Time has been horribly short for wargaming, painting or blogging in recent months. I've not even been able to keep up with reading some of my favourite blogs of late so I must apologise for my absence in posting on the excellent work of others. This shortage of time will get worse until about April when a course I am doing comes to an end - hurrah!
I have some game reports to write up but these are always time-heavy to type up so I shall add a few pics of recently painted units. This time it is the Dark Age Warrior set from Gripping Beast. These are plastic figures and assemble very nicely indeed. You may notice a few of the Gripping Beast metal figures in the ranks too, just to fill in gaps.
I have also used a few heads from the Wargames Factory Saxon Thegns set. The Thegns set seems to be a lot better than the early offerings from Wargames Factory, though they really annoyingly have only a few helmeted heads for the chain-mail clad bodies (surely if a warrior can afford a mail shirt and sword he will buy himself a helmet!). The set does have some heads in Phrygian caps so it is these which I have trimmed to fit to add variety to my Anglo-Saxon Fyrd.
For gaming purposes these fellows will have a front rank consisting of Thegns and Huscarls with factors leaning towards the fighting strengths of these troops until stamina loss and casualties lead them to lean on the Fyrd who will then use their factors until they win or break!
I have only a few more units and command to paint up before I can have my first 'proper' game with my Anglo-Saxon and Norman armies. It has only taken me 21 years to get this far with my Dark Ages collection. This spring/summer WILL be the time another collection reaches 'playable' status. Thank goodness (and about time too!).
