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 […]

Easy Terrain: Craters

Good for Bolt Action, 40k, especially good for Lunar if you skip a step, and of course good for Deathzap! Start out with a foil pie plate: Then mash it into your basic shape: I then coated the entire thing in texture paint. Mine is home made and hard wearing. It’s a mix of filler, […]

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 […]

Reducing my hobby debt

As previously mentioned I’m tracking my hobby spending this year and the value of finished models and trying to make the latter exceed the former. I think rather than talking about piles of shame a hobby debt or deficit is a little healthier. I shouldn’t feel guilty for buying things I want, but keeping an […]

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 […]

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 […]

Bigshot – An Attempt at Fast Play Blackpowder

So as a follow up to my Blackpowder Skirmish rules Deathshot I’m attempting to put together some bigger scale Blackpowder rules I’m calling Bigshot. I’m initially using simple wooden blocks, although the humble block does have a certain appeal, not only in aesthetics, as I can repurpose these units as Moderns, Pike and Shot, Medieval, […]

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 […]

Building a Bolt Action Board

A friend and I have been getting more into Bolt Action lately, and we needed a table to play on. He being a very handy man set us up with two 2’x4’ boards to play on. He then braced each board so we weren’t concerned about warping, and then over the past week I set […]

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 […]

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 […]

Mission Accomplished – 1000pts of Soviets

I can’t quite believe this is done! The Bolt Action Soviet starter army I grabbed a long time ago was sat in its box on my shelf of shame seeming like an insurmountable task. But I stuck to that simple and quick scheme I explained last time, and before long I was ploughing through all […]

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 […]

Deathshot returns

I wrote a little while back (2018) about a simple black powder skirmish set of rules I was hoping to use for fleshing out Jendar’s history. To save you finding them, the rules are here, with some adjustments from their original posting: Each skirmish force should have between 12 and 20 figures, all figures are […]

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 […]

Big Boys

A nice day was had bumbling around our local ‘big town’ Barnstaple today and the Mrs and I took our weekly pilgrimage to the finest discount shop B&M. Most of the time it’s fairly slim pickings in the toy section but today that was definitely not the case! 76 pieces for £5, sure there’s two […]

Homemade Acrylic Gaming Mats

I played a game of Deathzap 3 this weekend which I’ll be writing up shortly. I played it out on a portion of dust sheet I’d hastily sprayed rivers, wooded areas and roads on. It did the job, but I was aware from several YouTube videos that people use dust sheets to make their own […]

Buried Treasure!

My Aunt and Uncle sent me a package this week. I enjoyed looking at the box quite a bit, but I wasn’t ready for what was inside: I let out a childhood squee when I saw the sort of thing that I enviously see in the possession of the Man of Tin. I formed piles […]

Even Superer Simpler Skirmish Rules! Now With Added Strategy!

A lot has happened to my Monochrome Minis game over the past two weeks. I think I’m now on the third iteration of the rules, I’m up to 8 painted warbands, my second gaming board and there’s a load of new terrain. As you can maybe tell from the image below I’ve upgraded to a […]

Steampunk Colonial Brits… for some reason…

Sometimes you don’t need a specific rule set in mind, or battle to aim towards, sometimes you can just build and army for the sake of it. To this end I put together some 1800s Sci-fi Brits. There may well be a future attempt at some rules writing, but for now, just seeing them sat […]

Monochrome Minis and Universal Skirmish Rules

I’ve attempted painting ‘monochrome’ miniatures this week. This is mainly down to my desire to speed paint things, to try out oil washes and just tackle a new challenge. Monochrome miniature painting is a style that I have seen some attempt in the past, even Games Workshop, however I don’t think they do it right: […]

Playtesting Darkfell

As mentioned in a previous version post I’ve been playing a lot of Darkfell and rather enjoying it. The basic rules are still the same as seen here. Although now I’ve added 15 separate character classes, 5 Magic Users, 5 Ranged Weapon Specialists and 5 Melee Specialists, each with 10 different traits that your character […]

New Years Brawl

So I’ve managed to build a roster of 16 fighters for my zero player duelling game. Here’s the previous post if your unsure what I’m on about: https://thedeathzap.wordpress.com/2020/12/24/zero-player-duel-wargame-rules/ Funnily enough there are only 15 possible combinations of 3 whole numbers between 1 and 5 that total 7: 115,151,511 124,142,241,214,412,421 133,313,331 223,232,322 So I had to […]