"Mayhem in the Med" - The Great Siege of Malta: Part 1

November 30th saw the 'Wyrley Retinue' take our usual trip to the local Wargamer show. This year was a little different, as the show has changed venue and moved to Leasowes High School rather than Great Barr High School - the other side of Birmingham and a bit of a longer journey, but ultimately a much better venue overall. More on that later though. First, we had a game to present - our "Mayhem in the Med!", based on the Great Siege of Malta 1565. 

The premise was simple - the Christians were outnumbered more than two-to-one defending the town, and simply had to survive the day and prevent the Turks crossing the walls. Controlling the Christians were Paul and Dad; controlling the Turks were Gary, Ben and myself. The Christians had the advantage of a ship-full of cannons waiting in the harbour, while the Turks could turn the tide if they could claim both boom towers and allow their own galley into the harbour. 

The horde of Turks flood the board!

Gary's galley waits in the bay for the boom chain to drop

The view of the board from the Turks' entry point

The harbour entrance, with the galley waiting outside

The town, with Christians atop the walls.

The Christians rush to defend the outlying buildings from the encroaching horde

The Turkish continue to advance slowly...

 

The view down the street, towards the advancing Turks

Jean de la Valette stands atop the walls!

Getting there slowly...

The Janissaries lead the advance, attempting to clear the Christians from the street

Where did those Janissaries go? The Christians put up quite a fight...

The Christian reinforcements arrive...

North Africans in their sights...

Stay tuned for part two!

The 2015 Game - Building Malta

Way back in January, I set out the projects I wanted to complete over the course of the year. Well, things didn't quite go as well as planned, but by far the biggest task was our plan for the Wyrley Retinue's 2015 game. As has become habit now, we went with a theme that would have some sort of anniversary in 2015. Rather than the obvious choices like Agincourt or Waterloo, we went with the slightly more obscure (i.e. the sort of thing only Gary would know the date of...) Great Siege of Malta as 2015 marks the 450th anniversary of the Ottoman invasion of the island. 

Of course, Malta looks nothing like our existing set of boards and so a whole new bunch of terrain boards were called for. While Gary took on the task of getting all the figures painted, I tackled the building of all the terrain (with intermittent help from Paul...). The deadline, as usual, was the local Wargamer show on November 30th. Nine months to build a completely new set of boards to make an 8'x6' gaming table, with all the accoutrements necessary to go with it. No problem, right?

The initial MDF boards laid out in the intended arrangement.

Each board was edged with wooden batons to ensure a flush fit next to each other. At least, that was the plan...

The three non-water boards lined up next to each other.

With the wooden batons added, the frames were filled up with dense polystyrene and raised to the height of the batons. All the gaps were plastered over and once everything was dry, the boards were textured with two layers of sharp sand.

The harbour boards took  a bit more trial and error to get right...

The initial placement of the boom towers.

The boom begins to take shape!

The simple yet elegant boom mechanism - wooden clothes pegs!

With the flat boards constructed, I set about building the add-ons. First up was the "castle board" - the raised hill area that would represent the town. The base was built with foamboard and more 50mm polystyrene, with plenty of carving to get the "right" slope (although you'd still need some muscle to push a siege tower up there...)

The town laid out next to the early dock board.

Foamboard buildings inside Citadel Fortress walls - the buildings would ultimately end up outside the walls...

The view from the bottom of the slope

The pictures stop at this point, but there's still plenty of construction to do. Copious amounts of cork bark slivers were used to add cliffs to both tower boards, and the dock board was built up to a slope before the frame of the docks themselves were added. At this stage, the painting began with each board receiving a thorough coat of a mid-brown (roughly GW Graveyard Earth) before getting a heavy overbrushing of the appropriately named "Sand" (pretty much GW Bleached Bone). With all the earth/rock painted, it was time for the trickiest task - the water. The majority was simple enough, but the water needed some careful blending where the deep water met the shallows around the shoreline. Despite having been painting figures for years, blending is something that still scares me and it would show up even more on such a large surface as terrain boards. In the end, I think I got away with it...

The boards with water painted - not as bad as I expected!

With everything painted, it was time to add the water. If I hadn't left it quite so late in the day, I'd have taken much more time to get the water effects just right. In the end, I resorted to simply pouring a layer of PVA onto each of the boards. You can see the results in the next couple of posts!

Testing, testing...

...is this thing still on?

*Ahem*

Sorry for that folks, not entirely sure what happened there. I was all set for a good year of blogging, but life intervened halfway through, as it has a tendency to do. Holidays, illness, promotions, marriage proposals, work etc. came along and somewhere along the way blogging fell by the wayside.

I do have some stuff to show from the last six months though, which I'll be posting up in a bit. Not as much stuff as I set out to complete this year unfortunately, but I'll talk about that a bit more in another post. For now though, roll the pictures!

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - June Progress

Just a quick update on the ToDG progress so far - not a lot has been done, in all honesty, as the month has played out busier than expected so far, especially with the World Cup going on! I've managed to assemble all the Wildwood Rangers (the first ten of which are shown below) but at the moment, painting is yet to commence on them.

In the spirit of showing more WiPs though, I will show a bit of the painting that has been done. I've had 15 Glade Riders in the wings for a while, and I've finally made a start on painting their horses.

Fifteen horses in a variety of shades!

This one is slightly further along, with all the leatherwork painted...

With just under two weeks left to get the Wildwood Rangers painted, I'd better crack on soon or end up facing a repeat of the first month, and miss the deadline!

Phalanx 2014

Just a quick post to say that we will be taking our Battle of Kirkburn Bridge game to the Phalanx wargames show in St Helens tomorrow, so if there's anyone in the North West reading this - please pop over to our table to say hello and have a chat! 

Check out the Spartans' website for more details of the show: http://spartans.org.uk/#&panel1-1 

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - Here We Go Again...

Into month three we go then, so what have I got lined up this time around? 

Well, I have two boxes of these:

which will be used to make twenty of these guys:

So that's twenty Wildwood Rangers to build and paint. A big step up from last month, but not quite as big a target as the Eternal Guard back in April! I'm looking forward to putting these together as the models are pretty darn cool looking, and I have plans for a "darker" variation on my usual colour scheme to reflect the Rangers' more sinister nature...

Amount Spent: $94

Number of Figures: 20

Price at Current UK exchange rate: £51.94

GW UK Retail Price: £47

Price Paid: £40

Here you can see some of the incongruity between UK and Australian GW prices; a single Treeman in Australia costs $2 more than two boxes of Wildwood Rangers, but somehow in the UK the two boxes of Wildwood Rangers work out as a whole £10 more expensive than the Treeman! 

Anyway, as we're now at the halfway stage of the Tale, I thought I'd do a quick round-up of the spending so far as well:

Amount "Spent": $388

Number of Figures: 51

Equivalent at current UK exchange rate: £214.34

GW UK Retail: £157.80

Actual Amount Spent: £136.50 ($247.09)

You can see that even at the halfway stage, I'm a good few bob better off than buying at normal GW prices, let alone Australian GW prices. I've saved just over £20 compared to buying everything brand new (and that's quite a skewed figure as it is, given that two out of the three months so far have featured brand new models that haven't popped up on eBay yet...). Compared to my Australian brethren though, I've saved a massive £78/$141 on their GW prices...

A Tale of Duelling Gamers - Enter Treeman!

Here we go then, the finished product for May's portion of the Duelling Gamers challenge. Although one model seemed like a hugely underwhelming target for a whole month, in hindsight I'm glad I didn't give myself more to do. I'm not used to painting big models like this, and certainly not this "type" of figure where the colour scheme is completely undetermined. Really, the only model I have to compare to this is the Screaming Bell for my Skaven, but that was easy to paint, relatively speaking. Everyone knows how to paint metal parts, everyone knows how to paint wooden beams, everyone knows how to paint rope and chains, which is essentially all the Screaming Bell is - the colours are already "pre-set" in your head, because you know what they're supposed to look like. But what colour is a living, walking tree supposed to be?

I'll admit I went in rather rashly and began painting before I'd actually thought about *how* to paint the Treeman. I undercoated white (as usual), basecoated all over with Rakarth Flesh (as usual, for my other forest spirits, anyway), washed with Agrax Earthshade (as usual) and then....

Stuck. I had no idea where to go from there. Eventually, after plenty of trial and error, I stumbled on a scheme that I'm more-or-less happy with. In the end, I think I probably spent more time thinking about how to paint the Treeman than actually painting him. 

In the end, I don't think he's turned out too bad, and I think he fits with the established colour scheme of the rest of the army (as much as is possible for a living, walking tree anyway). The only part I'm not entirely happy with is the strangleroots shooting out of his hand; they need something more doing with them to really do them justice, but I'm not confident enough to attempt the (seemingly) complicated blending I'd like to do, especially on a deadline!

Anyway, that's another month over and finished on time (he was actually finished a couple of days ago, so I wasn't painting right up until the deadline this time!) 

One thing I have realised though, over the course of this month in particular, is that I'm completely rubbish at posting blog updates. In fact, with the ToDG going on, I've even stopped updating on other non-ToDG subjects as well, which isn't good. 

I think part of the reason for that is that I really don't like posting WiP pictures. I love seeing other peoples' work in progress shots, but I'm rubbish at doing it myself - I hate the thought of posting the inevitable "here's another picture showing how little I've done in a week" updates. Why would anyone want to see that I've managed to paint another colour on a bunch of unfinished models? And so, I wait until I have a finished product to show which, as you might have guessed, takes me a while. Combine that with the fact that I tend to paint whole units at a time, rather than break them down into smaller batches (like the other ToDG participants seem to do), means that blog updates are few and far between.

All of this isn't intended as a criticism of those people who *do* post WiP updates, by the way. Like I said, I love seeing other peoples' work in progress, and seeing the evolution of models from start to finish. I just can't seem to bring myself to do it for my own blog! 

But all that is (hopefully) going to change. For next month (and, if it works, the months thereafter) I'm going to get over my irrational "fear" of WiPs, and post some of my own work in progress shots in an effort to increase the number of blog updates across the month, and hopefully give readers (if there are any!) more to keep them interested!

And on that note, I'll end! Stay tuned for the next update, coming to you sometime this weekend!