Tatars from Old Glory

 Bulking out my Crimean Tatar horde with a batch of Old Glory sculpts. Gotta say, I don't really get their whole short-sleeve jacket thing, doesn't match any other miniatures or images of Tatars that I've seen, and the full beards also seem odd, but painted up they blend in just fine with the rest of my collection.

 

 

 Size comparison with a TAG Crimean Tatar (middle), and my kitbash plastics (right):

 

Combined manufacturer unit:

 

Boyar's Sons (Muscovite cavalry)

 Any proper Russian/Muscovite army from this period is going to have swarms of irregular feudal cavalry. I have TAG minis to represent a few units' worth but wanted to have another go at converting some. These six are made from different Gripping Beast plastic kits; one Arab Heavy Cavalry, two Goth Noble Cavalry, and three Dark Ages Cavalry. Of note, these minis include my first ever attempt at adding stirrups. All of these except the one from the Arab kit, I made stirrups from wire and greenstuff.

 

I am quite happy with how these turned out, I think they mix pretty well with the real thing. 

It's a Dead Man's Party

 Here are all the infantry casualty counters I need for the next time I run my Tczew/Dirschau game. Models are my own. I need to cast a few more for the next batch which will cover cavalry and gun crew.

 

The little dice receptacles are just paper, I didn't want to worry too much about exact fit, the paper has some flex so it was easier to manage than hard plastic or whatever.

Back to Blogging, with Tatars

 Well 2024 was a busy year for me. Not a lot of hobby stuff getting done for real-life reasons, but now that we're settled into our new place and gotten past the holidays I expect to do better with mini stuff and the subsequent posting.

I got another batch of Assault Group minis last year that I didn't get a chance to work on at the time, and it includes my first "real", i.e. non-kitbashed, Tatars. However, I also have a bunch of leftover Wargames Factory bits for making kitbashed ones. I decided to do them together just to keep building my Crimean force in general.

 

Unfortunately, I don't know if I'm just rusty at hobby tasks or what, but I screwed up the priming and sort of textured them with some splatter. It's not super noticeable on the table, and it fits their aesthetic okay I guess, but I'll probably relegate these to back-rankers once I have the numbers to do so. I do think the real and fake tatars look ok mixed up like this, which is good because I have a few more of both.

Making a Cossack

 So after making the casualties, I sculpted and cast a hooded minion for my pulp gaming. He turned out pretty well, and it occurred to me that the long robe would be a decent base for a Cossack figure. I started with a real basic design inspired by a decorative figure from a Beauplan map.

 

 

 

This one has a Gripping Beast head and an old Wargames Factory right hand and gun. I am working on sculpting some weapon hands and heads of my own, but realistically I am going to be using a lot of real bitz because they look better. Even so, these homemade miniatures are not going to be front-rankers, but with my long-term plans I'll eventually need hundreds of Cossack infantry, so they don't all need to be professional quality. Besides the heads and weapon hands, I've also made some variants of this body for, uh, variety, iteratively from this one like how this one was iterated from the minion.

I did notice my painting is even worse here than my normal standard, so I have since bought a pair of reading glasses. Hooray for being 40!

I have a box of Wargames Atlantic generic horsies on the way, once I have those I'll start working on Tatars, Polish noble levy, and pancerny, all of which I want in bulk.

Wanna See a Dead Body?

 So, one of the very first posts I ever did here was a couple of casualty markers. But since then, I haven't really kept up with that. However, playing my big birthday Tczew game, I definitely saw how some little dead guys might enhance the tabletop experience, even if ultimately I would still be using dice to track the specific numbers.

But even further back, way back to the mid nineties when I was in middle school, when I first encountered wargaming miniatures at all, one of my first reactions was that I wanted to sculpt my own. That also fell by the wayside for a couple decades, but when I was recently evaluating some battles I would like to recreate after Tczew, I realized that lots of them require large numbers of mediocre troops that are not available in plastic. So the idea of sculpting my own miniatures and casting them recurred to me.

Well, there's a bit of a learning curve with sculpting, so I decided to start with some dead guys for some low-stakes practice, and one of them turned out well, so I bought a casting kit to give that a shot as well.

Once the one turned out OK, I decided to make some variants - one with boots and gloves to represent a reiter, and a one with a bandolier to be a musketeer. The original mold I will use for pike casualties

I'm pretty pleased with the results! Additional castings will be fancied up with headgear, hands and weapons from real miniature kits for variety. Hopefully I can sculpt a full miniature soon that's worth trying a double-sided mold on.

Tczew Dirschau - more thoughts

 Now that I've had some time to reflect and recover, I can post something a little more detailed about my birthday Pike & Shotte game. Not a Battle Report though, the game did not proceed close enough to a conclusion, nor did I take the necessary notes or pictures to make it worthwhile. I had a lot of fun, and the players did too, but it was more of a miniature showcase and demo than a proper game.

Primarily, this is my fault. While I had tested and timed the terrain setup, I did not get a chance to do the same for the miniatures themselves, and it took much longer than I estimated to get the armies in place. Also, I had a nasty cold the week leading up to my birthday, so I did not have the time I had anticipated to re-read the rules or properly share them with the participants. So between the late start and the slow progress once we did begin, the game itself didn't really get exciting until just before we ran out of time/energy. 

Next time I will be more familiar with the rules, and also see if I can set-up the night before. Someday my wife and I will have a house with enough room to host such a game ourselves (and thus, set it up however far in advance we want), but until then, hopefully the local game store will be able to accommodate.

I am still extremely pleased with how everything looked, and with the historical background I was able to convey to the participants! Here are some pics from Chris, the overall commander of the Swedes.