Another Crusades battle

Another 6mm Crusades battle with 'Shattered Lances.' This time using an all-Frankish force. It's early in the 1st Crusade and Bohemond and Tancred's force of Italian Normans encounter a Seljuk force somewhere in Northwest Anatolia. The Crusaders sensibly refuse both flanks and push forward with knights protected behind spears. The Seljuks attempt to pin the…

Shattered Lances

Brendan Moyle has kindly agreed to make a pdf of his Crusades rules 'Shattered Lances,' available as a pdf. The rules have been out of print for some time now and print copies are virtually impossible to come by. These have become my rules of choice for the period and are downloadable here on a…

Anna Comnena was right

Anna Comnena wrote that the charge of a Frankish knight was so powerful it would smash through the walls of Babylon....  

Brothers in Arms: A Shattered Lances game

“Ridwan of Aleppo was worried. To the south in Damascus, his brother Duqaq was preparing for war. On succeeding his father as ruler of Aleppo, Ridwan had quite sensibly began murdering his brothers. Duqaq, however, managed to escape to Damascus and was now ruler there. Duqaq seemed to be bearing a grudge over his attempted…

A 6mm Crusades Project

Crusades is one of those periods I keep coming back to. Most recently I did it in 15mm, but now it’s become the latest period I’ve decided to convert to 6mm. I started out with 6mm a few years ago as a way to get a lot of figures painted quickly, then with Napoleonics. So…

6mm Viking Age: Buildings

In the last post I wrote a bit about the figures for the 6mm Viking Age project. Now I thought I’d cover some of the scenery. While the project is primarily aimed at doing large battles, I’ll be looking to use the figures in other games as well. One of these games will be the…

6mm Viking Age

The genesis of a project for battles in the Viking Age stretches all the way back to the 1980’s and a wonderful series on British early medieval battles by Guy Halsall along with a set of rules called ‘Dark Age Infantry Slog’ by Andy Callan. I’d had a few goes at doing something ‘Dark Age’…

Tora No Monogatari: A solo Test of Honour campaign. Part Two

I previously talked about a solo Test of Honour narrative campaign here. The basic principle is that the AI for the opponents is very simple, and events on the table-top, coupled with occasional use of random events, form the narrative that holds it all together. What follows is an account of the second part of…

Linking figures to cards for Test of Honour

One of the issues with test of Honour, or any other game where each figure has a card to record its abilities, is working out a way to connect the figure on the tabletop to that card. This is especially true with Test of Honour for me as I use any cards for any figures.…

Tora No Monogatari part 1. A Test of Honour solo campaign.

I talked a bit about a 'narrative' solo Test of Honour campaign in an earlier post. I thought I'd collate the story so far. The historical setting is Owari province, where Oda Nobunaga is attempting to gain control of the province by deposing the senior branch of the Oda clan. Ambush at Atsuta. Toranosuke, a…