Gemsbok

Ever since I first saw a Gemsbok on the television as a child I have been fascinated by the beautiful patterns on the animal.

And one of the privileges of the miniature hobby is that you could always get a Gemsbok on your own. The problem could be to fit all those nice miniatures into tabletop games of course.

This one is intended to be used as a sort of backdrop or terrain piece for my African games.

I think the miniature was bought from Ral Partha Europe.

And a little picture for scale. That’s a lot of meat…
Apparently a male Gemsbok could weigh as much as 300kg.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemsbok

Saracen light infantry

I have always been fascinated by the crusades somehow, the whole heavy knight thing, the light horse archers and the hot desert sun. All the famous places the mystics of the Middle East.

And now I have taken the plunge to start to collect it in 28mm.

The plan was to try to reuse one or two of my African tribal unit as a sort of mercenary light skirmishing unit for an Egyptian fraction. And the Medieval Swedes I painted previously is planned to be recycled into a western force.

Its great to be able to use one miniature for lots of different settings.

But my first new and dedicated unit for this project is this small unit of Saracen light infantry. Ive used leftover parts from the Perrys plastic box Mahdist Ansar. The miniatures with most clothing or Arabic headgear and so on that I didn´t think matched what I was after in the Tribal Africa project.

 

I used my fingertips to bend the swords and that worked really good as a way of giving the troops curved blades instead, Im not sure about how accurate that actually is but I think it looks good.
I used a knife and greenstuff to the shields to give them a better Targe looking shield instead and painted the miniatures.

The banner is from the plastic box.

I will start this with single bases miniatures to be able to use them in skirmish game but intend to use multibases later on when I have gathered a bigger collection for larger types of games.

 

 I think they maybe look a little more like Barbary corsairs then Saracen infantry but I think its close enough and its hard to argue with the price of plastics especially considering I got these from the leftovers.

A nice little unit for trying out the brush and colors for this new project.

Fyra nyanser av brunt

I have painted this nice chap. It was a gift from my friend Daniel and I thought It was only fitting to paint him up now that I just got the rules “Tooth and Claw” a game about  prehistoric animal hunting.

And here is his hunter to acompany mine: http://das-ultra-kaninchen.blogspot.se/2013/11/hunter.html

I wanted to keep the miniature brown in a sort of autumn hunting fashion.
Damn, I really needs to get me a new tweed hat now…

I got the rules “Tooth and Claw” by Chris Peers.

I’ve just read the rules and I am a little disappointed, by reading it alone I got the picture it will be more of an animal killing spree then an actual hunt. The game looks like its more of an “shoot all things” then to track and hunt down a specific animal type.
The rules include throwing spears, bows, muskets and more modern Elephant guns so It could be played as a stone age hunting group against Mammoths and such.
But I think its lacking in that it haven’t included anything like wind directions if the hunters want to sneak closer without being noticed, including rules for hunting dogs that could help anyone from an stone age group to a more modern hunt.

 

I think I will have to try it out before I can pass a final judgment on it but by reading it alone It does seems to miss a few things of the stuff I thought would be included.

Im sure its still a blast to play, not just as I had imagined it to be.