The Gauls are massing....

Faced with a potential Roman invasion, the Gallic / Celtic forces continue to muster reinforcements.

I wasn't intending to buy anymore  painted figures from eBay, when some nicely painted Freikorps 15  caught my eye. There were some others, but these turned out to be unavailable and I settled for some average painted Essex as replacements. The usual story of missing weapons and in one case hand....so out came the super glue and baking soda and plastic broom bristles for spears or squashed flat for sword blades.

Before:

After repairs, touch ups and re-basing:

The chap with the replaced hand (from a Peter Pig elf! has been christened "Tuatha of the silver hand!"

I resisted rebasing (apart from swapping out a slinger) and ended up with another horde base.

I also did some painting, first some old Minifigs - a mix of new used eBay purchases and some broken remnants from when I painted my Celts some 20+ years ago.....new spears, swords, spear ends were needed, a couple just had their broken hands reattached. I debated more realistic hair shades with white highlights but went for a "Billy Idol" bleached blonde look - they have obviously overdone the lime wash...

This week I churned out some Galatians and Gaesati - as Stephen Caddy commented on VWC -as Father Dougal would say "they're all in the nip!"😀

A few random skirmisher figures were completed to complete stands for a lone slinger and javelinman

One area lacking was cavalry, so some assorted eBay remnants added to with some old Minifigs on original horses, produced a veritable horde of cavalry...

Originally, I was going to mix them up but ended pairing similar sized figures or manufacturers on bases. Minifigs and Essex.

Some got  fancy cloaks so rear views in all cases.

Freikorps 15 old and new redesigns

Donnington and Irregular

Again there were many with broken swords or spears.

Black undercoat, hordes white drybrush, water-based oils on horses, wiped off. Colours blocked in and armour drybrushed, then AP dark tone wash followed by touching up and highlights.

Still more to do - Germans and more Celts as well as Roman cavalry and odd things like fortifications for both sides.

Now for something different - Pete Foggin's Barbarossa

 On Martin Rapier's blog "Fred" was asking about the Barbarossa games at Hammerhead:

https://tgamesweplay.blogspot.com/2026/03/hammerhead-2026.html

After a bit of a false start, I managed to get the rules out of Pete. They are designed for a participation game with the whole campaign of 1941 on one table with players taking the part of the Germans.

The rules:

Pete created the terrain from a painted cloth with stick on Scrabble letters for the locations! In addition he also created the 10mm figures and tanks...

The idea was to replicate one of those command tables seen in movies complete with long sticks to move units. These can be seen in some more photos from Pete of the game ay Claymore - bit on the small side but I have not been able to enlarge them unfortunately.

Pete has designed figures for Outpost, Warrior, Old Glory UK and QRF and some of his 10mm are commercially available here:

https://www.foggofwarminiatures.com/

The Tyneside Wargames club meet weekly:

https://tynesidewargames.co.uk/

Other large games are the 1914 Schlieffen Plan in 10mm like Barbarossa.

Ancients progress and butterfly distractions...

Some short sessions after work and weekends have seen me clear the decks of 15mm ancients in progress.

Both were supposed to be "quick wins" as the figures were bought painted and "just" needed rebasing...

So much for plans! It turned out the rebasing was a major project and for the Romans, the re-touching turned into virtual repainting! The previous owner had not undercoated and bits of bare metal showed up. Irritatingly, the shields had been edged with brass which took several coats to rectify. Anyway, they are done now.

By way of a "before and after" I give you the Germans:

Before - as bought:

There was also a base with a lone figure - Herman the German - some mates were dug out:

I contemplated rebasing but rejected the idea - Herman was moved slightly to make room. The figures were nicely painted and close to my style - until I'd rebased I didn't notice how many blonds there were....a bit of a "Children of the Damned" look.....

After rebasing:

Herman's mates included a slinger converted to a standard bearer with club and the Minifigs chief from the generic command pack - more Sarmatian than German and as I painted him with an uncanny resemblance to Noggin the Nog.....

https://www.nogginthenog.co.uk/

Perhaps I should have painted him thus...

There were some stray Pompeians - painted a long while ago - I think of them as Evocati - recalled veterans.

And the Romans to form the new raw Legions for the campaign.

Before with some touch ups:

And fully finished varnished and rebased:

More Germans and Celts await paint.

Now butterfly distractions.....

A lot of the blame for this can be put down to Alan Gruber of the excellent Tradgardland Blog (https://tradgardland.blogspot.com/search/label/Hot%20club%20de%20Carpathia) who really inspired or re-inspired me with his post:

https://tradgardland.blogspot.com/2026/02/the-army-of-transilvania.html

Using the Strelets Rumanians as the first of his imaginary interwar nations. 

Like Alan, I like the chunky Strelets style - not all their figures are in this style and I understand one of their sculptors was killed in the ongoing war in Ukraine (http://www.deartonyblair.co.uk/2025/02/anton-derbilov-reality-of-war-strelets.html). 

In any case, in addition the the Romanians, they also do Hungarians and Italians as well as various WW1 and partizan figures in eastern European garb.

Alan cannot take all the blame. Indeed, he blames Bob Cordery for his series of posts on his Belle Époque armies ( https://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/2026/03/the-army-of-kingdom-of-ashona-is.html).

I have had a long running desire to "do" something along imaginary Interwar lines - I thought about taking Soldier King forwards, bit that seemed a mammoth undertaking; similarly, I toyed with using my Latin American country of Costaguano and its neighbours San Angeles and El Bravado for some ABC wars:

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ABC_countries

None took off or the plans spiralled into huge projects. Following Alan's post the seed planted long ago began to germinate. More cross-pollination had been dormant from the excellent Greg Horne's Duchy of Alzheim:

https://mavisming.blogspot.com/2015/12/long-live-borduria.html

Tin-Tin inspired (yet another influence). Searching the internet for 1920s and 1930s Imagi-Nations revealed comments from me about moving to a more generic "Graustark v Ruritania" background....

For the uninitiated, these are imaginary countries from romantic / adventure fiction popular in the C19th and early C20th set in vaguely eastern European principalities, indeed Bob is a fan:

https://wargamingmiscellany.blogspot.com/2013/05/an-to-z-of-ruritania.html

I had encountered Graustark elsewhere; Frank Chadwick in one of the versions of Command Decision gave a fictional ToE  for a battalion from Graustark. More tellingly, he also postulated both countries as real Balkan states in Space 1889, providing details of flags and armies in that era:

He also includes Transbalkania as another minor state - from yet another series of books (https://avramdavidson.com/the-adventures-of-doctor-eszterhazy-avram-davidson/). 

Frank Chadwick locates them squarely in the Balkans between Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria and on the borders of Austro-Hungary. Very much "Grand Budapest Hotel"!

With such synchronicity, who  can resist the temptations of 1920s and 1930s tanks and tankettes and obscure interwar aircraft?