Mechanics Lab: Advanced Gaol28

I’ve been having a lot of fun lately mashing plastic kits together and thinking about rules for my very rules light skirmish game Gaol28. Some commenters on Instagram asked about a more advanced version which presented a good number of challenges, challenges I could think about for hours and hours. I suppose the biggest issue […]

Gaol28 Battle Report: The Infirmary vs The Chapel

One of the things I wanted to be able to do with Gaol28 was post a full battle report on Instagram which means being able to do it all in 10 images, so here’s my first attempt. The full rules are on my previous post.

Gaol28

Here’s a little project I also undertook while sick with COVID. My goal was to write something short but interesting so I could post the entirety of the rules on Instagram (hence the odd method of posting here).

Still Death Duelling and Reflecting on My Hobby Spend

It was a busy weekend so there was a lack of hobby progress, however I have still been duelling, refining rules, speeding things up, buying miniatures and painting them. The figures bought are mostly from the weird and wonderful areas of Irregular’s 28mm range – zombies, futuristic cops, ninjas and aliens. But a duel with […]

DEATH DUELS

SET UP Fighters have four stats Power (P), Toughness (T), Agility (A) and Special (S), a fighters stats can be any number between 2 and 9 as long as the total of a fighter’s four stats equals 24. The game is played on a 1×8 grid. One fighter begins on the 4th space in, the […]

Harry the Executioner vs Ankh the Egyptian

So I’ve been zero player duelling again, and things have moved on somewhat since my last duelling post: https://thedeathzap.wordpress.com/2021/01/01/new-years-brawl/ Now each character has four stats Power, Toughness, Agility and Special and they roll for which move they want to perform during each ‘turn’ – Strike, Heavy Strike, Kick, Heavy Kick, Grapple or Special for the […]

The Charge! – A Comfortable Wargaming Battle Report

A comfortable start to some comfortable gaming, two infantry forces go at each other: I fully expect the Pavlovians to hold the line, but this should none the less be a fun go at some simple horse and musket rules that borrow heavily from Stuart Asquith and Donald Featherstone. Turn 1 was uneventful, but rolling […]

Getting Stranger

That strange creativity flow hasn’t yet slowed down it seems as over the last week I’ve been adding even more odd creations to my collection. Starting with some town guards, they were your garden variety plastic knight figures in rough 54mm scale, with head replacements and added cocktail sticks. One guys weapon was replaced with […]

Let go and get weird

The wife and I went to the Broomhill Estate for our Wedding Anniversary (7 years) and took in some art. A lot of it was the sort of stuff you look at and don’t really ‘get’. But one piece really did get me. It’s called ‘Welcome to the Third Millennium’ by artist Mike Roles. It’s […]

WW2 Fantasy Figures?

So I’ve painted those previously mentioned Dwarves. For some reason I chose to mostly limit myself to using Citadel washes. The clothing was either Athonian Camoshade or Coelia Greenshade, all leather, pouches, straps and wood was given a coat of Agrax Earthshade, the skin Reikland Fleshshade and the metal Drakenhof Nightshade. The beards got a […]

What’s on the desk? 21/05/22

I suppose I’ve never really done hobby updates, but in a relatively slow week I thought why not? The week has mostly been slow due to work being extremely tiring and me preaching this Sunday so a lot of my free time was preparing for that. I painted up my Alien Recon Mercenaries from Irregular […]

Is this how to paint fire?

It was hard to think of a title for this post that didn’t make me sound like a know it all. So now I’m just going to talk about how one of the best painters I’m aware of does things incorrectly. Darren Latham: Darren painted this Avatar and did an incredible job, there’s no denying […]

Some Most Irregular Warbands

I’ve been itching for a number of reasons, (the main one I’ll talk about later) the other reason is to do with my Universal Skirmish rules. I keep rewriting them, writing entirely new skirmish rule sets and trying out all sorts of odd mechanics, but I haven’t got anything solid enough yet for a good […]

Cheap 1/72 Knights

For those interested in 20mm Medieval, Fantasy or Turnip28 (Turnip20) there are cheap and decently scaled knights for your modelling/ gaming pleasure. They can be bought here. 200 figures for £11.99, so what do you get exactly? A standard bag of boys: There are 12 poses in total, and I’m no expert on this period […]

Mechanics Lab – Super Simple Universal Skirmish Rules: Groblins vs Elves

Often a throwaway line in a ruleset can have massive ramifications, or in other words – no ruleset has throwaway lines! While setting up for playtesting I read the deployment rules: Five shrines are placed before the game. Place a single shrine in the centre of the playing area. Player’s then place two shrines each […]

Mechanics Lab – Super Simple Skirmish Rules

Tinkering with rules is what I do. I suppose its part of the hobby you really can take with you, in a boring or slow moment at work when you haven’t got anyone to talk to you can theorise about combat systems, probabilities and hopefully think up new and unique mechanics. Having played a good […]

The Forest vs The Bobbies

Our forces are as follows: The Bobbies: 1 Inspector – Gunslinger, 15 Might 1 Detective – Gunner, 15 Might 1 Headsman – Berserker, 15 Might 1 Sarge – Soldier, 15 Might 2 Bobbies with Rifles – Soldier, 10 Might 2 Bobbies – Warrior, 10 Might The Forest – 1 Witan – Monster, 32 Might 4 […]

SUPER SIMPLE SKIRMISH RULES REVISITED AND The Clockwork Empire vs The Family

In the interest of spending less money on this hobby, I often find myself returning to old projects. This week I looked back at my Monochrome minis and the Super Simple Skirmish game, to see if I could simplify it further and add even more strategic depth. I think I’ve managed that. WARBANDS, FIGHTERS AND […]

Cheap And Plastic Fantasy Figures

Wargamers really are spoilt for choice these days. It wasn’t that long ago that the only easily available fantasy figures in plastic were sold by Games Workshop. Now however there’s Mantic’s Kings of War line, North Star’s Frostgrave and Oathmark (that they make with Osprey), Fireforge Games’ Forgotten Worlds and Warlord Games’ Warlords of Erewhon […]

real violence, digital violence, movie violence and PLASTIC VIOLENCE

Wargamers on the whole appear to be an intelligent and sensitive bunch. News of the Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to have sent a bit of a shockwave through our niche community with many bloggers expressing feelings of guilt, distaste, even a little shame. I myself have been turned off exploring my own Global War […]

mechanics lab: polygonal dice

It’s been an odd week, one of those weeks where I experience a bit of creativity overload, many new ventures, many new projects, almost none of them the Global Warfare rules I’m supposed to be working on. One such venture this week was a simple skirmish system using polygonal dice to do all of the […]

So what did I do in 2021?

One of the weird things about having a hobby blog is being able to look back over the year and see pretty much exactly what I’ve been up to in the year just gone. JANUARY I started the year with my 0 player duelling project. It was a fun distraction and got me revamping old […]

Ectomites – The Cheapest Army Ever

Ectomites have inhabited my brain for a while. I suppose you could say they were low rent Shoggoth rip offs, they’re back story is almost entirely similar. However when I first imagined them when I was about 12 years old, around the turn of the century, I had never heard of or knew anything about […]

Infinite Battles – Another Irregular Project

One thing I’ve always wanted to have is a generic system that could be used for anything – fantasy, historical, sci-fi, anything. The idea is to keep the rules interesting enough that they give a good game while also allowing you to stat your own units to fit any genre or period. I’m calling it […]

Bog Roll Wraiths

I think I found an opponent for my Elemental Knights, although I don’t think I’ll call them Bog Roll Wraiths. Loo Paper Lichs perhaps? The figures I used were the standard low quality plastic knights you find littering discount shops. The quality of the figures is significantly lower than the other cheap knights that I […]