Italian Wars, Greek Unarmoured Hoplites, basing Republican Romans and Star Wars

This Last Fortnight in Gaming at 5th Column 

 
Well its the Second of November and I am bit late with this update.

This last fortnight has been filled with some gaming down at the Club, and toe dip back into armada, some musings about republican Romans and reflecting on Star Wars Armada.

So where do we start?

Italian Wars

The Saturday before last the lads down at Berwick convened to continue our foray into the early Renaissance with a focus on the Italian Wars.   Peter, who's venue we use for these awesome days of gaming in his custom built games house (only way I can describe it), recently finished his collection of Landsknechts and other associated troops such as some glorious French Gendarmes.

We have been playing over the last few months a series of games and different scenario's using the Pike and Shotte Rules from Warlord Games.  The Games have been very interesting with massed blocks of Pike clashing into each other and heavy cavalry sweeping all before them.

I have to say the color's and the models fired the imagination and the temptation to charge off into yet another period and buy figures was strong for a while, probably a good thing I have two many other projects going otherwise you know..... the lead pile would grow.

Here are a few shots from last meets game:

This game I was on the losing side.  We aggressively attacked the enemy, however the luck of the dice gods was on the side of the bad side (the other guys), however it was allot of fun.

Next Unit of Hoplites:

This week I was able to finish off the latest unit of Hoplites and then subsequently decided that I want to go back and add a 3rd rank to all these units and future units.

I have also done some preliminary work a scenario to base all this work on and focusing on the 2nd Battle of Coronea in 394BC.  The battle took place between Sparta and her Allies and Thebes and her allies.  In Rex Warner's Translation of Xenophon he noted that Coronea was a double battle, a knock out championship for military excellence.

I am reading the Ancient text, specifically Xenophon and Plutarch and hope to write more on the battle in the next few posts as well as sketch of the army lists and scenario.  In the meantime here are shots of the latest unit.

A Group Shot of the Collection so Far.

On the Ancients Army front I have also begun work on research on my republican roman army, which I hope to start in the new year at the earliest.  The hardest thing is how to reflect the manipular structure of the roman legions of the time.  And that has put a focus on how they really fought.

Roman Legions in this period fought in a checker board style deployment with 3 lines of maniples, however to reflect that, at the next club meeting we are putting a few games on to test a few ideas.

Star Wars Armada. 

After about 2 months of not playing an FFG game Harley and I sat down this afternoon to play a game of Armada. Harley made a list while i took a random list from the Fab Fleet Builder  Link Here
We played a 500 point game as generally we find these games are a bit more interesting at the higher points values, and while Harley is perusing the competition scene in X-Wing I'm more interested in the fly casual games and personally prefer more traditional war-games if you hadn't guessed.

I fluffed the entire game and gave up after turn 4 as i successfully handed ship after ship to Harley's imperials.  However it has me wanting more as annoyed as I was I knew I can do better :P  With the imminent arrival of Wave 2 also I think the game is going to step a whole level. Here are some shots from today's game:

 

 Well thats the lot for this update. 

Catch you at the next update.