Xyston Takabara

 Earlier this summer I accidentally ordered some Persian Takabara infantry from Xyston, as part of a valiant effort to get value for money out of the postage costs of buying one piece of 15mm artillery from them (which you may have already seen ...).

This first photo shows their backs, as that is where most of the arty stuff is visible, as I did them with a base coat of GW Contrast, and then added double-spots with Army Painter fanatic colours - which didn't run into the Contrasts, much to my relief.

These are great little figures, and even better with LBMS transfers on their shields - although with 4 different sizes and shapes of shields and transfers, each of which is only slightly different, matching them up is a little tricky! 

Because the transfers might not always go on the right shields, its really important with these I found to blend in the edges of the transfers with paint - which I have done with all of the ones here. 

It proved a perfect excuse to get my Wet Pallette out again to do the blending, and a good self-justification for buying some of the ArmyPainter 6-part "triads" as well to blend an exact match for the LBMS transfers too. 

These guys are especially good IMO, with a base of Mantis Warrior Green with Pure Red and Daemonic Yellow dots. 

You may notice that a couple of the archers here are wearing Early Persian ceremonial dress - and are in fact Museum Z-sculpt figures, as it turned out I needed 12 archers to give each base 2 "support" shooters as well as the 4 spear/axe/sword armed troopers.

Anyways, I am really pleased with how they came out - there are some more photos of them in the Photo Gallery on this site. 

Ostrogoths in Milton Keynes : Battle Reports from Campaign 2026

 This year I returned to Campaign for the first time in a while, as part of one of the CLWC teams of three players in the traditionally tightly themed event. The pool I was in was themed for the Wars of Atilla, with Huns, Patrician Romans, Gepids, Arabs and Ostrogoths as the only options.

Having already used Patricians, and Huns, and Gepids, and deciding that the Arab army in this time period was a bit rubbish, the Ostrogoths ended up being the default choice - rather irritatingly as I had recently sold my Sarmatian/Gothic cavalry on eBay prior to replacing them with some as-yet unpainted FiB figures!

That meant my Ostrogoths did look a tad Gallo-German, but they were close enough so that's how they rolled into Milton Keynes ready for battle.

All 5 battle reports are now published in video format. To try and be a bit different I took a lot of the photos from a "helicopter view", trying to take a shot after each player's turn. 

The general idea was to show more of the broad brush strategy of how the battles developed, but of course with a lot of Impetuous Cavalry Lancers on each side the amount of tactican finesse on display was often somewhat limited in practice!

Anyways, the reports are now posted on this website on a single page where you can view them in sequence, or in a YouTube playlist.  

Random Legionaries

No-one is quite sure how their bits box becomes a home for so many random figures, almost none of which you can ever remember buying - and mine is no exception. 

But every now and then my efforts to try out new styles of painting, and new paints collides with the contents of the bits box and I have a got at cobbling together a little unit of vaguely similar figures to see if I can make the old lead into something worthwhile. 

This time it's a very eclectic set of Imperial Roman figures that I noticed had somehow managed to get up close to double figures, allowing me to make up a full base of ADLG Legionaries.

  

My "EIR" Legions are all Old Glory figures, with LBMS transfers so these are very much a quick and dirty extra unit who look rather unlike the rest of them - maybe Praetorians, or maybe Penal Legion, take your pick!

The "test" aspects of them are that the lorica segmentata is done in Enchanted Steel from ArmyPainter onto a white base coat. 

I have no idea where the guy standing at the back is from - he was the shonky-est casting of the lot, so I sort of hid him at the back.

All of the leather is ArmyPainter Speedpaint Hardened Leather

The figures throwing pilums are I believe Donnington EIR legionaries, with one Auxilia in the middle so you can't really see his oval scutum shield.

I suspect the chap standing up holding his shield in the front row may be a Corvus Belli figure - how I came to own him I don't know as I don't have any more like him at all.

The standard bearer may well be a Chariot Miniatures figures, as he looks a bit skinny - but he is nicely detailed.

All the red is Armypainted Blood Red Speedpaint, and the super-simple shield design is kinda rubbish this close up, but from tabletop distances looks acceptable enough. 

When or if they will ever make it on table is anyone's guess - but at least the bits box is a little lighter now!  

 

Kneeling camels

This may well be getting pretty deep into "want but don't need" territory, but the combination of Museum's January sale, and having seen that there are at least a couple of Ancient armies (Moors and Early Arabs) who can have troops defending behind a line of tethered camels inevitably meant I was compelled to buy some of Museums kneeling camels earlier this year - and here they now are.

There isn't a great deal to say about them really, other than that they are done in GW Contrast Paints, with Darkoath Flesh and Aggaros Dunes being the two main colours used.

Here are some Legio Heroica and Esssex Arab warriors defending behind them. 

Anyways, if I were riding a horse, this would put me off charging these guys for sure!

Artillery!

After having a challenging experience at the Dorset Dodderers against an army with a Heavy Artillery unit in it, I decided to bite the bullet (or "large stone" I guess?) and pick up a proper Roman/Greek stone thrower unit to add to my collection.

This also meant having an opportunity to use some more of Donnington's excellent Roman artillery crew - great little characterful figures that I have already utillized for the "artillery on carts" (which appear in the  ADLG rulebook on page 137) - but the question then became where to source the engine itself?

In the end, after some debate with the CLWC massif I plumped for Xyston's Heavy Stone Thrower - which comes with some Greek-looking crew, giving me the dilemma of potentially wasting some figures (Yoiks!!!).

The solution to this issue was...magnets, or more specifically, some very thin magnets I'd had kicking around for ages, most probably bought to hold the turrets on resin-cast tanks (before hard plastic kits totally replaced them in the wargamers pantheon.. before being replaced by 3D prints in turn..). 

This allowed me to base up two sets of crew, and repurpose the artillery piece itself to be used by either.

 Add in a small ballista that I found kicking around in the bits box (in 15mm scale - not the full size one I saw at Vindolana) and suddenly I have two sets of interchangeable Heavy and Light artillery. 

Here's the rather over-crewed Light Ballista version of the Roman artillery base.

And the same tiny engine with Xyston Greek crew. The chap holding up a stone missile must be rather dissappointed...

Here you can see the magnets embedded in the two bases, and the corresponding magnet glued to the bottom of the large engine.

This Xyston piece is incredibly crisply cast. 

The Greek crew are simply painted with my current go-to "white" technique of Army Painter "speedpaint" Holy White with a top layer of Army Painter Matt White semi-drybrushed on top, leaving the shading that the Holy White generates visible in places.

The metal elements are Enchanted Steel, again from Army Painter, and the engine itself is ArmyPainter Hardened Leather speedpaint on a white undercoat.

Same engine, different crew from Donnington. 

Ready to ping !

Dorset Dodderers: The Match Reports

 Creaking and groaning into life in the deepest bowels of Dorset, the inaugural Dodderers competition instantly doubled the UK (World..?) roster of midweek L'Art de la Guerre competitions for the more refined and mature (aka "already retired" or "working at best part-time and keen to stop even that as soon as they can") gamers.

Themed for a post-Roman era, and taking place in Entoyment's spiffing new gaming centre at the arse-end of an industrial estate on the Poole half-ring road*,  this was a great opportunity for me to wheel out some of the countless hordes of 15mm Byzantine figures I've been painting over the last year or so.  

With five very entertaining games having been played over the "midweek two-day thing that feels like a weekend but isn't", some brand new figures getting on table, the huge benefit of a gaming space with excellent lighting, and the awareness that many of my more recent battle reports have been arguably a tad rushed, the end result is an old-school epic of military incompetence, surreal in-game figurine based banter, a rare appearance from the "Meso American Personalities with the letter Z in their names" Top Trumps set, some suitably acerbic analysis from Nasty Hannibal and (in this case, with the Justinian Byzantines on table), pompous and self-aggrandizing reportage from Byzanto-Canadian popster/general Justinian Bieber.

In Game 1 you will see the Justinians attempt to tempt the Zapotecs down from their Mexican mountain redoubt, whilst also learning from a couple of the tribal warriors the convoluted (but all true) story of how the Zapotec nation came by their Z-tastic name.

 

In Game 2, a Justinian Civil War breaks out while I scratch around furiously to try and identify a second famous Canadian "Justin", and then shoehorn that detail somehow into the already tortuous narrative arc of the battle.  

In Game 3 the Justinians take a trip through time to engage in another Civil War against their near-descendants, the Thematic Byzantines, who, like the Zapotecs, appear less interested in fighting the battle and more eager to debate the origins of the appelation "Thematic" as the action continues around them. 

In Game 4 it's time to get down to the YMCA and take on Harry "In The Navy" and his Arab Conquest army in a game characterised by some decidedly David Lynchian Dunes and a potentially nostril-expanding giant minaret.  

Finally in Game 5 the Justinians take on one of the all time classics, Classical Indian, and try their best to conjure up a way to defeat a wall of elephants without having time to buy and paint up even more FiB figures to provide a full range of dismounts for the Justinian elephant-phobic cavalry.  
 

All 5 reports are presented in full traditional text and image mode, meaning you'll have to actually read them rather than watch them, and they are all online now ready to go.  

* Poole is right on the coast, so it's kinda hard to have a full ring road as some of it would then be in the sea..

Rubbery Barbarian Slingers

At Devizes last year I picked up some Warlord Games resin barbarian skirmishers from the bargain bucket on their stand. 

I'm not even sure if these figures are still in their catalogue, as the bright future that was supposed to be "Warlord Resin" (aka rebadged Siocast) never really took off due to, well, Siocast resin turning out to not be some form of magic new material, not being particularly cheap, seemingly reliant on one company in Spain for machinery and raw materials, and often covered in flash..

.. but hey ho, these guys actually seemed pretty nice sculpts, and I also picked them up for a bargain price - and here is how some of them have turned out. 

The chap on the far left who has just released his sling seems to be ideally suited to this resin material, as the resin is rubbery but tough - I can imagine a metal casting of this "opened up" sling being so long it might be hard to cast, and prone to stress breakages as it bent.

 

They are all on 60x30 bases for ADLG in 28mm.

They've all been done quickly and simply with GW Contrasts, and Vallejo flesh to pick out the muscles (OK, sort of..) on the bare arms and highlight their faces. 

 

I really like some of the facial expressions the sculpts have captured here 

And this guy, poking a finger at whoever he's about to hurl a slingshot at, is super! 

More fragile Camels

 I've already posted loads of photos of the Red Copper Camels that Harry @Mightllittlemen on Instagram printed for me a while ago, but here are some more, just a bit further away..  

These were printed at 90% of the "recommended" 15mm nominal scale - I made sure to glue the "threes" of them all together at the rump or neck as well to generate more stability and robustness on each base. The bases all have a layer of metal in them too for extra weight.  

As I'd already spent ages doing the last batch with a layered painting style I decided to bash these ones out a little quicker, as I suspect they will be my second-string camels (is that a thing?) that only get used when I try to put an all-camel force on table.

Irritatingly they seem to have come out pretty much the same as the ones I slaved over for hours - perhaps its my eyesight, or just the 90% thing means they are that bit further away so you can't easily see where I've been careless with the paint !

 

At 90% they did become even more fragile, and one particular design seemed to struggle to correctly print its forelegs - you'll see in the photos some of the camels have large bits of vegetation in front of them, which is covering the missing legs and also the metal pin I had to drill into their underbellys to get them to stand up. 

Here they are next to the 100% boys. 

This angle looks like it shows quite a noticable difference, but some of that may be a visual trick due to the tall spear on the larger print.

Mixed together here they seem fine to use as a mass.