The Karn Empire

I’ve been getting the ball rolling on my Havok project already. My first port of call was a box of Eisenkern Stormtroopers from Wargames Atlantic. The figures are really good, and I’ve already built and painted a box before, so I know what I’m up to. The challenge here however, was finding rough equivalents to […]

Havok in 2025?

Havok was a wargame produced by Blubird Toys in the late 90s. It was extremely short lived, dying before all of the units were released. I can’t imagine their intention was to rival 40k at the time, but maybe just exist as a slightly cheaper pocket money option. All the miniatures came pre-assembled (bar vehicles […]

Perpetually Painting Partisans

Phew! It’s been a longish stretch of painting Partisans this week (and picking up penguins*). It’s not that the Partisans took a long time in the grand scheme of things, a full platoon in a week isn’t exactly tough. However, they did take long as far as Bolt Action painting is concerned. My Russians and […]

The Sweetest Wargame

Inspired by a fellow instagrammer Hyvemynd I’ve been thinking about extremely small scale wargaming. Hyvemynd created Roman Legions by using 1mm thick card cut into 4mm squares. Painting was the main issue and they couldn’t figure out a way to paint the card to look convincingly like groups of Romans. To be the sort of […]

A Game in a Matchbox Part 2: Rules

While continuing to ponder my Matchbox game with my spare grey matter while at work today, I imagined a game with a single stat. Since there won’t be much room for stats! And along the lines of SKIRMASH I want that stat to be balanced whether it’s low or high. Keeping things simple and using […]

A Game in a Matchbox

I spied a really great challenge on the Man of Tin’s blog, that he and The Duchy Tragardland have been working on, the idea of getting an entire Wargame in a matchbox! http://tradgardland.blogspot.com/2024/11/no-time-for-swanning-around.html?m=1 https://manoftinblogtwo.wordpress.com/2024/11/16/wargame-in-a-wee-matchbox-challenge-accepted-1/ I’m always inspired by this kind of restricted wargame. Whether that’s fitting an entire ruleset on one page of A4, or […]

Painting Space Marines Very Quickly

I had some kind of sick desire to paint Space Marines this weekend (please forgive me), especially as they were Loyalist ones too… Anyway, I didn’t have any, but thankfully I do have the kind of friend that offered to give me a bunch. I came away with two captains, five assault intercessors and a […]

Improving my terrain

Barreling towards some games of Deathzap, I knew I needed to improve on my terrain. I’ve had the same cork buildings for some time now: They functioned… sort of… but could do with some improvements. One of the major complaints I had was the lack of room on the insides of the buildings, it was […]

Christmas Wargaming?

Inspired by the Man of Tin’s snowball fights, and various imagi-nations games, for the longest time I’ve been looking out for suitable snowmen. Snowmen to play out the Arctic Civil War. Here’s a snowball post from the Man of Tin: https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2019/10/29/packing-sugar-at-freddie-snowball-fight-wide-games-scenario/ I finally found some snowy conscripts on Amazon which seemed suitable. They really are […]

The Supremacy of Kannis’ Second Ascended

Darros Mortan’s work in genetic engineering brought about the ‘Ascended’, the elite troops of Mortan’s Men and feared defenders of the moon of Oltra. Their increased size and strength allowed Mortan’s Men to put heavy weaponry in the hands of infantry. They were the best troops seen, out pacing and out fighting all comers, their […]

Is the Contrast method an Option?

After being out of action with Covid, I was reading to get hobbying again. I’d really wanted to paint my Bobbies for my Super Simple Universal Skirmish Game: All the figures are from Irregular Miniature’s Very British Civil War range. These same figures have appeared before in monochrome, doing battle with tree folk: https://deathzap.co.uk/2022/03/23/the-forest-vs-the-bobbies/ Not […]

The ALL Alien Response Force

While the Jendari Defence Army utilised fairly standard infantry platoons and supporting armour in the Selenoid Wars, the ALL took a different route. Heavy infantry armour had been in use for centuries in Swordsport, one of the more popular Warsports played between the League of Zandor and Legion of Kharthion. While fighting in the Oltra […]

Kitbashing Space Orcs

I think I’ve been experiencing a bout of Covid over the past week, which has slowed me down somewhat, plus now pepperoni pizza and coffee tastes particularly bad, a change that I’m not a fan of and that hopefully doesn’t last too long! Stuck in the house with nothing to do, I’ve been setting my […]

The Khydran Enclaves

I was pondering how humanity would be able to fight the Selenoids, given the Selenoids can teleport themselves at will, appear and disappear in such a way that typical human warfare with frontlines would be a nonsense. Scanners would be a requirement, to detect atmospheric changes, to predict a Selenoid raiding parties appearance before they […]

The Jendari Defence Army

To counter the Selenoids on Jendar, House Baronor and the Jendari Collective put the Second Global War on hold and formed the Jendari Defence Army. The JDA had been formed prior to the Selenoid War, to counter the possible invasion of Jendar by the ALL or the newly formed Supremacy of Kannis (SoK). The JDA […]

Hail The Gunlord!

I initially set out to make myself a Gunbeast, a unit commonly seen before supporting my Selenoids: Basically you get a quadrupedal dinosaur toy, chop its head off and shove a bunch of cocktail sticks and kebab skewers into its neck hole. Gunbeasts provide the support fire for the Selenoids. But in my current Selenoid […]

The Selenoids

From the former Allegiance of Gnossos Science General Von Dan Ericken, translated from Proto-Gnossian religious or mythological texts: Alas we have been cursed with the great undoing. Our strands are becoming untwisted. Our children are our ancestors. The great undiscovery of the star demons was our end. They hunted us from the plains of Guri […]

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 […]

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 […]