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 […]

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 […]

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 Necromancer and a Golem

I must be tapping into something here, it is odd for a wargamer as stricken with butterfly-ism as badly as I am to find as much continued focus on a single project as this. Although truth be told, my childhood collection of Britain’s ‘Knights of the Sword’ bought from Kettering’s town market may have something […]

Good vs Evil

Progress has been slow again this last week, mostly due to me coming down with man flu. However I have finished a surprising amount off considering how bad I’ve felt. I spoke last time about expanding my forces and expand I did! Working first on my evil forces, as stated before I rebased and touched […]

Expanding My Crusade

I’m still playing with my Templars and horrors despite a slow hobby week. As you’ll notice the demonic forces gained a dragon, a heavy hitter to counter that Nephilim. Unfortunately for the demons however, the Templars have brought another Nephilim to bear. This one particularly penitent: I hope to get him painted over the next […]

The Holy Abomination

‘There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown.’ Genesis 6:4 I’ve been having fun thinking about the Crusade my Templars […]

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 […]

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 […]

England Invaded

My attempts at sticking to a few things this year are once again frustrated. Maybe a better New Year’s resolution is to not restrict yourself to one or a few projects at all, but just let yourself go nuts. While putting some much needed washing in the machine, I saw a A5 rulebook jammed in […]

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 […]

Poundland Mugshots

With hobby motivation dwindling and an increase in nap frequency, I’m suspecting a bout of Covid is upon me. Unable to manage much on the hobby front I went rummaging through my draft posts. Amidst the random and abandoned posts I found an odd thing. A post with ‘mugshots’. Mugshots of my Poundland armymen. I’m […]

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 […]