Samurai and ronin, part 1

There’s some news on the Samurai front. I’ve bought the Ronin rulebook published by Osprey Publishing and two sets of figures from North Star, which turn out to be the exact models that are illustrated in the rulebook. What are the odds? Ronin lets you field so-called buntai of between 4 and 20 models. This is ideal for me, because I love painting models but hate having to work my way through large armies of nearly identical figures.

I’ve chosen a set of armoured samurai and ashigaru and a set of unarmoured ronin. The first set provides a nice variety of weapons like katana, naginata, spears, bows and arquebuses. Most of the ronin are equipped with katana, apart from one wielding both a katana and shorter wakizashi and one armed with a massive odachi sword.

Each set contains nine figures, which seems an odd number (in both senses of the word ;-). It goes very well with the Japanese preference for odd numbers, though. I wonder whether that was on purpose... Anyway, with the two samurai I painted up earlier that makes a nice even 20 models. Much better!

The figures require a little bit of assembly. The unarmoured models come in two parts (body and scabbard) and the armoured models come in three (body, scabbard and sashimono/war banner). Super gluing the banners on was quite a fiddly job and I’m not too sure about the strength of the join. I therefore added a bit of Milliput for some added strength. Next up, painting!

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More simple Warhammer 40k terrain: craters and rubble piles

Time for some more simple 40k scenery: craters and rubble piles. Both are pretty easy projects and pretty quick too, if unlike me you plan out your work a little so you don’t need to continuously correct your mistakes along the way! For the craters, I started with two old writeable dvd’s. I first closed off the central holes with mdf miniature bases. I then broke off semi-triangular wedges of cork from a pan coaster and hotglued these to the dvds, forming circles (see the picture below). I then applied wall filler to the craters to hide the mdf circles covering the central holes and to add some texture to the cork. I then glued smaller bits of cork in between the larger wedges and added coffee grounds for texture. After this step I noticed that the cork wedges didn’t look very natural. Tapering them off made them look a lot better (picture below). I then gave everything a coat of black paint: I still thought the craters didn’t look quite right, though. They were a bit too uniform ...

Gloomhaven characters

Back in the winter of 2020/2021, my wife and I played a lot of Gloomhaven. After several months of playing multiple games a week we put it away for a while, but recently we picked it back up again. Gloomhaven is probably one of the best tabletop games I’ve played. The only downside in my mind is that it can easily take you 15 minutes to set up a scenario, especially if you don’t invest in some aftermarket box inserts to organise the literally thousands of tiles, tokens, cards and standees. But once you’ve set everything up, the game plays really well. Plus, I really like that it is a cooperative game in which the players need to work together to get through a scenario. Anyway, the game comes with 18 plastic ‘heroic’ 28 mm or 32 mm scale miniatures. The monochrome grey plastic really stands out against the beautifully colourful floor tiles, so obviously these had to be painted... The plastic is a bit softer than your average model kit, but a lot harder than the soft plas...

Roman watchtower

After wrapping up my wee Roman army with my Roman cavalry unit last month I needed a bit of a change of pace. Designing and scratch building a Roman watchtower to go with my army seemed just the thing. Most models of Roman watchtowers you find online are based on stone examples like those found along Hadrian’s Wall or in southern Germany. I, however, wanted to build a tower more like those found along the Dutch part of the limes , the border of the Roman Empire. As stone is pretty hard to come by in this tiny flat country of ours, watchtowers were either made entirely out of timber or had a timber frame with inset wattle and daub sections. I particularly liked the look of the reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-De Meern, with its dark timber frame and yellow wattle and daub. As you can see, my tower is quite heavily influenced by the Vleuten-De Meern watchtower, although I wasn’t too strict when it came to the exact dimensions. The reconstructed watchtower at Vleuten-...

Little Tanks & Tiny People

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