What Are Alien Races?

I’ve been taking my time pondering the Selenoids, and it got me thinking more generally about Alien races. More specifically how would a human civilisation begin to research or interact with an Alien race? I guess you’d need a crack team of people at the height of their respective fields to begin to unpack a […]

Let’s Develop an Alien Race Together: The Selenoids

The Selenoids have been a race in Deathzap almost since its inception, but despite being around in my mind for six years, I’ve done very little to develop them past their initial appearance. Since they’ll be playing the big threat for the next little while (I don’t want to say ‘big bad’ as the humans […]

Star Wars: A Deathzap Story

The wife and I have once again found ourselves wandering around Disney World in Florida. Being away from the hobby table, once again has gotten me to think about my Deathzap setting. What do people like or dislike about different fantasy/ sci-fi settings? What makes one setting successful and another fall by the way side? […]

Some Really Great ‘Penny Dreadfuls’

While stalking the dark alleys of Amazon I noticed a discrepancy: The figures outside the bag are different from those within the bag. The ones outside are decent, but I do have a lot of them already. The ones in the bag really piqued my interest because I spotted a figure closer to the original […]

Identifying ‘Penny Dreadfuls’

My hyper focus over the past few days is tracing the origins of my cheap Deathzap army men of choice or Penny Dreadfuls as the Man of Tin calls them. I’ve given them code names for ease of identification if you want to help me out in the comments. A somewhat simple example is below: […]

One Box Wargame Challenge Progress

So I got working on my Afghans this weekend, making two warbands of 10 figures each, leaving me enough for two more warbands. Wargames Atlantic figures really are incredible value. The kit is great, and you really could knock out a huge Afghan Tribal army for colonial era gaming for very little money (just over […]

The One Box Wargame Challenge

Malev Minis recently started a challenge to create an entire wargame from a single box of miniatures. His own creation ‘Convict Combat’ is a death match style game using a box of Wargames Atlantic’s Cannon Fodder. https://youtu.be/yG8IhzpMk8Y?feature=shared I thought for a while about the challenge and wanted to go with something a little outside the […]

Mechanics Lab: The Amalgamation

Non descriptive titles maybe unhelpful, but I couldn’t think of what to call this post. It’s my attempt at combing the Simple Toy Soldier Game and my Universal Skirmish Rules into some sort of Chimera. Warning! This post is really rambling and only half makes sense, but this is the creative rules writing process in […]

Dinos of the Dead

I’ve been away the past few days so haven’t made all that much hobby progress bar putting my order in with Irregular Miniatures for the extra figures I wanted for my Super Simple Skirmish Game, and ordering more bases for those figures from Amazon. Before leaving however a small package arrived also from Amazon (do […]

Revisiting The Super Simple Skirmish Game – Dragon Temple vs Invaders

I realised I hadn’t played with the latest version of my Super Simple Skirmish rules since I posted about it last time and made adjustments. A bit mad considering that was almost two years ago: https://deathzap.co.uk/2022/09/24/revisiting-old-rules-super-simple-universal-skirmish-rules/ My warbands were as follows: The Dragon Temple had: A Hero (Monster M16), a Dragon (Monster M24), two Flamers […]

Ain’t no Party like a Partisan Party!

It’s been a slowish week but I have set about building my Partisan force. Here’s everything I was able to get out of the Wargames Atlantic box, all 32 figures. I’ve grouped them into two 10 man Rifle squads and two 5 man Assault squads. You can probably guess what the Rifle squads have (9 […]

Bolt Action 3

Looking forward to the new edition of Bolt Action I’ve spent a while thinking about what army to go for. The sensible choices would be Russia or Italy since I’ve already got those armies and have barely plumbed the depths of them. But of course being a wargamer that was infected by Games Workshop’s brain […]

Crusage: The Battle of The Rift

The forces of Hell freshly emerge from the great rend in reality where the city of Jerusalem once stood. Now they begin their own damned crusade against mankind. Can the splintered forces of humanity rise to the occasion and save the world? Rolling a D12 and consulting the Bolt Action 2 Rulebook led me to […]

Melee Combat in the Crusage

In prepping for another big battle I felt my melee combat rules could do with a tweak. Here’s where they currently stand: Select a target figure in base contact with the attacking figure. Roll the attacking figure’s MA die, and your opponent rolls the target figure’s DF die. The lower roller loses a number of […]

Pegasii and Pirates

I was slowed down somewhat in the week past due to a nasty headache but I came out of it filled with enthusiasm. I’ve finished ten of the Skeleton Pirates shown off in the previous post: I guess I’m really stretching the realms of possibility considering this game is supposed to be set during the […]

Pirates of the Amazon

I was plundering Amazon for various toys I could deploy in my Crusage game when I stumbled across a bunch of Pirates. You may have seen these guys already and were wondering how good they are before taking the plunge and spending your hard earned pieces of eight, well me hearties, let me show you! […]

Jimmy Fingers

I had a good number of those cheap Halloween skeletons left over and I was unlikely to turn them all into Nephilim like before: So I thought instead about turning all of them into a monster, something where multiple skeletons combined into a bone Megazord. So I just got down to chopping and gluing with […]

Crusage

Continuing my fantasy crusade project I’m now calling ‘Crusage’, that’s Crus-age, the age of crusading. I’ve had my Pegasus Cavalry and Rocket Battery on the painting table, and managed to get the Battery finished this morning: It’s already been pressed into service and proved rather effective at dispatching the forces of evil (you can see […]

Something Wicked This Way Comes 2: Electric Boogaloo

I remember failing to make a Nurgle Plague Tower some time ago: https://deathzap.co.uk/2019/02/22/something-wicked-this-way-comes-part-5/ That project burned out for me, I think because I didn’t have too many skills yet in the trash bashing arena, but another attempt is bubbling away in the back of my brain. This time round however I set my sights on […]

Monsters, Mutants and Mayhem

Back on the Crusading front, I’ve been working away at some new figures and ideas. With the number of dragons I’ve somehow accumulated, I thought it’d be a good idea to mount a bad guy on one. I gave him an overly sized masking tape axe, the sign of a true bad guy. Textured and […]

Speed Painting Adeptus Mechanicus

I suppose for some folks out there ‘cheap’ might not necessarily be about money, but has more to do with time spent. On the odd occasion that I build and paint something from Games Workshop, I normally go for the ‘cheap’ speedy option. My Thousand Sons tutorial is one of the most popular pages on […]

Putting My Money Where My Mouth is and Working on Some Dinosaurs

I’ve done this before, but after much changing around in my hobby room I’ve misplaced my previously painted Dinos, and sparked on by my £5 wargaming challenge post I though I’d have a go again. I went slightly over budget (£5.99, forgive me, I’ll say five ‘Hail Featherstones’), and nabbed a bag of small Dinos […]

A Saturday Morning Cartoon SKIRMASH

Cue the power metal intro as colourful heroes and villains dart across your 14” CRT TV screens. Three Dice of Power have fallen from the gods above! Heroes and villains rush into the bleak valley to claim them. Vlad the Vampire darts forward, screeching like an animal, heading for the central Dice. Polar the Bear […]

The Big Battle

So I finally managed to get my new armies to the table and let them have a go at each other! The ‘Good Guys’ were as follows: That’s 5 Templars, 5 Handgunners, 5 Grenadiers, 5 Shining Templars, 2 Nephilim and a Warpriest. The ‘Bad Guys’: 5 Devildogs, 10 Wraiths, 5 Hellknights, 5 Sauracens, a Golem, […]

A Cheap Wargaming Challenge

With Games Workshop (or are they just Warhammer now?) putting up prices again, hobby spaces online are flooded with negative comments. Considering Warhammer figures are already overpriced, you can understand the complaints. But this blog isn’t about expensive hobbying, it’s about doing it on the cheap. So here’s a question, how cheap can it be? […]