Welcome to the Baccus weekly update, and what is currently a rare occurrence – the weekly new releases without any shades of olive drab, khaki or dunkelgelb.  But more of that later, as it’s time for the order number update.  This week we have reached the dizzying heights of #23380.

The first of this week’s releases is more of a new look for an old friend.  Many years ago, Duncan Head introduced the wargaming world to the idea that Achaemenid Persian infantry formations consisted of a front rank of bearded chaps carrying very large shields (Spara) behind which they could stand and poke long sharp pointy things at anyone threatening them.   This left all the subsequent ranks to work in relative peace and hurl invective, javelins, rocks and especially arrows on those aforementioned threatening foemen.   The subsequent formation therefore looked a bit like this

and this.

The theory was backed up by very substantial literary and artistic sources and most rules writers incorpoated these Spara formations into their army lists.

However, nagging in the background were reliefs from Royal palaces depicting Immortal infantry equipped with a distinctive dipylon shield, whose presence was never quite satisfactorily explained.

Over the years, the more traditional view of Persian infantry being more conventuonallly spear and shield equiiped infantry has never quite gone away as my email inbox can attest.   As a result we’ve fomally given into the pressure and the result is APE2a -Immortals, Shield. 

  Can I now offer congratulations to Mike who first asked me about this sometime around the Millenium…

Mike (and anyone else interested) can find more details here.https://baccus6mm.com/catalogue/ClassicalWarfare/AchaemenidPersians/

Carrying on with the theme of old friends revisited, I’m really excited to be able to release our new full colour edition of our Polemos Rules for the Wars of the Spanish Succession.   The rules themselves are the same, but they presentation has been substantially upgraded as can be seen from the following pictures.

You can find more details here.https://baccus6mm.com/catalogue/WargamesRules/WaroftheSpanishSuccession/

The new Persians look very nice indeed and will definitely be included in my next order.

Hi Peter! Can you change the title of the Post? as HEAD of the webpage you can... it leads to confusion with other Posts done by error, hurry or disinformation... we all be better served if it says by example weekly update or similar (up to you of course!) BTW I always thought the rules deserved better pics... (All of them... only ACW is well illustrated!)

The Persians look great and the same thing goes for the presentation of the ruleset. 

I do like the new look of those WSS rules.