2023 in review

The best laid plans, as they say...

Do feel free to go read my 2022 end of year post and laugh - probably somewhat hollowly. 

For those who missed the story - we were called up to parents by neighbours at the beginning of January, as Mum had had some kind of fall. Found her not brilliant (with hindsight, she may have had the first of a few minor seizures) and Dad seriously unwell with what fortunately turned out not to be a stroke. Dad to hospital, wife and I up to care for Mum for the next month while we tried to convince her she needed carers in. (How on earth Dad managed to look after her alone (beyond sheer bloody-mindedness) is beyond either of us. She'd been largely chair-bound for most of the past decade.)

When you're 87 and admitted to hospital in as bad a state as Dad was, it's not at all uncommon not to make it out alive. Dad, fortunately, is made of markedly more stubborn Yorkshire grit, and despite being flat on his back for most of 5 weeks, was back walking with the aid of a frame and then sticks before the end of April. And still in possession of the majority of his marbles.

Finally won the carers argument with Mum as it was the only way the hospital would allow Dad home. Sadly she was growing weaker, and passed away at the beginning of March. Next couple of months were taken up with funeral arrangements and starting the process of sorting out her estate. Then Dad (wisely, to be honest) decided that he'd found a really nice residential care home, and didn't want to live on his own in a house that would easily hold 6 while paying for care. (He was wise enough to recognise that his need for some form of regular daily care wasn't going to go away, and quite frankly, after the amount of effort he'd put into looking after Mum, I was quite happy for him to do whatever ever the hell he felt happiest with, because he'd Damn Well Earned It.)

And around about that time Anne's dad passed away. So, once the dust had settled on that, July was spent moving Dad, and then August to pretty much the end of November spent getting the house sold and emptying it of two peoples' lives for the past 50 years. I am I think blessed in that while Dad is a hoarder, he is remarkably good (whether the hospital stay was a wakeup call, who knows?), in fact ruthlessly so, at the idea of 'I no longer need this, lets get rid of it'). So we did - a local auctioneers run a house-clearance service, and they basically auctioned what was saleable (some nice antique furniture) and disposed of the rest. Finally found a buyer and agreed a price, not long after Mum's probate got granted, and Dad and I have spent December helping him set up various savings accounts, ISAs etc to store his half of the proceeds. (Us, we just paid off our mortgage - thanks Mum).

And for a final kick in the teeth, our close friend and musical partner in crime Steve passed away very suddenly in October. 

So. here I am. It's the end of 2023, and ... whew. In some ways I'd like it back for a do-over, and I know I'd like my Mum and Steve back. But... all things must pass, and we move on.

Takeways from that experience:

• Lasting Power Of Attorney - set it up NOW while the people involved still have their mental faculties. You don't have to use it, but it's there.
• Treat elderly relatives protesting that they are fine with a healthy degree of scepticism until you have evidence with your own eyes.
• The process for dealing with what happens when someone passes away is remarkably well documented, Don't panic.
• The NHS are overstretched, underpaid, under-appreciated and being manipulated by the present Government for their own gains and that of their cronies.
• You probably won't have to pay inheritance tax. The upcoming abolition probably isn't going to affect you at all, the Government would just like you to think they are.
• Tell the people you care about that you love them. You might not get another chance.

2022 End Of Year Review

The end of another long strange year.

So, where to start?

On a personal note? Changed jobs again, which was almost as much a surprise to me as it probably is to you. A definite "it's not you, it's me" moment as I got a contract offer from CricViz I couldn't refuse, which also allowed me (as it is only a 3 days a week contract) to take on a second contract for a project I was in at the beginning of that I'd been trying to squeeze into my non-existent free time. Result? Hopefully both more money and more free time, helped by having more trained minions for church tech stuff.

The club, back from a fresh start at a new venue in 2021, grows from strength to strength: we have lots of new members, and consistently over 20 people showing up each Monday. Show wise, we took a big 54mm WW2 game to Hammerhead, our mad 1:1 garden gnome patio skirmish to Partizan, the equally mad Dead's Army (everything is better with zombies!) to Campaign:MK, and our 6mm IABSM game set on D-Day in Chef-du-Pont to the Other Partizan. 

Additionally, we ran a club open day (at which our Bloody Omaha game saw another outing) and Posh Lard, at which the Chef-du-Pont game actually got its first outing. 

We restarted our Wednesday night 'paint and natter' sessions late in 2021, which have basically seen a small group of club members variously doing work on club projects and personal ones. Principal club project at present is detailing the Chef-du-Pont boards, but we will have to revisit and tart up our Dambusters game for the Salute 50th (and Operation: Chastise's 80th) anniversary next year.

As for my personal hobby stuff?

Definitely New Year, new start.

• Just sent the most up-to-date set of Dux rules corrections off to my partners in crime. Now I genuinely have some free time, I'm aiming to crack on and finish the Compendium before the end of Feb. I know - you've heard that before: this time, hopefully is the charm.
• Slowly working on some fresh buildings and vehicles for a narrative Bulge campaign using IABSM - this was supposed to start this year but didn't :D
• I bought two Warlord Epic Battles ACW Starter sets off a club member in February: they are probably the 'second half of 2023' project - there's a heck of a lot of figures there, so it's going to need a good batch painting strategy, probably using Army Painter Speedpaints.
• I'm also aiming to set aside an hour a week to blog, initially, in 2023. Once the Compendium is out of the way, that time will go towards restarting the podcast. I wound up listing to a couple of Meeples episodes recently and realising how much I missed it.

• 

  Studio, including WIP Chef-du-Pont board.
  Garden detailing work started on the three houses
  near the camera.

  The hobby room (studio) just acquired an Ikea Kallax to store all the boardgames, and is looking pretty fine. I have to get some shelves up above the workbench in the end room (workshop) and then I'm aiming to set up the spray booth, hot wire cutter, Cricut machine, 3D printer (or printers if I get a resin one) and maybe an MDF cutter along its length along with a Mac to run them all.

A Happy New Year to you all, then, and hopefully you'll see much more of me online in 2023!

2021 End Of Year Review

To use a familiar phrase from this blog, "I Aten't Ded".

Hard to decide if 2021 was better than 2020 or just different. :D

Hobbywise, I guess the good news is that after a year of Monday Night Zoom calls, we actually opened the club again in mid-August, at a new and very nice venue - for those more local to Peterborough, we're now out at the George Alcock Centre out on the east side of town just off the parkway. Loads of parking space, nice airy main room. The only real downside is a lack of handy pubs and eateries, but this is made up for by having a bar on the premises (who will do food for special occasions) and an Aldi 200 yards away.

It's taken until pretty much this Christmas to get enough minions trained that I'm not spending a night or two a week editing something for church, so hopefully various bits of hobby stuff should start to pick up in the New Year, including You Know What, if I can find space in the 'editing stuff' brain compartment now it's not being used for church video.

On the subject of You Know What, I did manage to record a video version of the Miller's Tale episode 8 for virtual Hereward in September - if you missed it, the link is here. Sadly, the week I'd planned between Christmas and the New Year for at least making a start on the Compendium got eaten by the case of COVID my lovely wife brought home from work, and in the true spirit of the marriage vows, shared with me. Not recommended, I have to say.

Otherwise, I've run a couple of games for Virtual Lard, started a very loose IABSM Lite Battle of the Bulge campaign at club, bought more MDF and more WW2 vehicles...

So. Here's to 2022, and fingers crossed. Stay safe, and hopefully see you all online or in person sometime soon!

2020 End of Year Review

Whew.

What a long, strange year 2020 has been.

First up, of course, there's COVID. I am, I confess, monumentally blessed in that my working life for a sizeable percentage of the last two and a bit decades, and certainly the last couple of years, has allowed me to do the back-end Perl development jobs I do from home, so lockdown, while it's taken a bit of getting used to, hasn't required that much of a lifestyle change. Well... barring a few things of which more later. 

My employer (well, their parent company, really) fired me in March: nicely timing it so I couldn't sue them for unfair dismissal by about a week. Frankly, I was glad to be rid of them, as even the original folks who understood the system and hired me in 2018 were apologising ("this is not the company we hired you to work for") and one-by-one leaving as well. (The last one left a month or so ago, and i think it may finally have dawned on someone that they are, in a nutshell, screwed,.) I managed tot land a contract at the beginning of May with GoDaddy, who are everything the previous lot aren't - an absolute joy to work for, and I'm anticipating some changes on that score in April 2021 which will make it even better,

Obviously, face-to-face gaming took a bit of a hit. We took the sensible but painful decision to shut down regular club meetings as soon as lockdown hit, and (unlike at least one other local club) resisted the temptation to re-open in the summer, not least because our venue (the local St. Johns Ambulance) wasn't prepared to let us. We have, though, managed regular (weekly) Zoom chats every Monday, usually with some mix of show-and-tell and on- and off-topic chatter (and thanks to Grahame, a couple of quizzes, which Carl won by a mile!). 

Hereward Wargames Show, likewise, had to go virtual: if you missed any of the items at the time, they're all on our YouTube channel. Huge thanks to everyone who helped, especially the folks who dived in for a last minute round-table discussion on the future of historical wargaming.

Wargaming sanity was largely saved by the fabulous Virtual Lard games organised by Jeremy, where I ran some Dux and some IABSM, which was both fun and useful. IABSM with limited player view over Zoom was fascinating to umpire, in particular - see the 2020 Lard Mag for more.

I managed to get a group of play testers together to hammer on the Dux Britanniarum Compendium scenarios, to whom many many thanks for helping me iron out a bunch of kinks in deployment rules. especially for one particular scenario! As to the Compendium itself... well...

A very large amount of m free time has gone on video editing work for Werrington Parish Church. For the spring, until we managed to get a team together I could offload stuff to, I was spending most of my free time editing (fortunately when I had no job!), and once I got to delegate, I moved on to just editing the music, which chewed up Friday and most of Saturday (as well as some cat-herding earlier in the week). I think that Dec 25 was the first Sunday or holy day since March 22 I didn't do anything for church (the vicar made me take three weeks off over Xmas!)

It dawned on me sometime in Autumn that there are different head-spaces for different things, and it's possible to run out of free time/desire for them at different times. Specifically, my video editing and rule writing/editing brains seem to be the same one,  and by the time I have done the week's video, I really don't want to use the analytic/editor side of my brain any more. The Compendium is really down to the nit-picky stuff that's very like editing video, in fact. 

This is, oddly, different from the pure creative side of my brain: I may not be motivated to work on the Compendium, but creating and running a D&D campaign (and playing in a couple more) seems to use a different chunk of resources that I don't run out of at the same time. We are, though, managing to put together some processes at church that may give me some of that headspace back, so who knows - there may be a tentative Easter deadline for the Compendium yet!

Painting wise? not a lot. I did a bunch of buildings for one of the Virtual Lard games, as well as a couple of vehicles, and I have a vague memory of painting some figures, but I'm blowed if I can remember what for :D I did just acquire some Reaper gunslingers for What A Cowboy, though!

Podcast: um. No. That's audio editing! No headspace, except for actually taking some working days off to do Hereward! 

Some day I am going to figure out enough hobby income streams to retire from the software business, I swear!

And that... assuming I haven't forgotten anything... was 2020. 

Man.  

That was not what any of us expected!

Stay safe (please, don't think you know better than the health professionals: I like having my friends and readers around), and may your 2021 be better than 2020.

Review - Multideck

Multideck is a Mac OS app for designing and printing cards for games. In essence, it's a graphical mail merge program customised for single- and double-sided cards, taking a CSV and a layout and using them to produce printable sheets of cards.

I'm currently using it to generate D&D spell cards for my players (which is why I didn't get this review finished yesterday, as my players turned up!), but it can also be used to generate custom activation decks for games such as IABSM, or unit cards for games for which they're useful, etc. For example, generating cards for a certain well known rule set.

Create a spreadsheet

Add some image files - note that the Boar and Dragon files match the values in the Symbol column.

Create a layout. Note that Item2 is of type Image, so that it picks up an image file corresponding to the value in the field Symbol, rather than the text of the field. Item2 is the card name - it's set to a certain font size and style and also Shrink to Fit as part of that style.

And print. The backs (and the card background) are very similar except that they use static images rather than ones picked  up from the CSV. Standard poker cards print 9 up on A4.

This took me about 15-20 mins. I should note that Multideck is a little temperamental - it has crashed on me a couple of times, but it seems to save as it goes so I've rarely lost work. Also some of the magic incantations to (for example) only display an item if a given field is present in the CSV can be a bit tricky to figure out. There is a very handy forum for it on BoardGameGeek, and the author is quite responsive.

Worth the money if you're proposing to do a lot of cards.

2019 in review

Whew. That was a year.

Looking back at it from Dec 31, it was more of a year than it felt like at times, too. Let's have a look, aided and abetted by having a lot of blog posts and tweets to look back at.

First off, as should be obvious if you follow me on Twitter or pay attention here, I've been doing the #hobbystreak challenge - basically doing something hobby-related every day. There have been a few days (often when away) when it's been as little as some background reading or some discussion with someone on plans for the future, but I have managed it for the whole year - this is day 365! Around mid-February I decided to move the master record of what I was doing from Twitter to here, as well, as that allowed more words and pictures.

At a rough count, over the year I've painted:

• 22 Saxons for Dux Britanniarum (GB Dark Ages plastics)
• 12 White Company warriors for my D&D world (Shieldwolf Shieldmaidens)
• 6 Skeletons and a dragon (from Dungeon Saga)
• 5 Cultists (Northstar)
• 12 or so US Paras (Battlefront - really must get more done)
• 110 US 29th Infantry (Battlefront)
• 4 Sdkfz 250s (PSC and Battlefront)

I reckon that's 167 figures and 4 vehicles. Not bad. Add to that a goodly number of buildings and bits of scenery, and actually I've been pretty productive.

The two major gaming products have been Bloody Omaha (re-visiting for the D-Day 75th at several shows as well as Posh Lard, as well as a hosted game here for Per and his young lad, which was amazing), and the Dux Britanniarum Compendium, which... Is really honestly, nearly finished. I'm going to commit (Rich and TFL willing) to trying to get it out for Salute. We've been play testing like made for the last couple of months, and I'm down to three or four last bits of writing (one of them is the master index, which I'm still not looking forward to!). I've also got the studio (aka PE2 Collectables old office) setup for regular gaming.

Speaking of which, I also (as a side-effect of starting to watch Critical Role when I couldn't sleep one night), rediscovered a love for RPGs, discovered how much less D&D 5th Edition sucks than 3.5, and started to both resurrect my old campaign and start a new one, as well as a RPG blog, The Sage DM. This has, actually, more improved than detracted from my hobby activity as a whole, I think - there is a crossover both ways.

On the topic of blogs and websites, I also turned the Mill House site into my 'professional' site - if you haven't found it yet, and you have use for me as a writer, mapmaker, editor, designer etc, please drop by!

Let's see - sold stuff: 

• all my Napoleon at War figures, having realised they were so far down the list I'd never paint them, I want to play SP2 in preference, and for Napoleonic big battles Gary at our club has enough figures to recreate Waterloo...)
• a fair pile (£200 worth) of old RPG books

Other than that? Several shows, several Lardies events, lots of games. Still club chairman. Got to meet DaveC in Kansas and catch up with the ATF guys (Jeff and Elliot, specifically) in Minneapolis. 

On the downside, I no longer have a wargames outlet at the bottom of my garden - PE2Collectables has sadly ceased trading and moved out, which is a shame, as I rather miss having someone to natter to off and on during the day, and having a ready source of paint when I run out.

Podcast: I got two episodes out (and one in the can that may possibly see the light of day),  which is nowhere near as many as I'd like. Part of it is I think I need to figure out a little more of what I want to do with the podcast, and also work out a process that works for putting an episode, and not leaving it needing editing. 

To be fair, the non-gaming bits of 2020 haven't helped: losing a friend (right here in our guest room) early in the year, having James in hospital or needing to get there daily for most of May and June, and then getting him to and supported in his first term at Uni (while still being treated for depression and ADD) has been ... kind of crazy. Also? I really need a new boss. Getting half an hour to keep the hobby streak rolling is relatively easy when you're frequently out of good thinking brain by early evening, finding the energy to record and edit a podcast or do bigger things, less so. 

Anyway. Things are improving. Hopefully that'll clear up even more in the New Year. I have interesting plans, but I can't really talk about them until certain real-world things happen (or don't). 

Oh, and I've lost 60lbs in weight (deliberately, not through stress, I hasten to add!). More to go, but go me!

OK. If you've read this far, well done and thank you! I'm sure I've missed something, but hey... I'd love comments on what you'd like to see in the blog(s) and the podcast in 2020 - feel free!

Happy New Year!

Customising the Shieldwolf shieldmaidens

Well, only a bit, really. Yesterday I found a box of Fireforge Teutonic Foot left over from the Night's Watch project, with lots of tall shields, perfect for what I wanted. Just had time to affix a few before Anne\s work Xmas do yesterday.

I also got a new toy from Amazon - nice cheap (£6 and small change) AA battery powered display turntable. It's only annoyance is it doesn't have a power switch - it's on as soon as you insert the battery. But it's smooth and slow. And it was very cheap.

And yes, I didn\t use the DSLR on the tripod for this, because I stupidly left its SD card in the Mac in the house, and it was hosing it down when I came to shoot the test shot yesterday.

Shieldwolf Miniatures plastic 28mm Shieldmaiden Infantry/Rangers

Evocative box art...

If you're following my RPG blog, you'll notice I've been running a series on cheap fantasy-usable plastic minis for D&D, and one of the things I spotted were the Shieldwolf Miniatures range. Now - memory serves me that they got a wee bit of stick on an episode of Meeples for the bare midriff look some of their sculpts on their first go at the Kickstarter had, but I'm happy to report that the end results are (barring four bodies that you don't actually have to use) loads better, and not going to freeze in winter. (Note, they actually successfully rebooted the Kickstarter having cancelled the one linked above, earlier this year, which I'm annoyed I missed.)

...but no help for guessing what the
figures will look like.

A clever design, in that the body comes in two parts, with either a plain upper back or one with a cloak, which glue on. The heads are a bit of a tight fit in the resulting small hole, but other than that they go together pretty well, even if the poses can look a bit awkward. You get 24 bodies, but enough arms etc to make 20 figures: there are actually enough to make a complete set with crossbows, which I might buy a second box for at some point. The weapons are a bit more fantasy than some folks might like - I've seen people use sword arms from Perry knights with these, which seem to work quite well, and with a bit of filing there are other heads from other ranges of female plastics that could work, too. That said, the heads are fantastic (in both senses), with some great helmetless windblown looks. Most of the rather nice shields are, annoyingly (but only so to me), round with moulded detail: hence I haven't fitted shields yet, as I need 20 plain plastic heater shields from somewhere for the unit these ladies are intended to be. (I need to go hunt in the leftovers of my Fireforge boxes from making the Night's Watch, I think.)

And here we are. These probably won't
rank up on 20mm bases, given the
amount of 'cloak swirl'!

Anyway - between various other things today I've assembled 4 just to see how they go together. The plastic takes Humbrol 'yellow' Precision Poly Cement very well, but then they're manufactured by Renedra, so I've come to expect that. A teeny bit fiddly to assemble, and the point of contact with the base is literally the feet, so you have to be sure to file them flat - smart move would be not to make the sprue contact point on some of the bodies be the sole of the feet, guys! The plan is to use Contrast paints on them, and see how they come out, so a trip to the Rift is in order if I can get there in time tomorrow, as I need white and one of their metallics and some more undercoat :D One other minor gripe is that it seems to be impossible to get the banner blowing the same way as the bearer's hair! (I may fix this by cutting it (no, the banner!) off and replacing it, especially since I need a specific design on the banner, and it's going to be much easier to print it or produce custom decals, I guess.)

Anyway - despite the odd grumble, I actually really like these.

Northstar cultists

Needed to throw a few evil cultists together for last night's D&D session, so I grabbed a box of Northstar's Frostgrave cultists (handy Amazon next day, turning up about an hour before my players did!): here's a very quick review.

They're pretty much like their Barbarians and Soldiers, both of which (along with some Fireforge Sergeants and a few GB Dark Ages heads) I cannibalised together for my Night's Watch army (which I probably still owe folks some pictures of!)

Easy to put together - the plastic reacts well with Humbrol's 'yellow' Precision Poly Cement, which makes ensuring things stay stuck much less painful. Essentially there are four identical sprues with five torsos, a gazillion heads with variations on hooded, skeletal and otherwise, and enough arms for both all-skelly and all-normal sets of figures. There's also two sprues with 10 x 25mm round bases on each. Nice clean sculpts, nothing too fragile on the sprue, although I didn't use any of the skeleton arms. Of course, being Frostgrave, you can hack away happily and swap heads and limbs with soldiers, barbarians etc, as well as GB figures which use the same head joint style (and I think Fireforge do too).

Fortunately (as I was in a hurry), all I had to do from there for my purposes was spray the end results black, pick out blades in Warlord's Dark Gunmetal (I love love love this colour for metalwork), woodwork in AP Werewolf Fur, and drybrush a hint of skull masks/faces and the crossbow string in AP Skeleton Bone. Now I have a little more time, I may dry brush some deep blue highlights on their clothing, and maybe do something with the bases.

Simples! One set of death cultists done. The Frostgrave minis are a fabulous resource for D&D minis!

Man flu and the Royal Game of Ur

Not really connected, except that I wouldn't have discovered the latter without a dose of the former rendering me incapable of stringing many coherent thoughts together.

But hey, I vanished down a YouTube rabbit hole yesterday  (as this requires very little brain) and came up with something that's both about ancient history and boardgames. Good enough for here, no?



The Royal Game of Ur, for those not aware, is generally held to be the oldest playable board game in existence. The latter appeared on a cuneiform tablet in the British Museum, and were the subject of some serious research by Irving Finkel, who's one of the museum curators.  The video in question is from blogger/YouTuber Tom Scott (of whom I'm a fan), who actually took on Finkel at the game.

What actually makes it interesting is that, despite (in the form they were playing it) being a very simple game (you can explain the rules in under two minutes) it has a fascinating combination of luck and strategy, has dice that are basically ancient D4's (well, technically D2's!) and is a game with an interesting self-balancing property where the further ahead you are, the easier it is for your opponent to catch up (given a bit of luck and optimal play).

A fun game: I shall have to grab a copy to add it to our copy of Hnefatafl.

Review: Feed Me Games

If you've been around Twitter or the right parts of Facebook or other social media, you will have noticed mention of a new gaming site - Feed Me Games.

Essentially, it aims to pull together games of all kinds (roleplayers, wargamers, boardgamers) onto one social media site, free from spam, harassment and general idiocy. Since I fit all three of the first categories (and hopefully none of the second three :D), I signed up - you can find me there, predictably enough, as TroubleAtTheMill.

What do I think?

Mostly, I think it suffers from not having hit critical mass yet - starting this kind of thing is always difficult, as without enough people interacting, it won't take off. Witness Google+, which, with a much less laudable and focussed aim and a much bigger company behind it, never really took off, and ditto Google Wave (which I think was criminally underused and absolutely brilliant, and I wish Google had kept it going, but that's by the by). Traffic is slowly ramping up - my D&D 5E discussion group is acquiring a half dozen or so members a day.

It's kind of a bit of everything - it looks and feels as if it's derived from Facebook, with a front page news feed of all your interesting stuff, plus groups, personal blogs, messages and events - and ads, which might make it the one social media site on which I wouldn't bitch about ads, because they're actually relevant. It's not perfect, and I think jaytee and his partner are well aware of that - there are always going to be teething problems (trust me, I'm a web developer) with a site like this - but what there is for the most part clean, pretty robust, properly secure and usable.

I know there's already plenty of places for us gamers to be social - Twitter, Facebook, Blogger etc. I'm loath to move lock stock and barrel to  FMG (hell, I'm damn proud of my page view count here!), but I do think it has the potential to be a good home for discussions, and for cross-pollination between the various strands of the gaming hobby. I certainly intend to give it my support, and I'd like to encourage folks reading this to do so as well: if enough of us do, it has the potential to be a really good place.

[Note: this is going to be one of the very few posts I cross-post verbatim to The Sage DM]

Lunch break MDF building - Dave's Wargames

Needed a brief sanity break from computers, so I spent my lunch break putting together one of Dave's Wargames' 15mm Normandy buildings I picked up a couple of Herewards ago. His buildings (in both 15mm and 28mm) are available from his eBay store, or from The Sleeping Dragon Hobby Shop, who by a useful coincidence will be at the show this Sunday.

Nice kit - pretty much the perfect compromise between MDF tabs so loose they won't stay together without quick-setting glue, elastic bands and swearing, and fitting so tight you have to force them. These are for the most part a pretty perfect interference/press fit, which means that a lot of joins will hold themselves together till the glue dries. (Sarissa run the next closest - a lot of their tabs are unfortunately just a hair too tight, meaning you either need to apply a fair bit of force, file them down (which usually results in them becoming sloppy) or risk the top 'skin' of the MDF delaminating if you don't force it exactly right.)

Also? The neatest designed MDF house chimney I've come across - three layers that fit together to form a square chimney with an actual hole - basically, the middle layer has two 'fingers' to form the sides, the other two are solid to form the ends. AND the house has a chimney breast!

Full marks (and this is a big bugbear of mine when folks get it wrong) for making the building floors big enough to hold a Flames of War medium base. Some companies, who should know better, don't, often because they downscale from 28mm to 15mm and don't think about it.

The one real irritation is that one pair of roof cross-supports was missing. Whether this is a design flaw or I just managed to lose them sometime in the past two years, I dunno - there certainly wasn't space for them on the sprue. The design of the rest actually meant that the small triangular ones were enough to hold it to shape, but it would have been nice to have the lower down cross-pieces (see arrow on diagram) to hold it a bit stiff and plug the holes. The latter I achieved by filling them with some tabs salvaged from bits of the MDF sprue: fortunately Dave designs almost all his tabs the same length, so they fitted rather neatly.

I also had a very minor gripe that the parts weren't as easily separable from the sprue as I'd like, and in some cases left bits that needed a little filing. However, remember this kit is a couple of years old, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover it's improved since.

All in all? A nice little building. I shall tile it and paint it up in a bit.

Battle Report - 25 Mar 2019 - Rebels And Patriots

Dan Mersey's AWI to ACW ruleset based on the Lion Rampant game engine. (No photos, sorry).

Nice little AWI scenario with a balanced force - I had 12 Indians, 6 cavalry, 6 rangers, 2 lots of 12 line infantry, Chris had much the same but as Rebel militia. I had the Indians in a small village, with Chris and I approaching from opposite sides to clear or relieve them, respectively.

I definitely got the worst of it early on - my cavalry routed, and my Indians got seriously shot up, while the line were busy working up the middle and the Rangers through a field up one flank. I got to the point where I had one of four units that wasn't needing to rally, and all Chris' units were good to fire... Pretty sure I was done for, and then Chris managed to fail to activate every single unit on his side! (Which does require some pretty dismal luck.)...

I managed to rally everything, the Rangers offloaded hard on one unit of American militia, one of my line units in close order ripped through Chris' cavalry, and pretty much like that the tables were turned...

To summarise:

This is about Dan's 5th or 6th ruleset using the same core engine: essentially units are made up of 6 or 12 men, and roll 12 dice for combat against varying target numbers, needing a set number of hits to cause casualties. When a unit drops to half strength it drops to 6 dice. Everything else is just gravy :D

This and Pikeman's Lament, I think, seem to work the best. Maybe it's just my style of play, but it seems to lend itself more to musket + melee than it does earlier periods. Had a great time.

Empire At War 15mm Villa - almost done

Nothing new in the building process - just more of the same for the one remaining building and two courtyard walls. :D

Made slightly exciting by a local power cut while I had the last door in one hand and was about to pick up the superglue in the other!

All done now bar the base, which I'll do tomorrow, and the photos, which I'll upload from the phone, or once I've figured out why the file server hasn't come back up! [Answer - I accidentally unologged it while sorting out the wiring round the UPS! Doh!]

I may knock back the red on the brick inserts...

...and sand the front wall a smidge...

...and paint the steps...

...and maybe add some ivy.

Empire At War 15mm Villa - update and a correction

Oops - missed the shutters on the smaller building :D

I have two of the three main buildings finished.

There's a bit of a tale here: I took them to club a couple of Mondays ago, since I didn't have a game and figured I could do a bit of work on then. Like an idiot, while loading up the car to come home, I dropped one of the buildings in the carpark,. where the not-as-stable-as-I-hoped glue joints gave and it scattered under my car in about half a dozen pieces.

To my considerable annoyance, when I got home I found out that I'd missed one or two bits in my fumble in the dark.

There's no problem with the roof - I just set it
down all skew-whiff :D

After working on a few other things (like going to C2C :D) I eventually got round to placing an order for a replacement with Empires at War. Very prompt delivery. Finally got around to working on it again yesterday, and the important thing I should note in light of a criticism in my earlier review is they have, sometime since I bought the first one, fixed the internal floors to fit. Very snugly,. but they do fit.

The process, then. Assemble except for the shutters. Use artists texture paste to plaster the walls. It's kind of like Polyfilla but a little smoother - I'll probably stuck with the latter for 28mm buildings but this is superb for 15mm as the texture is a bit finer. Then a layer of AP Skeleton Bone, or the equivalent shade in a tester pot of emulsion, then a fairly heavy dry brush in white. 

I'm becoming a fan of this.

I discovered by accident a handy trick for the latter - I squeezed some AP White out onto my palette (a spare Pringles lid) in a relatively thin layer, and got called away by my wife for about half an hour. When I got back it was still wet enough to pick up on the brush, but tacky enough to almost dry brush with without having to do the whole "pick up paint, wipe off" routine. 

That done, paint shutters, affix them, and then ink wash the pantiles. A little warning here - the plastic pantiles have two ways up. One is wrong. Ask me how I know. :D

Still have the middle building to rebuild (after its late night mishap) and the outer walls: I think I'll find some thin Plasticard or something to base it all on once done. 

More 15mm Italy

(apologies, no pictures but the phone's flat!)

Did some more work on the Empires at War Mediterranean Villa - one new and slightly annoying discovery is that the exterior wall caps are too long unless you fit them on the outside of the wall, which just seems wrong.

Otherwise, all going together pretty well. Debating how to texture the walls at the moment. 

Back to Italy - Empires at War 15mm villa first steps

Made a start on the Empires at War Mediterranean villa, as I need it for an upcoming IABSM.

So...

On the up side, pre-painted MDF and thickish card and, even better, what I guess are vac-formed plastic pantile sheets plus carefully engraved dowel for the ridge tiles. Mediterranean roof tops are hard work, so this is a big win!

4Ground style interlocking corners, which hold the walls together well (but see below). Also some clever work using the pre-coloured sheets to slip in some exposed brickwork on the walls.

Nice card inner walls that give you recessed window frames. The instructions suggest fitting them after the exposed brickwork, but it's much easier to fit the inner walls then glue the brickwork to them through the holes.

On the down? Ohhhkay. First up, the sheets for the inner walls on my kit were cut the mirror reverse of what they should be to have the painted side visible. Not a showstopper, but a shame - also the courtyard walls are a single layer, not two back-to-back like 4Ground do for most of theirs, so they will need painting, which probably means I'll have to paint everything. Can't complain too much about that compared to most of the recent Saxon and late Roman stuff!

Second, the floor is just stuck on the bottom of the walls, so it provides no help at all in squaring up the building - even Warbases' floors fit inside the walls and do give some help. The same appears to be true of their 28mm buildings, of which the club has a boatload.

Third, the card particularly is thin enough that it can de-laminate (with the coloured layer coming off) as you pop it out of the carrier - fixable but cosmetically annoying.

Last - the inside floors are miscut - they're the right size to fit inside the walls IF you don't include the inner walls. I haven't decided what to do about that yet. [NOTE: this has been fixed in newer revisions of the kit.]

To summarise - lovely looking kits, some great design ideas, the pantiles are awesome. Let down by some slip ups in the design, none of which are irredeemable. Now, I've had this kits a while, so it's very possible they may have had the flaws fixed since [see above], but it'd be good to check. I'd still buy it, because no-one else makes this nice-looking a range in 15mm!

"Setting The Scene" book, accountability post for 12th Jan

Oddly quiet day, apart from showing Reuben round the building works and feeding the builders tea.

I have been mostly doing something I should have done a while ago, namely re-reading the two Dux Britanniarum books and making notes: had an awful moment of wondering whether I'd screwed something up in our campaign to my detriment, but sadly not :D I aim to spend a chunk of tomorrow making sure I have the rules from all three books for a Lord's advancement properly amalgamated.

Other than that, seems to have been a day for life-related admin (oh the joys of being technically unemployed).

Today's arrival, though?

Silver Whistle (Pat Smith)'s rather fabulous "Setting The Scene" book, on terrain building, specifically a winter table.

Gorgeous pictures, and I've always found his scenery work an inspiration - check out his SP/War of The Roses table. Recommended buy, definitely, with just one teensy criticism: given the amount of white space available on all the 103 pages, it might perhaps have been a kindness to those of us with failing or recovering eyesight to up the font size on the text a bit. But that's my only gripe on an otherwise absolutely beautiful book.

Beowulf: Return To The Shieldlands ranty-review-thing

Just had this show on the Sky box and finally watched the last episode.

Hm.

Yes. Well.

It wanted to be Game of Thrones. This much was obvious from the computer animated title sequence and the theme music, which took the Game of Thrones "dum dum dada dum dum dada" rhythm (in 3 to the bar) and replaced it with a "dum dum dada dada dum dum dada dada" four to the bar, but left everything else very familiar. That and there's a certain degree of Lord of the Rings, as Beowulf could pass for Aragorn...

Lots (yay) of female characters who weren't just window dressing, including Joanne Walley as Hrothgar's widow (that's really not a spoiler, he dies in pretty much Act 1 Scene 1). Lots (man, oh man lots) of SHOUTING! I'm sure there were a few characters whose only emotional level consisted of SHOUTING AT PEOPLE A LOT. (One of whom gets beautifully silenced by the title character).

It sort of... moseyed its way along, with a lot of shouting, a lot of dubious fighting... OK. So, you're defending a narrow high-sided bridge and massively outnumbered. Why in Odin's name are you standing out in FRONT of your wide-as-the-bridge shield wall? Also, a lot of 'why is this anything to do with Beowulf'?... Right up until the last episode, which suddenly threw in a name and a relationship and sort of made me want to go back and re-watch all the rest with the benefit of hindsight - only not enough to re-download them. It was kinda fun, and the scenery (NE England) was pretty, though.

And all the factions were, to quote TV Tropes, colour-coded for our convenience in variously blue, red and yellow - shades of all three that were perhaps a bit bright for Dark Ages dyestuffs. But...

(sounds of Mike banging head against wall)

Aside from those conveniently colour-coded cloaks etc, it was all shades of grey just like the Vikings series.

FFS, people. The Dark Ages wasn't called dark because of the colour of people's clothing! And grey's a really HARD colour to make with natural dyes.

Grrr....

The good and the bad of audio books

For the first time ever last week I asked for a refund on an Audible book (yes you can do that, surprisingly!)

The book in question was "Hawk Of May", the first in Gillian Bradshaw's excellent trilogy of Arthurian/Dark Ages novels about Gwalchmai ap Lot (Gawain). I own it in print and I adore the series, but given I had credits to burn, I figured having it to listen to on my commute would be good inspiration for Dux Britannoiarum.

Oh. Dear.

Let me quote my review:

Quite honestly, this is unlistenable. The (American) narrator affects a range of supposedly Scots accents for the characters (including the first person narrator), and they are, I'm sorry to say, unlistenably, almost embarrassingly bad. Gwalchmai (the narrator) as a teenager sounds at BEST like Wee Jimme Krankie, and is at worst borderline incomprehensible.

The reading has pretty much ruined the story for me, so much that I've actually stopped listening,. 

The video link to the right is the first 15 mins, which was about all I could stand. Some of the American reviewers actually liked it!

So, to easy my disappointment, I'm now two chapters in to Bernard Cornwell's "The Winter King", read by someone with a much better grasp of accents.... which is prompting interesting thoughts on the nature of magic in its world.