Welcome To The World

    I try to keep this blog pretty hobby-centric but every now and again I've got a good reason to break that rule and this is one of those posts.

   About a week ago my wife gave birth to our first child, a boy we have called Edward. As you can imagine he is taking up nearly all of our time at the moment so my hobby is definitely suffering, but its been totally worth it so far.

   I've got big plans for my hobby next year and have been buying up armies since we found out (giving fair warning that I have failed at least one of my hobby targets for 2020) but I suspect posts will dry up a bit in the immediate future.

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World War Of The Roses

    This post has been written a bit earlier than I planned it to, but I've had a week or so of a complete lack of hobby mojo (not obvious from my posts) so I decided the best thing to do would be to look at something fresh for a bit before going back to my Britannia AD43 project.

   A couple of weeks back, I came across a group of posts on Twitter talking about something called the World War Of The Roses and it intrigued me.

   As you can see from the picture, I helpfully downloaded from Twitter, the aim is to have as many games set during the Wars Of The Roses played over the weekend of May 22-23rd 2021 as possible. While I didn't have anything painted up for it, I did have two armies bought and in line to be next, so why not set myself a deadline - of nearly a full 6 months.

   I've decided to go with my painting plan of doing mixed batches of troops but taking it to the next level and doing the whole of a single retinue in one go - although over a batch or two to keep numbers down. I'm going to mix the size of retinues from 6 up to maybe 16-20 depending on the lord, so some colours and badges will be more common in the army than others.

   This first retinue is Andrew Trollope who I picked because I liked his heraldry and his name - how could you not. He was a Lancastrian which is also the side I am starting with (and also the side that I have bought the most for as I think one of my gaming group plans to do a Yorkist force of their own in the future), although I do plan to continue my normal thing of painting armies for both sides as it always means I have the ability to get a game in.

   The aim is to get two side painted as and when time allows - although I suspect it'll be fairly quick as the figures are fairly easy to paint - and then bulk out each side as the deadline gets closer. I'm sort of hoping this might end up being a fairly big project.

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Building Up The Strength

    I'm on the home stretch with my Ancient Britons now, with the two units in this post being the last full units of their type - although there are another 2 full units of other types and some stragglers left but that's a different problem. It was only as I waited for my laptop to warm up enough to open Chrome that I realised this army has outgrown the boxes I bought for it and will now need extra storage, so the temptation to add more units is overwhelming, something to have a stop and think about I suspect.

   This post is the last unit of regular warriors and the second (also last - for now) unit of horse. I gave the warriors a couple of flaming torches while I was building them as it occurred to me that I would like the option to play an attack on a Roman town as a scenario, as I have Roman buildings for Gangs of Rome already. In hindsight I should probably have made more than 2 with torches. All figures are Warlord Games still and I've included the guy from Boudica's chariot in this unit too.

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Last Of The Legion

    I've set myself a bit of a deadline for project Britannia AD43 (or so) that I suspect I am going to fail to achieve but I'm still getting a fair few figures from it moving to do my best. This post is about the last unit of Legionnaires inc the command elements, while I have a few stragglers coming along and I'm not going to rule out another unit one day in the future but we are done with legionaries for now.

   With just a couple of units of Auxilia left to paint for this half of the project, I had better get back to the painting table.

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British Laager

   I've definitely mentioned this before, but my Wagons, Carts & Civilians* label is probably my favourite option in my blog side bar as it lets you do some really fun things, although it was in writing this post that I realised I have a lot less wagons than I thought I had - something to rectify. This post was particularly fun to get ready and will hopefully address the balance a bit..

   Laager was not a word in my mental dictionary until I sent Simon Miller from TheBigRedBatCave a message asking where he got his Celtic Wagons from as I couldn't see any mention in his Celtic label search of manufacturers. At the point I asked, I'd bought 3 wagons from a couple of different sources** but wanted a bit more variety and my google-fu was failing me. Simon's very helpful response included where he thought they had come from but also told me to search Laager on his blog and it was an eye opener.

   A few of orders later (that escalated somewhat) and I had bought another 9 wagons from various sources for this project and for a couple of other projects. For this project I ended up with; 2 from 1st Corps, 2 from Front Rank, 1 from Redoubt Miniatures and 1 from Wargames Foundry along some screaming women for heckling purposes. This ends up being just less than 2 foot of Laager if you are using the Simon Miller method of counting wagons - must try harder.

*Slightly amended  

 **One of which was later requisitioned by the Romans

Front Rank

Redoubt Miniatures

Front Rank

Wargames Foundry

1st Corps

   I am now in the weird position where I can rank different companies wagons in a single post and while I don't think there are any bad kits in this batch, some deserve a bit of praise. 

   The 1st Corps wagons are my go to place when I first decide I need a wagon, but I do think the lack of variety is a bit of a shame, saying that they go together really nicely. The Redoubt Miniatures wagon was a dream to put together but the other wagons I picked up for my ECW project - coming soon - were a bit more of a puzzle to get built, although, as some of the cheapest wagons on this list, they definitely rank highly. The single Foundry Miniatures wagon went together fairly easily and is a really good basic wagon, but it is the Front Rank wagons that I want to really single out as they were a dream to put together and left me wishing I had bought another one or two**.

   The figures are a mix of the Foundry Germanic women (heartily recommended to me by Simon), a couple from Crusader Miniatures and one or two from Warlord Games. The woman holding a baby in one hand and a Roman helmet in the other was a limited edition figure from Warlord, I think you got free when you placed an order, and I knew I had one somewhere - it turned out I had a few of them. I've still got a few more non-combatant type figures to do for this project but if I keep waiting for everything to be finished I'll never post this up.

**I did but that's a story for another day

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The Dreaded Praetorian Guard

    The Praetorian Guard is a unit that I had no plans to include in this project, but a chat with a mate on the best source of replacement shields for GW's Minas Tirith troops* reminded me that Wargames Illustrated had two free Roman sprues in a row, I've already used the Veteran Legionaries (mixed into my Legionary units) but I also had something else. A search through my Pile of Potential and I found it was a sprue of Praetorians. So, on my last (so far) Warlord Games orders I added a couple of packs of decals for their shields and an extra sprue to make them a useable number, figuring if I didn't paint them as part of this project they would languish in my sprue pile forever.

*If anyone has any ideas we are still stuck

   Then a couple of weekends ago my Podcast mates decided to do a hangout and hobby session to have a catch up during Lockdown 2 and I decided that instead of doing the next thing in my painting queue, I would use the chance of being 'forced' to paint to get on with a project I wasn't looking forward to, a few things came to mind, but a full batch of 20 models won. I don't like painting in batches bigger than 6 (which allows me to do a Lion Rampant unit in 2 batches rather than 2 and a bit of most people's 5 in a batch) but as my Romans had already been worked in batches of 12, what I really wanted to avoid was painting the 12 I needed then leaving the rest of the unit in my painting queue to catch up with later.

   While painting 20 models at a time is horrible and I don't know how you people that do it, actually do it, doing the boring bits while having a chat was a better experience than I expected (damned with faint praise?) and it meant the project was well on it's way by the time we called it and got back on with our weekends.

   I've also given them pretty bad stats, instead of making them an elite unit as other games seem to, for Lion Rampant and at this point I'm sort of looking forward to another player finding that out mid game . . .

   Then with the Praetorian Guard being painted the next obvious thing was someone for them to guard. As Claudius only got involved in the invasion at the point where it was basically a photo op and Nero had other problems on his hands during Boudica's uprising (fiddling while Rome burned?) I didn't want it to be an emperor, so I went for a Legate or Tribune. I'm pretty sure this pair are from Warlord, although I have got a bit lost in where bits are from at this point. I only plan to use a single one in a game, but it's nice to have options. The extra figure is a mob figure from Gangs of Rome that I have spare and I plan to use him as a freedman of some sort to give the leader some advice during the battle.

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Hit And Run

    I'm at that awkward point in what I have started dubbing my Britannia AD43 project (just because it sounds flashier than Britannia somewhere between AD43 and AD60-61 but with the option of AD83 - sorry Boudica) where I can see the end of the project looming and that means it's easy to take the eye off the ball and let the last units drift down the painting queue (like pretty much every other project I have done in the last year or few). I'm trying to show a bit of self discipline and make sure everything for this project is built and sprayed, then close to hand so painting carries on with as few distractions as possible.

   That is where this post comes in. I have made no qualms about my dislike of painting cavalry in the past, and as this project only has 2 units of cavalry a side (actually really small numbers all things considered) they could so easily become the casualties of my end of project drifting, so I'm aiming to make sure I have some horses on my painting desk at all times now.

   I finished the first unit of Roman cavalry a couple of weeks back, so this time it is the turn of some British cavalry. I've mixed horse colours as I normally try to I've basically just been adding a horseman or two each time I've painted a batch of warriors to try and keep a mix of clothing colours and patterns.

Thanks for reading