Something nice from the Society of Ancients

 Nothing for six months, and then two posts come along at once! This arrived in the mail today:

I wrote quite a long descriptive review of Tactica II for Slingshot and won a thing.

I built a Kzinti Starbase

And here it is, with two fighter squadrons: 

There is a reason for this, believe it or not. Real life became unbelievably heavy last year due to a combination of work, work, more work and yet another redundancy threat. This means I had relatively little time left for any games stuff, as you could probably tell from the long silences on this blog. However, the situation gave me the impetus not only to go for the full head shave I'd been contemplating for a while (no hairdressers open = mad scientist look anyway), but also to apply for the sorts of jobs I wouldn't normally. So I will be moving to Al Ain in Abu Dhabi in the autumn to wok for the UAE University. In fact, I've already started, but they are extremely strict about covid, and everything is online. Which means I get to stay in the UK for a while longer.

I have been thinking about getting back into Star Fleet Battles and Federation and Empire for a while now, especially since there is a great Vassal module for the strategic game. I am going to need something I can play solo while I am over there, and setting it all up as a grand miniatures campaign has always been something in the back of mind; time to turn it into a reality. I have started a blog to chronicle it all here.

There are all sorts of things available that didn't exist when I first played these games several decades ago, such as a really good Shapeways section for SFB. I have been slowly building up a Kzinti fleet, and above is the start, along with a shield marker to show the station's facing without needing to move it too often. I got a boxed set from Goblin Games that allows you build stuff, and I wanted a base that looks different from the classic Federation stations. Plastics are really easy to stick in a suitcase...

Command stands for German Cavalry

 I'm still slow, but some bits and pieces are gradually being completed:

Apart from casualty markers, which I will as usual cull from plastic figures, pretty much the entire army will be Old Glory. The only exception I can think of might be to buy a nice c-in-c from another range, but I haven't decided yet.

Shield designs by Little Big Men, as are the flags. I rescued these from an old set of Arthurian Banners (I think) that I had lying around; they are sufficiently generic to do for general pagan types.

I used the same figures for each group of three, but varied the clothing colours a little. You can tell these guys are posh, because some of them even have dyed cloaks and clothes.

Some of the horses are a bit on the big side, so I extended the usual WRG basing to a 5cm depth. Frontage is the standard 6cm.

Finally, a top-down shot to show the basing - a mixture of brown acrylic plastic wood, Faller landscape product, and flocking.