Irregular Wars Wargaming

This week I pushed some 10mm 'Greeks' for my Men of Bronze project up the painting queue (I do hope it's a good game!). The first unit to be painted are the Macedonian heavy cavalry - you can call them hippeis (knights) or hetairoi (companions), take your pick. The miniatures are Magister Militum Thracian light cavalry with green stuff petasoi (as mentioned here ). Thucydides makes a point of saying the Macedonian noble cavalry of the 5th century (429 BC specifically) were about the only capable fighting force in the country - the infantry being unable to stand up to either Greek hoplites of Thracian peltasts.  "The Macedonians never even thought of meeting him with infantry; but the Thracian host was, as opportunity offered, attacked by handfuls of their horse, which had been reinforced from their allies in the interior. Armed with cuirasses, and excellent horsemen, wherever these charged they overthrew all before them, but ran considerable risk in entangl

I hadn't seem my good friend JB in a while but he managed to come up into the hills this week. We had no fixed idea of what we were going to play, but my wee lad suggested we play Lord and Lands , insisting JB lead his Legion of Super Evil. JB's Legion set up in a tight cluster with only his spider riders off on his left flank in the woods (top right of the photo). My halflings were much more spread out. Foolishly I had slow halfling militia on my left flank, and slow tree-folk on my right flank. Even more foolishly, I intermixed the slow bowmen, with even slower artillery.  After the opening couple of turns, it became clear that my maneuverability was going to be questionable (with the exception of my poultry patrol skirmishers), and the Legion of Doom were going to play hard to get, refusing their right flank. The wee dude left us at this point for bed time. Eventually I got into a position where my halfling skirmishers and poultry patrol could start shooting, a

My noble martyrs Romano-British took to the table again this week for another gripping game of Dux Bellorum . This time, taking on a very similar force of Romano-British. It seems that Andrew Rex and Princeps Lee felt that the Irish raiders who savaged them in the last bloody draw had used my harbours to launch their attack. Foul lies of course, as those same Irish raiders have savaged my Romano-British many times before. Andrew and Lee's force (top) consisted of mounted companions, three units of noble riders, three shieldwalls and a unit of bows. My force (bottom) consisted of mounted companions, three units of noble riders, two shieldwalls, a unit of bows and a conclave of monks. In the opening moves, both Andrew's companions (supported by a unit of noble riders) and my own (with two noble rider supports), charged directly forward and crashed into each other with a surprisingly tender and ineffective lack of crunch.  Elsewhere, Lee's noble riders whee

Having decided to delve into Men of Bronze , I needed a new army. Ok, 'need' might be a bit strong as I can already do at least one force (Philip II's Macedonians) in 6mm. But I figured that with such small armies, 10mm would look nicer than 6mm. Wanting to start this project with early Macedonians, I knew I needed cavalry wearing the broad brimmed petasos, some hoplites, and some peltasts. After a few days nosing about the internet, I settled on Magister Militum and placed an order. All photos below give an idea of the different sculpts in each pack, but don't do them justice. They are all nicer in hand than in the pictures. I ordered two packs of hoplites. The top row here shows the Early Hoplite pack, the bottom row shows Late Hoplites. Both packs let you order spears upright, spears at 45 degrees, thrusting spears, or a mix of all three. I ordered both packs with upright spears, mostly for ease of painting, and secondly for the diorama style basing I anticipat

Back in September, I heard the first whispers about a new Osprey Wargames title coming out next year - Men of Bronze by Eric Farrington. My fancy was immediately tickled, and I set out to try and find out a bit more about the forthcoming game. It is already available for pre-order (and has been pre-ordered) through Amazon and between there, the author's blog , and a Men of Bronze thread over at the Lead Adventures forum , I've managed to piece together a (still fragmentary) picture of what to expect. It seems Eric has written a set of rules focused on the age of the hoplite - lets say 7th - late 4th centuries BC. By focusing on the, relatively, narrow time frame, he has hopefully captured the nuances of hoplite warfare which never really feature in more generic ancient rule sets. Furthermore, Eric has noted that he's been inspired by Dan Mersey's stable of rules (including Dux Bellorum , a favourite of mine), so that can't be a bad thing. From the Amazon des