Irregular Wars Wargaming

I am reliably informed that Faustus Furius is now available in hard copy from Amazon.  Unfortunately, whoever looked over the listing at Amazon HQ 'corrected' the spelling of the title, so if you search for Faustus Furius, nothing will come up. If however. you search for Favstvs Fvrivs, BINGO! The mind boggles! That aside, the rules are available as a full colour book! What's your poison? Pounds - Faustus Furius at Amazon.co.uk ; Euros - Faustus Furius at Amazon.takeyourpick (lets say Amazon.de) ; US dollars - Faustus Furius at Amazon.com . Cards for determining turn order will be available from DriveThru Cards soon, and there will also be a pdf available on the Ganesha website for people to print off their own cards. An Italian translation of the rules will also be in print shortly, so watch this space.

Over at the One Sided Miniature Wargaming Discourse, the Sun of York has put up a couple of nice little AARs of Galleys & Galleons using ancient vessels. Well worth the read HERE .

A clever blogger would have saved up all these recent posts and made one post will decent content. Never mind. For today's offering I have a secutor, or pursuer/chaser. Wearing a smooth helmet with eye holes (rather than the more common 'grill'), secutors seem to have been mostly matched agains retiarii (the net-men). This secutor (the waspish fellow on the left) is from Strategia Nova. Originally he had a raised right arm covered in a lovely manica (armoured sleeve) but holding a sica, the curved knife of a thraex. Indeed, it is now the curved knife of this thraex . I wasn't thinking when I lopped it off the secutor to make my thraex, and so I was left with a secutor's body, but armless. And here we see my conversion/sculpting skills stretched to the max. I borrowed a knife wielding bare arm from another model (an RPE Demonworld Empire rabble), stuck it in place and then sculpted some very chunky manica over the top. In reality it is not a particularly fine...

As I selectively paint up strays from my bits box, here are couple more 15mm ancients. These two Parthian nobles are Xyston sculpts and were beautiful, a dream, to paint up. I'll use them in Song of Shadows and Dust as Edessene nobles in Parthian style dress.

My quiet (as yet unspoken of) gladiator project continues apace. On the miniatures front, I have just added a Donnington 15mm Roman auxiliary archer to the collection as a sagitarius. The sagittarius was a specialist gladiator armed with a recurve bow, perhaps inspired by Parthian or Scythian archers. They were often used in mock re-enactments of historical battles and may sometimes have fought from horseback.  

There have been more Faustus Furius races over at the Wandering View blog . Well worth checking out Tom's page if you don't already follow it.

Inspired by Balkan tribesmen, the Thraex was a lightly armoured gladiator who fought with a small  shield and a sica , a vicious curved sword perhaps derived from a Thracian rhomphaia. Uninspired by the Mick Yarrow (a little messy) and Outpost (a little... little) Thracians, I wanted to paint up another one for my gladiator school. I have always liked the sculpting of the Strategia Nova gladiators (for all their questionable historicity), so scavenging through my bits box I found a Strategia Nova hoplomachus with a nice small shield and a couple of other more generic murmillo-thraex type chaps with large shields. A quick couple of cuts and a drop of glue later, I have a new thraex who seems to have lost his helmet somehow.

Over at the One Sided Miniature Wargaming Discourse blog, Simon's scratch built 1/100 vessels have been out on the table for a spot of Galleys & Galleons . Check out the full post HERE .

Taking advantage of some downtime and the intermittent Irish sun this week, I decided to build myself a little arena for gladiatorial bouts. The base was a cork-backed table place mat. I cut out a 20cm diameter circle with a jigsaw. I picked up some 90cm lengths of 12mm pine strips from the hardware store for £0.75 each. These were cut at 30mm intervals and then roughly sanded to bevel the edges to make each little block look like pieces of ashlar masonry. Starting at a random point - I chose the bunny ears - the blocks were glued down, alternating over two tiers to give the brick-work affect. At the bunny ears I left an opening which was then built up into an arch. I made the archway very high (about 65mm) to accommodate larger scale miniatures as well as my 15mm gladiators.  Obviously I didn't complete the walls of the arena. I left them open as an abstract 'cut-away' to allow for easy access during play (or, if you prefer, maybe it is a ruined arena). The entir...

"A whole lot of pictures from today's game of Faustus Furious. Amazingly fun game and looking forward to the next race." Damon Richardson recently posted a whole raft of photos of a recent  FaFu  game he ran. Not a whole lot of commentary, but some great photos of 15mm chariotry (and it looks like he's making use of the counters included in the rules too).

Continuing with my slow build-up of 28mm mythical Greek forces for OGAM , I have just finished up three 28mm centaur archers from Black Hat Miniatures. I now have enough Greeks and associated monsters to easily run a 1200 point game, or even two 800 point forces to fight against each other if the need arose. As the photos show, the Black Hat centaur archers are armed in a generically Greek way, with a cuirass (I made mine linen although on the Black Hat website, theirs are bronze) and crested helmets. Two are Illyrian and one Chalkidian. All have a quiver on the right hip, and a gladius-looking sword slung on the right hip (Roman style). They suffer from being satin varnished (I haven't yet replaced my matt varnish), and also from being painted as a unit, rather than their centauris companion who was painted as an individual. The three of them took as long to paint as she did, and I didn't really feel the need for them to be painted to the same standard. In game ter...

This year's Northern Irish Song of Blades and Heroes competition day -  The Cú Chulainn Cup  - was held over the weekend. I can't believe this is the 3rd year we've run the day at Wee Gamers, in Whitehead Co. Antrim. The time has gone by so quickly, and the number of participants has snowballed.  This year we had 14 players, plus myself acting as referee and MC. We played five rounds in the day, meaning 35 games were played in a space of 6 hours. Not bad going. There were nine tables set up, each with their own scenarios.

Tom has recently posted a nice little review of Faustus Furius . If you haven't already read it, I'd encourage you to head over and read it in full HERE . "The family plays one chariot game a year at the annual Con. They love it so much I made custom chariots for Sara and Miles. With this game, the chariots will be out a lot more often ... This is a blast of a game, can be used for any sort of racing. Really into these rules, will use them for sorts of racing."