I have bought the new Epic Battles: Waterloo by Warlord Games and I’m slowly making my way through the painting much like Declan (when I’m not painting those pesky Kruleboyz). However, one thing I’ve noticed (as I’m sure many others have as well), is that the models are epic in scale but the basing and the rules are standard Black Powder. What I mean by this is that a standard unit in Epic:Waterloo is the same as a standard unit in regular Black Powder.
This got me thinking to how you could have truly cinematic and epic battles in Black Powder by converting the inches to centimetres (like many others have done).
By doing this, you can play a regular game of black Powder on a much smaller play area – 2.4 feet by 1.6 feet rather then 6′ x 4′. But also, it gives you the option of playing much, much larger games on a regular table.
The only issue is the basing and miniatures. if you take a standard unit in Black Powder with a frontage of 240mm and divide this so it suits the cm measurements rather than inches (i.e. dividing 240mm by 2.5) you’ll get a standard unit frontage of 96mm (let’s call it 10cm). If we use increments of 20mm then the basing could look something like this:
The great thing about his, is that if you use Baccus Napoleonic 6mm infantry you can get two large bases completed for just £8.00!
But what about different formations. Well these could either be represented by a dice in one of the dice holders on the base (i.e. 3, for line, 4 for square etc) or you could just model some other bases as Square and attack column etc. I’m inclined by the later personally.
The other dice holder can also be used to measure the units stamina. For Dice holders I’m always inclined to use Pendraken.
But I’d like to know the opinions of those experienced in Black Powder and what they think!
This post is partly a reference for myself as to which colours to use (Citadel or Vallejo) when painting my Epic Battles Napoleonic French. I’ve listed colours that could be used from both systems.
All of the paints listed can be purchased from ElementGames. Why not use my referral code and get double the crystals when you purchase anything? XBJ9837
Line Infantry
An overall base coat should be applied with London Grey or Mechanicus Standard Grey.
BASE COAT
Area
Vallejo
Citadel
Jackets
Dark Prussian Blue
Kantor Blue
Belts/Muskets/Slings & Lapels
Light Grey
Grey Seer
Trousers
Any of Offwhite, London Grey or Beige
Pallid Wych Flesh, Mechanicus Standard Grey or Karak Stone
Shako & Boots
Black
Abaddon Black
Skin
Basic Skin Tone
Cadian Flesh
Collars, Cuffs & Lapel Piping
Dark Vermillion
Mephiston Red
(Voltiguers) Plumes & Epaulettes
Black Green
Caliban Green
(Voltigeurs) Collar, Epaulette edging, Pompom, Tip of Plume
Yellow Ochre
Yriel Yellow
(Grenadiers) Plumes, Epaulettes and Shako Lace
Dark Vermillion
Mephiston Red
Backpacks & Musket Wood
Flat Brown
Mournfang Brown
Musket Barrel, Bayonet & Canteen
Oily Steel
Leadbelcher
Shako Plates, Sword Hilts, Chin Scales & Buttons
Old Gold
Retributor Gold
WASH
Area
Vallejo
Citadel
Grey Trousers, Shako Covers & Steel
Dark Tone
Nuln Oil
Beige Trousers & Shako Covers
Strong Tone
Agrax Earthshade
White Trousers
Dilute Light Grey
Dilute Grey Seer
Skin & Gold
Flesh Wash
Reikland Fleshshade
HIGHLIGHT
Area
Vallejo
Citadel
White
Offwhite
Pallid Wych Flesh
Yellow
Flat Yellow
Dorn Yellow
Green
Intermediate Green
Warpstone Glow
Black
Black Grey
Dark Reaper
Bayonets
Plate Mail
Stormhost Silver
Light Infantry in Greatcoats
An overall base coat should be applied with London Grey or Mechanicus Standard Grey.
BASECOAT
Area
Vallejo
Citadel
Greatcoats
London Grey, Beige or Light Brown
Mechanicus Standard Grey, Karak Stone or Balor Brown
Trousers & inside Open Jackets
Dark Prussian Blue
Kantor Blue
Piping, Belts & Straps
Light Grey
Grey Seer
Shako & Boots
Black
Abaddon Black
Skin
Basic Skin Tone
Cadian Flesh
(Carabinier) Straps, Plumes, Epaulettes and Shako Lace
Dark Vermillion
Mephiston Red
(Voltigeurs) Epaulettes & Plume
Black Green
Caliban Green
(Voltigeurs) Collar, Edge of Epaulettes, Shako Lace & Tip of Plume
Blood Red Skies is the new World War II mass air combat game from Warlord Games, written by renowned game developer Andy Chambers.
Packed with everything you need to play this fast paced air combat game, the Blood Red Skies starter set does what it says on the tin. Plus once started you’ll have the extra rules to introduce the play cards that really bring your fighter aircraft to life, allowing you to fly them just as they would have been by the Aces of WW2!
It has been given a rating of 7.4 on BoardGameGeek from 150+ ratings.
Simple but effective gameplay
Tabletop Anarchy has produced a series of videos explaining how to play Blood Red Skies.
1. Core Mechanics
2. Activation
3. Movement
4. Pilot Action
5. Shooting
6. Wingman
7. Clouds
8. Cards
9. Build A Squadron
10. Gameplay
Tabletop Anarchy also have a number of videos on painting the planes.
If you’re interested in getting into Blood Red Skies I can’t suggest you start anywhere else but these excellent collection of videos.
Warlord Games have released their Epic Waterloo miniatures and game system this weekend after just over a month on pre-order. I was lucky enough to pick mine up from SCN Hobby World yesterday and having returned from a one-day AoS tournament I was desperate to look inside my British Starter Set and see what treasures await!
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It’s a big box… of Warlord goodness!
it is competitively priced at £90 and I’m sure your FLGS will look after you, or you can give Sarah at SCN Hobby World a call if you’re in the UK.
First Impressions
There’s a lot in here…!
Lots of red plastic, so you can play without painting the toys, but there’s definitely more in there, so let’s dig deeper.
Sprue 1– Light Cavalry
3 Sprues
There enough here for 11 bases of Lighter Cavalry, as well as 3 artillery – both key elements to the Allies’ success at Waterloo. They are very detailed models, with a number of different poses to add variety to the bases of cavalry as they sweep towards the French cannon!
Sprue 2– Heavy Cavalry
3 Sprues
These are the other 11 bases of Cavalry, but these make heavier versions of the Cavalry regiments at Waterloo on the British side. Again, great detail and strong plastic and the swords seem to be reasonably strong.. although no doubt I’ll break a few from being clumsy!
Sprue 3– Foot
11 Sprues for Infantry!
There’s loads of infantry… at 10 men a strip and 2 strips a base there’s a lot of paint here… and they look great. At the bottom of the picture you can also see some of the soldiers without they’re bayonets – these are the Riflemen, and each sprue comes with a command strip, a Cavalry commander, and an artillery piece to add to the ones from the cavalry bases. Again great detail at this scale and I’ll certainly enjoy trying to paint them!
Bases
Bases… lots of them!
Of course, none of these would play well without the basic addition of bases… just look at that pile! It’s huge.
Dice
And some dice… as if wargamers don’t have enough to build their own fort! Still a good inclusion for a starter set.
Yes… I took a picture of the dice for completeness… don’t judge me!
La Belle Alliance – Building
Warlord games have teamed up with Sarissa Precision to bring some scenery with the boxset. And it’s a great large piece of scenery to play around. Having played Warmaster large terrain that effects movement is critical in this scale of game.
Flags & Painting Guide
Flags and advice
A great addition is a full colour sheet of British flags for the regiments at Waterloo. This will really add to the colour and make the regiments individual on the tabletop. Well done to Warlord games for this inclusion.
There is also a guide to painting the little chaps… and I’ll definitely need to follow this and see how I get on – inside the pamphlet there’s also a guide to the various regiments and their colours. I have some Osprey books to help, but this is a another great addition.
Rulesbook
The full rules book for the Waterloo Campaign in Epic Battles. This appears to be a full rulebook at 260 pages. It’s in glorious full colour as well and means you don’t need a separate copy of any of the existing Black Powder rule books.
Colour… and pictures!
Warlord Games have raided their catalogue of pictures to provide visual inspiration for the game.
Summary
This is a great box, and I’ve no doubt that the equivalent French box is just as jam packed with goodness. Now all I need to do is paint it all and get it on the table… this may take a while!
I’ll often paint a single test model before batch painting the rest. It lets me take my time on making sure I’m selecting the right colours.
In the case of Napoleonic miniatures I find this is also useful as I will refer to images on my phone about the uniform of the unit I’m painting. Then, once the model is done, I can just keep it in view while I paint the remainder. This prevents me having to keep turning the old phone on and off while I paint.
So here’s the model, this is a phone picture so apologies.
It had been given a rating of 7.6 on BoardGameGeek from 50+ ratings.
Beyond the Gates of Antares invites us to a time when mankind has evolved into new and diverse species: the strangely powerful NuHumans, masters of the Panhuman Concord; the ape-like Pansimians, the greatest warriors in the whole Galactic Spill; and feral Revers primitive Humans driven by a irrepressible lust for adventure and danger. It is a universe where technology and humanity intermix indistinguishably, where human knowledge and endeavour has long since been supplanted by integrated machine intelligence IMTel. Where humans go their technology goes also, protectors, workers, and fighting machines in the form of WarDrones armed with deadly weapons and shielded by energy fields a thousand times more resilient than steel.
Warlord Games’ YouTube channel has produced a series of excellent videos explaining Gates of Antares.
1. Introduction
2. Order Dice
3. Shooting
4. Pinning
5. The Assault Phase
6. Leaders
7. Q&A
If you’re interested in getting into Beyond the Gates of Antares, I can’t suggest you start anywhere else but these excellent collection of videos.
It has been given a rating of 7.8 on BoardGameGeek from 550+ ratings.
Written by veteran game designers Alessio Cavatore and Rick Priestley, Bolt Action provides all the rules needed to bring the great battles of World War II to your tabletop. Using miniature soldiers, tanks and terrain, you can fight battles in the shattered towns of occupied France, the barren deserts of North Africa, and even the sweltering jungles of the Pacific.
Players get to decide which of the major or minor World War II powers they would like to represent, and then construct their armies from the lists provided. Army options are almost limitless, allowing you to build the kind of army that most appeals to your style of play. The choice is yours.
The original… now changed slightly in Warmaster Revolution
On Point HQ has produced a series of excellent videos explaining Bolt Action. I recommend checking our his other videos as well!
1. Building a Bolt Action Army
2. Unit Quality and Issuing Orders
3. Combat
4. Pinning and Morale Tests
5. HQ Units and Snap to Action
6. Transports and Tanks
7. Ambush
8. Troop and Vehicle Movement
9. Medics and Snipers
10. How HE Shots Work
11. Artillery Movement and Orders
12. The Turn Sequence
If you’re interested in getting into Bolt Action, I can’t suggest you start anywhere else but these excellent collection of videos.
I’ve added a page to the website called Wargame Rules. In there you will find any rules for scenarios or wargames that I write. At the moment its pretty empty apart from one item which is Clausewitz.
Clausewitz is the Napoleonic wargame I’ve been working on for a number of years now. This is still very much a work in progress but I’m pleased to say it’s at a stage now where I feel comfortable releasing it for public consumption.
What is Clausewitz?
Clausewitz is a Corp level game designed primarily for 6mm Napoleonic warfare. I always wanted a Napoleonic game which focused on the whole battle but where what the individual battalions actions were still important to the outcome. Therefore in Clausewitz although the basic unit is the Brigade, those brigades are made up of individual elements called Battalions or Squadrons. Think of this like individual models inside a squad in a game like 40k or AoS.
The key features of Clausewitz include:
A departure from the traditional IgoUgo turn sequence and instead relies upon chips drawn from a bag to represent a Generals actions in the turn (with each turn representing 10 minutes of battle).
The game is driven by your Generals, they must position themselves and activate the right units at the right time in order to win the day.
Objectives – There are six objectives and units can only claim an objective (and therefore score points) if a General has ordered them to do so.
Mini-Game – there is an optional fun mini pre-game to the main event in which your light troops determine the deployment zone in the upcoming battle.
Formations matter! Brigade formations and individual unit formations are presented in an intuitive fashion. The players must ensure that their units are in the right formations for the task at hand!
Alternatively there are two mods on Tabletop Simulator just for Clausewitz, the first being the test bed which is used to test the various rules as they are implemented or adjusted and the second being the Battle of Elchingen 1805, where the Austrians attempt to defend against the French advance.
There’s only a week to go with our inaugural painting competition the Woeful Brush, sponsored by our friends at SCN Hobby World.
The winner of the competition will walk away with their choice of Combat Patrol or Start Collecting Box. You still have a week to enter as the closing date for entries is 30th November 2021.
To enter, email at least two pictures of your models to thewoehammer@gmail.com. One picture must contain a note with the email address the submission is coming from, this will prove its your own work and not that of someone else.
Your chosen model must be on a base no bigger than 50mm in diameter
Only one submission per person
The miniature can be from any manufacturer not just Games Workshop
Once the submissions close on the 30th November voting will begin on the website and Twitter. Once the voting is over we will contact the winner to congratulate them and ask them for their choice of start collecting or combat patrol box.
It’s been a little while since I last posted to the A Life in Wargames series, for which I can only apologise. These articles take a lot more effort than the others I write and unfortunately I’ve simply not had the time for the research recently.
John Stallard, from the wonderful city of Cardiff in Wales is a Games Designer who for 27 years worked with Games Workshop. In 2007 her left and set up Warlord Games along with Paul Sawyer (who some of you may remember from White Dwarf).
John lived in Cardiff until he was four years old, at which point his family moved to Scotland where his father was working for BP, eventually at the age of ten John and his family moved to Worcester.
His cousin introduce him to military models and toy soldiers after his cousin thought he was much to grown up for such things handed John his collection. John set about expanding his collection by making weekly purchases of Airfix kits with his pocket money.
The first set of rules that John played was the Airfix Guide to Napoleonic Wargaming written by Bruce Quarrie (1974), which he then followed up with Skytrex’s Middle Earth Wargames Rules (1976).
Airfix Guide to Napoleonic Wargaming (1974)
After university John moved to Nottingham a move which was prompted by reading a job advert in White Dwarf. After a successful interview John joined Bryan Ansell‘s Citadel Miniatures team, initially working in the Mail Order team reporting to Rick Priestley.
John learnt about customer service from Bryan Ansell and his wife Diane. Games Workshop was very forward thinking at the time where orders would be sent as soon as an order form was received, meaning the customer often had their orders within the week rather than the 28 days advertised.
After a year John left the Mail Order team to retake his exams, which he failed. He put this failure down to playing Warhammer all the time. John then worked in a freezer warehouse during the summer where in a forklift truck accident he lost most of the toes on his left foot. He then attended the Wargames show in Manchester on crutches and saw Rick Priestley behind the Games Workshop Mail Order stand. Rick Priestley asked if he wanted his job back and he returned to Citadel Miniatures.
John progressed from Mail Order to Trade Sales, followed later by becoming Sales Manager and later became Head of Sales and then Sales Director. He stayed with Games Workshop until 2007 when he set Warlord Games.
Warlord Games came into being because I had always wanted to do historical military models. I’ve been fascinated with them since I was six. I kept on saying to two consecutive bosses at Games Workshop that the company should start to do historical models. I remember Tom Kirby, a man I admire very much, saying to me, “John, I’ve done a study and if you add all the historical gaming companies together it comes to £2m, there’s just not enough money in it.” Being older and wiser than me, he’d actually done the research. I said, “But Tom, that’s because it hasn’t really been done before. What was the market for Goblins with spears fifteen years ago? Bugger all! Citadel and Games Workshop made the marketplace by making great models and banging the drum and producing wargames rules.”
– John Stallard
John teamed up with Paul Sawyer (White Dwarf Editor in yesteryear) who’d also been made redundant by Games Workshop, they contacted Renedra Ltd, the plastic manufacturing company who has previously been Games Workshop‘s plastic manufacturing arm. They also bought on board Bob Naismith to make their figures.
Warlord’s upcoming British Starter Set for Black Powder: Epic Battles
It takes around four months for the complete manufacture of a set of plastic models. During the period after the final designs were made for their Warlord Games plastic models (Romans), John found out that the Perry twins also had an upcoming plastic release. They were still working for Games Workshop at the time but they had set up Perry Miniatures in the background (which was allowed within their contract). They were going to release some plastic American Civil War figures which would be made as either Confederate or Union troops. There release would be the first ever 28mm plastic historical wargame figures, beating Warlord Games by only two or three weeks.
John Stallard’s work:
Solo Wargaming for your Favourite Games
I’m in the process of creating a series of Wargaming Aids which allow players to play their favourite games in a single player format against an AI controlled enemy army. To find out more on this click here.
For as little as £1 a month (the price of a chocolate bar) you can help support me in this endeavour and receive cool perks as a thank you, such as access to our Discord Server as well as downloadable copies of the gaming aids which you can print out and use at home.
Why not pop over to Patreon and sign up and help me in this project? Money raised will go towards making these as physical products.
