Crossing the 200,000 Mark!

It has been very busy at school over the past couple of weeks, and hobby output has been suffering. However, this week my humble blog passed a significant milestone with 200,000 page views. Thanks so much to everyone who visits and comments on the blog - it means a lot to me.



This week also saw the first experiment at the school club with Battle Group Kursk. Basically we just chucked some units on the table to start getting a hang of the turn sequence and how combat works. It is initially a bit confusing remembering the sequence for different types of fire (area fire, AP etc), especially when excited 13 year olds are queued up to ask me arcane questions about SAGA. We started getting the hang of it though, and I can see that this is going to be one of my favourite games. We have a SAGA tournament coming up in a couple of weeks, but for next term the focus will shift a bit to Project Kursk, with plans afoot for making terrain boards and some communal assembly line painting sessions.

School Team on Tour

On Sunday I took five boys from the school club out to The Hall of Heroes at Campbelltown, on the fringes of Sydney's urban sprawl, to take part in a SAGA tournament. The risk assessment forms were enormous fun to fill out, as always. I refer to this group as the school Representative Historical Wargaming Club, and am working on being able to present reports in assembly based on the sort of cliches that rugby reports are noted for.

There were 12 competitors in the tournament in total, so we made up half the field. I brought along my Welsh. We played three scenarios using 6 point warbands - Clash of Warlords, Sacred Ground and the Escort. Fortune did not shine on me, being destroyed in the first game by one of the boys from school with his damn unstoppable 12 figure unit of Breton hearthguard.

Round 1 with those damn Bretons
In the second game I fought Normans, and if the scenario had gone for the proper 8 turns I reckon I would have pulled off a win, but when the time ran out I was well behind on points.
Steve the Norman plots my doom
Round three found me attacking an Anglo-Saxon convoy of sheep, women and beer. I was all over this one, using my mounted hearthguard with effect to get in amongst his baggage and capture the sheep. The beer proved a tough nut to crack, and proved my undoing (as so often in life). The beer fought me off for a couple of turns and then we were out of time, so a draw. The beer prevented me getting hold of the women, which is something of a life lesson.

Despite my lacklustre performance, the School Representative Team crushed all opposition, with boys from the club coming first, second, fourth and fifth! Quite a brilliant achievement, especially since they were playing against much more experienced adults. The winner found himself the proud owner of a new Strathclyde Welsh starter warband to paint up, along with a handsome trophy.

The boys were great throughout the day, the competition as always was good spirited and friendly, and I have nothing but praise for the chaps at Hall of Heroes.

Battle approaches...

On Sunday I'm off to a SAGA tournament at the Hall of Heroes in Sydney's west, and I've even managed to turn it into an excursion for the school wargaming club, with five vicious young warlords joining me for the day (my comitatus? retinue?) Sunday is also the Duchess' birthday, which shows what a magnificent, understanding and supportive woman she is.

I'm going to use my Welsh for the Tournament, and painted up an extra figure this week to act as a mounted standard bearer, in case I feel like adding a war banner to one of my units, using hte special rules introduced in the Raven's Shadow Saga supplement. The figure is from Westwind, with a LBMS banner and handpainted shield.



I must admit that my morale is not high as I approach this Tournament, largely because I have either offended the dice gods or perhaps more likely have played a couple of games recently with cursed dice. To demonstrate:

The week before last I had a game of Saga at school with one of the boys. I launched a cunning attack on one of his units in which I only needed to roll 3s to hit, and was rolling 10 dice. This is what I rolled.

In response, my opponent was rolling 9 dice and needed 6s to hit, Here's his roll:

I played another game this week using the same dice with a similar result. I will never use those dice again, and if they didn't belong to one of the boys would introduce them to an angle grinder. Tomorrow night, I plan to give my own dice a stern talking to, offering them a bath in a bowl of beer if they at least obey the laws of probability on Sunday, which doesn't honestly seem too much to ask, and reminding of them of the meanings of the verbs 'to die' and 'to dice' should they betray me. So my morale is not high, but I take some comfort in my performance using the rifle simulator at Cadets this afternoon. A single shot, standing, and here's the result:

Heh heh heh. The old Dux has still got it.

Project Kursk Part 9: Soviet Artillery

The latest minis to roll off the assembly line for the Battlegroup Kursk Project are 8 Soviet guns. These are all from Plastic Soldier Company, made from one box each of their 45mm AT guns and ZiS 2/3 guns. All up, we have here three ZiS 3 76mm field guns, a 57mm ZiS 2 anti tank gun, three 45mm M1942 AT guns and a 76mm infantry gun.

I've also finished three prepared positions that can accommodate any of the guns. I wrote up a work-in-progress post about these bases here.

More Fireforge Knights

Here's the second batch of 13th Century German Knights, made from a mix of parts from Fireforge's range of mounted knights and sergeants. Apart from the 'heroic' proportions of some of the weapons, I love these figures. A real pleasure to paint.

Custom Movement Trays

Over the past year I've been basing most of my dark ages figures individually, for use in SAGA. Ideally however I would also like to use the same figures in games like Impetus and Dux Bellorum. I love the look of large bases looking like mini-dioramas, and I'm usually frustrated with the solution of using movement trays to group individually based figures. They never look realistically packed in close enough to each other, and usually stand in neat rows worthy of the Welsh Guards.

I got in touch with the good folks at Warbases and explained my dilemma. They were incredibly helpful and quick to respond, and here is the result.

I call these the 'Dux Homunculorum shieldwall bases'. Each base has a frontage of 12cm and depth of 5cm, so ideal for Impetus and Dux Bellorum. The individual 2cm holes for inserting bases are as closely packed as Warbases could get them, and they came up with several variations of slightly uneven rows and spacing at my request.

What do you think? They are still a compromise, with the figures not packed in closely enough to really resemble a shieldwall, but I reckon this is the best solution for basing individual figures I've ever seen. I'm sure Warbases would love to sell them to anyone who is interested.

Waterboys and Zombies

WARNING! NON-HOBBY RELATED POST!

Back to school tomorrow for another year of inspiring young minds. Nooooooooooooooooooo!

The last week of holidays has been quite nice. An absolute highlight was being able to see The Waterboys live in Sydney. They have been a favourite band of mine since about 1986. I fondly remember writing out lyrics from some of their songs on my school folder circa 1987, and from 1989-the early 90s they were the soundtrack to my life. So I've been waiting about 25 years to see them live, and finally Mike Scott got around to bringing the current lineup to Australia.

There were two Sydney shows. The Duchess bought me tickets to the first one for Christmas, which turned out to be an evening almost entirely showcasing Mike Scott's work putting the words of W.B Yeats to music. It was a great night, and stunningly beautiful music, but I had the strange experience of seeing a band I have been obsessively following for years and not really knowing the songs. They played three old favourites as encores, and it was quite sweet to see the pudgy middle aged audience go nuts (I include myself in this, obviousy). In fact, I was struck by the close resemblance between the audience and the crowd at most wargames shows, with the fundamental difference of course that there were lots of women at the gig. The Duchess and I had a grand old night.

Dux Homunculorum Having A Grand Old Night

So grand in fact that I couldn't resist buying some tickets for the second Sydney show, in the Opera House on Australia Day. This was much more a general retrospective set, and it was just brilliant to hear so many songs that are like old friends. Mike Scott is one of perhaps a minority of performers who sound even better live than on disk. My musical hero is still firmly on his pedestal.

Waterboys Live At Sydney Opera House

Why the zombies in the post heading?

Over the past few months I have been steadily coming to the realisation that I am in serious danger of developing what we might call a 'wargamer's physique'. I like food. I like beer. I like sedentary hobbies, and as the Duchess pithily observed, 'the trouble with nerds and exercise is that it is so very very boring.'

The crunch came when I had to go to a wedding a week or so back and found that one of my work shirts that I haven't worn since December no longer does up around my neck. Must have shrunk or something. Drastic measures are obviously necessary, so I've been a week not eating anything sweet, hardly drinking and even doing some structured exercise.

Which is where the zombies come in. You may recall my mate Antonius, who we last met fraternising with zombies in Sydney's Hyde Park. Antonius is ludicrously fit, and regularly runs distances I would feel tired to drive. However, he put me onto an app for my new iPhone (you may recall my previous phone was incinerated in a bushfire) called Zombies, Run! Basically it is a fitness program built around a zombie game. You head off on a walk or run, listen to your phone, and the story unfolds. You play the role of a Runner, collecting supplies etc for a community of survivors, and as you complete missions different parts of the story are unlocked. It's a brilliant idea, quite fun and has got me running a bit, or at least shambling slightly faster than a zombie. The cheap version (which I naturally bought) was only a couple of bucks. The more expensive one I think includes graphics so you can see your community grow and has a wider range of missions. Strongly recommended if you're worried about your weight but bored beyond belief by the prospect of just going for a jog or visiting a gym.