The mysterious Project T is officially started!

As I have a couple of sadly unemployed ancients armies, namely Greek and Celtic, I've thinking about finding some work for them.

So enter Project T. We are going to take these guys, find some rules, buy and paint some contemporaries for them and drop them on a mediterranean island. Then we see who gets voted off the island at spearpoint...

The first stage is selecting the ruleset. I've previously used these guys with Warhammer Ancients 1st edition, Vis Bellica and even Fantasy Rules! Fantasy Rules is fun, but I feel it's a bit bland for historical or almost historical games.

Vis Bellica I didn't really care for. The pre-battle thing is interesting especially if you take the time to prepare the mystery templates properly, but I wasn't too keen on the actual gameplay and I felt the army lists were pretty restrictive requiring you to acquire and paint very rare miniatures that were then completely useless in gameplay (Carthaginian chariots anyone?). And I'm not a huge fan of roster-based games.

Warhammer Ancients is obviously out with a new edition, which I just recently got. It's got a track record and all the required army lists, but I'm still not 100% sold on that.

Let me lay down a few ground rules for the rules selection:

- The rules have to work with my figures, which means individually based 28mm figures.

- Absolutely no rebasing. This basically rules out all rules based on DBM basing, my figures just won't fit on that antiquated scheme. However, movement trays are okay if they are large enough.

- Must have support for all belligerents around the med in ca. 500BC to 200BC. The actual time period for the game will be defined later, but it would be somewhat stupid if my existing figures didn't find a place in it.

- Must work on normal table sizes with 100-200 figure armies. This is just realism, I don't have a larger place to play and something requiring 500 figures per side is just never going to get finished.

- I don't really have the endurance for hyper-detailed table/modifier fests. Games should last 2-3 hours.

So I went ahead and ordered Hail Caesar. Obviously my name isn't Michael Perry and I don't have a 10,000 figure collection all painted up and ready to use, but let's see if this can be adapted to mere mortals.

Then I was thinking about some new ruleset I had heard about, stumbled on Clash of Empires and ordered that as well.

As it turned out, the ruleset I was thinking about was actually Crusader's rules (shows my concept of "new" is colored by my four year hiatus). So I went ahead and ordered that one as well.

Oh yes, and I do have Osprey's Field of Glory tucked in somewhere. I just fell asleep reading it. Doesn't seem to be my cup of tea, but it looks like a well supported ruleset for those with more need for complexity.

P.S. Naval rules for the same period would be nice as well... but more on that later.

maxxon