Inspirational Amsterdam

I spent the last days of 2018 in Amsterdam. As someone who is interested in old buildings and shipping, the city has a lot to offer in terms of sight-seeing and museums. Thus, the visit was my first inspirational boost for hobbying in 2019.

Buildings

The most obvious and probably most famous thing about Amsterdam (marijuana consumption aside) is the grachten and the houses with their decorative gables.

Walls from Games of War

A few months ago, Games of War released some Spanish-style walls as the latest addition to their pirate buildings range. I finished painting my lot this weekend to show them off just in time as my last painting project for the year.

I have been loving the products from Games of War for years now - not only their nice pirate buildings, but more so the fantastic ships and boats, such as the British cutter, the longboats and small ships. With the release of these walls they have expanded their buildings range which should be interesting not only for pirate games such as Blood & Plunder but for a variety of other settings as well.

Animal tokens

For a long time I have been wanting to do some animal tokens. Now I finally had the time to do some.

The basic idea is to have a number of "empty" bases that accompany my normal miniatures. Obviously, they have to be the same bases as usual so they are, as always, from Fenris Games:

• 25mm DS round Innsmouth Cobblestones (Fenris Games)
• 25mm round Deep Recess (Fenris Games)

Over the years I have collected a number of animals. These are the ones I used:

• Chicken flock (Black Cat Bases)
• Cats (promotional miniatures from Black Cat Bases)
• Animal set (Stronghold Terrain)

So what to do with these bases? In a number of scenarios that we play, the characters can move across the board unseen. Sometimes they hide as civilians, sometimes they move as shadows or street animals. For each of my pirate crew members I have one respective character marker on a 25mm round plywood base. These markers are secretly placed under Civilian models or under these new animal tokens.

Character markers for my pirate crew members

Battery by Slug Industries

In this post I take a look at the battery terrain piece which was produced by Slug Industries as part of a kickstarter project for their Spanish Fort.

In my recent review of the 28mm Spanish Fort I already mentioned that I also got the battery piece that was funded via the kickstarter project. The battery is a solid piece of resin. Aside from the main piece there is a planking piece, similar to the one that was provided with the Spanish Fort, and an MDF kit for a ladder - again, same as with the fort. So, beside filing off a few sharp edges and assembling the ladder, there is no further assembly required.

The battery, the planking (right) and the ladder kit (bottom right)

Pirates of Treasure Island

In August this year, there was a kickstarter campaign for releasing a range of 28mm pirates of Treasure Island. I'm not only going to say that these are really nice miniatures. But I have also been waiting for almost ten years for them to be released.

Mr. O'Brien from the
Pirates of Treasure Island range

It was back in December 2008 when I first blogged about this range of pirates. At the time, Legends of the High Seas was slowing growing to become my skirmish game of choice after having played Mordheim for many many years. Wargames Foundry and Black Scorpion Miniatures were the pirate manufacturers of the time.

Through a Polish forum I got to know sculptor Flis Wojtek, who had been working for Black Tree Design and Warlord Games. He had shared photos of greens of a lot of characterful pirate miniatures that were supposed to be released through Black Hat Miniatures. However, that never happened, until ...

Personalized Movement Gauge from LITKO

While I was browsing the LITKO website recently I came across their offer for personalized movement gauges. With its lengths of 1/2", 1", 3" and 6" this is a very handy tool, not only for Age of Sigmar. The surface can be customized with your own logo and text. The gauge will be very useful in our games of Dogs Ahoy. I would have liked to use the free space for a summary of the turn order or some other quick reference notes. However, since the rules are still work in progress I chose not to and only went with the Dogs Ahoy logo.

Two movement gauges from LITKO with the Dogs Ahoy logo

Since I was ordering anyway, I chose to also get some flame markers. There are a few scenarios in Dogs Ahoy where crews set a ship or building on fire and these work quite nicely.

Spanish Fort by Slug Industries

The Spanish Fort by Slug Industries is a terrain piece modeled after the actual Fort Matanzas and successfully funded via a Kickstarter campaign earlier this year. In this article I take a closer look at the model and present my painted version as well as some gaming ideas for the fort.