Templars vs Sauracens

I’ve had a couple of bags of the ‘bad’ knights for a while. I’ve used up a few for Wartomata in Deathzap: But that uses up very few, and I hate seeing poor quality toy soldiers go to waist. I imagined a portal to Hell or a parallel dimension opening up during the Crusades. So […]

Trash Nurglings

Babies abound on Amazon. So I bought some, these babies in particular: A day later I had 90 for £5.99. I was hoping they’d be large enough to play the part of Plague Bearers, however they were about half the size I needed (although two in a trench coat might do). So I settled on […]

Baby Dinosaurs

After the success of my Porridge Baby, I wondered if it would be possible to make an entire Nurgle Daemons army out of discount toys and cheap Amazon purchases. So I turned to Beasts of Nurgle and/or Chaos Spawn. Naturally I bought a bag of baby heads and a bag of dinosaurs. Luckily they were […]

Cheap Box City in a Box

Terrain is a struggle for any wargamer, and especially for wargamers as eclectic as me. It’s not really possible to collect terrain for every era and fantasy world in every scale from 2mm to 54mm. My biggest issue is the space required, so I came up with a potentially useful solution. Children’s stacking boxes can […]

The Saga of Porridge Baby Part 2

I’m kind of blow away by how well this has worked. When I was looking at expanding foam splatted on pizza boxes in the back garden I was cautiously optimistic, but I couldn’t have imagined things were going to end up. So from where we left off, I spent a lot of time plugging gaps […]

The Saga of Porridge Baby

Bolstered by my recent success in building a Dreadnought for my Death Guard army, I set about turning another idea of mine into reality. I felt convinced that expanding foam was a great way to build your own Great Unclean One. Putting down rough shapes onto cardboard was where I started. Not having used expanding […]

Still SKIRMASHing

I think it’s important to know with a project when you’re done. Sometimes a painting is finished before you choose to stop, and the paint you added after that point only served to make things worse. The same goes for miniature painting. Films and books can sometimes be over-written, too clever, too well structured that […]

SKIRMASH

I’ve been playing with SKIRMASH over the past few days and it’s been a lot of fun. My initial idea with SKIRMASH was a quick and easy skirmish game that balanced itself. Here are the original rules I posted in a single image: The way it works with SKIRMASH is the stats work like double […]

Deceptively Difficult Deployment Part 2

Many, many thanks are in order for all the brilliant comments on my last post about deploying apemen. I’ve broken things down into three rough sections, randomised deployment, card based and misc. Here goes: Randomised deployment: Place terrain. Pretend the board is a clock face, have players roll a d12 per figure to give each […]

The Small Skirmish Obsession

So I’ve recovered from the plague, and in a post fevered state threw together yet another small skirmish game. I suppose you can blame this on the fact that Darkfell was really designed to be a Mordheim replacement and for some reason I’ve been playing it with superhero-ish figures, the two just don’t quite fit […]

Deciphering Darkfell

All the feedback for WOTH was fantastic and I’m looking at doing a post soon trying all the different options and seeing the pros and cons. If you’re wondering what I’m on about, the post and comments are here: https://deathzap.co.uk/2024/01/10/deceptively-difficult-deployment/ So in taking a small break from WOTH to gather data, and to come back […]

Goodies vs Baddies: Darkfell The Wager Battle Report

I’m using the Darkfell: The Wager rules you can find here: https://deathzap.co.uk/2024/01/04/returning-to-darkfell/ I recommend you give them a read as this will be more on the technical side of a battle report, mostly just the mechanics and the dice rolls. Going this way, instead of going for the Mordheim vibe, I thought why not get […]

Deceptively Difficult Deployment

I’ve been working on my first version of WOTH (War of the Hominids), a simple game where you take 6 apemen and make them fight your opponent’s 6 apemen. It’s all lobbing rocks and ripping arms off. I’ve mostly cracked the core of the game, with a small niggle regarding ‘objectives’ (if apemen even have […]

Returning to Darkfell

Darkfell is my own Mordheim, with a sort of ‘anything goes’ vibe. Medieval armour, 20th century guns, magic, alchemy and cyborgs. I’ve posted a few times on Darkfell before, and much like Deathzap written several rule sets for the setting. The last rule set I put together I called ‘The Wager’, and you can find […]

Plans for 2024

It’s been a fun year. Looking back through the blog is always interesting, so many projects discarded and forgotten, so many exciting ideas to rediscover. So what am I hoping for in 2024? A New Year’s resolution of mine is to play more games and to attempt to stay 5% more focused on current projects. […]

Easy Tabletop Hominids

So I’ve had a bag of crappy army men I’ve been looking to do something with for a while. I’ve also wanted a game about the various hominid cryptids, Sasquatch, Yeti and my personal favourite the Skunk Ape. Picking out some of the open poses I cut off the guns and gave them a wash. […]

The One Page Game Jam is Here and Incarn28

I must have missed this somehow, but a while ago I mentioned writing something for the One Page Game Jam: https://deathzap.co.uk/2023/04/07/1-page-game-jam-ideas/ After much silliness a friend and I put something together we called Incarn28. I’ve posted a little about it before: https://deathzap.co.uk/2023/05/01/weird-and-wonderful-warbands/ https://deathzap.co.uk/2023/05/08/the-most-insane-one-page-rules-ever/ https://deathzap.co.uk/2023/05/13/the-eyes-above-an-incarn28-story-battle-report/ I’d really recommend checking out the Game Jam, there’s a lot […]

Painting Basilea

So after playing a lot of Grimdark Future my usual gaming chums have started on One Page Rules’ other battle game Age of Fantasy. I dove in with a good amount of enthusiasm and even though I already had a couple of fantasy armies already I bought a couple more (since as wargamers we are […]

So how do ghosts work then?

Comments and questions posed previously on my Ghost Legions posts have lead my head down a rabbit hole over the past few days. It’s a rabbit hole I’ve gone down briefly before, but now I am exploring it somewhat further, hopefully to the underworld of answers itself. But before getting too esoteric, before I consult […]

Ghost Hunting

I’ve been making slow progress on my Ghost Legions project. Most of my free time last week was spent painting up my Army of Spartacus figures, and I went with highlighting skin in white and shading some parts to add variety. I don’t think I’ve lost the ‘ghost’ look, but I do think it’s a […]

Ghostly Painting and Ghostly Mulling

I was surprised at the challenges that arose when I set out to paint up a few boxes of 1/72 figures as ghosts. Getting those pesky little guys (1/72) onto the table has always been a challenge. 1/72 figures are as detailed as their 28mm brethren, just smaller. The nightmare of realistically painting a bunch […]

Ghosts Legions: The Revenge

Much like my recent post on Elemental Knights a frequent brain worm of mine is Ghost Legions. My attempt at fighting wars with ghosts in the afterlife, a good excuse to drag out any historical figures you have to hand and play a game with them. Similar to those you may have fought as a […]

Return of the Elemental Knights

I think I’m remembering some stuff from my childhood that’s made me somewhat obsessed with the idea of knights that have elemental powers as the basis for a Fantasy setting as seen before on this blog: The original Elemental Knights post is here: https://deathzap.co.uk/2021/07/13/elemental-knights/ The three major culprits as far as I can see are […]

‘Someone has to play the Nazis’?

You may have seen or heard of the recent controversy online regarding a video put out by a much loved, mostly Warhammer YouTuber Midwinter Minis: In the video he wonders why historical wargaming isn’t as popular as Warhammer, and considering WW2 is by far the most popular historical period, he wonders if it’s the presence […]

The Eyes Above – An Incarn28 Story Battle Report

Carvus looked up at the eyes, they watched him closely. He had thought from youth that they were the gods, watching over him, but in truth no one really knew. No one knew why the sky was covered with them. No one knew their purpose. No one knew why their giant tears of blood that […]