In July little tins of paint have a tiresome habit of becoming rock solid. There must be some liquid known to man that simply dissolves the crusty bits around the rimI suppose it would dissolve everything else too. Fearing that the 15mm revolution would soon overtake me and leave me with hordes of oversized Saxons, I invested £ 3 in the basics of that most romantic of armies, the Arthurian British. I have before me a small unit of spearmen based more or less accurately on Ian Heath's drawing No.29, which I have painted up, noting the following points: the time taken in painting the unit compared very favourably with 25s. the paint wastage did not. I should paint in much larger batches in order to use up a very small pod of paint. detail remained surprisingly similar. I managed moustache and eyes (two tone, a spot of blue on a spot of white) but then I always use up a fair number of triple-0 brushes. I copped out on the crossed garters, as I fear I do even on 25s, never having had success with them. the manufacturers did tend to let me down in some aspects. In this spearman figure, the warrior is provided with a sac-like excrescence between his hands and resting on his stomach. You can't see this from one side of the figure, but you feel a bit silly painting tunic-colour an area which is patently a casting mistake, and one not easily rectified with the jeweller's file. Similarly, a cavalryman has what appears to be a camp-bed among his armament. I think it is meant to be two spears. The question of preference depends increasingly on price. Most wargamers like some choice within their favourite army: thus I can field a 1066 Anglo-Saxon army, predominantly mail-clad and axe-wielding, or a largely C and D class seventh-century army led by the man who actually wore the Sutton Hoo helmet, with no figure fighting in both. These days it is a luxury to buy up examples from every new Saxon and Viking range, as I once tended to do. The solution, as I see it, is to create your broad-based armies from 15mm ranges, and leave 25s for your second army, perhaps taken from the army lists and utilising no surplus figures at all. I realise I speak here for those of fairly humble income, but it is my experience that wargaming gets many recruits from the ranks of third to sixth formers, whose enthusiasm may not match their pockets. 15mm figures go some way to solving this problem, although I did wince at one lad who fielded a suitably-based but entirely unpainted 15mm Roman army against some hapless but at least colourful Gauls. Some penalty, I suggested, should be incurred per unpainted figure. The Roman muttered something about exams and point out, not unjustifiably, that he preferred a silver army to one painted as hurriedly as his opponent's. I forget what Vercingetorix said in reply. I suppose I am the only humourless wargamer who finds that other people's battle or campaign reports lose much by being lumbered with whimsical nomenclature. Somehow an interesting battle-plan or manoeuvre forfeits respect when executed by G.Sextus Inebrius or Mediokrites or the Emperor Charsiu. Wargamers, in print or across the table, display many excellent qualities, of which wit, being one of the least necessary, takes a suitably low position. Those who like amusing names need look no further than the Icelandic Sagas, which furnish more entertainment per nickname than a hundred armies led by Queen Hernia and all her witless ilk. Incidentally, is it only we Ancients that are so afflicted, or do other periods suffer similarly? (Anglo-Saxon humour tended to the laconic, grim, even sometimes a deadpan bawdy, but never, I venture to suggest, trite.) Back to Table of Contents -- Wargamer's Newsletter #210 To Wargamer's Newsletter List of Issues To MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1979 by Donald Featherstone. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com