Lestrades_Game

   What did I paint in 2025 A brigades worth of 6mm Napoleonic French. About 12 bases of infantry and 6 of cav ~15 Battletech Mechs   A Vampire Counts Army of ~70 miniatures A few more Warhammer Dwarfs, ~20 miniatures Added around 30-40 infantry and 12 Late Roman Cavalry and three command bases. A similar number of Goths/early Saxons ~100 6mm Sci Fi infantry and vehicles ostensibly for Laserstorm. I painted them all over a weekend or two using contrast paints. Around 20 ships for Russo Japanese war. I have about 12 more to paint. Around 25 French and Russian 28mm Napoleonics for The Silver Bayonet 50+ 15mm Carthaginian and Greeks – ongoing. A lot of 6mm Great Northern War at the start of the year but I cannot remember what was in 2024 and 2025. 10 silly space goblins from Alternative Armies in 28mm. A handful of monsters for Frostgrave, giant spiders, bears etc. Dwarf and Orc Armies in 10mm for Warmaster / Midguard. ~500 figures.   I d...

 My posts fell off in the latter part of the year. So here are some end of year posts   The year in historical games   Blackpowder (Epic Waterloo set & some 28mm Zulu wars) This is probably my game of the year. A new fella started attending our club and had painted his entire starter set +. I felt I should play a game with him and that spiralled into about 10. This isn’t the Napoleonic simulation to end all others. Warlord games are action orientated and use the mechanics you know and love with a few twists. It does perform quite well despite all that, skirmishers are required for screening French columns, big cav charges are a huge gamble and the command and control mechanics make coordinating attacks challenging. If I was to critique its historical qualities I could argue with some aspects of the randomness but I think the bigger thing is reserves. I am not sure holding reserves helps much in this game. As a game this rocks. I have ME/CFS and sometimes w...

  The year in Sci-Fi and Fantasy Games   Battletech Classic and Alphastrike This is mostly workshop games through most of the year but for me Battletech beat the evil empire out in 2025. I only played three games of Battletech and one of Alpha Strike, all were a good time. Battletech has all the box checking appeal of naval games with Sci Fi trimmings. Classic is a little slow but has the major advantage of being very different from most modern skirmish games. In an era saturated with entertainment being different matters. Both forms of Battletech emphasize facing which is also unusual in modern games. Somethings were better in the 80s.   Warhammer the Old World I have played around 20-25 games of Old World. I really loved my first ten games and since then have soured on it a lot. The start of 2025 patch was much needed and definitely improved the game. I think I have realised a few things about myself playing Old World. I enjoy crunchy games but I hate having...

I've been slowly building up a Russian fleet using Three Decks 1/2400 miniatures. I've had most of the Japanese fleet for some time, but used them against the Chinese for Sino-Japanese war or against my French fleet for no compelling historical reason. I picked up Broadside And Salvo from Long Face Games (David Manley) as a shorter form quicker rule set. The other rules I have copies of (Tsushima A&A rules designs) and Fire When Ready (also David Manley) require quite a lot of prep getting together box checking sheets for each ship.  Typically this is 20-120mins work depending on whether I've got the research done. For Broadside and Salvo a battleship is a battleship, an armoured cruiser an armoured cruiser. All ships of a class have identical stats and no box checking sheet. Damage is split into four grades which ships move up or down with repair and damage.   This means I only need an ORBAT for my scenario, and a few markers.   Hopefully we will return to...

I have complained on a few occasions about the random movement in TooFatLardies games and the die roll for actions mechanics in DBX style games. It's not that I think that random movement is wrong or bad or that random activations are bad but in both cases the range of results can seem to wild. In Chain of Command vehicles can sometimes seem like they are driven by learner drivers, surging forward one turn, stalling out the next. In DBA Hannibal can have a brain wave one turn and forget to move both flanks on the next. The story of the battle in my mind hits the record player stopping sound effect and I feel irritated on these occasions. With that in mind I want to talk about Winter Hammer. I played a Winter Hammer scenario at Ferret Con in Sheffield a few weeks back. This is a ruleset by Nordic Weasel for the Finnish - Soviet Winter War. I have not read the rules, only played Tom's excelent game set in a ~brigade level action south of Lake Lagoda in the intitial soviet of...

 I painted up a 28mm collection of Late Romans and Goths / Early Saxons a year or two ago for Saga. Having played about 5 games of Saga I realised I hated it. It is a very clever and imaginative ruleset, but far to gamey and historically dubious for my tastes so onto eBay those books and fancy dice go. The armies assemble either side of a stream I had picked up Dan Mersey's Osprey rule set Dux Bellorum on the cheap some time ago, so I decided to upscale my armies and sabot base them for some rank and flank. The Goth infantry line My Romans army is roughly 100 figures from a mix of manufacturers. In metal I have Footsore cavalry, some Gripping beast characters and some Foundry manabalistas. In plastic they are gripping beast and Victrix. The Victrix are more detailed and more dynamic and I like the Victrix heads alot. But they break really easily and are hard to rank up because they are all flailing their limbs around. The Gripping Beast and exaggerated sculpts, not quite heroic sca...

  I’ve not successfully blogged in a while, mostly due to excessive miniature painting. I will post some of the years progress in a post soon.   Generally speaking I have not had much luck with 3d prints. Some have had poor detail, others wrong scale, others rather fragile. The only 3d prints I’ve bought that have been great was my Man-O-War fleet. It cost me £30 off Ebay for a 1000pt dark elf fleet and it’s been a blast to play with. The perfidious Brets approach my glorious dragon fleet   Man-O-War was released by GW in the 1990s, it was one of their shorter run base game plus a few expansions then done products and it is very much a game of its time. Its best and worst features are typical of 80s and 90s games.   Avast ye surly dogs!   Broad brush Man-O-War is a very traditional naval game. Your fleet will have 5-10 ships in a typical game, you have a basic system for determining wind direction, which influences sail movement. Your ships have tu...

 Daisho is a fantastical Samurai ruleset. Here's a quick run down for those who TLDR, or in my case are too lazy to write proper reviews; Lady Takori and her retainers storm the sake den, whilst the sisters and their archer move to flank > Its what I call a toybox ruleset. Lots of options, very customisable, easy to build your bespoke warband for your toys and create your scenarios. Is anyone in? > It's light on game design, and probably strategy. There are points for the stats and builds of your warband, but little else. The core rules are roll a D10 and add some modifiers. It really is just move and attack, no gimmicky or clever mechanisms. You could min max your warband built, but that's clearly not what this ruleset is for. A troop of aggressive warrior monks storms the Sake House > It really does have a lot of options. About 10 of the 90 page book are rules, the rest is either character/warband creation options or ideas for scenarios A brawl ensues > It is ...

 What is Games Workshops best game? The correct answer was always Space Hulk. It's a lean focused design that nails the aliens corridor shooter experience. Some of the narrative games came close, Necromunda and Mordheim, Battlefleet Gothic had the best box cover, but really it was always Space Hulk.  Well that's what I thought until yesterday. Warcry is the best game GW have ever made. Hands down. The Spiranx looks on with its Chaos Turkey companion! I'm really drawn to games that know what they are trying to be and set out manchette in hand into the jungle to hack out that goal. Warcry is basically Warhammer goes to the Thunder Dome. A standard game has 3 turns, is objective based, and uses one die roll to resolve most actions. Its very quick and razor sharp. You deal with the chaos, construct a plan and whip out half of each others warbands in 30-60 minutes. Pick axes to the face of the dark elf scum The core engine is a fairly stripped down standard GW fair. It's I g...

  Bit of a gap in my blogging (too much time spent miniature painting). But I will start 2024 with a rundown of the last 12 months.   Time (and monies)  Spent: I got into miniature wargaming at the end of August. Since then I have painted; Ø   >  1x 15mm Carthaginian army of around 30-40 bases Ø   >  1x 15mm Greek army of around 15-20 bases.   Have at it you fools! These are for any classical rule set I can lay my hands on but so far I have just played L’Art De la Guerre. Which is Ok, see my review.   Ø   1x 28mm Goths / Saxons / Vikings army. These I have not used for Saga yet, which was their original purpose. They have been hosed by dwarves ( I killed one dwarf and lost half my army) in a game of Warlords of Erewhon. Erewhon gets a tentative thumbs up. Need some more games and fewer rules mistakes before I decide on it, but I had fun.   Ø   >  1x 28mm late Roman army – these mostly still nee...

  I have played a couple of games of this now and watched one more. Not an expert but enough to share my opinion.   It’s mixed   I have enjoyed my games and will enjoy several more but I would caution the general recommendation for this rule set that gets chucked out regularly on reddit when anyone asks for a medieval or ancients ruleset. Hannibal surveys the field from behind  his gallic infantry   I will stick the boot in first then end on the positives.   As a simulationist by preference this game is nonsense. A generalist ruleset is going to struggle to represent the nuances of warfare in a specific era. I should not be surprised that the way elephants are used is not that similar to their historical deployment, or that running three lines of republic romans is a bad idea however I’m not sure that these rules represent any ancient or medieval warfare in a particularly meaningful way.   Let’s start with the victory conditions. Yo...