Preparing for To The Strongest

Next weekend myself, Essex Boy, World2Dave and Goat Major will be gathering at the Foundry venue in Newark to play a big game of To The Strongest. Myself and Dave have quite big 15mm Punic War forces, Simon has a good few as well and Iain…well…Iain has a few Greeks…a very few Greeks…

Dave and Simon (W2D and GM) have collated all our forces and worked out lists etc. and basically there is nothing for me to do but turn up with all my stuff and play. But that is far too easy… So… I’m repainting shields and rebasing a legion, rebasing cavalry and rebasing command stands. And painting a few odd figures for the latter!

My Romans are the first 15mm I painted when I got back into wargaming in 1993 after my travels. I painted the first legion in traditional red. And while agonising over shield designs I read somewhere that they often had a plain cover over the shields so I decided to paint them a mid-brown colour. And then for some bizarre reason I then painted the metal boss and top and bottom metal edges! These would logically be UNDER the cover! This has bugged me for several decades but I’ve never got round to re-painting the sheilds. So now seemed a good time to start.

I went for white and then decided to do the plumes as well…

The whole lot will be rebased as well in my current style. I also decide that the command stands should be on round bases and not the old DBM CAV 40x30s… I’ve put the CinC on 50mm and the sub-commanders on 40mm. Plenty of time to finish them by Friday…

I also had six stands of Carthaginian cavalry that I bought painted years ago. I never got round to re-doing the bases and they were also an almost gloss varnish. So I’ve stripped them off the bases and matted them ready for re-basing.

Again, the Carthaginian commands are DBM style so I’m painting up four foot figures to make two sub-commanders and at some point will do a proper CinC.

A lot of the figures are still based in my old style. These broadly blend in but I think as I add to the forces I’ll re-base the rest as I go. So hopefully I’ll get these done before Friday! Pics if I do else you’ll have to wait for the full game report.