It has been an interesting Gaming Year, has 2017, or maybe rather more of an interesting Painting Year, mainly playing around with Pound Store Plastic Warriors.
All fully in keeping with the Man of TIN blog favourite quote: “The pleasure does not begin and end with the actual playing of the war-game. There are many pleasant hours to be spent in making model soldiers, painting them, constructing terrain, carrying out research into battles, tactics and uniforms …” Donald Featherstone, War Games 1962. Wise words …
What’s on the painting table at the moment to take me into the New Painting Year 2018?
Joining in with the general New Year resolutions and looking back, looking forward spirit of many blogs, here are five things that I might get around to in 2018?
NGY 2018 Irresolution One – Carry on Converting
Several tubs of Poundland’s finest “penny dreadful” plastic figures should see me through 2018, along with a jumble of pound store 42mm and 54mm figures.
Pound Store Plastic Warriors is my sister blog to this Man of TIN blog. 2017’s pound store “Little Wars on a Budget” has partly been simple paint conversions and latterly scalpel and tissue page conversions into how many interesting skirmish size forces in 36mm can be made over time from Poundland’s current £1 for 100 plastic Funtastic figures. Lots on the painting table at the moment to take me into the New Painting Year 2018.
NGY 2018 Irresolution Two – More solo short small skirmish games
Get some small skirmish games in on my portable game boards, either on my larger 192 Hexes of Joy board or my two smaller boards.
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2017/08/01/192-hexes-of-joy-a-larger-hex-game-board/
NGY 2018 Irresolution Three – Paint More Peter Laings
Get painting more of the small stashes of vintage 15mm Peter Laing figures that I have randomly picked up throughout last year, mostly Nineteenth, Colonial and early Twentieth Century / WW1. This should be great fun, whilst the tribal and Arabian figures will help with the next Irresolution …
NGY 2018 Irresolution Four – Full Metal Hic Jacet
Pardon the Pun but the Romans in Britain or (Asterix the) Gaul have always had a bit of a Vietnam or Colonial feel to me. Eagle of the Ninth. Lost legions of the Battle of the Teutoberg Forest 9AD. Trained technically advanced troops versus masses of hit and run wily natives, it’s similar in feel to Andy Callan’s simple rules ‘take’ on the Maori Wars. When he wrote these rules in 1982/3 he “saw them as a sort of Victorian assymetrical Vietnam equivalent – high tech westerners vs wily bunkered-down natives…”
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2016/08/04/maori-wars-update/
I now have a fair number of Peter Laing 15mm Ancient figures, including some lovely vintage Roman and Pict figures painted by Stuart Asquith! It was good to let Stuart know that they are in good hands and will soon be in action again. Bought during 2017, these Romans and Picts were embargoed in the present cupboard until Christmas. A Happy Christmas Day at the Man of TIN house. Patience apparently is a virtue …
Some of the other randomly acquired Peter Laing Ancients range of infantry, cavalry and chariots are named, some unidentified. I’m sure my fellow members of the Peter Laing Google G+ Community (set up this year by fellow Peter Laing enthusiast Ian Dury) will be a great help here with the ID.
Full Metal Hic Jacet may turn into a new sister or side blog or at least a thematic blog Page on this blog. I checked my Latin online and Hic Jacet is appropriately “Here Lies …”, a common epitaph.
Ancients are quite a new or mystery period to me, apart from the familiar Airfix Romans and Ancient Britons. Cavalry or chariots on the battlefield are a bit of an unknown quantity for me too. Asterix aside, I have started reading up on Ancients, initially Phil Barker’s Airfix Guide to Ancient Wargaming and for simple Ancient rules Donald Featherstone / Tony Bath’s Ancient rules in Don’s War Games (1962). These link into my adaptation of Don’s previous Close Wars skirmish rules.
I also like the Tony Bath Hyboria idea of fictional countries, mentioned in Donald Featherstone’s War Games. This is something that fits well into or prefigures my ongoing Imagi-Nations work based on Angria, Gondal and Glasstown 19th Century Bronte (paracosmic) family fiction set in the colonies.
For uniforms and troop types, there are various Ladybird books and another colourful childhood library classic (j399 SAX) Blandford’s Warriors and Weapons of Ancient Times by Neils M. Saxtorph and Stig Bramsen.
NGY 2018 Irresolution Five – Return to Planet Back Yarden
More Garden games and Close Little Wars in the summer? When the weather improves by summer (!), I might want a change of scale. I hope to get my 54mm ACW figures (mostly unpainted) or the 2017 Close Little Wars conversions, homecasts and hollowcast repairs of the Remount Department back into action in the garden.
However, since watching the recent Star Wars movies VII and VII and my favourite of the three, Rogue One, I have also been wanting to paint the 54mm Airfix Space warriors picked up here and there and Pound Store ‘Space Marines’ that never got painted this year (or 2016).
https://poundstoreplasticwarriors.wordpress.com/2016/10/06/pound-store-space-marines/
https://manoftinblog.wordpress.com/2016/09/25/close-little-space-wars/
Probably best to quit at five Painting or Gaming Irresolutions for one year.
It should be fun to look back in a year’s time to find out what shiny distractions cropped up during the New Gaming and Painting Year of 2018!
I look forward to reading everyone else’s foolishly optimistic Irresolutions and all your New Year of Gaming and Painting adventures.
Happy New Year!
Blogposted by Mark, Man of TIN / Pound Store Plastic Warriors blogs, 31st December 2017 / 1st January 2018.
Keep in touch via the follow button or the comments.
Man of Tin blog 
Happy New Year Mark.
Thanks for sharing your New Year Irresolutions. I do try to have a plan for the year, but like most wargamers, they go astray. However, I am getting better at this.
So, My own Six Irresolutions are:
1. Continue with my Chessboard Gridded Games and add some further terrain items made specifically for them (I have already started this!)
2. Further add to my Peter Laing ImagiNations (Greek/Roman & Assyrian/Persian) ancient collection – Yes, this was also inspired by Tony Bath’s Hyboria and Chessboard Wars.
3. Use ‘odd’ loose figures from the above for the development a skirmish game, also utilising terrain from 1 – Something inspired by Greek Mythology probably.
4. Continue with my 1/4800 Fighting Sail (Osprey) games and develop some rules for Brigs, cutters and other small boats. (needed a few islands and a coast line – started over the Christmas Break).
5. My 15mm Spy-Fi Skirmish (Christmas Present to myself) as a gridded Chessboard game.
6. Finding homes for anything that does not fit the above!
Jon
LikeLike
Jon
Sounds like a plan whilst also being Irresolutions, so it does not matter if broken! All 5 sound interesting and worth blogging and recording / photographing. 6 is probably the hardest! Happy Gaming. Mark, Man of TIN
LikeLike
Great collection of books there. HNY.
LikeLike
MJT
Heavy reading, that stack of Asterix on my shelves! What is really nice about these books shown is that many of these are my family childhood Ladybird and Asterix books or the actual library books I borrowed as a child and then bought when they started selling off old library stock in the 1990s. I’m sure some of the odd paintspots are mine from way back then – whoops.
Wishing you too a Happy New Year of gaming and blogging
Mark, Man of TIN
LikeLike
The Blandford books were real favourites of mine when I was at school.
LikeLike