Irregular Wars Wargaming

As playtesting continues for Fantastic Scuffles , Giulio has sent in another beautifully illustrated game report that he's happy for me to share. If you missed his previous experiment, you can find it here . Giulio continues: *** The lists My wife kindly offered once again to be my opponent for this game, so I created two 165-ish point warbands. I've been testing fantastic scuffles for a while, now, using mainly two lists: a Witch Hunters warband and a "Villain" minion master who controls all sorts of evil creatures. I recently painted Torgillius from Warhammer Cursed City, so I decided to use him as my minion master. He is a Sage, and I gave him the Erudite trait and chose three spells for him: Summon (to bring in some extra friends), Mystic Missile, and Transfigure, to transform him into a giant spider! I also wanted to create a loyal, powerful warrior bodyguard character to accompany Torgillius, so I used a Kosargi guard from Warhammer Cursed City. I wanted him to ...

The goblin potion dealer is the fifth member of my ne'er-do-well party of rogues.  It is another Vae Victis 3D sculpt bought online. It came from a different seller to the others in the party, and the resin is completely different with much softer detail. I got quite disillusioned with painting it to be honest and abandoned it. It's been sitting base painted in a drawer for the last three months. However, it's been a bit of a funny weekend (not in a humorous way) and I wanted to do something quick and easy, so I finished him up. I'm not super happy with it, but content.

*Record Scratch* *Freeze Frame* " Yep, that's me. You're probably wondering how I got into this situation … " Andrew and I continued our gnomes and goblins campaign this week with another encounter. I had spent some of the loot accrued over the last two glorious victories to hire a new minion for the bog goblins, this time a little chap with a net and the trapper trait. Otherwise, the parties were the same as previously: Clachtoll the unstoppable wyvern and his little gobo jockey, Nigg, along with their two minions (archer and trapper), against the gnomes, Hrolf, Haakon and Hans, and their two fox minions.  Rolling for objectives, both parties ended up with NPC focused missions. The gnomes had to keep the peace, ensuring no NPCs were slain, while not making the first aggressive action. As for the goblins, they were trying to win over the hearts and minds of the local populace, striving to convince them the join the boggy gobby side rather than the notoriously nosey gn...

I've had these 3D sculpted traps from Vae Victis sitting around for a while and, after taking the head staggers with work this week, have finally gotten around the painting and basing them. In Fantastic Scuffles , traps can be set by models with the trapper trait during a regular encounter, or can be placed by the dungeon master during a dungeon delving scenario. Depending on the players' needs and wants, traps come in five varieties: bear traps, fire traps, pit traps, poison traps and spike traps. They can be based on anything up to a 40mm base - all these are on 30mm rounds. Lyra Halfcraft negotiating some bear traps. The Wolf, caught between what could be a fire, poison or spike trap, and a poorly disguised pit trap.  Flint Runehammer nestled between a fire trap and a spike trap. And because you were all thinking it...

Over the last few weeks there have only been a few snatched hours here and there to paint, so I have been slowly working on the second unit (and first infantry unit) of my 10mm Romano-British army for Fantastic Battles . Again, these are entirely Pendraken miniatures, taken from a mix of packs in the Late Roman range to give a real levy/ad hoc sense to the pedyt shield wall.  Rather than a single uniform shield device, I went a little wild with variations of geometric patterns, chi rhos, and alpha-omega in black and white marking what is most definitely a levy unit from a Christian civic community. I have aspirations for other shield walls to be more uniform, or more wild from the hills.

This week, Andrew and I played another couple of games of Fantastic Scuffles with new parties: he with woodland gnomes, and me with bog goblins.  In the first encounter, the gnomes were tasked with escorting four religious novices through a woods, while the goblins had been hired to hunt a golem stalking the same woods. The gnomes decided to play it aggressively, making short work of the goblin minion archer, but the remaining goblin and his wyvern led the golem a merry dance, into the gnomes. In the end, the gnomes went down fighting, but they weren't strong enough to cause much more than a scratch to the heavily armoured goblin. The second encounter saw the goblins recruited to vandalise a monument, while the gnomes were trying to steel an object of 'purely sentimental value' from the goblin minion. This was a very fast game as the wyvern quickly knocked down the dolmen, and the gnomes realised they had little to gain here and bottled shortly after. More anon!

Andrew and I continued to test the Fantastic Scuffles campaign system last week ( following on from this earlier game ), playing two more encounters between my Itinerant Adventurers, and Andrew's Restless Dead. For the second encounter of the campaign, the parties were the same as the first. There were just three adventurers: Crom the ogre warrior, Balthazar the seer, and Lyra the halfling rogue. Facing them were two undead characters: the bloodless king (a warrior) and the mummified priestess (a seer), along with three minions with swords and large shields. Balthazar carried a hand wound over from the previous encounter, while the bloodless king had a lasting leg wound. Rolling for objectives, the adventurers had a contract to hunt down any opposing seers and take them out of action, while the undead were searching for a hidden treasure located near one of the gate pillars of the little walled shrine (centre bottom in the photo above).  Advancing boldly, the undead priestess move...

Between work and other commitments, I have not managed a lot of painting recently. This weekend, however, I did get the first three-company unit painted for my Fantastic Battles 10mm post-Roman British army. These are from the Pendraken Late Roman range. Well armoured and carrying spears, swords and shields, in-game, these will be a built as an elite company, probably also using the mounted, barrage and skirmisher traits to allow then to dash forwards and away, hurling their spears, but still able to hold their own in a melee. As this is the first unit of a new army, I have provided rather too many photos. As I become more jaded, I'm sure I will suffice with just one photo per unit! The shields are inspired by one of the designs in the Notitia Dignitatum showing a stylised dog/wolf/dragon head. The exemplar has a wee Christ/saint's head off to the right - not something I felt confident of attempting on shield less than 5mm across.  Horse butts...

This week it was great to catch up with Andy T, an old gaming mate I haven't seen in person in years; certainly not since before Covid. We got in two games of Fantastic Scuffles over the evening - one with 200 point parties, and one with 100 points. The first match up saw my gnomes with a blood feud trying to slay one of Andy's ruffians (the toughest one with all the armour a luck would have it!), while his ne'er-do-wells were trying to get a message across the board. Rolling for environmental conditions, the weather was fine, but it was dark, hampering all our dice rolls. This was my first time running the gnomes (although they have been out before under Jim's command), and it took a couple of turns to work out the best strategy for using the vehicle rules. I was just getting used to the concept indeed when a thug with a great axe split the poor bunny chariot in half, ending the experiment.  My poor gnomes were quite unprepared for the amount of hand-to-hand combat th...