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Monday 25 July 2016

OLD-SCHOOL OTTOMAN ARMY



At the Tring Club we recently were contacted by a chap who offered to give away his wargames collection to any members of the club who wanted to use them. These were old 25mm wargames figures that hadn't seen the light of day since the early 1980s, but it was still a generous offer, which we gratefully accepted.

I ended up with a box labelled 17th century Ottomans and Poles. This contained about 300 painted 25mm figures, mostly a mix of Hincliffe and Minifigs, with a sprinkling of other manufacturers, the majority unbased or on flimsy bits of card, riders not stuck onto horses, loose spears etc. These bought back memories as they were the sort of figures I started gaming with back in the early 1970s. Once I'd got them all sorted out I realised that the Poles were quite incomplete, missing winged hussars or other heavy cavalry, so I put them aside for the time being.The Ottomans, on the other hand, seemed to be a viable army as they stood, comprising of 46 cavalry, 90 infantry and 2 cannon with 11 gunners. Admittedly the normal Ottoman army would have a higher cavalry to infantry ratio, but these would give me a playable army "out of the box".

My aim is to get these onto the table as quickly as possible, so no repainting other than a quick touch up of obvious damage, a wash and a coat of varnish. I'm not sure of which ruleset I will be using at this stage so the basing will be to be as generic as possible. I'll put the cavalry on 25x50mm bases and the infantry will probably end up on 25mm washers.

So here they are at the first stage;

The Infantry


Some of the Cavalry

Sipahis stuck onto horses and rebased.

1 comment:

  1. I'm making assumptions about the rules you'll use here, but remember you will probably have about twice as many infantry in a unit than cavalry so the cavalry/infantry ratio may be fine.

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