Anno Domini 1666

Apparently 17^th century Poles were fond of wearing leopard skins. It’s the first time I paint leopard skin. I’m happy with the result.

I’ve painted my first miniatures for this project: the Polish dragoons.

For the colour scheme I found an image of a Polish dragoon from 1683 in Polish Armies 1569 – 1696 (2) from the Men-at-Arms book series from Osprey Publishing. I’ve tried to copy this image as accurately as possible for these miniatures. For the other Polish miniatures I will try to stay close to the look of the dragoons.

The same book mentions king Sobieski’s dragoons were dressed in red. Since Sobieski has a miniature in this game, I assume they are his dragoons in red.

This game comes with a lot of cards in different sizes. Hundreds of them! To protect them I wanted to put them in sleeves. Never having played collectible card games the world of sleeves was new to me.

This are the sizes of sleeves you need for AD1666 and the ones I bought. I choose matt sleeves.

• Mini American for equipment cards; Board Game Sleeves (Non-Glare): Mini (50 in a box)
• Standard MTG for character cards and game cards (the game uses these cards instead of dice); Dragon Shield Card Sleeves: Standard Matt (63x88mm) (100 in a box)
• Double MTG size for some characters; Mayday Card Sleeves (Premium): Custom Tiny Epic Kingdoms (88x125mm) (50 in a box)

I bought 400 mini American sleeves, 400 standard sleeves and 50 double size sleeves. That should be enough.

To my surprise I enjoyed putting all my cards in sleeves. It’s an opportunity to take a closer look at all the cards in the game and may help to grasp the game better later. At the end I had some sleeves left, but not that many. For the mini American sleeves: 350 is enough. Ah well, they have plans for a new Kickstarter to expand on this game. Without a doubt with a lot more cards…

Now I need to store all these sleeved cards somehow. The boxes in which the sleeves come can be used to store them once there filled. There is even room on the boxes to wright down the content. But for the character cards, I wanted something special: an album. I bought the Dragon Shield Card Codex in the photos bellow. The cards look great in it.

The eight pages the codex comes with aren’t enough. An extra set of 24 pages are far too many! I will certainly have enough pages for the cards of the follow up Kickstarter.

With all my cards sleeved and properly stored, the next step is to start painting miniatures. This may take some time. I have another project to finish first.

In 2018 Wargamer Games Studio launched a Kickstarter for Anno Domini 1666. Essentially this is a skirmish and espionage game played on a board. It’s a largely historical game set in Vienna with some fantasy elements added in the expansions.

During the Kickstarter I took the all-in pledge. Once the pledge manager came online an even bigger all-pledge became available and off course I bought it. Then I waited. For a year and a half. And then… it arrived:

The game contains the following factions:

• Represented by the Royal Musketeers, including d’Artagnan, Portos, Aramis and Athos.
• Poland
• The Ottoman Empire
• The Broken Cross (an evil sect)
• Spain
• Cossacks
• Monster hunters
• Monsters
• Magical beings (eg. a succubus)
• “The locals.” These are tugs, thieves, guards and other inhabitants of Vienna.
• The Cardinals Guard (from Cardinal de Richelieu)
• The werewolf

I don’t know how many miniatures there are in total, but I suspect close to a hundred.

Project goals

1. I want to do these very nice miniatures justice and will try to paint them to a higher standard then I usually do.
2. As historically accurate as possible.
3. Try out new techniques such as zenithal priming and glazing