A few new arrivals

February and March have passed in something of a blur and the blog has been a little quiet. I came back from Cancon to discover we were acquiring a new dog. While this had been discussed, I was not expecting the arrival quite so soon. Nor was I expecting the hard work. A six week old rescue puppy, as gorgeous as she is, has required an awful lot of attention. Meet young Lottie.

It's been fifteen years since our last puppy and I'd forgotten how exhausting it can be, let alone for one that is really too young to have been separated from mother and litter. 

As I'm the only family member based at home all day, the burden has fallen on me, so my time hasn't really been my own for a few weeks. That said, a young puppy sleeps a lot and that's meant, with a bit of reworking of my hobby space, I've managed to paint a few things. Unfortunately, I can't say the same for playing games. Hopefully that will be rectified in the coming weeks as things settle down into a more regular routine. She's come a long way in only a couple of months.

At first, I decided to simply focus on a few small unfinished projects. The first were a final few groups of Romano-British that I had bought at Cancon. I wrote more about these just last month in this post.

Realising that painting armour and mail was relatively quick and straightforward, inspired me to come to grips with the outstanding Romans that I wanted to put together to oppose my Germanic tribes. 

For that I'd acquired enough Victrix sets to make up the force of legionaries, auxiliaries and archers that form one of the units for the early imperial Romans in the Infamy, Infamy rule book. I've made great progress here and will shortly be able to compile a post on the project with the completed figures.

While Infamy, Infamy has single figure casualty removal, I've decided to go with multi basing for these Romans, it's something I'm more inclined to do going forward for a couple of reasons. 

Firstly, in the past I've been basing my figures on 25mm rounds and for that I need a 60x60mm sabot base for four figures. That's a big footprint, especially if you compare that with multi basing on something like a 40x40mm. That's a substantial difference - from 3600mm square down to only 1600mm square. After a bit of trial I decided 40x40 was just too small and crowded, so in the end I've opted for 50x50mm, which allows for more space for each figure while maintaining a smaller footprint. 

Secondly, I've never been a fan of empty sabot slots and in the past I've gone to great lengths to create blank terrain bases to fill those slots. With multi basing I can avoid that altogether and maintain a more pleasing aesthetic. Yes, I do need to come up with a way to mark casualties, but I think there are solutions with less glaring visuals than empty sabot slots.

One much smaller project was eight Perry Miniatures plastic British colonial figures for the Second Anglo-Afghan War. These I had made up while doing the figures for the Sudan (which could work equally well for the Afghan War). 

However, I'd always wanted to paint a few as the 72nd Regiment of Foot in Afghanistan, after seeing this picture in one of the Osprey books.

I'd actually done this once before many, many years ago, when I converted a 54mm Airfix multipose US Marine figure.

Fortunately, the tartan is not overly complicated and reproducing it in an abstract way for a smaller scale was fairly straightforward.

Now, you might be asking, why the Second Anglo-Afghan War? Well, that's because another uncompleted project is putting together some of the Perry plastic Afghan tribesman. These were purchased a few years ago in a sudden rush of blood to the head when I was immersed in the Sudan project, but have since sat in the stash. My motivation was driven by a couple of things. One, my Sudan British could work just as well for the latter parts of the 19th century on the North west Frontier and Afghanistan. Two, I already have a collection of Afghan style buildings that I scratch built for modern games. 

The Perry plastic sets gave me an affordable and attractive entry point and so the new puppy can take some credit for resurrecting this particular project.

I have to say, I'm really impressed with the figures, I think they are some of the best Perry plastics I've worked on. The sculpting is terrific and that's matched by the myriad options for poses that can be created with the various combinations of bodies, arms and heads.

So, while it's been great to watch the collection grow and to see various projects come to fruition, I do need to start thinking seriously about getting these figures into action on the tabletop.

And then, before you knew it, there was a Romano-British warband

Regular followers will know that one of the surprise additions of last year was a Saxon warband. That was an accidental spin-off from my Germanic tribes project and something that took on a life of its own. You can read more about that journey here.

Towards the end of that post I wrote, 'I've worked out that if I were to buy another twenty or so figures of Romano-British or Arthurian types, that would give me enough figures for both opposing warbands for Dux Britanniarum. Hmmm, twenty figures, that's not a lot now, is it......'. Even as I typed those words I knew how this was going to end. 

While I didn't set any deadlines or timeframe, I had casually investigated what was available in terms of figures. In the end it was serendipity. While perusing one of the trade stands at the Cancon convention in January I stumbled across a heavily discounted set of Wargames Atlantic late Roman armoured infantry. A box of 24 figures, almost exactly what I needed. Not a difficult decision. 

Naturally, that wasn't quite the end of it. I wanted suitable shield transfers and Little Big Men Studios had a few sets that would work well, except.....they didn't fit the Wargames Atlantic shields. Happily, Victrix sell sets of shields separately. So, the money I saved buying the figures was reinvested in the shields. Que sera, sera.

In terms of what I need for Dux Britannarium, from the 24 figures in the WA set, I can make a Lord, possibly someone we'd describe as a Tribune, his Champion and a group of six Comanipulares, the force's elite troops.

Together with most of the remaining figures I could make up a total of three units. The aforementioned Comanipulares, plus two groups of Milites or Combrogi, who are defined as Warriors in Dux terms.

From that one box, I now have those three groups plus the main nobles and the champion, which completes what I need for the British force. As with the Saxons, they are based on 60x60mm squares with six figures to a base. I discussed the rationale behind that basing in the earlier post about the Saxons, so there's no need to repeat it here, suffice to say it gives me some flexibility for a number of different rule sets.

Below are the two groups of milites with their noble.

Their Saxon equivalents come mainly from the Gripping Beast plastic range. While those figures are on the shorter side, especially if you compare them with something like the Victrix range they don't look too bad up against the Wargames Atlantic figures.

I've tried to mix up the helmets so they don't all look as though they are all dressed the same. While there is very little in the way of historical evidence as to how they appeared, we do know that legions remained in Britain and so there is a good chance the appearance didn't change significantly from the late Roman period. The nobles and champion are based individually, as I've done with the Saxon equivalents.

The levy in the British force are made up of Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors. A box of these figures was what started this whole project and having sufficient of those to make up units for both a Saxon and British force led me to add the extra figures to complete each warband. While those figures are not a perfect match in terms of size, I don't think you really notice much of a difference when the bases are side by side (which they would rarely be in the course of a game anyway).

The Saxon nobles and champion are Victrix figures. They are noticeably larger than the Gripping Beast figures in the warband under their command, but not so much so compared with those from Wargames Atlantic, which probably sit somewhere in the middle.

So, with those Romano-British warriors and their nobles completed that gives me a range of options to field both sides for games using Dux Britanniarum, but also Lion Rampant or Midgard. It's all been a bit of an impulsive diversion from what I really should be doing and that's painting up the early imperial Romans to oppose my Germanic tribes. That's the next project on the bench. Well, that's the plan at least....

Of course, having created these two warbands, I now have to find time to actually play games with them. Bah, as if a small issue like that would have stopped this project anyway.

Filthy, revolting Americans...and their law abiding neighbours

I never seem to play enough games using my American War of Independence collection, but that's never an impediment to accumulating more units. The 'filthy, revolting Americans' in question, are the rather excellent range of Ragged Continental figures from Eureka Miniatures. I acquired these last year and now they are finished.

As usual they have been put together with the Sharp Practice rules in mind. So, this has given me three groups of eight, plus an officer, an NCO, drummer and ensign.

From what I understand, the uniform items that were rarely replaced were breeches and small clothes, so I've tried to reflect that in the figures by adding some variety in colours, presuming the men had used civilian clothing as a substitute.

I've also assumed the officers and NCOs were similarly attired. 

I like the way the Eureka sets include different hats, or in some cases, no hats at all.

While their attire might not pass inspection on the parade ground, these represent hardened campaigners. The sort of men who fought at Cowpens and were not afraid to go face to face with British regulars. In Sharp Practice terms this gives me an additional three groups with leaders to add to my force of Continentals.

They will join my rather better attired Continentals, in this case from the Perry plastic figure set.

Their law abiding neighbours are, of course, Loyalists and in this case these are represented by the Queens Rangers. I've wanted to create a Loyalist force for my Sharp Practice games for some time and the Queens Rangers are one of the first units that spring to mind. Not least because Perry Miniatures have some very fine figures in their range. 

Initially, I bought a dozen of their riflemen with the intention of using them as Loyalist skirmishers. They were lovely figurers to paint and I was very happy with them.

However, as I've learned to discover with this period, things are rarely quite as simple as they seem, particularly when it comes to finding accurate depictions of uniforms. It turns out these riflemen were a good case in point.

Brendan Morrissey very helpfully took time to highlight some of the issues - "the starting point for confusion over the Queens Rangers is the painter Charles Lefferts, who mis-identified them as the same unit that was raised in the 1790s in Canada; this latter unit WAS entirely rifle-armed and many, many authors (and figure manufacturers) have followed this error since the Bicentennial in 1976, including Mollo/McGregor".

I have the Mollo/McGregor book and have found it a font of information, but they too have relied on work by contemporary and later painters for their sources, with the inevitable inaccuracies creeping in.

It seems no matter where you look you will find conflicting descriptions.

Having said all that, the Queens Rangers did indeed have riflemen, but only one detachment, with somewhere between 12-16 men. Good to know my efforts were not entirely wasted and I'm glad I hadn't bought too many of those figures, as I can pretty much do the detachment at a figure ratio of 1:1.

The Queens Rangers were raised early on in the war as a straightforward infantry battalion, with the usual two flank companies (grenadiers and lights) and eight centre companies. At this time, the whole battalion seems to have worn the same hat as the regulars. I used inspiration from various sources to create a fairly generic loyalist unit using the plastic Perry AWI sets with the uniform loosely based on the New York Regiment. As it happens these would pass as Queens Rangers centre company men, but only in 1780 (it seems there's always a 'but' when it comes to AWI uniforms) .

So, if I want a degree of accuracy and use the Perry figures, my unit needs to cover the period 1780 onwards, when the distinctive leather caps were issued. It looks like the centre companies and light companies will look similar in appearance and only the grenadiers and highland companies will have a more distinctive uniform.

With that I have put together four groups of eight figures that can serve as either centre or light company men. These are all from the Perry metal range.

 As the figures are to be used for Sharp Practice there are also the leaders and a trumpeter.

I have also added two groups of Grenadiers with an NCO as a leader figure, once again all from the Perrys.

That gives me options to field light infantry, skirmishers, centre company and grenadiers, or any combination of those.

The next mission is to get these on the table in 2026 with more frequency than I managed in 2025. Let's see how we go. Naturally, that's not necessarily the end of the force - there are highlanders, cavalry and artillery that could be added.....