Vintage Wargaming

Some of you may be aware that British Pathe has begun uploading its archives to YouTube. A wonderful little piece from 1966 popped up on my feed the other day, and I wanted to share it here:



 Old school!

(Nice to see that "husband & wife" wargaming goes back a ways, too.)

A Wonderful Blast from the Past

Following a trail of links, this morning I found myself inspired by a set of photos of an old-school fantasy army made up of vintage Minifigs and Citadel sculpts, and paint jobs inspired by King Crimson's In the Court of the Crimson King.

Love the pine bark armor and pine cone standard!

You really can't go wrong with animated hands, especially giant ones.

There need to be more saturated pastels in today's painter's palette.

When it comes to miniatures, I absolutely eat this stuff up. This sort of whacked-out imagery evokes memories from my childhood of strange books and movies, imagery that made me fall in love with all things fantastic. It brings to mind Brian Froud and Alan Lee and Terry Gilliam and innumerable other creative visionaries. It reminds me of a time when all fantasy wasn't necessarily grimdark and serious and codified.

Check out the full photoset here and bask in the trippy glory!

Current Projects Update

Here's the most recent shot of my work area. Two of my current projects are easily discernible; the third might be a bit harder to pick out, still being largely in bags, but it is, ironically, my current obsession.

• The Normandy project is moving along nicely. Shortly after posting those pictures of painted Highlanders, I decided that consistency of scale was more important to me than I had realized and I resolved to limit myself to a single manufacturer as much as possible. I plumped for Artizan, and all the figures have since arrived, been based, and primered. (And as a change of pace, I'm taking the advice of several other bloggers and doing the base texture before I paint the figures. Should be interesting to see how that pans out.)
  
  As an old fan of Necromunda and Mordheim, I couldn't be more pleased that the figures currently occupying space on my table constitute the entirety of what I need to play Operation Squad. Of course I plan on expanding by adding other squads and eventually moving into the game's vehicular supplement (see the primered Panther over on the left?) as well as playing larger, platoon-scale games of NUTS! once my collection gets big enough, but I'm loving the small scale that the basic OS game offers. Next up: ordering a few buildings from Paper Terrain, finishing up a couple other terrain-related odds and ends, and then playing some games! Hoping to realize the latter goal by the end of summer at the latest.
• Up on top of the plastic drawers sits another skirmish-level project, my 28mm samurai. I'm looking forward to Osprey's Ronin rules, but if those aren't quite what I'm looking for, I've always got Taiko. In fact, I'm planning on basing my samurai with magnets so that I can mount them in scenic movement trays in the style of Impetus to do larger-scale Taiko battles even if I end up using Ronin for my skirmish games. I plan on working on these guys slowly but surely, mostly as a colorful relief from the earth tones of my Normandy project.
• Lastly, there's the surprise project: my return to Epic-scale 40K. I posted back when I made an impulse purchase of a heap of classic Titans on the subject of my abiding love for Epic gaming and the many good times that Space Marine provided. Well, my old adversary Alex and I have been furiously exchanging emails, planning out our return to the fold. Amazingly, I just last week landed a complete boxed set of Adeptus Titanicus (styrene buildings and all!) for less than half of what I paid for it 20 years ago. And I've been slowly acquiring other pieces for my quickly-expanding collection, all the while trawling NetEPIC and ginning up armies. The plan in place right now is to build a Titan Legion/Space Marine army and paint up a few traitor titans as well - I've already picked out legions and paint schemes and can't wait to get started on that. The long-term goal is to build up an Ork army with my three old Gargant models as centerpieces. Alex is putting together a Knight-based Adeptus Mechanicus army with his long-term goal being the fielding of an Eldar army similar to the one he had in days of yore.
  
  This way we can play both the original Adeptus Titanicus rules with a handful of titans per side or have nice big bashes with NetEPIC armies. We only manage to get together about once a year at best (living 1,000 miles apart tends to put a crimp in social plans), but we're already planning to bring our tiny little armies along for whenever it is we see each other.

Oh, and I've also got plans for a third Armies of Arcana project, but that's projected to be a ways down the road and will warrant a post of its own, coming up shortly.

I won! I won!

Holy crap, I totally won that prize draw I posted about in a previous entry! This is an especially soothing balm since just yesterday I got effing sniped on an eBay auction I thought I was going to win, a set of Citadel giaks from their "Giak Attack" boxed set, part of the limited Lone Wolf range put out in conjunction with the game books. I've been after those figures for a couple years now, and for once the rate on the auction was reasonable enough that I could put in a bid without having to take out a personal loan from my bank first. And then some jackass came in at literally the last second (damn you, eSnipe!) and stole my precious giaks out from under me.

Ah, but now I have an even bigger pile of vintage Citadel goodness coming my way! And I'll get those giaks one day. One day...

An Epic Acquisition

Adeptus Titanicus was the second miniatures game I ever bought, and in many ways it's responsible for my miniatures wargaming hobby.

The game came out in 1988 and was (I believe) Games Workshop's first "epic" (i.e. 6mm) scale game. Set in their Warhammer 40,000 continuity, but thousands of years earlier during the Horus Heresy, it was a game of giant robot combat, which naturally appealed to my young adolescent sensibilities when I saw it sitting on the game store shelf. I still remember walking out of the store with the box tucked under my arm.

When I got home, the game contained within did not fail to disappoint. It came with four expanded polystyrene buildings and six plastic Warlord Titans. The rulebook dripped with good old-fashioned grim-n-gritty gothic-punk flavo(u)r and was my introduction to the joys of the 'Eavy Metal painting team and rulebooks with full-color photos. (Fantasy Warriors, my first miniatures game, didn't go much farther than pixelated line art for its rulebook.)

At any rate, I never played much of Adeptus Titanicus, but I enjoyed painting up the titans, and the photos in the rulebook caught the eye of my friend Alex, who was to become my first gaming buddy thanks to the conversation the rulebook sparked. A scheduled game turned instead into a broader interest in tabletop RPG gaming, and we didn't actually play a miniatures game until a couple months later (and Fantasy Warriors, at that!). But it certainly fired our imaginations, and it's no coincidence that a few months later we each asked for and received a Games Workshop game for Christmas (he: Warhammer 4th edition; me: Space Marine 2nd edition). We played a lot of both games over the coming years, but we both agree that our fondest memories from those years were courtesy of Space Marine and the truly "Epic" games we played. Over time, all those excess Titans (and the styrene buildings) from the AT box were lost to the sands of time, although I hung on to my metal Ork gargants (one Great and two Slashas) and still have them today, even though the gargants have for years served mostly as symbols of good times long past.

I was giving some thought to those memories a couple weeks ago, specifically in regards to the "Oldhammer"movement. As much as I admire the vintage Citadel sculpts of the 80s, my heart and soul lies with the epic-scale minis of the early 90s. So I went to eBay to see what was on offer...

Imagine my surprise when I found a lot of fourteen vintage Titans (including three metal Reavers and a Warlord still on the sprue) for a seriously reasonable price. I put the auction on watch on followed it as it got closer to the finish line. By the final day, the price was still not terribly exorbitant  so I started bidding - and I won. In the end, I paid about $8.25 per Titan, a very reasonable price considering that one often sees single titan figures being offered for upwards of $25.00.

What's more, the lot came with a bunch of "extras," stuff I was only dimly aware of back in the day - custom heads, new weapons, and various other add-ons and ephemera. Clearly this lot belonged to a devoted Adeptus Titanicus gamer.

One of the things I love about picking up stuff like this on eBay is how you sometimes get these fun little personal touches in the lot. For example:

Considering this was probably painted in the early 90s, that reference isn't perhaps as dated as it may first seem. Nice to know The Hammer is still enjoying some level of popularity in the 41st millennium.

By far the weirdest feature of the auction was this Reaver Titan, which has some sort of home-wired attempt at creating a light-up system for tracking void shields. (Normally you just use a spinning disc set in the base):

What you can only barely see in the picture is the massive watch battery case required to power the lights and switch, nor can you see the rather sophisticated wiring under the base. It was a noble effort, but I think I'll stick with the spinning discs.

I emailed Alex about my purchase and he immediately wrote back, enthusiastically offering to take some Titans off my hands. How could I refuse? We don't live in the same city anymore, but we do manage the occasional visit, and when we do hook up, we'll be sure to bring our minis along and finally have that game of Adeptus Titanicus.

In the meantime, these guys have a date with a Dettol bath. (Yes, even "It's Hammer Time" - hey, it's preserved in picture form, at least.) I'm quite excited about doing these Titans up properly, with lots of banners and heraldry. Pics will, in due course, follow. I'm also now cagily monitoring eBay, looking for more deals on vintage Epic figures. I'd like to re-acquire a nice collection of infantry and vehicles to go with my Titans, and my Gargants will need some Ork Boyz to swarm around their feet. I'm also thinking of giving Future War Commander a look by way of rules for any game that isn't purely titan vs. titan, in which case I'll use the original Adeptus Titanicus rules.

Quite unexpectedly, it looks like I've found my niche in the Oldhammer movement. Go figure.

Current Projects

The revivification of this blog seems like a good opportunity to look at what I'm currently working on, both in terms of painting projects and the games I'm hoping to play this year.

Back in 2011, I swore off World War II for the time being and declared that I was going to put my efforts towards slowly building up a collection of Warhammer 40K Orks. Well, that didn't really work out. Ironically, not only am I back into WWII, but that project has so far much more closely resembled the goals I'd laid out for myself with my Project Ork.

The spark of inspiration came with the decision to move up to 28mm for my WWII skirmish gaming. I realized that skirmish gaming is truly where my heart lives as far as that period is concerned, and as long as I'm dealing with that level of engagement, why not go with a big figure scale? I've been very happy with my decision thus far, particularly in light of it coinciding with Warlord Games making WWII its period of focus for 2012. Jury's still out on the Bolt Action rules, but that's another matter.

(It's looking more and more like 28mm is going to simply become my scale of choice across the board. I guess it comes of all those games of Warhammer I played back in high school. Although I also played tons of Space Marine back in the day - not sure why I'm not as much of a 6mm partisan.)

At any rate, much like my stated aims for Project Ork, I'm taking things very slowly and deliberately with the WWII project. I'm currently weighing options between NUTS! and Operation Squad. I quite like the former's solo-play capabilities, so that's what I'm going to be checking out first. Initial collecting efforts are focusing around Normandy (a well-trodden theater to be sure, but a first for me, strangely enough), Brits versus Germans. Or, more properly, Jocks versus Huns, as my British squad is going to hail from the 51st Highland Division. The Germans, of course, are going to be redoubtable 21st Panzer Division sorts, because who can resist putting some wacky AFVs on the table? I'm going to keep the Germans fairly late-war generic, though, as I want to be able to re-use them as opponents in other theaters I plan on branching into. Italy '44 and Berlin '45 call out to me like sirens from the shore, but I resolutely stuff my ears with wax and sail on for now...

So yes, the WWII project is what's currently occupying my painting attention, although I'm also painting vintage Grenadier and Ral Partha fantasy figures as a break from all the earth tones.

State of the paint desk, February 2013

As for actual gaming, I'm hoping to get something accomplished this spring in terms of doing more of that. A lot more, if it can be managed. My cabinet currently boasts two completed fantasy armies, a couple-dozen painted gladiators (for use with another solo-friendly THWG game), two 10mm DBA samurai armies, a nice pile of zombies (Two Hour Wargames again!) and enough 1/6000 WWII naval miniatures to run some North Atlantic skirmishes. So there's no want of available games to choose from, for sure. It's just a matter of making the time. With the exception of the couple brief DBA games I played last summer (which did, at least, finally bring my long-suffering 10mm samurai some kind of closure), the last major minis game I played was Labor Day weekend of 2011! That's a terrible drought and one I will be quenching this year, solo or otherwise. If anything, playing more games is the top resolution of the year for me. To me, without the game play, all that painting and modeling going on in the above photo is pointless!

Truth be told, what I'd really like to get into this year, assuming I can start gaming regularly again, are campaign games. Most of my collections are geared towards this mode, now that I think about it: the WWII skirmish scale, the DBA samurai, the gladiators, the zombies, the battleships - all come into their own and are at their best when played in a campaign rather than one-off games. I'd even like to set up a campaign for our Armies of Arcana games, if nothing else than to provide some context so it's not just the same two old armies bashing away at each other all the time. I had enough of that back in high school playing Warhammer, where it was always my Empire army against Alex's Orcs & Goblins.

(Although one-off AoA games should be a lot more fun now, too: another of my projects last year was adding a couple more units to each army. This way, we've got more potential points than our 3000-point budget allows, which means we can custom-build our armies before each game and not necessarily know what the other person is going to field. Adds a nice wrinkle to the whole thing, I think.)

Oh, there is one last pipe dream, both in terms of painting and playing: to get into "vintage" Citadel collecting by way of Rogue Trader. That game was before my time initially, but hot damn if it doesn't look like something I'd be interested in now. I love the aesthetics of old school Citadel sculpts and I really like the sort of loose, DIY RPG-miniatures-game-hybrid feel of Rogue Trader. So that's likely to be a project I start looking at more seriously as the year goes on, or so I hope. Posts like this certainly go a long way towards throwing fuel on the fire...