Romans and Britons

 My 10mm paper Romans and Britons/Gauls are due to get their first proper outing next week so I've finally had to bite the bullet and try and mark out a grid on my game cloth.  We're giving Strength and Honour a try and this uses a grid system... for 10mm figures it suggests 100mm squares.  I've been putting this off for weeks as I've been really worried about it all going badly wrong and my squares ending up very wonky.

To be fair some of these squares are more square than others, but overall I'm pleased with the effect and it was  a relatively painless process.  Thank goodness for a new pair of varifocal glasses which made life a lot easier although now I feel old!

I couldn't resist popping some of the 10mm figures on the table along with some of the terrain (also in paper).  I started these back in July and I certainly couldn't have got two armies onto the table in that time, or at the very low cost.

Strength &Honour camps

 I've been busy prepping Roman and Gallic armies for an inaugural game of Strength and Honour in a couple of weeks time.  I've decided to go with 10mm armies using the excellent Paperboys armies by Peter Dennis.  This means the dining room is awash with little snipped-off bits of paper and heady with the fumes of UHU glue.

I've really enjoyed making these and find an hour or so of snipping and sticking can pass quickly (unless that's just the glue fumes!), aided by listening to an audiobook.  

I've never really listened to audiobooks, usually listening to music when I paint but have recently discovered that they're great (as are podcasts... I know I'm way behind the curve here!!).  Our local library has a great selection available to download so I've worked my way through the BBC versions of Lord of the Rings and Neverwhere... the latter is especially good and well worth looking out for.

I still need to add some more units to the armies and, more scarily, I need to mark out a grid on my game cloth which is making me very nervous!

S&H requires each side to have a camp or baggage so I've made up a Roman marching camp and a Gallic camp from the set and I'm pretty impressed by them...

Once the completed armies are ready to go I'll post some pictures of the forces.

What have I been up to?

This week saw another game of Blood Red Skies which ended in a win for the RAF... we'd each lost a plane (out of 4 a side) but BRS emphasises morale wins with planes likely to break off and head for home when the hits start to mount up.  The more I've played BRS, the more impressed I've been by the way they manage morale and the importance of manouvreability as much as shooting.

I've also been busy prepping my 10mm paper Roman/British armies for a forthcoming trial game of Strength and Honour.  So far I have a decent amount of legions and warbands (as well as some chariots, skirmishers and cavalry for thr Brits) but I need to add some Auxiliaries, skirmishers and cavalry for the Romans

The Romans

...and the Britons

Chariots

I also need to mark a grid on my game mat which I must admit I'm a bit nervous about!

I was out and about for work last week (a bit of a novelty these days) and popped into a branch of Game in Worthing.  I recently discovered that Game have diversified a bit from videogames (I guess these are generally downloaded these days) and stock quite a lot of boardgames and sundry geeky stuff.  I picked up a copy of Colt Express for the very reasonable price of £9.99.  It's a  very light Cowboy themed game where you have to rob passengers on a train  and, of course, other players and get away with the most loot.  Looks like good fun for family game nights.