Painted - 6mm Pontic Thureophoroi

 As part of my January painting challenge I have been painting some 6mm Pontic Thureophoroi, which is medium infantry. Most days I have been painting more than the 15 minutes a day I am required to. It was, however, very nice to have some days where I just painted the minimum 15 minutes, and still felt I made some progress.

I paint 8 strips at a time which corresponded to 2 bases. Normally I would do such a batch on an evening.

They are painted with GWs contrast paints apart from some small metal paint on the spear tips and on the shields. Although I look for inspiration various places I just try different colours and hope it looks good. I finished a total of 8 bases which is 4 units in Sword & Spear. Afterwards I actually realized that on the Spanish and Roman medium infantry bases I only had 12 figures on, so I made a small mistake putting 16 figures on these bases, but it doesn't matter that much.

Next on the painting cue is some Pontic skirmishers.

Game - Chaos vs. Humans - Blood Bowl

 The other day my brother and I had another league game of Blood Bowl. I had recently painted my chaos team, so both teams was painted, which is always a nice thing to see.

Both teams were somewhat hurt by casualties and had to use journey(beast)men. Chaos was on the receiving end and immediately began a bloody way towards the end zone. The minotaur managed to blitz the ogre and knock him out.

First half ended with 1-0 lead to chaos. It was a bloody half with 4 casualties in all, and even 2 human players knocked out.

The humans came close to scoring when a brave catcher almost picked up the ball in the end zone, but unfortunately failed.

The beastmen picked up the ball and started moving across the field. The brave human catcher desperately tried to steal the ball but with no success. The rest of the human team was being in check by the chaos players.

The depleted humans team was unable to prevent another goal to the chaos team, who took hime a rather secure 2-0 victory.

Painting - January Painting Challenge

My friend, Steffen, and I have started a painting challenge in January, inspired by a Youtube video by Storm of Steel Wargaming(who I believe was inspired by another video). The challenge is to have painting session of at least 15 minutes every day in January.

For me the purpose of the challenge is not that I expect to paint 15 minutes every day for here on and forth. By rather to acknowledge that in periods where my painting motivation is very low, just doing 15 minutes some days will still mean something. I suspect we all have periods where we don't paint as much as we would like to. And then, rather than get too disillusioned about not painting, simply doing as little as 15 minutes worth of painting once awhile will hopefully help the situation somewhat.

I have no specific painting project I'm going to work on during January. Rather I will just paint what I feel like. So this first week I started of with 2 bases of 6mm Pontic cavalry. At the moment my painting motivation is rather good so I will most likely paint more than 15 minutes a day. But I have had a couple days with only about 20 minutes of painting, and it actually felt rather good, that I didn't feel like I needed to do more.

First day of work. Just painted the horses.

Second day I added a bit more colours.

Third day they were done apart from the base.

Next couple of days I worked another 3 strips.

On the sixth day I was done with both bases.

It has been a good experience, and I really can feel the appreciation of not thinking I need to paint a lot more and for longer time. So it will be interesting to see how much I get painted in January.

Game - Middle-Earth - Elves/Rohan vs Moria

 Last night I played a game of Middle-Earth against Chris and his Moria goblins and their friends. We played 600 pts.

I had 3 warbands, one with Legolas and and 14 warriors from the Halls of Thranduil list, one with a mounted Rohan captain and 12 Riders of Rohan, and one with Gamling and 10 warriors of Rohan. I don't have that many different troop choices for my LotR armies, so that is why it is all common troops in this list.

Chris had 2 warbands, one led by a Balrog and one led by a goblin captain. He also had a cave troll and about 25-30 goblins.

Deployment. Chris put the Balrog in the middle, and the goblin captain with the cave troll on his right flank. I tried to spread out my army as much as possible to outflank the goblins and avoid the Balrog as much as possible.

We played the Clash at Moonlight scenario, which although randomly selected seemed very appropriate. This meant that shooting ranges were only up to 12" which hampered me severely, but shootings attacks also had +1 to wound which was very nice.

I really didn't know what to do against the great Balrog, so I quickly decided to just go for his goblin friends instead. One of the Rohan warriors did, however, get a lucky hit quite early, which actually earned me a victory point.

When my Rohan riders stormed up my right flank, Chris decided to move the Balrog and most of his army towards that threat. This left my elves on the right flank a bit out of the battle, but at least there were a few goblins they could kill on their flank (apart from one lucky little bastard who somehow survived in combat against 2 elves most of the battle).

I had hoped to make a dashing cavalry strike on my right but when the Balrog turned towards the Rohan riders they quickly changed their minds and tried to get away from the monster.

The Balrog did manage to catch and slay a handful of riders, but the rest managed to get away, while the rest of my army killed a bunch of goblins.

The Elves cleared my right flank and much of the center (apart from that little bugger seen in the left corner here).

The Balrog got ready to charge the center of my army, but it was too late. I had killed almost all the goblins and so the Moria army was forced to retreat.

A fun game were I fought hard to avoid or limit the Balrog's killing ability. I had quite a lot of shooting in my army, so I think it was lucky that we played a scenario that limited it. Legolas did very little in the game other than kill a few goblins. The heroes of the game were those unfortunate Rohan riders and warriors that had to give their lives to ensure the rest of the army could go goblin hunting 😀

Always fun to play against Chris, and I am sure he's fine tuning his army and tactics for our next game.