Irregular Wars Wargaming

Sometimes you have moments when you realise how many acronyms we have to deal with in life and wonder how we do it... Regardless, we have to carry on I suppose. This weekend I was invited by the great lads at Wee Gamers to take Song of Shadows and Dust on the road in order to run demonstration games at a trial gaming weekend at W5 (otherwise known as Whowhatwherewhenwhy). The weekend was organised at fairly short notice (at least I only found out about it the week before...) with the mandate of showcasing the vast array of board games on the market, from the very popular to the very quirky. "The enthusiasts from Wee Gamers will be demonstrating a range of games and invite you to come along and try them out for yourself. Over the weekend the members of Wee Gamers will be demonstrating a range of Board Games ... There will also be some miniature games on offer including ... Star Wars X Wing - the rebellion rages on as the Empire try to take down the Rouge Squadro...

Will o' the Wisp, redistributed from HERE Talk of 6mm ancients mayhem has been hotting up here in Northern Ireland. This, for me, is great news as 6mm is always a scale that has appealed to me but has been as illusive as a will o' the wisp. I bought a few pieces from Rapier miniatures a while back to decorate my 15mm scale temple , and then only recently got my act together and painted and based some of the spares and really liked the result. So it looks like next year's project will be to build a 6mm ancients army. We are focusing on the Hail Caesar rules set for now, although the flexible approach to basing and unit sizes mean that the figures will be able to be used in other games as well if needed. After a bit of chat back and forwards, the ever popular late third century BC Mediterranean was chosen as the theme, roughly pinpointed around 220 BC. That date historically gives a bunch of exciting options for armies, with lots of young rulers who have not yet pro...

Way back at the dawn of time (the 1st of January this year to be exact), I made the first of what was to become a swarm of posts devoted to Song of Shadows and Dust , the ancient urban skirmish game that will soon be published by Ganesha Games. Of course, central to an urban skirmish game is the city itself. Being generally underpaid, I embarked on a series of building-works-on-the-cheap using balsa wood and as few other pieces as possible (the latter include great little resin boxes, bags and ceramics from Baueda, and the OO scale tile roof pieces covered in earlier blogs. After a full gestation period of just over nine months, the result is Antiocheia Mikros (or 'Little Antioch'). A series of 15mm scale buildings inspired by Syria in the first century BC. I am sure that I'll add more structures to the collection as time goes on, but what I currently have is more than enough to cover a 2'x2' playing table - if I use everything, it makes for a very densely popul...

"Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears..." SONG OF SHADOWS AND DUST FACTION BUILDER The SSD rule book currently contains 57 different character rosters designed as guidelines to populate your faction or guild. Players are most welcome to use the rosters straight out of the book if they choose - I have included all manner of character types from henchmen, assassins and punch-drunk boxers, to street urchins, elder statesmen and courtesans.  However, if you have a model that doesn't fit any of those categories, or you just disagree with a suggested roster, Andrea over at Ganesha Games has just unveiled the official faction builder programme for  SSD . Designed and coded by Ray Forsythe, the same scholar and gent responsible for all the official Ganesha Games builders, the programme includes all the new special rules from the game and allows total flexibility in creating 100% customisable character rosters. 

I entered the world of tin soldiers at the impressionable age of 10. I was taken to a pokey shop, now closed down, in the centre of Sydney by a school friend and bought for myself three identical 25mm Napoleonic figures at about $1.50 each. To this day I am still unsure what they were - I suspect they were a Prussian artillery officer but couldn't say for sure. Through variegated levels of peer pressure I was, for a time, distracted - first by fantasy and then sci-fi wargames. The type of game produced by large companies whose legal juggernaut makes me shy away from naming them in a public forum. Lets just say that they don't like you to play with anyone else's products at their table. You know the one I mean. Finally, towards the end of high school, in a garage at another friend's house, I saw his dad's 15mm DBM late Roman army. With an epiphany I realised that there were other games out there and they allowed you the freedom to play with a low budget. The possib...

My 1:1200 scale Valiant Enterprises galleons (rather ironically) fared very badly in the ship journy between the Antipodes and this island, clinging to the edge of Europe. I rather like the vessels by Valiant, but loath how soft their masts are. The weight of all those sails always left the masts bent so I replaced them all with brass rods. For me, that was far too much effort if I ever wanted to put together a decent sized fleet and so I looked around for alternatives. Tumbling Dice to the left, Valiant to the right. One result of the search was the discovery of the Tumbling Dice line of 1:2400 scale vessels. These are smaller than I would have liked, but I placed a small order (last year) to see what they were like. Twelve months on, I've finally painted a few of them and thought I'd share a couple of pictures. The website at Tumbling Dice has changed since I placed my order and is now much easier to use with clearer definitions on which ships belong to which range. Th...

We ran two more games of Song of Shadows and Dust up at Wee Gamers this week. The rules themselves are coming together very well with only slight questions raised and modifications made as a result of the testing. The first game was a shifty stealth mission. In a standard game of SSD , both players roll independently for their objectives. In a stealth mission, only the attacker rolls for an objective (in this case, an assassination attempt). The defender then deploys their full faction across the board, however, they may only activate characters who are within line of sight of an enemy model. The attacker deploys a reduced force (1/3 of the points value of their faction) and has to make their way across the board and achieve their objective without being overwhelmed. In these shots, Iamblichos the assassin is trying to knock off Strato, the leader of the Kybiosaktoi. He started the game at the board edge closest to the camera and has managed - despite being kicked off a roo...

Just a couple of quick snaps to give an idea of the comparative heft of Pendraken small and large rats. Here they are based together and I can't really tell the difference.  In the background you can see the half painted Ayatollah of Gorgonzola - a softly converted Pendraken rat necromancer.

Back in June I scored a superb wee Glorantha figure on eBay . He came already undercoated which would have been fine, except that the undercoat was black (I use white or pale brown) and wasn't undercoat per se ... more of a slick, shiny looking, generic, spraypaint I imagine. Well yesterday I was working on some gaming aids/terrain etc and poured too much brown paint out of the pot and onto my bit o' plastic-cum-easel. Rather than let it go to waste, I decided to paint the base of said Glorantha miniature. I have been consciously putting off painting this chap because I didn't know how to go about the lion skin or what other colours would work. Anyway, after doing the base, one thing led to another and here is the result: I'm really very happy with way he came out. At a pinch this lion-skin clad figure (built like a proverbial brick outhouse) could be a stand in for Herakles, but I am fielding him in Song of Blades and Heroes as Ariston the Hunter. ...