Irregular Wars Wargaming

More 10mm dwarves from Cibo's Little Dudes, this time a unit of three companies of shield-bearers (and a captain).

As the Covid-19 pandemic eases here in Ulster, we are now allowed to meet in small groups, inside, for the first time in over three months. The obvious way to celebrate was to play with toy soldiers. In person! Four brave souls met for a live playtest of Fantastic Battles, pitching the goblins of the Wyvern Hills against the Vermintide. The bowl of dice is substituting for a bag of counters to randomise initiative during the Action phase of each turn. There is one coloured counter/die per character, plus one for impetuous units. As each coloured counter is drawn from the bag, the respective players activate a character and any units they are able to command. The Great Goblin is engaged by the Great Rat in what was to be come the turning point in the battle. Before he can rush to the aid of the goblin warlord, the hill giant is charged by a furiously propelled rat wheel. The goblin warlord fell (and was eaten) by the Great Rat, and the gobin army fell apart shortly afterwa...

Dodging the the judgmental stares of the unpainted 6mm Austrians sitting on the shelf, I made a start on a new 10mm army this weekend. My 'Ziggurat Dwarves' are based on the evil dwarf range from Cibo's Little Dudes with a few modifications. The company of flying carpet uses a couple of dwarf magic-users mounted on greenstuff carpets. They will provide some mobile shooting support to what will, on the whole, be a slow melee-based army.   The djinn is from Cibo's desert empire range. Like all of Cibo's stuff he's full of character, but this chap seemed very unstable when I went to base it. I adapted the figure a little, removing the lamp and shifting it to the side, then adding more magical bubbles around the base to give it a bit more stability. 

We had a busy weekend playtesting Fantastic Battles  over the wonder of the internet to ensure that we simultaneously stayed dry and respected social distancing.  Jim (and his cat, obscured though she was in the photo) took on the role of halfling warlord, while Joel (avec hound) played as the great goblin. I was impartially pushing figures around on the table at their respective instruction.   There was an early (hard fought) scrap in the woods between the halfling poulty scouts and the goblin warlord mounted on his wyvern, supported by bat- and spider-riding goblins. Unfortunately not captured by the battlefield correspondent. On the opposite flank, the woods can alive to halt the advance of a massed unit of goblin wolf-riders. In the (left of) centre, more treefolk engaged a unit of goblin warriors from the front, while the halfling-friendly cockatrice flew over to attack the same unit in the rear. In a desperate attempt to stop his centre crumbli...

What better way to spend the summer solstice than by building a stone circle? I've had a stone circle for a while, but it was poorly based so I pulled it apart to make a few new terrain pieces. First up, a smaller stone circle! This can be used as rough terrain, or even a settlement feature in Fantastic Battles . Three other stones have been made into separate standing stones or 'totems'. If choosing to play Fantastic Battles with Objectives, warlords can be tasked with an iconoclasm, destroying totems located across the table. The last of today's wee pieces is a small barrow or the entrance to a troll-hoard. In Fantastic Battles , these features can be discovered through random events, or can be the target of on Objective.

Fantastic Battles has reached a point where it would benefit from a few more playtesters outside of my regular opponents. If you are interested in helping out, please drop me a message through the contact form and let me know your gaming capacity at the moment - with lockdown at different stages in different places, some people can play solo or over video link, some can meet with friends, and some might only be able to read but not play. Cheers!

While the playtesting of Fantastic Battles is still very much a work-in-progress, the army building mechanics are relatively stable so I thought I would showcase one of the armies we have been playing with. As outlined previously , army building is designed to be fully customisable to suit a player's vision of their faction. This list represents my view of goblins as a jibbering, unruly, tribal society, brought together only by the strength and cunning of a 'great goblin'.   This army is costed at exactly 1000 points. It includes seven characters and 22 companies (bases of troops/monsters) which I would normally run as 13 units. I have chosen the 'unreliable' trait as a racial trope to reflect the notion that goblins are not the most steadfast of fantasy races. Away from the watchful eyes of their commanders, they are wildly unpredictable. The rules work perfectly well with smaller armies, and with multiple players per side. I haven't yet tried larger arm...

To bring my 10mm goblin army up to full strength I needed one final unit. I settled on spider riders from Cibo's Little Dudes in Switzerland (I added the tiki masks). With so much character pumped into these little chaps, they are slightly heftier than either Warmaster of Polarfox 10mm goblins, but work perfectly well alongside them in their own unit.

One of the challenges brought on by the current pandemic is the inability to meet friends inside to roll dice and push toy soldiers across a table. We are now able to meet outside (wargaming in the sun?), but with the recent squally weather, it's not all that enticing. This has been rather frustrating for writing purposes, as  Fantastic Battles  should now be in the middle of extensive playtesting. I started testing back at the start of the year, but lockdown really put a dampener on that.  While other people have managed to test the rules, either solo or with various technological solutions to social distancing, I have been a couple of months without testing a battle.  A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Steve and Forbes, two wargamers across the water in England, to join them for a virtual playtest. It had never occurred to me that this was a viable way to play wargames, but it seemed to work for them, so we gave it a shot ourselves this week. I set up the...

In Fantastic Battles , all armies are custom built to suit the player’s vision of their fantasy race, nation or faction. This post is intended to give some insight into the process of building an army with which to crush their enemies. Armies consist of a number of characters and companies built using the guidelines below. For pick-up games, players would normally agree a nominal point limit of 500-1,000 points within which to build armies. A 1,000 point army might have somewhere in the region of 4-7 characters, and 15-25 companies. Games with multiple players per side are easily accommodated. The rules will include a number of pre-generated army lists based on the armies of the various play-testers, but these should be seen as suggestions rather than canon, and players are encouraged to create armies that suit their own collections. Characters  Each army must be led by a single warlord (or a necromancer) and may also include a number of other individual characters who are cl...

*NB - May not be actual LEGO. The figures came out of boxes branded “Pogo” or “Juracic Park”* Here is another game report from Mark in Thailand. The game was actually played back in February, but I forgot to share it at the time. The Joker is taking a break from pranking Gotham City, and has taken his gf and a couple of associates hunting on Dinosaur Island. They want to kill every dinosaur they can find, just for the fun of it, and they have 10 turns to do so. The hunters are: ♥️The Joker: pistol, Engineer ♦️Harley Quinn: club ♠️Alan (blonde hair): sub machine gun ♣️Smiles (black hair): rifle Here they are (photo below) surveying the scene from the top of a small hill. And here is a shot of most of the island. Note the pterosaur at top R (Raptor), King Carnosaur at bottom R, and small herd of 3 x Great Herbivores around the waterhole at bottom L. There is also another King Carnosaur roaming off-table. It will appear at a random spot if the right condi...