This weekend I took part in the 15mm L'Art de la Guerre competition at Roll Call, finishing in a creditable 7th place with a Hittite army which was salvaged from the last knockings of Clive McLeods' collection.  The army was painted pretty well originally, but had suffered a LOT of battle damage so the end result I think was somewhat of a demonstration of the power of repairing and especially rebasing. More of them can be seen here on this site in an article from a few years ago.   Over the weekend I played against: New Kingdom Egyptians (won) Assyrian & Sargonid (w ..read more

I've just uploaded a new video to the Madaxeman YouTube Channel, showing the process of rebasing some 15mm Renaissance wargames figures from "DBx" bases (40mmx20mm) and rebasing them into (the really cute!) integrated Pike & Shot units that are used for L'Art de la Guerre Renaissance.   The video is pretty straightforward (OK, "basic") and takes you stepwise through a set of simple techniques for quickly and effectively rebasing 15mm (or any scale really) figures that would work for any change from one ruleset to another. Rebasing can often seem such a huge PITA that any rulese ..read more

 In a vain attempt to avoid repeatedly misspelling "Seleucid" I've just created a set of 5 video battle reports from the recent Beachhead competition in Bournemouth earlier this year.  These feature a mostly-Victrix 28mm Seleusid army taking on the Indians, Camillan Romans, Galatians, Dacians and finally the Early Imperial Romans in 5 pretty brutal and full-impact battle play-through videos. At this event neither me nor any of my opponents seemed keen to muck about, so the end result is a lot of closeups of 28mm troops in push-and-shove close quarters combat - what's not to like eh ..read more

Various real life things, and a ridiculous amount of actual gaming have rather gotten in the way of usual programming here on Madaxeman, however I have finally managed to run a quick update on my now-traditional full-year snapshot of the UK Ancients competition scene in 2023. As usual I'll start with (an abridged) version of the ground rules and caveats.  These "2023" stats cover competitions held in the UK during 2023 for which attendance information is the public domain. In practice this means "results that appear in the rankings" plus a few more unranked events that I've picked up fro ..read more

 In these four all-new YouTube battle reports a brand spanking new Alexandrian Macedonian army in glorious 28mm takes to the field for the very first time, following possibly the most extensive period of pre-game trailing of their assembly and paint schemes ever seen on this relentlessly self-promoting website.  Alexander and his band of merry Victrix men take on an array of opponents from across the world, with the Warring States Chinese, Syracusans, Lysimachids and finally Ptolemy all squaring off against the tarmac-laying Irish navvy and his crew in these 4 widescreen battle-rep ..read more

 With far too many competitions in quick succession this January/February I'm going to be dropping a number of YouTube video battle reports over the next few weeks - with 6 reports from Alicante hitting the airwaves first! These 10-15 minute videos see a Mithraditic army taking on the Warring States Chinese, Hittites, Hebrews, Alans, Kushans and Epirote Pyrrhics in the narrated reports which you can either watch on this website or on YouTube. Pull up a chair, cast your YouTube to the Big Screen and enjoy my flailing attempts to steer this legendarily "lesser than the sum of its part ..read more

 A key part of many of the Later Successor armies are the "imitation" Legionaries, where Alexander's marshalls decided to copy Rome's successful pilum+sword+shield formula, and have a tentative go at moving beyond the Greek-originated spear+shield approach. This is pretty neat, and adds variety to a wall of pikes or spears, so adding a couple of units of Imitation Legionaries to my Successor collection has always been a bit of a must.  Other than knowing that these guys were copying Roman tactics however, there's not a massive amount of evidence for where they sit on the "Look like R ..read more

 The Successor army moves on apace, with the latest addition being 3 units of Cataphracts, making the later version of the Seleucids an option to use at a future event.  I already have some Gripping Beast fully armoured horse troops, which I painted up as Arab Ghilmen cavalry quite some time ago - however those figures were very wide, with the horse armour making it impossible to do the "wargames-standard" 4 figures to a base.   It was therefore with some trepidation that I picked up a box of GB's new Roman Cataphracts, only to be pleasantly surprised to find that they appe ..read more

 As I'm currently sat at Valencia Airport waiting for a flight home, the joys of airport free WiFi have allowed me to bring you 7 all-new ADLG army lists from this weekend, with both my army and those of my 6 opponents already in the Wiki on this site. Those lists are: Mithraditic (mine) 3 Kingdoms Chinese  Hittite Hebrew Kushan Alan Pergamene FWIW, the Mithraditic army lost to the Hittites and Chinese, and then defeated the remaining four armies in this list.  Before the competition Team CLWC undertook an epic road trip, taking in Cordoba and Granada before arriving in Alica ..read more

 I've already posted a few articles about my (of course over ambitious) project to create a generic Hellenistic/Successor army in 28mm, which started with the lighter troops and peltasts, and then added some Galatians and some cavalry... all of which was really a rather folorn effort to put off tacking the Phalanx for as long as possible! The dread of the Phalanx is twofold.  First up, it's a lot of near-identical, uniform figures, which always makes painting a bit of a chore. But more importantly I had decided that the Victrix spears were simply too flimsy to use as-is, and instead ..read more