Irregular Wars Wargaming

I have previously posted about the lamentable lack of 6mm mounted crossbowmen that are compatible with Baccus figures. Having already converted the spears of some light cavalrymen into something resembling crossbows, I have finally gotten around to sticking bisected foot crossbowman torsos onto the equally bisected horses and legs of cavalrymen.  Here is the result which I think, mixed together with the other mock ups, will do the job quite nicely. Out of interest, I found a rather informative wee blog post at Je Lay Emprins which explores the uses of mounted crossbowmen in the late Medieval period. "Could crossbowmen have fought effectively from horseback? My view is most probably they could. Crossbows were widely used for hunting on horseback and are shown as such in illustrations throughout the medieval period; however on the battlefield loading the bow swiftly, whilst remaining on the horse was essential. Following the widespread introduction of the cranequin from ci...

My semi-regular gaming is Wee Gamers , based out at Whitehead in Northern Ireland's beautiful east coast. Unfortunately for me, they tend to meet on school nights, where my opportunities to stay out late are limited due to family and work commitments the following morning. Happily, they have started running Big Game Days each month, where the bunker is open all day one Sunday each month. I managed to get along this month and I'm delighted to say, that I was not disappointed. Besides the craic (goes without saying really), I took part in a massive drop-in-drop-out game of Song of Blades and Heroes . Inspired by a popular fantasy series, the game saw two players leading a swarm of fur-clad barbarian types against the brooding garrison of a medieval fortress, entirely scratch built by one of my gaming mates, Jim. Note the pit ponies working the winch on the platform. You can see them under the platform in the second picture. The game was a great success for the barbari...

Chris over at TwoThreeSixMM has been beavering away testing the Galleys & Galleons fantastical expansion using Wizkids plasticard ships and monsters. He has a really nice write up of three recent games which you can check out HERE .

French gamer Stéphane has posted a great little review and together with a whole raft of photos (see what I did there) of his first game of Galleys & Galleons at the  Voyages à travers le temps  blog.   Séphane's conclusions "Pour conclure, je dirais qu'il s'agit d'une règle très plaisante à jouer avec pas mal de subtilité. Elle est surtout faite je pense pour jouer de façon fun et rapide." or if you prefer it another way, "In conclusion, I would say that this is a very pleasant rule to play with a lot of subtlety. It is mostly made I think to play fun and fast."  Have a look at the the full review and report HERE .

A wee teaser of our work-in-progress. Here is the current state of the fleet builder for the expanded Galleys & Galleons. Blue special rules are from the core book, the (currently) white ones are from the expansion. You can see, there are quite a few now and they look to increase further. Elsewhere on the web, Zac and Dan have been doing some more playtesting, this time with pointy elven spoity ships and undead galleys. Check there report out HERE .

I received a great wee email from Irregular Wars player Steve Duke this morning with a few details and pictures of an awesome looking multiplayer game they played recently. I don't have a huge amount of detail to share, but this is what I know: The two armies were Royal English vs Moghul, so a bit of an apocryphal match up, but not beyond the realms of possibility.  They played two players a side, each commanding two lords, on a 9’x6’ table. Each lord had their compulsory companies as default and then they rolled for five options per lord and distributed the optional companies between the lords as they wished. All companies were on 40x40mm bases and they played with 1u = 5cm. On such a big table we limited Heavy ordinance to 24u. Each lord drew a single chance card and that card effected only their command or a single nominated enemy command. Setup was 12u apart. They did not roll for Disease and Mishaps. The Moghul army's deployment: left flank at the bottom o...

Zac over at the Pile of Dice blog has just posted a short report using the playtest version of the Galleys & Galleons fantasy expansion. Leading a fleet of Dwarvern ironclads against elves, I'm afraid to report that Zac's stunties got the worst of it. Go read the full report HERE .

The lorcha will be one of many new ship profiles included in the forthcoming expansion for  Galleys & Galleons . Around a dozen or so of the new profiles will be historical vessels such as the lorcha, geobukseon (Korean turtle ship) and bomb ketch. Many more will be historically inspired lace-pulp fixtures, like airships, orinithopters, pirate rafts and a jacht captained by a pirate with an exaggerated reputation. Of course, there will also be a whole conglomeration of high fantasy vessels, dwarves, elves, orcs and the like, together with a myriad of monsters and mythical creatures. Merchant lorcha   Q3 C2 Lateen rigged, Merchantman, Razee, Yare Pirate lorcha   Q3 C2 Lateen rigged, Razee, Swashbucklers Yare A lorcha was seemingly a creative result of European expansion into the East Indies - a composite ship design combining junk rigging with a more streamlined European hull shape. First sailing out of Portuguese Macau in the mid-sixteenth century, th...