Looting on the streets of ancient Rome

Today I had a first, solo, go at using the Gangs of Rome skirmish rules from Footsore Miniatures & Games.  

Looking back at this blog I see that I purchased version 2 of the rules at Fiasco in October last year but the serious push to actually play has been on-going for just five weeks. Not bad going!

I set up a 3'x3' area using my Deep Cut Studio city mat (with some plywood and a metre rule defining the playing area as the mat is 4'x4').

The buildings are a mixture of actually-Roman stuff built for Christmas 2018's Dark Ages game, some buildings that looked vaguely believable because of their pantile roofs, and a few pieces knocked together recently.

While the set up was on the table, Postie arrived with a couple of additional MDF building kits; a temple and a granary from Warbases. More on these later!

Having just used the basic rules, I've found them to be fun and quite clever in places. For example. I was wondering why they have separate "Move" and "Climb" activations when the distance moved is the same in both cases. The answer is that the results of failure are different between the two.

Fail your die roll to Move and you just stay where you started, fail you roll to climb and you fall half the height you were attempting to reach and take damage accordingly. Cleverly, though, climbing a ladder is counted as a move so is safer and potentially quicker than shinning up the scaffolding elsewhere.

I used the first scenario in the book in its "Core Rules" configuration. Basically it's won by the side that gets the lion's share of four resource tokens scattered around the board. On this occasion the Green Gang led by Molendinarius were successful.

I think Gangs of Rome would make for a great Saturday Afternoon Wargame[TM], possibly even giving us a campaign to follow the soon-to-be-finished Siege of Hachigata series.

Some random air support

By the time the recent Joy of Six show came around I really fancied painting some 1/300th scale aircraft just for the hell of it. 

Fortunately friend of the blog Richard Phillips sells the Scotia Micromodels range at shows and attends  Joy of Six so after a rummage through his drawers (Ooh er Matron!) I came away with a selection of early Cold War British jets.

First up is this English Electric Canberra. The Luftwaffe acquired a small number. They were officially used as target tugs (hence the bright colour scheme) but there is some evidence that they were in fact used for photographic and electronic surveillance of Warsaw Pact military operations across the Inner German Border.

Fellow Cold War Commander Andy T has a model of one of these aircraft in an all-over orange scheme so I decided to go with the part-orange scheme seen here.

The crosses on the wings (one upper and one lower) were from my spares box. They are probably over 40 years old but they went on fine with a little decal fix and softening solution. The remaining markings are hand painted or applied with a Staedler waterproof pen.

Next up is a DeHavilland Vampire in Indian Airforce colours.

Obviously a much simpler, and quicker, paint scheme; just all-over Vallejo Air Aluminium.

The Vampire seems to have variants with and without little winglets outboard of the tail. Their absence on this model pushed me to depict an aircraft in Indian markings.

Finally we have a Royal Swedish Air Force DeHavilland Venom.

I do like this model in its grey and green scheme (I used Vallejo Pale Grey and Reflective Green over a Middle Sea Grey base coat). 

The Venom is noticeably larger than the Vampire and while it should be a little bigger I think Scotia have overdone it. Never mind though; in these colour schemes they're unlikely to see action over the same table at the same time!

So that was fun. Has it scratched that itch for a while or has it just reminded me of how much fun painting 1/300th scale planes can be? We'll see over the next few months!

Upgrading the dice tower - Revised!

As things stand my recently completed dice tower is a little plain. 

It was always my plan that I improve the thing to make it sit a little more comfortably among a range of terrain types. Adding a Neodymium magnet to the front wall has allowed me to attach a couple of temporary fixtures.  

This first one goes down the generic fantasy route:

It's a plastic bit, probably Games Workshop I guess, that's been in the spare bits box for years. It's painted in a dark bronze, dry brushed with brass and then covered in my usual home-made verdigris wash.

Alternatively I can bring the tower into a more historical setting with this little window.

It's made from pieces of thin card and an off-cut of Wills plastic pantile sheet.

And, added since the original post, another generic fantasy option is this:

Another TacWWII marker

I had a play around on Tinkercad yesterday and designed a new marker for TacWWII:

Sized at 75mm x 40mm, these company markers can potentially fill two functions.

Having spent ages advancing infantry companies through the dense forests of Manchuria in a recent game, I thought it would be useful to just have one base to move, specifically when the troops concerned were nowhere near the enemy.

In addition they could act as blinds allowing for limited intelligence as to enemy strength. Each marker carries an identifying letter on the rear.

These letters can be used to identify particular companies on the order of battle sheet. The opposing player will be kept in the dark as to unit type until the company can be detected (though speed of movement may give some clues!)

A Vintage Classic

My mate Mark P bought me a couple of Airfix kits as Christmas presents. This one has just reached completion:

It's the Tank Mk 1 from the Vintage Classics range. It's a 1967 moulding so nearly as old as I am!

The kit comes with a single decal and a painting guide for a vehicle at Fleurs-Courcelette during the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. However, I decided I'd paint mine in an overall grey scheme representing a vehicle prepared for testing at the Lincoln factory earlier in the year.

It's generally not too difficult a kit to build. A little filling and sanding was necessary to hide some of the joins between the armour plates. The biggest problem is attaching the steering trailer to the complex mechanism of springs at the rear of the hull. I think a permanent display base is going to be needed to prevent future breakage.

First Gangs of Rome models

Three weeks ago I took delivery of a box of Wargames Atlantic plastic Citizens of Rome. Having spent a fair chunk of the intervening time gluing and painting I'm now very nearly in a position to get started with the rules. In fact I've painted 19 figures; very nearly one a day.

As I reported previously, the box gives you enough parts to make 30 miniatures with the emphasis on gang members in combat poses.

However I did manage to produce a few figures that will pass for less violence-focussed civilians:

The 80mm sabot base identifies these miniatures as composing a "mob" into which fighters may disappear if things get too hot.

The ducks are some white metal castings that were sitting in my spares box awaiting a useful purpose. the racks of amphorae are 3D prints from Thingiverse.

Another mob base is this shepherd and his flock, obviously more relevant to rural games or to muckier parts of the city.

At the moment I don't really have any Rome-specific terrain so this photoshoot features my Warbases villa standing in as a large town house.

A mixture of homemade and Hovels resin-cast walls provide privacy to the senatorial family who live here. It seems they aren't at home as a number of ne'er-do-wells have penetrated the garden.

Fortunately the Vigiles Urbani are on the way:

I've found scribed Milliput to be the best way of making paved bases. Here we see a couple of vigiles bases, before and after painting. Each base gets a coat of Vallejo Basalt Grey before the individual stones are picked out with Pale Grey.

A Chilean Vampire

I bought the Airfix de Havilland Vampire kit when it was available cheap from Lidl (or was it Aldi?) before Christmas. Unfortunately, though, it comes with only one set of markings; for a Royal New Zealand Air Force aircraft. I'd already built that one so I invested in a set of after-market transfers from Xtradecal, paying significantly more than I did for the kit itself!

I've just finished the model. It represents a Vampire T.11 of Grupo 8, Chilean Air Force at Cerro Moreno airbase, Antofagasta in 1973-74.

I wasn't 100% impressed with the decals. The "NO PASO" (do not walk) markings on the wings are printed with the decal film only covering the lines themselves, not the whole of the area. As such, as soon as they came off the backing paper they collapsed into a ball of red lines that I couldn't untangle. In the end I used the markings from the kit for the trailing edge markings.

It's far from the best model I've made but the colour scheme's unusual and I quite like seeing it in the display cabinet alongside the RNZAF version. 

If I see another copy of the kit I'll grab it. There's a pre-UDI Rhodesian aircraft that's calling to me. It looks very British apart from the African spears on the wing roundels!