the Miniature World of Mike Peters: The Long Road to Partizan

Friday, May 15, 2026

The Long Road to Partizan - The Plan

The Cunning Plan

So we are going to Partizan, but what game are we going to present? I knew I wanted to use the Reivers, but I didn’t know how.

I played several games with Rob Squires, Jordan Linton, Mark Taylor and Chris Bailey featuring an ambush using the Reivers figures that we had between us, and we began to gain a feel for how they worked on the table and slowly an ambush scenario started to evolve.

Then I painted the Queens Envoy set from FOW and that inspired the scenario. The Queens Envoy- a dark tale of Ambushment and Deep Skullduggery in the 16^th Century…

Pic the information board for Partizan

We played this through a few times but never had enough reivers figures to provide a balanced scenario and although I was pleased with my version of Slackbladder and his men, in practice they proved to be nearly invincible. Slackbladder was an excellent leader and a very capable fighter too which did not feel right for the appalling coward he is meant to be. It was back to the drawing board and eventually I arrived at a much less impressive, but more cunning Slackbladder and brought a dashing Lord Flashheart into the game to provide leadership and cahoonas.

It was only in the week leading up to Partizan that I realised that I had given my only Flash figure away as a prize at BIG Ruckus VI. I emailed Dan at Wi and he offered us a loan of the Wi GIM model…woof!

Now that we knew what we were doing, several of the Ruckusteers started creating Reivers Retinues. I wanted to have about eighty figures on the table which is what we had with Robin Hood last year and it looked about right. However, due to the vagaries of life only Chris was able to get some figures together which left me wondering if we had enough to stage the game.

Pic the Irish always ready for a fight!
I thought of a plan B which involved a raid by Finn Mac Cool and his Irish as I have a lot of Irish and this would save a lot of figure painting which is time consuming. It was reassuring knowing that we had a ready-made force that we could take instead and we plodded on.
I carried on painting regardless. I had some very fine Garrion men printed from FoW by Chris and created a small Elizabethan escort for Slackbladder. With these and with Chris’ Reivers we have enough figures. Yay!

Last year I had no idea what to expect of Partizan, we took the same mat and terrain as we game on week after week, nothing special, we had a great day and to my everlasting surprise we won the Duncan McFarlane award for the best demo game.
This year I wanted to make more effort and create a demo game specifically for the show, a game that we could take to several shows this year. We will run it as demo at Partizan, but I also plan to use it as a participation game at other shows with up to 6-8 players and a choice of 4-6 different scenarios going on at the same time. The scenarios will be drawn from a deck of cards for each player. As one player completes a quest or drops out we will have another step in and I aim to have continuous play throughout the day.
We will be taking the game to Attack at Devizes, Colours at Newbury and Crack Con in Derby.

Having painted the figures and the buildings, created a new faux fur mat and some new hills and renovated my tired old trees I turned my attention to the fluff and the playing aids.

The Profiles for each Character were printed and mounted on card. There are fourteen of them. They will be placed along the sides of the game and act as an aid memoire for the Players.

I also created some information boards. The Border Reivers is a little known conflict even among wargamers and I thought a little information might increase interest. The wonderful illustrations of Angus McBride always draw the eye!