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A Tale Of Two Warbands. The Saga Continues…

We wanted more. I wanted more. I was too lazy to paint more (and anyway, my painting would never match the great job Felix had done already.)

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Enter the new painter for hire… A local chap with a steady hand and a love of painting that I could never have matched. eBay user zulu1870.

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A great painter and a nice chap to boot. Not his usual style of painting but he kindly found time to accommodate me, and the new figures stand out as great miniatures while still fitting the original warband’s style if combined into a larger force.

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All we needed now was a rule set to get us started. War and Conquest was the game that caught our eye. Exactly how we expected a big battle rulebook to be, hard backed, full of glossy images and reassuringly expensive but with a large online resource already available, ensuring we would have army lists to use from the start.

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Sadly we never got any further with this little venture. Mustering such a large force and finding time to paint it proved too much for some of us and we never got things off the ground. I still use the warbands for the occasional game of Saga. And we used them to help with the playtesting of The Valhalla Sagas (finally published as Valhalla). I would still love to get them out on the table for a big bash at some point…

It would seem that skirmish games have their benefits, and the ease of collecting a skirmish force in preference to a main army is obvious to me now. I will get my big game but will have to wait a little longer it would seem.

A Tale Of Two Warbands. The Saga Begins…

Saga. A little game you might of heard about before.

We found it, as is often the case, when a friend started collecting something new. In this case it was dark age miniatures. Vikings to be exact. In an effort to keep up and get some use out of these miniatures we all bought into the Saga buzz.
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Saxons have always appealed to me. I didn’t find the thought of painting all those miniatures in one go appealing though. Time was against me with family and work commitments at that point leaving little time for a paintbrush.
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I did find time to identify a reliable and fair priced painter for hire though. Felix Figure Painting did a sterling job on my first warband and supplied me with something I had always wanted. Villagers, a village looks empty without them and so many games call for objectives these days it would have been foolish not to get some done at the same time…
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Pop in a few extra archers and huscarls from my older collections and I was ready. I already had the setting ready as my ever growing collection of buildings contained thatched cottages that would fit our needs nicely. Again 4Ground provided a beautiful backdrop for our games.
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The Saga was started… It wasn’t to end there though. After playing skirmish games for so long now we began to dream of larger battles. My mind drifted back to our games of yesteryear. It was WAB back then, but why go back when so many new games are out there to look forward to. A new game beckoned. But I would new more men…

Then there was everybody’s favourite villains… The pirates

Everyone loves pirates, right?

We had been talking about getting into a pirate game for a month or two when we went to Warfare in Reading. Talk about good timing…

On display there were the new Black Scorpion pirate ranges and their pirate game, Cutlass. 3 rule books later we were all off and digging through our bits boxes for figures that could be pressganged into a pirate crew. Fortunately some old Games-workshop Empire sprues were kicking about in my drawers which, with a little effort, would do just fine.

The first crew were based on planking made from blue craft foam, cut and carved to size. Only problem was, it melts when exposed to plastic cement. The second attempt worked better but the glue then reacted with the matt varnish leaving the boots of the crew looking a little odd. Matt varnish has often been problematic for me as you will come to see.
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Second crew were based without making as much of an effort and worked more to my liking.
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The buildings in the photos are mostly made by 4Ground and are excellent examples of their prepainted, lasercut, MDF range. I love these and they often find their way into many of our games.
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Cutlas has a unique and fun initiative steeling mechanic which keeps you wondering just how long you can keep going before you fail something and lose the initiative to your opponent.

As usual though, before too long, we found a new shiny thing in the form of Saga to distract us…