elephantine memories...

I first became interested in historical miniature gaming in the mid 1970s. However, the first time figures became readily available to me was in 1980 or 1981 when I took a part-time job at Light Brigade Hobbies in Concord, California. I believe that is when and where I acquired these six 25mm elephants. I've been carrying them around ever since.

Over the years they've been sorely neglected. I don't recall ever using any of them in a game and only one bears anything close to a finished paint job.They do, however, show something of the progression of my painting experience. At least up to a point. As I've been inventorying my collection of figures I found these and instantly felt an impulse to repaint and rebase them. Just seems like the right thing to do. Consider these the 'before' pictures.

Hinchcliffe Successor Elephant
circa 1978

I'm sure this elephant was manufactured by Hinchcliffe. In fact, Jeff Jonas has a wonderful picture of this model on his web site.Mine is painted with old Testor's enamal paints telling me that this was one of the very first figures I painted. In fact, I recall using the same deep blue on a 1/48 scale Aurora Albatros C-III model which I built in the mid-1970s.

Mea Familia Gladiatoria - 25mm

Another year, another move, another part of the country. And while the new apartment has fewer square feet, more of those feet are dedicated to closet space so all my toys and books have come home to roost. It's a good feeling. Over the past month I've been unpacking, inventorying, and assessing damage. In the big scheme of things the damage is minimal. I lost no books to Hurricane Sandy--and it was a very real possibility as our storage unit was barely 200 feet from the sea coast. Two moves by...  'professionals' resulted in just a few broken swords, detached shields and debased figures. Of course, I haven't unpacked everything yet so there's still a chance to discover a disaster, but the prognosis is good.

I tried, I really tried, to get into "Spartacus" series on cable TV. I watched the first four episodes and decided it was not worth the effort--especially after watching the original Kirk Douglas movie. Nevertheless, it reawakened my interest and then a number of posts on the 'Lead Adventurers Forum' motivated me to dig out my small scale figures.So, without further ado, here are my 25mm gladiators. Now to see what it takes to tweak my rules for solo play.

my familia gladitoria...

Some projects never end. I have a collection of 25mm gladiators which are pretty much finished. But for some reason when I started gaming with 54mm figures I really wanted some big-fig gladiators. Of course, that was years ago.

Oceanus Strategoi updated...

Well, I've moved and all my gaming stuff sits in storage. Nigh well inaccessible for now. But that's given me some time to get back to thinking about rules and rules writing. I recently saw my old ancient naval rules mentioned on The Miniatures Page and, upon seeing if they were still on my old site, I realized that I'd never finished uploading them! Since the old HTML format really wasn't all that user friendly I reformatted them as a *.PDF, made some clarifications, and included the ship charts, player aid sheet and a couple of other helpful tools.

This is probably one of the first sets of rules I wrote. The mechanics are pretty conventional but I think they hold up well.

You can download them from here.

romans on the march...

 So I've been back into historical gaming for a few years now but never really picked up any of my old projects. I've been leaning more towards doing games in 54mm due to the exorbitant price of metal figures and aging eyesight. Then I noticed that Wargames Factory had their plastic 'Caesar's Legions' figures on sale for $9.99 per box. Since I had a couple hundred Old Glory Gauls sitting around I figured it would be a good match. I've got the first of six boxes of Romans completed.

a hoard of gauls...

A Gallic army is a necessity for any serious ancients player. After all, they fought against just about everyone at one time or another. These are mostly Old Glory figures from probably 15 years ago. I think I purchased them about the time that DBM was first published. Maybe it was DBA... I don't remember. Anyway, they've been sitting around for years. I had painted up a DBA army's worth but had plenty of unpainted figures sitting around.