Irregular Wars Wargaming

"This Atalanta was exposed by her father,  because he desired male children;  and a she-bear came often and  gave  her suck, till hunters found her and  brought her up among themselves. Grown to womanhood, Atalanta kept herself a virgin, and hunting in the wilderness she remained always under arms." Pseudo-Apollodorus, Bibliotheca 3. 9. 2 As well as the dryads in the previous post, I also recently ordered a Shadowforge 'Amazonia' gladiator. It would appear that I have a bit of a female archer fetish for my OGAM force, as along with this athletic lady, I have Artemis as one of my gods, a female centaur archer legend, and plan on getting a unit of Amazon archers when I find models with the right Skythian look. I thought I would use this figure for Atalanta, the Arkadian princess, huntress, and occasional Argonaught. Exposed by her father at birth, she was suckled by a she-bear before being found and raised by hunters. She sailed on the Argo with Jason,...

... you know, it's amazing how many more hits a post generates if it has those four letters in it - NSFW. The internet, eh? Dryad by Devi-Eurynome So, with only a little further-ado, here are the latest additions to my Of Gods and Mortals forces, a unit of four dryads. Dryads count as mortal units in the game, and are, on the face of it, rather rubbish. With a combat factor of 1, they can expect to be beaten up by most other mortals, not to mention legends or gods.  But, and it is a shapely but, these leaf-clad lovelies suffer no penalties in wooded terrain and are also pretty cheap. I have found in my previous games that I do not to use my mortal units very much. I previously only had two - hypaspists and satyr archers - and they tend to just sit around invoking most of the time, either to grant my god more power, or to bring the god back after they have taken a smiting. At only 40 points for the unit (out of the recommended 900 point budget), I figured I might li...

Zac and Dan have posted another playtest game of the fantasy expansion for  Galleys & Galleons  over at Pile of Dice. Can steam-powered ironclads crush the swift elves, or will the seabed be littered with bearded corpses?  Click HERE to find out how they got on in the grudge match of the ages, elves verses dwarves . 

Doc Phalanx has just posted a nice little AAR of his most recent Irregular Wars game, pitching the brave Hollanders against the tricksy Portuguese. Find out how he got on HERE .

Over in Hong Kong, Bertie has just posted up a totally engrossing multiplayer game report for Galleys & Galleons , making use of several of the rules from the forthcoming expansion. 1670: The Three Tunns Tavern, Port Royal Jamaica. “QUIET! You Blaggards!” The hard vowels of Sir Henry Morgan’s Cardiff accent did not so much cut through the drunken babble of the assembled pirates, as hack through it with a rasping, but none too sharp, blade. But it did catch the attention. “Now listen up… this be the plan.” “As ye all know it’s not been good pickin’s for the Brethren o’ late. Victims o’ our own success I say we is.    We been so successful with our depredations that now the Dons are reinforcing the Armada de la Guardia de la Carrera de las Indias , bringing in ships from as far away as Acapulco an’ Flanders I reckons. There be no way we can take the main silver fleet on, not with our small, light vessels up agin them mighty galleons. No way. But, me hear...

The second of the weekend's games of L'Art de a Guerre saw my Yorkists go head to head with Brett's Lancastrians in a 200 point War of the Roses arrow-fest. I am afraid that my camera work was even poorer than usual on the night, but it gets to int across I hope, even if it does not justify the paintwork. My Yorkists were defending this time against a Lancs assault. My left ward was composed of two groups, consisting of militia longbowmen on the far left and then retinue bow supported by retinue bill. My centre ward had elite foot knights supported by retinue bowmen, and both heavy and light artillery and two units of currour heavy cavalry. On my right were more foot knights and retinue bowmen supported by some handgunners. My lord-commander commanded the centre and both sub lords were unreliable (something I insist on doing with my WotR and Anglo-Irish armies to reflect the skulduggery).  I'm not exactly sure of the make up of the Lancastrians, but they must h...

News from the front: a few more playtesting games were posted online recently that are well worth checking out. At the Wandering View, Tom got his family involved with a great scenario which saw the conventional ships of Lord Ramsbottom racing against time and the dastardly luce-pulp fleet of El Supremo to rescue a stranded Lady Chatterbox.  Check it out HERE . Meanwhile, Zac and Dan had another meeting, this time seeing an undead fleet taking on an eastern fleet with gun turret toting mercenaries. You can read about their misdeeds HERE .

I enjoyed a couple of very enjoyable games of  L'Art de la Guerre  over the weekend. The first was a small 100 point warm up match helping us to remember the rules. I ran Early Arabs, an army that I've never tried before and which was completely out of my comfort zone. Every unit in my army could shoot, and the only units which couldn't evade were two units of LMI bowmen. We diced properly for attacker/defender etc and it turned out that I was the attacker, raiding into the plains east of Antioch no doubt. The photo above shows the starting setup. I had two skirmishing LI units on the left, then a group of four javelineers and the bowmen. Beyond them, three camelry units with bows and on the far right, three light cavalry units with javelins. My foeman, Brettius, also took a new army running Romans from the triumviral period. His eyes shone whith discomfort and excitement in equal measure as he deployed two units of thureophoroi/medium spear on his right (opposite m...