The Wargame Shed

With so much of 2025 taking up with preparing to move, moving and reorganising following the move with most of my gaming paraphernalia being in storage for months, I didn’t think a retrospective of the year would be either long or interesting. Consequently I’m just going to focus on my plans for 2026. So here are a few projects I intend to work on (but will, no doubt, be distracted from in due course!) [for an explanation of the Stages see my Project Categorisation post]:

I was vaguely aware of this game from Grey for Now Games before but paid more attention to it over the Christmas break and, then convinced, took advantage of the North Star Boxing Day sale to dive in.

I am still waiting for the bulk of the order to arrive but have the starter set and have assembled one building so far. Assembling the figures and painting them is yet to come though!

Having picked up a decent selection of Oddzial Osmy kit before Magister Militum closed down I have the ingredients for this project already. The rules are likely to be either Rommel or Eisenhower both from Sam Mustafa.

In addition to the minis (and they are very mini too!), I have the bases and materials for the terrain including some 2mm Eastern Front buildings from the Brigade Models range.

With my Serbians within sight of completion, I am now looking at the pile of unpainted metal I have for the other nations - Germany, France, Britain and the Ottoman Empire - as I have the Russians and Austro-Hungarians done already. 

An offshoot of this, which may get moved up the queue, is Russian Civil War, as I can use my Imperial Russians for Whites (with suitable new command stands) and have the Red Army figures in the aforementioned pile too. Of course, I may well use a different rule set for these games with the venerable Triumph of the Will from the Too Fat Lardies being the most probable.
 

This project stalled a little while ago so I need to pick up where I left off (initially finishing my invasion barges and pillboxes) and then some unusual (improvised) items.

The first game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, going to be the initial landing and I have plans for at least another two games following that. With Chain of Command likely to be the rule set of choice.

I have a number of new sub-projects to work on including Tomb of the Serpent (Egyptian), China Station and The Raid on Innsmouth. I have most of the things I need and just need to do some construction and painting now.

This one mostly needs basing and finishing touches before it can hit the table so it will just be a matter of when it gets prioritised.

 

Some minor completion activities and these will be ready for the table - I suspect the biggest issue will be deciding which rules to use for them.

Various Stage 2 Projects including 1848, Franco Prussian and 15mm Napoleonics are all moving at the pace of an asthmatic ant with some heavy shopping so don’t expect to see much here for a while!

I do also have various game ideas using existing kit so I don’t really consider these actual projects but these include 15mm ACW, 28mm 02 Hundred, 28mm Witch Hunting, 28mm Border Reivers and a few more that have temporarily slipped my mind.

So plenty to keep me busy for the year ahead!

 I'm afraid I have not been posting much for some months - I hope you can excuse the lapse but this has been a busy year on the personal front with getting married and moving house. Hopefully now that we are largely settled in the new home and I have finally moved all my gaming stuff into the new war room I will have more time both for gaming and blogging.

In any event, I would like to take this opportunity to wish you all the best for the festive season and a happy and prosperous 2026! 

 I have a decent collection of 28mm Spanish Civil War figures (and terrain) and have been wanting to get them to the table more. Unfortunately, I haven't found a set of rules that worked for the numbers of figures I have and also gave me the flavour of the Spanish Civil War I was looking for.  So I have decided to write my own.

¡Viva la muerte! are based around six 28mm representing a unit and use both event cards and the Fudge (or Fate as you prefer) dice (size sided dice with 2+, 2- and 2 blank sides). Each faction has differing victory conditions in order to create a semi-cooperative game.

So after having worked away at them for a few months I decided to give them a proper playlets at the club. 

The scenario saw a small town held by three factions of Republicans (with the Communists being the only well supplied) being assaulted by elements from a Nationalist column - again three factions (with the Army of Africa bing the only well supplied).

Here are a few photos from the game:

The general consensus was that the rules worked (phew!) but needed some tweaking in a few areas - combat factors, armour (the least mature element anyway) and some of the initial supply conditions. So I have a few amendments to make and then have another game later in the year.

 I visited my friend Lenin (no, not that one - he's dead! It's his online moniker). We played a couple of figure games and some board games, the latter including War Story: Occupied France and SAS: Rogue Regiment which were all lots of fun. Here are a few photos.

Midgard: Heroic Battles

Some fantasy action using the latest rules from Reisswitz Press:

 Here are some photos from a 28mm Vietnam game we played at the club last month. The game saw us moving up the river to try to rescue some hostages from the far end.

The rules were Ambush Alley and the figures and terrain are from someone else's lovely collection

 This is a long overdue post about the Christmas game we played at the club. It was a Judge Dredd miniatures game with appropriate Christmas touches (including exploding parcels and fairy lights inside the buildings). Here are some photos: