 3.0  fall, we have had a resurgence of interest in the game, and older son Norman and I (well, mostly Norman) have been at work reshaping and extending an earlier 1/72 Bronze Age project to cover more of the possible armies of the 13th century BCE.  For yesterday’s game, we pitted the ancient Libyans (DBA Army I/7b) against the New Kingdom Egyptians (I/22b).

 I set up the iPad on a tripod, having recently acquired a tripod mount for it, and laid out the reversible 3x3 ground cloth on the desert side.

Norman elected to command the Libyans, and William was therefore cast as the Egyptians.

We had to use a spare Egyptian chariot on a sabot base in lieue of the as-yet-unbuilt Libyan chariot, and the camps were also improvised.  Of the choices that we could make, Norman elected to take an element of Sea Peoples “blades” rather than a second chariot, and William elected to deploy his Sherden guards as “solid” (rather than “fast”) blades.

The terrain system gave us a waterway along one edge (as the Egyptians, a “littoral” culture, were defending).  William chose to use his amphibious capability to land two elements, some Nubian skirmishers and a renegade Libyan warband, behind the Libyan line in a bid to capture the enemy camp.

The battle then commenced.  William’s amphibious force won an early advantage by destroying two of Norman’s right flank skirmishers, but faltered in their attack on the camp.  After a single attempt, the situation in the main battle demanded all of his attention and command pips.

There was a good deal of pushing and shoving along the left end of the Libyan line (the Egyptian right), and eventually Norman’s Libyan “warbands” came screaming down off the hill in a bid to destroy the Egyptian infantry (against which they had a quick kill capability).  He was in the unenviable position of attempting to hold off chariots with skirmishers while hoping for some luck with the warbands, and the dice were not with him.  A couple of turns into the main fight, William finally overcame his cold dice situation, and killed two elements out on his right flank for the win.  

The video quality was still a little underwhelming, so we supplemented it by taking and texting pictures of the situations on demand.  As a result, the game took rather longer than it would have face to face.  However, if there’s one thing that most of us have these days, it’s time on the weekends.  With side discussion, set up, and the like, we were at it for about two hours.  We all agreed that we need to gain a little more familiarity with the rules, as extensive play with the first edition of Hordes of the Things was tripping us up fairly regularly.

Next time, perhaps we shall dig out the 2nd Punic War figures; they haven’t seen a battle in several years...

December and January

I had been back to blogging regularly for a while there, but the Christmas season preparations overwhelmed me this year, and things got out of hand again.

I only got a little bit of painting done during the month.  My 1/72 scale fantasy campaign collection started from a core of Airfix Sheriff of Nottingham and Robin Hood figures I had painted around the turn of the century for a kids’ game, and I have been using it recently with both Dragon Rampant and Hordes of the Things.  While Hordes uses single bases as the maneuver elements and any random stand can take its place in a battle line, Dragon Rampant is generally geared for units of 12 normal infantry.  I’ve had 6 of the armored archer from the Sheriff set (with 2 per box) and the recent Encounter at Terril’s Tavern wanted a distinguishable archer unit of 12 (two stands), so I finished up another stand of 6 for the next time.

My son and his wife came for a weekend of cookie baking, which seemed to fill most of my crafting urges for the month.

Dean Family Christmas Cookie Assortment 2019

I did get a few games in.  I even took miniatures on the road, and we had the now-traditional family Christmas battle with my brother and both sons.  We borrowed a table from the nice folks at Pandemonium games in Garden City, Michigan, for a try at Chaosium’s 1978 rules Perilous Encounters.  My brother has been collecting old rules to go with his vintage miniatures, and had been wishing for a test of these rules for some time.  Unfortunately, we didn’t really care for the results, with the morale rules, in particular, being a bit dd.  It was still good to see all the vintage lead on the table.

My brother and younger son commanding the Younger Sons Alliance

My ancient McEwan lizards supported by Broadsword rangers

A Superior lizard moves up in support of Minifig archers; RAFM wizard overseeing 

Elder son Norman received a copy of DBA 3.0 for Christmas, and thought that it would be interesting to dust off our somewhat neglected joint 1/72 scale Bronze Age project to use with the rules, so as the calendar turned over to January, he started painting Caesar Hittites to put on regulation bases. Our previous efforts were mounted as the 6-8 man 60mm by 40mm infantry bases we have been using uniformly across our 1/72 scale projects, and chariots were mounted on the same bases oriented toward the 40mm edge.  DBA wants chariots on 60mm by 80mm bases, so I cautiously pried four of them loose from their old bases for rebasing, rather than building sabots of sort sort.  They looked a little lonely on the large bases, so I started my efforts to support his enthusiasm by painting a pair of chariot runners for each base:

With that done, I could field an Egyptian army, as long as I didn’t mind using the original double rank infantry stands.  While I will probably paint single rank Egyptian infantry on regulation-depth stands fairly soon, I then turned my attention to the first of the opponent armies.  I should be able to do Libyans, Sea Peoples, Nubians, Syrians, and my own Hittites eventually. I have the stockpile of miniatures already, at least, even if the inspiration sometimes comes and goes...I decided that the Libyans would be first, and began with their 5 (?!) light infantry stands:

Libyan archer psiloi for DBA 

Libyan javelin psiloi for DBA

They also get two stands of swordsmen (‘Warband’ by the rules):

That leaves me three stands of warriors at three figures each, a commander in a chariot, and a stand of Sea Peoples swordsmen to go before a test game.

The  other things that has been occupying my paint brush this month has been vintage Minifigs “Mythical Earth” figures.  I’d had a unit of little goblins on the work bench for a couple of months, and finished them off as the “skull” tribe at the end of my vacation, before going back to work on January 6th.  I based them in 3s for flexibility.

I also finished off eight “true orcs”, based as single figures, which should give me a round two dozen for use with Dragon Rampant or as opponents for the heroes in some potential retro-style D&D game.  

Inspired by the rapid success of that effort, I tackled the next dozen goblins, of the “red hand” tribe:

With the completion of that unit, I was down to the last dozen on hand (and they are not presently available from Caliver Books collection of old Minifigs molds) and had the pattern of painting them worked out, so finishing up the sixth (and final, for now) “mountain” tribe did not take long.  I had based the first tribe on 1” individual bases, but thought that it might look better if they weren’t in quite so loose an order. I therefore chose to mount this last group on individual 3/4” bases, which will make it easier to use them in that potential future D&D game as well as in Dragon Rampant.

There’s still one more weekend left in the month, so it’s possible that I’ll get some more Libyans or the next Mythical Earth true orc unit done, but even if I don’t, it will still have been a solid month.