MINIART Hussite Wagons & Skirmishers in 1/72 completed!

Canberra's chilly nights have been a good incentive to get stuck into my plastic pile of guilt and shame. I know the locals here reckon it's all balmy and summery but when you're used to wearing footy shorts and singlets all year round in Darwin, Canberra is bloody cold. Even in March & April.

  Thankfully, being the thrifty tight arsed guy that I am has meant that my pile of shame isn't too large a pile, with about 5 boxes of el-cheapo 1/72 goodness sitting in my shed.

I understand it's all relative.

The rules for 'To The Strongest!' have war wagons. As I'm really keen to get that game on the table again this year I thought a couple of speccy units would do just the thing to inspire me & others.

I must admit I'm all thumbs when it comes to assembling model kits. 

Some of my Second World War tanks and artillery pieces suffer from my 'functional at best' or 'impressionistic' approach to modelling fiddly little bits. This has meant that tiny, tiny plastic pieces of detailed machinery or mechanisms become lost, super-glued to fingers, twisted, broken and occasionally, get cast aside with the justification that 'it's gotta be fit for wargaming'.

I keep seeing all these posts on forums with amazingly detailed kits and painting, but you know...I'm getting there. Starting & finishing stuff is an achievement in itself. There are probably people out there shaking their heads and muttering obscenities under their breath...eyeballs twitching with seething hatred when they see my painted soldiers all mixed and colour jumbled, historically inaccurate and button based....but you know, it's all got to be fun I reckon. 

And finished. 

I've just got to start and finish stuff for the tabletop. 

The assembly of the wagons went amazingly well considering my past frustrations. To be sure, there were bits of flash, delicate pieces that stuck to my paws, but it all was enjoyable. Sure, they do have that 'rickety'...say...'how's yer father' look about them, due mostly to the fact that once assembled they didn't sit straight at all, but this was remedied with spatula loads of spak-filla to level stuff out.

A bit of the old PVA glue, Casuarina Beach sand (from Darwin), my trusty bottle of Vajello Green-Brown (dangerously low now) and a speckle of static grass. 

Comes up all right I reckon. Good enough for the tabletop.

I used some thin strips of galvanised sheeting that I found at Bunnings for the basing. The strips were only about a $1.80, and were a pretty perfect size I reckon.

I played around with loading the wagon and the base with figures, and finally decided upon the four figures max. Three in the wagon, one figure to husband the horses. Anything more is a little too busy I reckon. 

There are 24 figures in the box. 

Some hand gunners. Enough left over for a skirmishing unit of six.

As well as some other Archers and Crossbowmen. The four figures with the pitch fork and flails were the most fiddly, as the staffs had to be super-glued together and are extremely delicate. You can see the blobs of glue holding them together. I can't see those staffs surviving a session. 

The prone figures are a bit unusual, but the more the merrier I say. 

I can use all these guys to flesh out my retinues or units for Lion Rampant or To The Strongest! some of them have that peasant look, while the hand gunners look ace, and once the updated 100 Years War rules for 'Never Mind The Billhooks' are published I'll be good to go.

I've decided that this year I'm going to double down on my medieval figure collection. I've got a few more MINIART  figure boxes in my pile, and I'm also tempted to try out a few other systems now that I'm in Canberra and starting to reach out to my old gaming contacts.

I did manage to get a game of Lion Rampant in at my house with my father-in-law last week. 

We played the 'fugitive ' scenario from the LR blue book, and no surprises I got beat, but it was a fun game and it's been great to start getting back into gaming & hobbying now that the dust is starting to settle from our big move south.

Well see how it all pans out over the next few weeks...