Ancients, Napoleonics and....Fantasy

A piece of Fantasy Wargames history

It has been a busy few days on the great label-fest front with the result that all of the Command and Colours ancients blocks are now complete - at least the two base sets of Carthaginians and Republican Romans and the Greek and Eastern Empires expansion are. I shall be collecting the remaining sets from Mr Gow at some point but in the meantime I am really pleased to have gotten this lot out of the way. I will need to get Expansion number 6 - The Spartans - and then it will be all systems go for some ancients action. I am not sure what I shall tackle first with this although the lure of Salamis and the campaigns around it has a compelling attraction - especially as I really fancy painting some ancients galleys.

I have given some thought to the movement trays fr the blocks and my preliminary experiments have gone rather well. Basically I am sticking some very narrow plastic strip to the base to form a perimeter in which the blocks are placed. This serves to stop them sliding about all over the place and gives the unit a respectable 'footprint' on the table top - especially useful for non grid-based rules such as DBA. The trays will be textured and painted which will add to the look of the thing hugely. Base sizes have give me some problems for sure and I am still thinking about this issue. The main problem is that deploying four infantry blocks in a single line means that a 60mm frontage is too small. I am leaning towards using 75mm (3") as the frontage with base depths of 1", 1 1/2" and 2". This will maintain the differential used for DBA for troop depth. As mentioned, by using these base sizes I hope to give the units a reasonable 'footprint' on  the table top and also when used on my Hexon set up. Once I have cobbled some together and painted the same I shall post the pictures on the blog.

SMWBO and I headed out to our usual boot sale this morning and I managed to acquire the above book - Fantasy Wargaming by Martin Hackett - for 50p. The book is very much a product of its time - published in 1990 - in terms of the level of detail around character development (much role playing stuff therein) but it is a piece of history I am very pleased to have acquired. There is a very nice 'imagi-world' detailed as well as various ideas about creating story lines and running campaigns. Very useful for any period really - certainly quite thought provoking and for me anyway, handy for those fantasy or science fiction itches I occasionally need to scratch.