Change of Direction

 With my disillusionment re the current state of the competitive 40k game, in particular its banality around mission design, I started looking around at other alternatives.

To this end I picked up "Cursed City" on its release and am looking forward to it as a painting project in the last quarter of the year. I also picked up the original release of "Warcry" and I will move to paint this once I've done Cursed City.

however the big change was that I pulled out my old Ancient and Medieval armies. These are what got me into wargaming in the late 1990s. At the time you played using the Wargames Research Group's DBM rules. In the past 20 years this has been replaced by DBMM and there is a thriving 28mm community in New Zealand, particularly Wellington.

The rules are supported by four Army Books which contain 320+ historical armies. I own three 28mm armies - Patrician Roman, Mongol Conquest and Early Viking. A few small changes saw more Romans able to take the battlefield and I have spent the last three months re-learning the game.

At the same time I bought and painted a Yorkist War of the Roses army based on the forces of Edward of March and Warwick "The Kingmaker" at Towton. That's now finished and I had my first game with them on Saturday.

I recently played in a tournament and while it was enjoyable my real interest is in more historical matchups between contemporary foes and multiplayer refights of historical battles.

That doesn't mean I've turned my back on 40k. I had a fun few months in the lead up to the Fields of Blood NZ Grand Tournament testing a modified version of the Maelstrom of War missions GW released in White Dwarf. By the end it was possible to get a game that was less linear than the Chapter Approved missions. Since then I've had my Death Guard on the table and been playing some of the missions in the core rulebook.

I've also been painting up odd figures to finish units in my existing armies. Most recently this has been to add two metal Incubi and an old metal Drazhar to my Dark Eldar. I have a metal gimp suit Mandrake to paint as well as some models to create a Court of the Archon.

So check back over the coming weeks and months and you'll likely see a mix of painting and gaming projects/endeavours on the site.