SOARING TO NEW HEIGHTS - LEVIATHANS: THE GREAT WAR

Italians Vs Germans 1914

 It has been a long wait, but finally Leviathans: The Great War Kickstarter is getting ready to ship. An alternative WWI era where flying warships dominate the skies of the world. The original game released in 2012 to great success and was set in 1910. This saw only British and French Air Fleets battling, while the new version has added German, Italian and Russians to the war. Combat is a unique die system using a set of color coded polyhedrals with Green 4 sided, Blue 6 sided, Yellow 8 sided, Red 10 sided and Black 12 sided all using D12 dice. Weapons are guns and aerial torpedoes, with an occasional ram attack as well. A key feature is unlike most sequenced movement systems where you get conga lines with the best ships holding back to the end to move, this uses the bigger you are the sooner you move in the turn. This plays out with first side A moving its Battleships, followed by side B's Battleships, then A's Battlecruisers, B's Battlecruisers, followed by Cruisers and finally Destroyers. This means lumbering Battleships that are bristling with firepower are vulnerable to smaller faster moving ships that can pick where they want to engage from. The games are fleet action in nature with a typical force of a single Battleship and/or Battlecruiser with an escort of around 3-5 Cruisers and Destroyers. The models come assembled and pre-painted so are game ready right out of the box. To say I am a fan is an understatement. 

I am going to let the pictures do the rest of the talking. 

Italian Destroyer and Prussian Cruiser out of the box.

Prussian Destroyer After I Have Added a Simple Wash. 

Italian Cruiser Again After a Wash.  

British Battleship Again with the Same Wash Treatment. 

The Same Three Ships Shown Together for Scale Comparison. 

The game comes as a Starter Box with rules, boards, dice and a set mix of Destroyers. The add-ons are Fleet Pack of a single Nations Battleship, Cruiser and Destroyers and Ship Packs of each Class of Ship separately. Each ship comes with two versions with different configurations and the cards in the Fleet Packs are different from the cards in the Individual Packs. 

A Game in Action. The Price of Reckless Behavior as an Italian Cruiser Used Its Speed to Get into the Middle of the German and British Fleet. 

ONCE MORE INTO THE BREACH - I'M BACK

 After losing my general miniatures Mk 2 blog nearly a year ago I felt it was finally time to start a new one, thus is born Mk 3. While I have not posted anything outside my Dog Wars Campaign blog, I have not been idle. For the past few years I have been saying, "No new project!", and by that, I mean less than a dozen. OK, so I have a bit of an issue when it comes to miniatures. I have rarely met a miniature I didn't like, or gotten a boardgame that I don't think, you know what would make this better? Miniature. With that said here are pictures of my latest projects over the past months. 

War in the Ohio, 1812. First Nation and United States

Punic War, Hyboria Wars Allied Spear. Warlord Epic

Carthage Sacred Band

Sacred Band Phalanx

Sacred Band Rear. The Side I Mostly See

New Plastic Quar

Quar Crusader Resin Tank and Fidwog Plastic Tank

Plastic 15mm Joan of Arc Spear and Halberds

Joan of Arc French Vs English

Clash of Steel - Cold War Gone Hot US Armor

Soviet Armor

Only four months into the year and already jumped to five projects. I wonder what I could accomplish if I stayed focused?

A little background on the Punic Wars / Hyboria. This is my oldest miniatures project. Begun in my teens when all I played was D&D and boardgames, plus it was a time I still built models. I picked up the February 1978 Battle for Wargamers Magazine. In it were two articles that caught my interest, Stuart Asquith's Battles of the English Civil War for Wargamers, and Tony Bath's Hyboria - The Campaign That Grew. After reading these I was hooked. From this point on I wanted to play with figures in everything. Within a short time, I had picked up Tony's Setting Up a Wargame Campaign and proceeded to start collecting Carthaginians while my key gaming buddy went for the Romans. Needless to say, I made every mistake you can, mostly being way to ambitious and the whole thing fell apart. Over the next forty odd years I have started and stopped this project at least a half dozen time, yet I continue to strive to make this work. More on this as things progress. 

I still own this and all the rest of Battle/Military Modeling they published.