Today I received a very exciting parcel from the postie. Warlord Games have very kindly sent me a preview set of there new epic punic wars set to paint, demo and blog about. Anybody who knows, me will know that I am very excited about Roman history in general and miniatures gaming set in Ancient Rome in particular. Sally 4th has been developing ranges of 28mm Early Imperial Romans and Roman Civilians for the last couple of years. The offering from Warlord games, is a very exciting departure, for a start it is an earlier period of history, featuring the Roman Republic and it’s wars with its neighbour and rival, Carthage. Secondly it is a completely different scale.

The miniatures are approx. 13.5mm high, in the bizarre (to an outsider) wargames system of measurement from toe to eyeball of an average adult male. This scale gives a pleasing 10 miniatures to a 60mm frontage base. Units consist of three bases, so a units frontage is typically 180mm, similar to the frontage of a 28mm unit, but with lots and lots more figures on the base. Light troops tend to have 5 figures to a base, medium / heavy infantry have 20 figures in two ranks and the well dressed, close order Romans have 30 figures to a base in three ranks.

I’m not going to preview the sprues at the moment as we’ve been seeing lovely detailed photographs of those since Salute, back in April.

My plan is to paint these preview armies up so I can run some demo games before the game is launched at the end of July, so I plan to cover my painting & army building with weekly blog posts, a bit like the ‘Tales of two gamers’ … back in the days!

A quick look at the rules has given me a little hope (and guidance), it looks like entry level into Hail Caesar / Epic Punic Wars is a 300 point army, which for Punic Wars is 14 units (of 3 bases), if I want to get these done in around a month, I’ll need to average a unit of three bases, a night. I’m planning to try painting the figures using Army Painter Speed Paints, my ‘go to’ range for 28mm painting, so will get started and let you know how I get on!

I was very pleasantly surprised by the A5 soft back rules. I was expecting them to be a softback copy of Hail Caesar, but they are much more than that. On a quick lunchbreak flick through, the basic rules look very similar to Hail Caesar, but Warlord have managed to squeeze in lots of gorgeous photographs of there new miniatures plus a wealth of background information on the dress, equipment and history of the protagonists and the background and prosecution of the historic campaigns.

The bit that I really like, and I think will shape our local gaming for the next year or so as the significant campaign section which tells the story of the Punic Wars and between the narrative gives you scenarios for playing out the major engagements of the wars.

Epic Punic Wars launches at the end of July.

We have all of the launch products available to pre-order now, at a hefty pre-order discount, click here to take a look.

Tune in again next week to see how I have progressed with first weeks painting!