A Review of the Year Part 2

To continue with my wargaming year, the latter half of the year was as much about gaming as it was painting. In July, inspired as much by my attendance at the Wargames Illustrated Saga Iron man day as by the fantastic Footsore figures, I decided to paint a new War Band – Dark Age Irish. The Iron Man day at WI HQ was great fun and despite my poor results, I had a great time. If there is anyone out there thinking of attending one of these events, I would thoroughly recommend that you do so. The atmosphere is very relaxed thanks to the hosting skill of Dan Falconbridge, WI head man, and it is an ideal opportunity to try out something new. I think that Congo, Deadmans Hand and Frostgrave are just some of the events set for this coming year.

August continued with the focus on gaming. The club had decided to add ‘Muskets and Tomahawks’ to our gaming repertoire. However, as we had mixed success with this rules set, Andy Callan came up with one of his rules amalgamations, ‘Sharp Tomahawks’ or ‘Rules for old war gamers with short attention Spans’. I’ll repeat the link to the condensed rules here:

Sharp Tomahawks

Please feel free to print them off and use them for your own games.

In September, I made good progress with the Irish Warband as well as fitting in a short break ‘Up North’ to visit Hadrians Wall, Lindisfarne Island and other iconic Castles in the area. Great inspiration for more games of Saga!

By October, I had finished my Irish warband, including making some scenery for my Saga games and had re started work on Napoleonic Portuguese.

My Irish War band consists of 51 figures, all of the Footsore Irish! I thought that the sculpts were so nice that I might as well paint the lot. Looking forward, I can see the same thing being repeated for either the late Romans ( If we ever do see the new Saga supplement Aetius & Arthur) or AngloSaxons. I really enjoy playing Saga, it’s just a struggle to get my gaming buddies to join in!

In November, the Portuguese took over the painting desk as I committed to finishing the brigade, some 96 troops in total. Unfortunately, I didn’t quite get there but I do have 72 finished now! I did also get to see my article published in WI!

And so as we come to the end of the year, I am finishing off those last 24 Portuguese as well as a couple of mounted officers. My tally for the year is just shy of 200 painted figures. If you include horses as separate figures, it’s just over that! I’ve played well over 50 games, including Black Powder, Saga, Lion Rampant, Sharp Practice, Muskets and Tomahawks, Sharp Tomahawks, Chain of Command and The Men who Would be Kings,  visited at least a dozen museums or historical sites, completed a distance learning course on the Battle of Agincourt and I have not counted the books, magazines and internet articles that I have read.

All in all, I’m quite happy with the enjoyment that my hobby has given me and I can only hope that the same is true of my customers and friends that are part of this hobby that we call wargaming. So Once again, I would like to wish everyone a Very Merry Christmas and of course, a Happy New Year. I mentioned last week that there was a bonus for those who bothered to read the blog. If you do decide to shop at Arcane Scenery and Models over the Festive period, please enter the code blog2016 when you go through checkout. You will get 10% off of your purchase as well as the usual free postage worldwide. There are some exclusions, we can only post aerosols to limited locations in the UK and some of the woodland scenic products are banned for export to Australia, New Zealand and Japan but you still have another 5000 or so lines to choose from! Of course, feel free to pass the code on to your gaming buddies – the code will work until mid January 2017.  Once again, Merry Christmas!