Romans, Dwarves and Star Wars

Well March has been another busy painting month with more good progress on an assortment of projects and I even played a game or two...on-line!

My prime aim for painting was to add a few units to my 10mm Early Imperial Roman army. More auxiliary cavalry and infantry were a priority plus another cohort of legionaries. I had fun painting all those little shields. My box of unpainted Romans is almost empty now and I need to move on to painting a few units for my Ancient British. 

Chris and I also got busy making buildings for our 20mm Star Wars project as well as painting up more figures. We will be using Fistful of Lead 'Galactic Heroes' for our games set in a galaxy far, far away. These were quite quick and easy to make from foamboard, xps and a variety of bits and bobs then liberally covered with polyfilla and painted. Our main campaign will be based on Tatooine where the buildings have a Middle Eastern look so we have added a few little bits of tech to theme the buildings to Star Wars. I have another building almost finished and then I need to make something a bit bigger.  

This final photo shows a couple of Chris's buildings and some scenic scatter crates. He is currently making a much larger building and a crashed spaceship; Tatooine being full of them! You can read all about how Chris made his buildings on his blog:

 The Periodic Painting Table: Building Tatooine in 20mm

I also couldn't resist re-basing my 10mm Dwarves to be used with Fantastic Battles. The warriors are the wonderful Copplestone figures but the archers are from the GW Battle of Five Armies range. A quick check on E-Bay shows that these figures are probably the most valuable figures in my entire collection, (there is a blister on e-bay at the moment for £85).

I have a few more Copplestone Dwarves and a few from Pendraken to paint and then I will start on rebasing and adding to my Goblin army as I hope to play and create a Battle of Five Armies scenario using the Fantastic Battle Rules.  

Having tempted Chris into buying a copy of Fantastic Battles he raided his wargames loft (a veritable treasure trove of over 40 years of wargaming) and rediscovered some of our old 6mm Fantasy project. He kindly sent me some Dark Elves to paint whilst he works on his Orc army. These are the old Irregular Miniatures strips of figures, ideal for a speed painting project and based on 25mm square bases that will perfectly suit a smaller wargames table; using inches as the base width for movement and shooting etc... 

I enjoyed my on-line gaming experience playing the Gladiator combat game 'Sons of Mars', umpired by Pete. In the first bout, my Hoplomachus was well beaten in the 8th and final round by Dave's Secator. A few days later I took to the arena again and this time I thrashed a Thracian, in 6 turns thanks mainly to Martin's awful dice throwing. 

Coming next should be a few 10mm Ancient British, 10mm and 6mm fantasy plus more 20mm Star Wars and buildings. I am still reading 'Lionheart and Lackland' by Frank McLynn, a fascinating book full of battles and other information. I have discovered that King John was only 5ft 5" tall, and that Robert the Bruce was the Great, great grandson of Sir William Marshall, the greatest Knight of England!