Andy Copestake has, as usual written an interesting piece over at his own blog, which got me thinking about rules, periods and the like...    I have in my almost half century, gone through the usual cycle of rules, often trying to find that perfect set - it doesn't exist - for my favourite period.     When it came to pike and shot, I stuck with Gush, until I got to the stage where my armies were too large for the mechanics to be comfortably used, and we were cutting down on tests for this and that, and in the end - sometime in the 90s I began writing and using my own rules, which, as of 2026 have become a no figure removal, basing agnostic set with straightforward mechanics which - I think - capture feel and flavour,    They don't use fancy cards or special dice, because guess what? I am not seeking to make a living from them and screw over gullible ex- Games Workshop acolytes and they don't need them.   Now, whilst I will stand second to no...

 Although I'd got my first whiff of the hobby via the Heritage mini games based loosely on D&D and the D&D itself, it was literally a month or so before I was finding out about historical gaming, which, despite what my other posts may convey, is always going to be every bit as important to me. For me, the two, nay three, if we give sci-fi it's own niche in the evolutionary ladder go hand in tentacles. I sometimes get typecast by folks as being a fantasy gamer who dabbles in historical, or the reverse. But the the truth is that I am a trans-genre, an oddity of my time I suppose, when gamers were in individual camps, sometimes quite vehemently and venemously so. I remember the first time I took the late Tony 'Spike' Atkin to Sheffield Wargames Society and he obviously and visibly had a good time, so much so that he was heard to quip that 'Wargamers aren't the wankers I always thought they were - well not quite as big wankers'. He did have a point I sup...

    Well, I am on the last day of my month's holiday, and so, I must return tomorrow to the rat race, albeit kicking and screaming like the condemned man being dragged to Madame Gilloutine's tender ministrations. Some of you may wish to contemplate that visual, given the comments you go to great trouble to leave me via DM on social media. Indeed, feel free to caress yourselves as you do so. It's free and harms nobody. :) I've deliberately stayed away from my studio, meaning that it's now a year since I put paintbrush to the first of my Citadel Giants. I guess I really ought to make some effort. It's been a busy 'break' for me with assorted hospital and optician's appointments, resulting in blood tests, steroid injections and new glasses, but it's not all been work.  We managed to go to a few galleries and museums as is our wont and spent some quality time in some great restaurants, wherein I ate a trawler's worth of crustaceans and molluscs, ...

 Well, the memsahib hs just today, finished basing the first of my two Roman Legions and all the auxilliary stuff. I'm just waituing on another legion and around 700 Celts and 27 chariots, then I can do some serious skirmishing!   TTFN!

 I was looking at a few historical conflicts over the weekend, and thinkinging to myself 'Hey, they are crying out for a range of figures. I think I'll get my sculptor on the case...' And then I thought, 'Fuck it! We are already collectively snowed under with more ranges than we need.' Indeed we have more periods than a sorority house. And I really believe that. We have way, way too many 'periods' and ranges of figures, which the 'Big Boys' in the industry troll out as the 'next big thing we all  need  to play'. And, because we are, like it or not obsessive with I think a higher than average spread on the autism scale - myself included, before some young scamp does their usual 'hatchet job' - we collectively believe the hype and spend money without thinking about it, considering what scope there is and replayability.  Of course, the Big Boys, want us to get bored and start something else, that they will already have planned... And do ...

In 1984, I first really got an interest in wargaming the Renaissance. Some older friends in the 5 clubs I gamed with every week, were ECW re-enactors, By The Sword Divided had been on TV for a while, and I had fallen under the Mephistophelean, the Machiavellian, grasp of Lloyd Powell, whom I looked up to as one of several role models, who collectively shaped me into the misanthropic and opinionated ne'er-do-well I am today. But more importantly, Lloyd really got me interested in the Italian Wars and Wars Of Religion, and even today, over 4 decades later, when I need to check something about that wide period, I will still pick up the phone and call him at his repose in the Tower Of Doom overlooking the Rivelin Valley, from where he plans the reintroduction of the Feudal system and the arming of certain government agents with the longbow and shoot to kill instructions. But, I digress, as always... I love the colour and pageantry of the period and I have developed a acute aesthetic se...

 I was chatting with my better and less opinionated half this morning about how one of my clients had been quite guarded when they first came on board. It turned out, that they had previous issues with so-called professional painters in the past and were rightly wary of getting taken around the corner and having their financial (and metaphorical) trousers taken down. This really pisses me off, as someone who paints every day over 46 weeks of the year and who has done so for well over a decade and for 30+ years on an ad-hoc basis before that. As I have covered previously, there was a certain painter whose 'schtick' was the dead relative ruse, which when the same relative dies three times, becomes a bit of an obvious load of bollocks.  I tried to help him out and stopped him getting himself de-bagged, but he then went back to his bad ways and the rest as they say is history. When you do something for a living or purport to be 'professional' you should by instinct, treat y...