Thoughts on the 1/72 scale ancients/fantasy/medieval project

 I have been fully vaccinated since mid-May, and the two and a half months since then have been pretty good for gaming.  HAWKs meetings have started up, my son has been up for a visit with his DBA armies, the monthly skirmish campaign has arrived, and I’ve gotten in a couple of solo and remote games as a bonus, a total of 12 games in 10 weeks.  A HAWKs sub-group also started a D&D 5th edition game this weekend, and therein hangs a tale.

5th edition allows the players fairly complete control over character creation, so the gamemaster asked what I was thinking about playing.  I said I thought that I’d like to try a bard, and, knowing the group likes to use miniatures, I thought about painting something new.  Despite the arrival this week of my Bones 5 Kickstarter package (originally ordered back in the fall of 2019), I didn’t have a figure from Reaper that I particularly liked. As one of my son’s said, I was basically looking for a male in doublet and hose with a lute. So I thought I’d have a look at Stonehaven Miniatures, a company whose miniatures I have backed on Kickstarter in large numbers, but of which few have been painted. I found just what I was looking for, and, better yet, found that I had backed that Kickstarter and threrefore had it around the house somewhere.  

However, ransacking the basement did not produce the box of “Stonehaven 2020 Adventurers”. Considering that it might take an arbitrary amount of time to find a single miniature in the hoard, I ordered  a spare.  Naturally, the box appeared on the next delve into the basement. 😳. When you reach the point where you are ordering spares of things you know you have rather than search for them, you’ve probably gone too far…

All of the gaming has cut into painting and preparation time, so that has had me considering the question of whether it would be better to decouple painting and playing…that is, play with what’s already done, and paint what I feel like painting without worrying too much about when it might be on the table.

That line of thought suggests that I have four “favorite” projects.  These are the 40mm home cast Not Quite Seven Years War, which I mused about recently, the 40mm home cast 16th century project, most recently played last September, 

Most recent 40mm Rough Wooing game; time to get these guys out again

small/true/vintage 25mm fantasy, which contains the majority of my oldest surviving miniatures,

These lizard riders have been in my armies since ~1977

and the 1/72 scale project.  Whether this is one project or several is open to debate. As far back as ten years ago, my son proposed that we deploy all the existing or planned 1/72 forces on a single map, along the lines of Tony Bath’s classic Hyborian campaign.  With all of the work he has been doing on the Bronze Age lately, he produced a draft of what he’s called “Myboria, the Second Age”, with the medieval, classical, and chariot armies generally divided up geographically.  Elements of the original map remain, but there have been some shifts in what miniatures we are considering likely to appear.

Myboria, the Second Age

I am currently splitting my very limited painting attention between two different sub-projects in 1/72. I am trying to fill out the other two Northalnds armies (elves and orcs), as well as add a historical Nubian DBA army for the ongoing Bronze Age expansion.

My Northlands map was an adaptation of northwestern Myboria

So, why 1/72 scale plastics? 

There is a nostalgia element.  I actually have a few of my own original pre-1976 Airfix Robin Hood figures in among the single-based fantasy figures. When I started wargaming with historical seriously again in the mid-1980s, I was finding the newer 1/72s (ESCI, Italeri, etc.) in the hobby shops.  This constantly tempted me to have a side project in 1/72.

Vintage Robin Hood figures from Barrage 2019 flea market

However, as I see it, there are two more objective reasons why one might take up 1/72 as a gaming scale.  The first is the transportability.  The light weight of the figures, even when based (as I do) on wooden bases, makes them easy to carry to conventions.  The second is cost. Even with increases in the prices recently, the average box is still about $15, and you can usually put on some sort of reasonable game with 2-3 boxes per side.  Less objectively, I also like the fact that most of the figures are cast in one piece (occasionally two) so I don’t have to try to assemble them, that their proportions are generally less exaggerated than the typical run of wargaming-specific figures, and that, for me, they represent the lower limit of what I can comfortably paint well enough for my taste, so are at a good spot for the combination of taking less storage space and being fun to paint.  

The Portable Fantasy Game headed to Gencon in the Before Times

There are a few downsides.  Because they are sold to a mass market, there is a tendency for the producers to stick to the tried-and-true topics, World War II, American Civil War, Wars of Napoleon, Romans and enemies, and the Hundred Years War, for example, although those topics have covered in some remarkable depth. (Anyone need some WWII German bicycle troops?) However, I guess that most of us are probably interested in at least one of the “common” periods, and if you have a yearning to refight King Phillip’s War, you may have difficulties even in metal.  The Plastic Soldier Review, in case you might not be familiar with it, has an extremely thorough coverage of historical (but generall not fantasy) sets that are, or have been, available. That is another downside; sets come into production and then disappear again quite quickly sometimes, and the recent disruptions to global commerce have not helped.  I have been trained, therefore, to buy promptly when there is something that fits into an existing project, but also not to start a new project unless you can buy everything you need to start all at once. 

The wide array of sets that have been released does give me a nice microcosm effect for fantasy.  I’ve got wagons, civilians, and farm animals, so I can set a scene in a variety of contexts, which is handy when you might be supporting a role playing game as well as a battle game.

Fantasy civilians gather for the market day

So, there you have it, why this works out to be one of my favorites…now back to some playing or painting!

2

For Janus: Looking ahead and back

2015 was an interesting year for wargaming, at least for me.  I started the year intending to work on 1/72 scale plastic ancients and homecast Dux Bellorum warbands, as well as finishing off the Portable Fantasy Game (PFG) skirmish project. I got off to a good start toward those goals, but, as usual, no plan survived contact with reality.

My Bones 2 Kickstarter package arrived with a ton of fantasy plastic, and the PFG completion got sidetracked while I quickly painted up a Bones undead warband, using some of the new Bones 2 figures.

However, the vast mass of Bones 2 was a little overwhelming, and the limitations of the material are becoming more apparent as I continue to paint and play with them.  One of them is that spindly parts are going to be a problem, and the Bones 2 cavalry and centaurs are not very satisfactory.  Reaper apparently agrees; there were no new cavalry figures in the Bones 3 Kickstarter. Figures suitable for arranging in units remain scarce in the line, so my notion of building new fantasy forces in modern (i.e. BIG) 28mm for mid-sized games, say 120 figures per side, is not working out.  So big plastic fantasy is headed toward the back burner, with a few minor exceptions I'll get to.

The next unplanned shift in emphasis came in March, when my long-time friend and fellow gamer from back in the day, Joe, came out to the East Coast for Cold Wars.  With a little encouragement from Joe, I ended up coming home with about twenty vintage 25mm fantasy figures from McEwan, Custom Cast, Minifigs, and Ral Partha for the nostalgia value.  That got me looking through my old fantasy figures.  Added to my issues with the Bones, I started looking around on eBay for figures I had once had, then figures I had once wanted, then figures that I might have wanted had I ever seen them or heard of the company that had once produced them....Somewhere in the middle of that exercise, which, by the way, was reinforced by my brother deciding to do the same thing, Ironwind Metals decided to revive some of the classic Ral Partha fantasy army lines and the old Chaos Wars rules.  I bought into that Kickstarter in May, and it happily delivered right on time at the end of the year.

At Huzzah, in May, I picked up a lot of reinforcements for my 25mm Byzantine/fantasy armies, mostly Hinchliffe with a smattering of Minifigs. That was the first "new" army I picked up this year.  I also got Aquilonians and Turanians (old Ral Partha Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age) from Classic Miniatures, and the Ral Partha Kickstarter elves and orcs.

I have mostly sworn off Kickstarters, with exceptions made only for established companies, or companies whose previous Kickstarters went well. In 2015, that meant that I signed up for three, Bones 3, the Ral Partha Chaos Wars, and Stonehaven Halflings.  All of them have either delivered or are on schedule, so that's been going well, except for the amount of painting stacking up, of course.

With all of this going on, I have been attempting to pick up the pace on army painting.  The thought that I had at the beginning of the year, that I might spend more time on painting some superior (not Superior, though I got some of those this year too) miniatures has been overtaken by the press of the amount of work I've taken on.  The good news is that it has been an excellent year for painting, with 205 25/28mm figures (and 27 1/72 scale plastic figures) completed.  The bad news is that I am going to need to reach toward some previous records (achieved back in the early oughts) if I want to see these armies on the table anytime soon. I also need to seriously up my game on the painting of horses, because I've got a lot of cavalry to paint.

It was a pretty good year for conventions; I made it to Cold Wars, Huzzah, and Gencon, and took games to all three.  I had friends at all three, which made each of them a good experience, and I am looking forward to doing at least as well next year.

I was involved in 33 miniatures games, which is a little below where I want to be.  With both sons out of the house, though, pickup games aren't as easy as they have been in years past.  Ross and I got in a couple of remote games this year, but technical issues have been keeping us from doing more. I hope to fix that in the coming year.  As might be expected, the 33 games included a lot of fantasy.  We played multiple games with four sets of rules, Chaos Wars, Frostgrave, Song of Blades and Heroes, and our home rules under development.  We also had single games of a couple of others.  There was still some time for historicals; we played several games of Warhammer Ancient Battles leading up to running it at Cold Wars, and several Charge! games with the Not Quite Seven Years War figures, leading up to Huzzah.

As far as games and rules went, that mix made it a fairly typical year, with just a couple of exceptions.

One was Osprey's release of Frostgrave, and several of my fellow HAWKs members immediately jumped on the bandwagon.  Since it uses warbands of no more than 10 figures, it was pretty easy to get a team on the table by simply reaching into the box of finished Bones.  In 2016, I want to line up a purpose built faction with appropriately themed basing, and see if I can get it painted in small batches in between 25mm fantasy. It will be mostly Bones, with a few other Reaper metal figures to round out a couple of figure types that are a little scarce in Bones.  I've also started my own set of paper model-based scenery so that I can run it at home.  My older son has also started working on a Frostgrave band, so there are some family games in the future. I don't usually buy into these small specialized sorts of games, but it seems to me that most of this can be easily recycled into something else if everyone gets tired of it. I'll try to post more on Frostgrave in the near future.

The second was also an Osprey release, Dragon Rampant, right at the end of the year.  A couple of the other HAWKs have been talking about trying its medieval precursor, Lion Rampant, but haven't yet done so because they are still working on figures.  Translate that concept to fantasy and, behold!, I have troops for a dozen warbands/retinues immediately at my fingertips.  So that allowed me to throw a game on the table (as described in my Christmas trip report) even before my pre-ordered hardcopy of the rules caught up with me, which is not at all my usual experience in testing something new.  I expect to be playing more Dragon Rampant in 2016, since it makes use of stuff that's already in place.

For 2016, I have already mentioned that I want to work on getting the 25mm fantasy armies painted.  After spending much of the past year stripping paint from eBay purchases, I am looking forward to working with figures that haven't been painted previously.  Beyond that, I want to get back to building the Dux Bellorum warbands with the homecast figures, partly just because I am interested in the period (thanks, Rosemary Sutcliff), and partly to take the opportunity to practice my conversion skills on small scale figures, using ones that are cheap and easily recycled in the event of any unfortunate occurrences.  I also want to get back to working, even if only gradually, on some NQSYW figures again.  I have been working toward a project goal for many years without yet reaching it, and I hope that running some NQSYW games will provide the necessary inspiration.  There is also some chance that this will be the year that I do some more with the 40mm Renaissance figures.

One final observation: much of the last third of the year was a little stressful at work.  I was interested to see that the way this played out in my hobby was to get me painting more in my available time, because painting was a complete break from the sort of thing I was doing at work.  Setting up scenarios and doing army list calculations seemed way too much like work for it to be relaxing, which contributed to the fact that relatively few games got played post-Gencon, right up until work things got finished, just at Christmas.  If a lower stress level at work were to translate into less painting and more playing next year, I think I would be at peace with that.

So, with that, 2015 is a wrap, and it's on to an exciting 2016.

End of the Year Review

With the Christmas season upon us, I have been busier with baking than with painting. While the Christmas cookies aren't entirely done, here's a sampling of this year's types...





While I have a few quiet days between now and the end of the year, it's probably close enough to have a look at this year's numbers.

I have painted, according to my notes, 37 25/28mm figures (including some large fantasy monsters) for the fantasy skirmish project and for the Dux Bellorum Dark Ages project. I have also painted 62 1/72 foot figures and 4 1/72 scale mounted figures, almost all for the Portable Fantasy Game project.
Most of them have been blogged here over the course of the year.

I've been involved in running or playing 26 miniatures games (or sessions in the case of some days that saw multiple short games using the same rules back-to-back). The average of one game every two weeks isn't bad, but I should note that the distribution isn't anywhere near that even, due to the concentration of events during conventions. While that's below my theoretical goal of 52 games, I might also note that I was in 21 sessions of roleplaying games this year, in a major revival of one of my other gaming interests, which has been dormant for a number of years. Added together, that would come a lot closer to the goal of a game per week.

I made it to four multiple-day game conventions this year, Cold Wars, Huzzah, Historicon, and Gencon, which is a comfortable level.

Behind the numbers, it turned out to be a bad year for Charge! and the Not Quite Seven Years War. I haven't been in a Charge game last fall, and the attempts to schedule a Skype game with Ross have been disrupted by a variety of life events. It was also a bad year for blogging, with time beyond that devoted to actually painting and playing being a little hard to come by.

On the brighter side, it was a good year for old friends, with the convention visits being an opportunity to spend some time with them. It was also a good year for the Portable Fantasy Game project, as shown below, which got assembled to a solidly usable point before my Gencon goal.




My goals for next year, as I see them now, are to continue work on the Dux Bellorum project, get back to the NQSYW with both games and a few new units, and to decide on a path forward for the mass of fantasy figures which Kickstarter has kicked out at me the past two years...

January Thoughts

As we celebrate (?) the month dedicated to two-faced Janus, god of doorways and beginnings, it seems appropriate to consider accomplishments and goals.

According to my painting log, I finished 7 40mm NQSYW foot figures last year (not counting the paint and basing touchups on figures bought painted), 99 assorted 25/28mm figures, mostly Reaper fantasy Bones, 10 1/72 scale horsemen (counting two chariots as four cavalry), and 3 1/72 scale foot (not counting some Persian samples who remain unbased).

As years go, that wasn't bad. Numbers like that again this year would barely make a dent in my overall painting backlog, but would allow me to deploy a couple of small skirmish games on new subjects, and perhaps get enough Persians and Greeks done to work up some inspiration.

So the usual January questions are:

1) What do I want to paint?
2) What do I want to play?

I have been thinking about the first question somewhat independently of the second. I would like to move my 40mm Prince August project, the Not Quite Seven Years War, along. I have a plan laid out which shows its maximum projected size at about twice what I have now, but there is no great urgency about that, with the number of other participating painters. Nevertheless, I'd like to finish up another regiment for my own army, and paint a sample unit for my proposed adversary army.

I'd like to continue the fantasy update, probably through the mechanism of painting up a few warbands for Song of Blades and Heroes, plus some things intended to be immediately useful in role-playing games. I am also lumping in some small scale science fiction and post-apocalyptic skirmish games with this. If I can concentrate on that goal, painting the few dozen figures that I would need to stage those skirmishes seems practical. I am not sure that I have an ultimate goal for this project yet. By the end of the year, Reaper should have enough figures available for me to consider working toward having a game based on units of a dozen or so figures as maneuver elements. Defining a target will be a matter for additional thought.

The third thing I'd like to work on is my "Herodotus project" (actually including Thucydides and Xenophon), which will involve armies of 1/72 scale figures based on double depth WRG standard bases (i.e. Armati-style, or for Simon MacDowell's Comitatus). I have most of the plastic which will be wanted for this already laid by. Some clever basing will be the only issue, since I am imagining that some smaller actions, from the Anabasis, for example, will be better depicted with individual figures than with elements. The work I did last week on some more detailed 1/72 scale fantasy figures gives me some confidence that I can handle painting the Persians. I just need to get started, and develop a sustainable style as I go. On the plus side, the proposed armies already have countries set aside for them on Norman's Myboria map. On the negative side, I don't really expect to see this on the table before 2015, which is somewhat demotivating.

The second question, what to play, is related. I keep track of what games I play, and have, as a result, a pretty good idea (barring transcription errors) of when each project was most recently on the table. Anything that hasn't been out in five years is going to get a fresh look, with a keep/sell decision which will reflect its completion status.

We have about 80% of the planning done for a test campaign for the NQSYW, so I want that to be high on the playing priority list.

Norman's Myboria campaign, if it were to get started this year, would also be a priority. Based on some of Ross's recent posts, I am wondering whether I could experiment with campaign mechanisms with a solo campaign using my 6mm ancient and fantasy troops, who don't really see enough play.

We tend to play quite a bit of Hordes of the Things. My recent experience with Sng of Blades and Heroes suggests that it occupies a similar niche, but for skirmish rather than mass battle, and I want to give it a good workoit over the next few months.

Now, as reality hits, I'm sure all of that will change....

Games in a Box

Packing the car for Huzzah! reminded me that I would like to set up a couple of other easy to transport "game in a box" projects, suitable to take along on a trip by plane, or to tuck into some underutilized bit of cubic in the car on the way to a convention. This time around we took the "Big Box of Six" as a contingency item, and ended up improvising a Basic Impetus game. That would have looked a little nicer if we'd had a larger cloth, but the BBoS is usually used for DBA or Hordes of the Things, so a 2' by 2' (or 60cm square for the rest of the world) cloth is all that we usually need. The box is not yet full, so there is room for expansion.

The ideal game in a box would remain self-contained, so that it doesn't have to be reassembled from scattered pieces just before a convention, and occupy 2-6 players for 1-3 hrs to fill odd time gaps. An ambitious one would also be deployable as a convention game, which I'd call 6 players for 3-4 hours. In addition to the BBoS, I built a box with two 6mm Spanish Civil War intro army packs from Irregular Miniatures back in the mid-90s. When it was originally completed, each army had about five battalions of troops plus some support elements, as based for Command Decision. (2nd edition at the time...) That would provide a fairly satisfactory game for 6, perhaps just a little light, and a solid game for 2-4 players. I've also deployed it more recently for playtests with newer rules.

We've tossed around the idea of housing a game in a plastic shoebox. I've been considering ordering something like the Pegasus 1/32 scale gladiators, for which a shoebox should be plenty. Putting a 20mm battle game in a volume that size would be an interesting challenge...

Project Musing

I was interested to see that wargaming activity has been going on in my absence, with a new battle report by my son on Junkyard Planet yesterday. Meanwhile, I'm still on the road, and the only hobby-related activity I'm doing is reading Song of Wrath, a new look at the opening of the Peloponnesian War. Reading on the iPad turns out to be even easier for me than handling large books, so I have a feeling that this is the way the future is going to look. The only downside that I've seen so far is that the Kindle edition I'm reading renders a two-page map somewhat inelegantly; this is a consideration, but is generally outbalanced (in my opinion) by the ease of handling compared to a large paper volume. I'm also reading (intermittently) The Landmark Arrian's Campaigns of Alexander, and, although I am a fan of the series, it has been slow because the physical book is just too heavy to carry around to read in small available time windows.

Ross was musing about the future of his projects recently on Battle Game of the Month.
I've been using time away to think about this issue myself. While it is possible that I will have more time to work on wargaming sometime in the next year or so, as my second son transitions from skating to college, it's also possible that other activities will take up the newly available time. The first conclusion, therefore, is that I am going to have to be very circumspect about adding any new start projects. I bought enough Russian Civil War figures to support a small game almost two years ago; the first base remains uncompleted. Since then, I've managed to keep myself from doing that again.

The second conclusion is that I need to spend more time on actual gaming. One of the things that I keep track of is when each of my miniatures projects was most recently on the table. It was good to get the Darkest Africa project out at Cold Wars. I was considering whether it had, perhaps, outlasted my interest, and was reassured to find that it had not. However, that doesn't alter the fact that it had been six and a half years since I'd used them in a game, which is rather too long. If I could actually manage to get in two games a month for a year, I could, at least theoretically, put most of my projects on the table at least once. I also have the usual experience of wanting to work on whatever I've played most recently, so some playing time would probably help with getting a few things completed.

The third conclusion is that I am still interested in about the same mix of periods as I have been for a while now. Therefore, I need to cultivate some patience regarding those things that haven't gotten far enough to play, and do what I can (mostly reading) to generate some energy and enthusiasm to get me working on them.