2010: No, this is not a new decennium :)

In this time of 'highlights of the decennium' appearing left and right in the media, I would just like to point out that the current decennium (if we define that as the first ten years of the century) ends on 31st December 2010, not 2009. So there.

With that bit of pedantry out of the way, allow me to wish all visitors and readers of this blog a prosperous, productive and shiny 2010, a year wherein all your dice will roll high (or low, depending), your armies will grow and you finally get to complete that one project.

For me, here's my very high level plan for 2010 -- the 2010 project list as you might say:

* Great Northern War -- the idea is still to put on Poltava at Crisis in autumn. For the figures, an initial goal will be a playable game by early spring, and build from there. This is my primary project
* Napoleonic 28mm Bavarians -- I plan on steadily building up my (currently [one battalion](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000359.html) large) Bavarian army. Initial goal is a playable force by summer (although the single finished battalion has already seen its first game).
* Romani Plastici -- 28mm plastic Romans. I currently have 3 legionary and 1 auxilia unit finished. The idea is to build this to a full army, with the initial goal being a 1000 to 1500 point force by spring.
* Napoleonic 28mm French -- these will be the refurbished ones from the Crisis bring & buy, plus the results of various Foundry sales over the past few months. There is no initial goal with these, just building the occasional unit here and there
* 'Gimmick' projects -- all the rest. Things like the Orc Uncharted Seas fleet, the 6mm Future Wars stuff, ... No set goal with these, so they will probably be painted in preparation for specific games.

What's everybody else's plan?

Bavarian Infantry Regiment 1, 2nd battalion

While painting their cousins of the first battalion I realised I had not yet posted any pretty pictures of the fully done Bavarians. Consider that oversight corrected:

"Painting" log: French 7th Cuirassiers

This isn't quite a 'painting' achievement, but I'm going to count them anyway -- I just finished 13 French cuirassiers.

They're a bit special, as I did not paint the figures myself. At the bring and buy at the Crisis convention earlier this year, I picked up a 28mm French Napoleonic army for a very cheap price. The figures are painted in a basic single colour style and have suffered a bit from use and transport. However, given the price, they were a bargain.

The idea with them is to touch up the paint jobs where necessary, give them a dip in [Army Painter Dip](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000347.html) and finally rebase them. I have done just that for the cuirassiers: touched up a few scuffed paint areas, painted in little '7's on their saddlebags (cognoscenti may now correct me with the correct Napoleonic term :) ) and dipped them.

Even though it is not a full paint job, there is still some time spent on these 'transformations', so I'm awarding myself half points for them. That means these bring me 13 points (out of a normal 26 for 13 cavalry figures), or a total of 44 this month. Painting is picking up again, it seems.

Photos to follow as their basing is finished.

Comment system approaching sanity

After another evening armed with a text editor and some mean Javascript, the commenting system seems to be behaving a bit better now. It now says whether you are logged in or not, and does so everywhere.

One last niggle remaining is the fact that the Name and other fields for anonymous commenting remain visible to logged in users, which might lead to confusion. Another dive into the evil bog that is Javascript will no doubt fix that.

For the cognoscenti: enabling the default Javascript from Movable Type solved most of the problems. The extra problem that created however, was that with the way I hide the comment form until needed, I hit some seriously weird Javascript scoping issues which took a while to track down and resolve. If any visitor loaded a page off of this blog earlier this evening and got a popup saying 'Canary!' - don't worry, that was me trying to debug this thing :).

So, feel free to use the commenting system. If you run into a problem, you can always send me an email (link behind my name up there) or, just for the fun of it, why not comment it :) ?

Merry Christmas

To celebrate Christmas, here's a little scene showing part of my toy soldier collection, along with my original copies of Little Wars and Floor Games, the books that started hobby wargaming in the early 20th century.

The soldiers of the Regiment are proud of their well-decorated Christmas tree. Meanwhile, father and grandfather are busily testing the new wargaming presents, much to the anxiety of junior.

Skaven Banners and Elephants

Time for some more pictures from my 'old' wargaming collection. Since I previously showed some figures from my Skaven army (look for the tag 'Phil's collection'), I decided to add some more of the illustrious ratmen to this blog.


The first picture shows two hand-made Skaven banners. The designs of both follow illustrations found in GW published material from the 80s. The banners are mounted on bigger bases (for stability), adding a General figure. This is not how it's done in Warhammer, of course, but since 1993 or so I have used my own house rules for fantasy battles, hence some more freedom in basing requirements. The figure in the middle is a Skaven wizard - all figures by Games Workshop, dated late 80s, early 90s.


The second picture shows my Skaven 'Hannibal' horde. I put these together for a wargaming tournament at EuroGencon 1993, organised by Martin Hackett (and using his rules). The army lists allowed for a large variety of freedom, so I came up with the idea of elephants being used as war animals in the Skaven army. The howdahs are scratch-built (nothing too exceptional), and can hold 4 figures based on 20x20mm bases. All figures (including the giant rats) by Games Workshop, except two of the rat-swarms (Ral Partha), and the elephants (models by Schleich).

Update (2014): for more of my Skaven in action, see the blogpost "Oldhammer: Bretonnia vs Skaven".

How I do bases these days

It's been a while since I've done a how to article, and even longer since I've done one on basing. Allow me to rectify this with an article on how I base figures nowadays.

As opposed to a full blown how to (which essentially is simply put stuff on base, paint, flock - no mystery there) I'm simply going to list the various materials I use in basing my miniatures.

The bases themselves

For the bases themselves I either use slottabases (both the 20mm, 25mm and 25x50mm cavalry versions) or variously sized bases from Litko in the US. The bases I order from them are the 1.5mm plywood ones, with the heavy duty magnetic bottoms.

Nd magnets

I glue these underneath the slottabases. I get these from Supermagnete.be

Golden acrylic pumice gel

These is my current version of the magic basing compound from Pebeo I wrote about earlier. Since then I have however been unable to track this down in my local Brico (it apparently was a one off and not part of the regular catalog), so I've switched to one I can get in a local arts'n'crafts shop (De Banier).

Ground cover

For ground cover I use various combinations of:

• Woodlands Scenics blended turf


• Static grass (no idea as to make)


• Woodlands Scenics field grass


• Noch grass tufts


• The occasional stone, twig or acorn supplied in unlimited quantities by my children, who seem to have half a forest available to them at their school, and have no qualms whatsoever transporting most of it back home in their pockets.

Painting log: Bavarian Napoleonic battalion, first half

Despite the afternoon being spent doing heavy remodelling on the blog software, I did manage to finish 12 Bavarian Napoleonic figures tonight. I'm painting them up as the first battalion of the first regiment, with the [earlier battalion](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000335.html) becoming the second battalion of the regiment.

The idea is using these units (24 men to the battalion, or 1:20 or thereabouts in figure to men scale) in brigade level rules, where the battalion is the basic unit represented. With my current amount of lead, this will give me about 6 regiments of infantry. I can also go 'grand manner' and combine two battalions into a single 48 man regiment (or battalion). Finally, by upping the nominal figure to man ratio to 1:40 my 24 man battalions become regiments and I end up with the entire line infantry component of the 1812 Bavarian army.

As I expected, painting these figures 12 instead of 24 at a time makes things a lot easier. To wit, I finished all the white, which as we know is [a b*tch to paint](http://www.nirya.be/snv/ttm/archives/000333.html), in a single painting session. When doing them 24 at a time I could not bring myself to keep on painting the dreaded white and consequently painted that colour in three or even four sessions.

That adds 12 points, for a total of 31 this month. Next up is the second half of this battalion, which includes a mounted officer.

Time to get medieval on junk

You may or may not have noticed, but the number of spam comments on this here fount of wonder, insight and knowledge (as we internally like to refer to TTM), has increased sharply over the last few days. I blame a [post](http://theminiaturespage.com/boards/msg.mv?id=186664) of mine on one of the [TMP](http://www.theminiaturespage.com) forums for this. It seems those forums are a favourite hunting ground for spammers to find blog links in.

Whatever the reason, I've decided to bring out the blowtorch and pliers and see what I can do about this. First step is upgrading the version of the blog software to the latest one to see if I can get better anti spam controls there (the current one has auto-delete for spam comments, but only after 1 day - that's obviously not sufficient).

If you notice anything untowards during the day, that'll be me taking down and replacing the foundations of this blog.

_Update_: 13:13 - the upgrade is done. Everything still looks the same on the outside, though there is still an issue with comments (they get an Internal Server error - blowtorch and pliers time)

_Update 2_: 14:33 - damn. They've changed the entire templating system in this version, wrecking the way I implemented commenting on the blog. As it seems, I've been lucky that the main blog still works and it's just the comment entry system that's exploded. So, until further notice, comments are not possible any more (which, coincidentally, solves the spam problem :) ). If you really need to say something profound, clicking on my name up there gets you my email address.

Phil, those mails are for 'unpublished' comments. Those are comments held back for moderation, most likely because they were published on entries older than 10 days (I think, could be 5). 99% of the case these are spam as well and need not be approved - I clean them up regularly.

_Update 3_: 16:48 - well that was fun. After a pleasant afternoon with blowtorch and pliers (read Movable Type templates and javascript) I've got the commenting system back up. Instead of a pop up window, the comment form will now open in the page itself (why? Because the comment cgi does not accept GET requests anymore, if you really want to know ) but otherwise things are still exactly as they were. I've got some tweaking to do (styling the comment form and making sure it does not open for all entries on the page) but the bare bones are there.

_Update 4_: 17:40 - and we're done. Comment system rebuilt and integrated in the page style. CSS, javascript and freaking MT template knowledge refreshed :).

Table Top Teasers

In my beginning years as a wargamer, when I dabbled with systems such as Warhammer 1st edition, I thought that a good wargame involved putting together 2 armies of equal point values, lining them up on opposite sides of the table, and have a go at it. An offf-table flank-move was considered exotic and a revolutionary concept.

This all changed when I discovered the table-top teasers, written by Charles Grant. I picked them up in the books 'Scenarios for All Ages' and 'Scenarios for Wargames'. Invariably, the table top teasers, as these scenarios are called, always offer a very good starting point for a wargame. Composition of forces, initial briefings, objectives, and terrain are always detailed and given the appropriate amount of thought. Some of the oldest teasers are collected on this site, and the magazine Battlegames publishes a teaser in each issue.








It was therefore with much anticipation that I acquired two new volumes, containing a linked series of table top teasers, and written by Charles Grant and Phil Olley. These two soft-cover books, The Annexation of Chiraz and The Raid on St Michel, contain five teasers each. The setting is the 18th century conflict between two imaginary nations, Die Vereinigte Freie Stadte and Lorraine. Both campaigns look exciting, although it seems that 1 or 2 scenarios in each campaign are very unbalanced and probably do not provide a challenging game for one side. In all fairness I must say I haven't tried the scenarios yet, so it might be a bit premature for me to make this statement.

The flair and enthusiasm with which both authors describe the conflict of their armies, has made me very enthusiastic about 18th century wargaming. So maybe I should take the plunge and invest in a period my gaming group hasn't explored before...