Back from "Derby"

Well, I did get back last night but I was too tired to post so I've waited until today.

On Friday evening 5 of us from the club met up for a veggie curry (which was very nice) before heading to St Pancras for our train. At the other end, after a cab ride to our B&B in Melbourne, 4 of us popped down to the pub for a drink or two. On the way we found that a new curry house had opened right next to the pub, so we booked a table for our Saturday evening meal.

Saturday morning saw an early start to have breakfast and get to Donnington Park. We got there in plenty of time to sort ourselves out and discover who our first opponents would be. We'd been drawn against France B. Do not let the "B" fool you - these guys are probably some of the top players in Europe (let alone France) and would be very highly placed in world rankings.

*gulp*

I'll be doing AARs of all the games over the course of this week, so I'll leave it there for now and skip to the results.

The Individual Results

The Team Results

We were rather worried going into the final round as we were in 9th place. How could we uphold our reputation, being placed so highly? We were even at risk of going up into 8th or maybe even 7th place! In the end we did manage to drop down to 10th place, but that was still 2 places higher than our target *sob*. Our heads hung in shame.

I had 3 games that were very enjoyable (even if I did lost 2 of them). Unfortunately I had one game where my opponent was, errmmmm, "difficult". Yes, I'll go with "difficult" as a description of him. I'm sure some of you reading this will know the type I mean.

Just to give you some idea of how big the tournament section of the show was, here are some pics:

I would guess that the tournament area took up about 40% of the overall floor space with the rest being for the trade stands and demo or participation games. Unfortunately, I didn't get much chance apart from an hour or so on the Saturday lunchtime to take a look around. There was one advantage to that though - I didn't buy very much. In fact, my only purchase was two Vallejo paints.

My Impressions

Venue

It is very much a huge barn and the lighting wasn't great for photography (almost all my pics seem to have a green tinge) but fine for the gaming. It did get quite noisy at times but not enough to be a distraction when concentrating on the games. Very occasionally we could hear planes flying over or go-karts on the adjacent track. I think the very high ceilings and air replenishment from open doors helped to eliminate the game(r)y smell you often get at shows and tournaments.

The only toilets I can vouch for the state of were the ladies loos down at the tournament end, which were clean and well stocked with toilet paper and hand towels. I remember that there were complaints about the gents toilets last year but as I obviously don't use them I have no idea if the problems had been resolved for this year's show.

Catering was about typical in cost and quality for venues like this (somewhat expensive, not particularly high quality).

As I only had a brief tour of the trade show, I can't comment too much on it. I did get the impression that they may have tried to cram too much into the allotted area which meant that the walking spaces between were quite narrow. There did seem to be more space around the demo and participation games.


The Tournament

The organisation for this was superb. Tables were all covered with suitable cloths and there was adequate space between rows for people to move about and watch games if they wished. Each tournament had an admin table centrally with a laptop and printer to allow results to be entered, collated and results and next round draws to be printed out within a few minutes of the final game ending. I didn't see all the prizes and trophies, but what I saw looked to be fairly nice.


Meet-Ups and Loot

Over the weekend I did get to meet a few bloggers:
Loki
Kev
Ian
PanzerKaput

It was great to finally meet all of you, even if we didn't get much time to chat. I know that a couple of others were there, and I'm sorry I missed you. Maybe next year or at some other event?

As I said earlier, I didn't buy very much at all. I did bring back a couple of other things though.

The Hastings Collection was a free sample being handed out to FoG:AM players (and possibly some others) on the Sunday. There were various different ones handed out. Mine appears to be a Saxon housecarl taking a well-earned breather on a pile of cut logs. The casting looks very nice. The company they are from is Cosimo Auricchio.

The other bag of figures are some AW French Indian War coureurs. Unfortunately they aren't for me to keep - they are my painting contribution for the Bloggers for Charity game next year. Loki gave them to me on the Sunday morning.

AAR: 800 point FoG:AM Romans vs Egyptians

Gordon needed a practice game for his Late Dynastic Egyptians before the tournament this weekend so I agreed to help him out. So, on Monday night I turned up for a game using the Mid Republican Roman army he had brought along as opponents.

Hmmm, Romans. How to deploy and use those? Oh well, suck it and see.

Gordon passed the initiative to me, so I selected "Agricultural" as the terrain type. For my compulsory open field, I went for a large (16" wide) piece which landed slap bang in the middle of his base line. I was quite pleased with that as it would play havoc with his deployment.

So, some pics of the game and some blurb to explain what's going on.

 My right wing after my first move. Gordon's entire first move consisted of advancing the skirmishers on his right wing - the main body of heavy foot stayed put for several turns. I'd very sensibly (= jammily) been able to stack all my veteran legions (superior Hastati and Prinicipes; elite Triarii) on my right where they would face Gordon's best battle troops.

My centre and left wing. the Legions here were average. There was a small unit of Italian auxiliary medium foot which I left in front of the camp. Facing them are some superior (yikes!) skirmishers. He also had two units of javelin armed light horse trying to sweep around my left flank.

Legions advancing on my left flank. I think the dice were a cohesion test from shooting by the skirmishers (I passed!).

The right wing advances. Heavy foot move very slowly, so it took several terms for the main battle to commence.

Finally getting close. Gordon's spearmen have finally moved, to present a flat frontage. In case you are wondering, the artillery bases are actually my commanders as Gordon doesn't currently have any Roman commanders painted up.

I can't remember whether I charged or Gordon did, but his dice in the impact phase were dreadful which was very nice for me. His chariots lost a base and went disrupted, then lost another base in the melee. As my legions were still steady, he had to break off.

And my right-most legion has broken his hoplites (and killed their general).

Unfortunately, my 4-base legion broke in the same melee, but the hoplites facing them couldn't pursue as they were still in combat.

Now you see them....

My light foot decided to stand when charged by Gordon's light horse (the light and medium foot had been herding those pesky horsemen for the previous turn or two).

My left-most legion didn't like being shot at all the time by those bleedin' superior skirmishers and had dropped to fragmented (and were soon to break). The neighbouring legion had shown a great reluctance to charge the skirmishers facing them, rolling "short" or "very short" for their charge distance each time.

My centre legions close in on the Egyptian spearmen, with their Triarii (superior offensive spearmen) move up into the gap.

....and now you don't!
Light horse unit charged by the Italians and forced to evade off the table. Meanwhile, my velites are still holding up against the other light horse unit.

I must have forgotten to take photos for a turn or two. My centre (average) legions had charged in, as had the triarii. On my centre-left the left-hand legion had broken their opponents, as had the triarii. the right-hand legion was less successful and broke.

A close up of what happened. Gordon's right-most unit lost the melee, then he rolled very badly on the cohesion test and he double-dropped to broken. The unit next to it had been dropped to fragmented, then failed the CT for seeing the break and routed through the hoplites behind disrupting them. My pursuing triarii pursued the routers into the flank of the hoplites, dropping them to fragmented even before the impact phase.

The dawdling legion has moved into the large open field and charged some medium foot archers. I was on a ++ at impact and would be on a ++ again in the melee.

I haven't shown the right wing for a while, so here is a shot of the final position. My right-most legion kept advancing after pursuing the hoplites, then turned to come around behind the flank. Gordon's chariots, reduced to 2 bases managed to drop to fragged after seeing another hoplite unit break so he very wisely decided to get them out of the way. They then charged some medium foot bowmen, disrupting them. Two turns later their colleagues joined in, charging the bowmen in the flank. That was the final point I needed to rout his army.

The overall result was that I'd broken 4 of his 14 units, fragged another 4 and forced one to evade off my baseline. In exchange, Gordon had broken 4 of my units (the light horse had eventually broken those velites, but it took them several turns of melee to do so). We had both managed to kill 1 general in combat.

Given that I managed to beat him using them, I don't think Gordon is relishing the prospect of facing Romans handled by better players at the tournament.

Anyway, this will be my last post before Sunday. I'm hoping to meet up with a few of you at "Derby" (actually Donnington Park) this weekend, assuming I get enough time between games! I promise to take plenty of photos over the weekend and will attempt to get reports of all 5 games written up next week.

Ghost Pirates

Well, that's what they look like right now! I primed the last of them this morning and they will be staying ghostly for a while yet. Just in case you disbelieve me, here are some pics:

Artillery, ships boat and PyRats

Cimmaroons; Malays; Chinese; dead pirates; Skeleton Crew; dogs; bits for camps and command bases

Rebel Minis pirates

Mostly Blue Moon pirates with some Rebel Minis - this sheet has the Captains

And all together

More Koreans

To be able to use my Koreans for FoG:R, I really needed to get myself some arquebusiers. I also needed a handful for a small (4 base) unit of light foot for FoG:AM. Unfortunately, they come in packs of 4 arquebusiers and 4 crossbowmen. I've already got plenty of crossbowmen (possibly more than I actually need) so this was going to be awkward.

However, I cheekily emailed Tony at East Riding Miniatures to ask if it would be possible to just get the arquebusiers. He responded very quickly to say that it was but there would be a small extra charge to cover the extra labour involved. No problem - I had expected that would be the case if he could do the splitting. I sent another email to detail how many I needed and he sent me a Paypal invoice.

I was most (pleasantly!) surprised the next morning when he emailed to say they had been cast, he was about to pack them and they'd be in the post that afternoon. The postman did try to deliver them the next day, but the pack was slightly too big to go through the letterbox, so I collected them yesterday.

So, a big thumbs up for East Riding Miniatures - fantastic customer service.

Korean Artillery

I'm actually quite surprised. There was much less to do on these than I'd thought and I managed to finish painting them last night and even got the Klear/ink coat done. This morning I sprayed them with matt varnish and flocked them.

This afternoon I have primed the first 144 pirates. I've also done the base colour for the blue camo of the Spetsnaz figures. Unfortunately it seems to have dried a slightly darker shade than I'd planned, so I may have to go over them again.

But that's enough blather about them - you want pics of the artillery.

The figures are by Grumpy, available in the UK from East Riding Miniatures or from Eureka in Australia.

The Grumpy figures are certainly characterful, but a little, errmmm, chubby compared to the Koreans from Old Glory 15s. They were very nice to paint though.

And she's back!

Hi all!

Sorry for the long gap between posts. In the week after my last post I got very little done in terms of painting (a few steps done on the Korean artillery), although I did manage to prep some more figures. I was also out at the club on two nights for gaming. After that I was down at the TUC Congress in Bournemouth, from which I have returned with a stinking cold. I did prep the rest of the pirates for my army, and since my return I've got most of them glued onto painting sticks ready to be primed.

The first game was to give Simon a practice game for the Lisbon international teams tournament as he hadn't yet played a single game of FoG:AM under the V2 rules. It was quite a successful game in regard to that as I think we covered all the major changes that he might come up against. It wasn't so good for me though as I lost 21:4!! Simon's army was Early Hungarian (approx 1200AD) and I had fiddled up a list for my Swiss making it as early as possible for the figures I had (1425-ish I think). In fact, I'd done two lists - one with 13 BGs and the other with 17 BGs (same overall numbers of each troop type, just bigger BGs). Unfortunately I went with the 17 BG list, which competently demonstrated the difficulties of manoeuvring lots of small BGs with just a few generals (V2 has imposed limits on how many BGs can be moved together by generals, so a TC can only move 2 whereas in V1 generals could move as many BGs as were in their command radius and in contact with another BG in the group). I did take pics and will try to remember to write up a AAR this week.

The second game was against Gordon and was a practice for the Derby World Teams tournament at the end of the month. I'll be taking a Sea Peoples army (figures borrowed from Gordon) which should be good fun. As the army is mainly Impact Foot-Swordsmen, tactics should be quite easy - plough straight ahead, charge the enemy line and hope to win the impact phase as I'm likely to be down in the melee phase otherwise. The main difficulty will be getting there intact against opponents with shooty troops as I have very few skirmishers to screen them as they advance (in fact, I'm probably better off sticking them on the flanks to hold up any attempts to outflank me).

The game itself was good fun and resulted in a draw. I was winning on my left flank, holding on my centre-left, but losing badly on my centre-right. On my right wing things were quite close as we ended the game, but I was in a very good position to win there if we'd carried on.

It was certainly a useful learning experience for me as I've never really played with a medium foot army before. I've certainly rethought my deployment and basic battle plan (stick the superiors in the centre of the line, use the skirmishers supported by some average MF to protect the flanks, have some BGs behind the main line to provide rear support and keep generals in range of all the battle line BGs - the latter two should help provide some protection from the cohesion-dropping effects of shooting on the way in.


Being a Winner

Whilst my luck in games may not be good, my luck in winning prizes in the blogosphere seems to be excellent. A couple of months ago I won a prize on Msr le Rosbif's blog. It arrived yesterday and I am thoroughly looking forward to reading it. Eventually - I've got quite a queue of books to read at the moment.


So, what will I be up to this week?

I was planning to go to Colours today, but my cold has put paid to that. Whilst I could still go tomorrow if I feel better, I probably won't as part of the rail journey has a bus replacement service and I've got a ton of chores to catch up on. Oh well, maybe next year.

Painting

Hopefully I'll finish the Korean artillery over the next few days. Then it will be back to Donogh's Hasslefree figures. I may go back to the beginning and try a different tack, working on them one at a time. Once they are done, I intend to set to work finishing off all the figures in my WIP drawers before I commence any new projects.

Prepping

I need to finish prepping the last 60 Sarmatian lancers, so I plan to take those into work with me this week, to do during lunch breaks. The horses they'll be going on were painted a year and a half ago, so it's about time I actually painted the riders!

If prep on those goes well, I've also got some 28mm figures for Saga to prep - a Viking warlord, some berserkers, two wolves and a mounted Norman warlord.

Once all those are done I will start prepping some other historical stuff, probably the remainder of the 30YW stuff and my 6mm ACW. After all, I want to have plenty of figures prepped and primed, ready and waiting for this year's Analogue Painting Challenge. I may also prep some of my 15mm SF stuff to paint up over the next few months.

Priming

Simon finally handed over the figures I'm going to paint up for him as a winner of my 1st Blogday prize draw back in January. So, 36 15mm Spetsnaz troops have been prepped and stuck on painting sticks. I'll be getting them primed during the week and will start painting them after doing Donogh's (or maybe alongside). These will be done in the blue urban/winter camo, but Simon hasn't told me yet which pattern he wants (tiger, woodland or reed). They should be good fun to paint.

I'll also make a start on priming the Pirates this week.


Gaming

I've got two more games lined up for this week. On Monday I'll be giving Gordon a practice for Derby. He's loaning me a Mid Republican Roman army to use against the Late Dynastic Egyptian army that he is taking to the tournament. How will I cope with nary a sight of a horse in my army?

On Thursday Richard is giving me a practice game for my Sea Peoples. I've given him some suggestions for opponents I'd like to try out the army against, but don't know yet what I'll be facing.

Of King Arthur and the Korean Guards

Yes, it's been a few days since my last post so shoot me! However, before resorting to your guns, do read on as you'll see that I've been fairly busy.

King Arthur

On Monday I was pleasantly surprised to discover I'd won a prize draw. Dan Mersey had randomly drawn a winner from his followers for having gained his 100th. It was me! On Wednesday my prize arrived so I am now the lucky owner of his book "King Arthur" from the Osprey Myths and Legends series. It looks like it will be a cracking read.

Thanks Dan!


Thursday Night's Game

I played a 850 point game of FoG:R against Clive on Thursday - my Swiss against his German States, so lots of pike-on-pike action was expected.

It was a pretty even match-up, but Clive had better dice than me, so I lost 22-3. The fact that his army had 4 guns which annihilated one of my pike keils wasn't very helpful for my cause. It was a fun game though. I'll post an AAR once I've had a chance to go through the photos.


Prepping Pirates

I've been taking pirates into work to prep them during my lunch break. So far I've prepped about 260 figures. I've still got to prep the captains, artillery and African and Asian figures (not to forget the PyRats and Skeleton crew) and bits and pieces for their camp. Once everything is prepped it will be time to glue them onto sticks for painting and prime them.


Korean Foot Guards

Progress was slow as I wasn't able to do much during the week in the evenings, but I managed to finish them over the weekend.

Various foot guard units flourished during the Koryo era, but their role diminished in the Choson era and they were eventually outlawed under the Yi military reforms, replaced by "soldiers".

In FoG:AM you can have 8 bases each of To Bang  and Tae Gak guards (equipped with heavy weapon or crossbow respectively) for both Koryo and Choson era armies. For the latter era you have a choice of guard or "soldiers" (equipped Bow*, Light Spear-Swordsmen) but can't have both together.

Painting these guards took a little bit longer than the regular foot did as I wanted to be as neat as possible when doing their vests, which add a bit of welcome colour to an otherwise fairly drab army.

Well, that's enough waffle, here are the photos.

Tae Gak Guards:

To Bang Guards:

This week I'll be trying to paint the artillery, but with games tomorrow and Thursday night and heading down to Bournemouth on Saturday for TUC Congress I doubt I'll have them finished before I go.