Wargames blog, covering many shiny things but at the mo its mostly a 1940 Desert Campaign, 28 mm Crusades and 28mm Italian Wars.
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A few days ago I posted up the first set of figures for my Cops and Robbers casts for the 7tv game, here is the next group, the remainder of my uniformed officers, with Inspector Morse' Jag added to the Allegro.
I think I must have double order some stuff in the past as I have ended up with two Sgts, 2 marksmen and 2 WPCs (as they were known then). So the Sgt above has been done with a white shirt to differentiate between the two.
The above photo shows the second Police marksman a female officer and another Traffic Constable.
This Sgt looks so much more friendly than the one in the blue shirt.
A bit of a change of tack for me today, historical military figures are the norm but today's fare is for my 7tv game and the start of of British Police cast from the 1970s.
The 4 figs are 28mm and from a Company called Crooked Dice who make the 7tv game, the car is seen as bought, a company called Vanguards do a number of Police Cars of the period and it looks the bizz.
I have another batch of 8 uniformed officers to finish, before starting work on some Life on Mars CID types. Above is a rather burly Sgt, if he told me to go home I would.
These 70s cops are armed with a wooden trunchen and razor sharp sarcasm, the white caps are representative of Traffic Police (who wouldn't be seen dead near the Austin Allegro must get them a proper flash motor), the blue shirts where common in at the time before the switched to white in the 80s.
The final officer doesn't even have a trunchen, he just has a torch, he is actually a dog handler but I forgot to paint the dog 😂
Welcome all, hope we are all well 4 weeks into the lockdown here in Yarkshire, I for one am seriously missing some Fish and Chips with mushy peas and a breadcake !
This week I've finished a second unit of Foot Sergeants for my Kingdom of Jerusalem force so I thought I would put a post up on this project, the unit above is armed with a mixture of melee weapons, they took a bit longer to sort out than the other unit due mostly to the shields.
I've used some shield transfers from Battle Flag, I bought two sets one battle damaged and one plain. The plain pack worked really well but I found the damaged ones disintegrating very quickly and had to throw a few of them away. I've not had this problem before, I've contacted Battle Flag but not had a reply yet.
I rather like this unit and they fit well with my Crossbow unit from earlier in the month, I've got a dismounted Knight, mounted Knight and Mounted Sgt unit and will most likely use the same livery to get a nice little force within an army.
The second unit is armed with crossbow. The 48 figures represent the contents of a full box of Foot Sergeants from Fireforge Games. Bases are 60 x 50 mm.
There are some strange poses in the box but in a mass they look really good, the faces do have a nice bit of character to them.
That's my second box of these done, the previous lot were painted in the colours of the Outremer State of Tripoli.
It may be a while yet before these guys see action and no doubt others will have joined the ranks of the Army before life returns to normal.
UPDATE - Battle Flag have sent me two extra sets of decals to replace the faulty ones, top service, thank you.
Regards Ken
TheYarkshire Gamer
It's like a time machine, going back to 2019 when the Italian Wars Project was in full swing and I was firing out a unit of these a week.
So here web have another unit of 6 28mm Wargames Foundry Men at Arms done up in a red Papal theme with two flags from Pete's to finish the look.
This is the last of my Wargames Foundry figures, I still have a few Perrys plastics heavies to add to the collection when they are done that will be 12 units of Heavy Cavalry, do I need more, probably 😉
Next up will be some more Kingdom of Jerusalem Foot Sgts with Melee weapons. I opened up my next paint project to the vote on Twitter and the results were,
Kingdom of Jerusalem Foot 37%
Italian Wars Mounted Crossbow 17%
7TV Cops and Robbers 14%
Afrika Korps vehicles 32%
Regular readers will be familiar with the Italian Wars Project which filled up most of this blog over the last year is so. One thing I did want to add was some more specific period buildings, during our recent big playtests I have been using our ECW houses for built up areas, as a famous game show host once said "Its good, but it's not right".
Like many others, due to the Phobon Plague, I have had to change my plans going forward and the holiday in May is off, the brass was still in the bank account and avaliable for redistribution. Searching through eBay I stumbled across a building (The one on the far right of the row furthest from the camera), I took a punt and was impressed, the rest as they say is history.
Three choices now for the reader, 1) watch the Utubes video below, 2) read the text below the Yarkshire TV special or 3) do both !
VIDEO
Before I continue I would just like to state that Yarkshire Gamer is not a company not do I have anything financially related to a gaming company, I have done a few reviews on here now and they have proved quite popular, I have also tried to concentrate on the smaller companies out there, let's face it Flames of War etc are on every other page of every magazine going.
The company in question is called Empires at War, a company I hadn't heard of before these purchases, a great range and a great service. I had added my mobile number to my order (for the two big sets), the following day the owner, Mick rang me and wanted to check if I wanted the duplicate building in the two sets, a quick chat and I was able to drop another building in to replace one of them. Anyway, link below if your interested.
The kits are pretty similar to other mdf kits out there, they are avaliable in plain mdf or for a couple of quid more they can be obtained painted, I went for the painted option (being lazy and not that keen on making terrain). They are easy to put together, I sat down with my son over a couple of afternoons and put all of them together is some quality Covid family time. The only tricky part was the window frames which are a bit fiddly but once you get the hang of it it's no problem.
The same town under lockdown
There are a total of 11 buildings including the one off I bought off eBay and these should fullfill my needs for the period going forward, they are also pretty useful for my Spanish Civil War games. I will definitely be going back for some Roman style buildings for my Ancient Punic Wars Collection.
It was also a good excuse to get some of my Italian Wars figures out for a little parade down the town main street.
Looking at some of the individual buildings now, above is the small farm, a couple of buildings which are walled and can be moved around to make a courtyard.
Going down the row there is a three storey house with balcony on the left, a Monastery libary in the middle (that's the building I swapped in) with a small church on the right.
After the church we have a two store house and then at the end of the street, behind the Landsknecht Pike is a Villa.
The villa is particularly impressive (I forgot to put the end wall on for the photos !). Next to that is the rather impressive clock tower, some great detail on the clock here and the facade reminds me of the buildings in Florence.
Coming back down the street after the tower is a 2 storey building with balcony, a Taverna and then a 3 storey building with balcony.
So all in all a rather lovely town, all done and dusted for £200 or thereabouts, I haven't laid a paint brush on any of the buildings these are all straight builds. The only thing I might do with them is put a wash on the pan tile roof on the buildings to weather them a bit, but with my enthusiasm for terrain I probably won't.
Some time ago now I dipped my toe into the world of 7TV, painted up a few figures but never really got much further with it. The Boy Wonder is home from Uni due to the Triffid Invasion so we started at random to watch some old episodes of Blakes 7 and that got me thinking, I've got some figures for that somewhere.
There is a Yarkshire TV special on the Utubes, link below,
Dayna, Soolin and Tarrant
I had painted up the original cast three years ago,
There are 6 further figures to do for the "good" side, 3 of them pictured above cover people who came in part way through the show, Dayna replaced the original character Jenna after the 2nd series and joined at the same time as Tarrant who replaced Gan. Soolin played by the lovely Glynnis Barber arrived for the final series as a replacement for Cally the telepath.
The other three figures in this group represent characters from the original cast but sculpted to represent their appearance in the later episodes. On the left is the older (Spoiler alert! ) version who comes back at the end of the show.
I do love these figures, there likeness is uncanny, especially this one, this is Avon who was played by Paul Darrow in all 4 seasons of the show (who sadly passed away recently). A great character who had some cracking lines.
The other character who made it all the way through 4 seasons was the cowardly thief with an amazing ability to open locked doors, was Villa.
I managed a game of 7tv today, with the lad and even Mrs YG joined in, to be honest we all really enjoyed it, playing it alongside watching Blakes 7 made it even better, it was a really close game with a cliffhanger finish, maybe I will write about it one day.
I've ordered some more figures to go with my Cops and Robbers casts so I hope to get some of those done soon.
