PSC SdKfz 251/10 and Roden SdKfz 234/1

I pray-painted the camouflage on these two models along with the two SPGs in January this year, but have only just gotten around to doing the weathering and crew for them.

The first is a Plastic Soldier Company SdKfz 251/10. The loader figures comes from PSC, while the figures with the SMG and MG are from AB Figures. The decals are from Peddinghaus,

The kit was a quick and easy build. The crew compartment is rather cramped, and even though I have several other crew figures, I couldn't find a way to fit them all into the vehicle.

The second vehicle is the Roden SdKfz 234/1.

I chose this one after reading a few reviews of the kits available out there, partly because I was intrigued by the fact that the anti-grenade screen is made with a sheet of mesh which came inside the kit.

As it turned out this is more of a modeler's kit than a wargamer's kit. The mesh wasn't easy to use. The turret MG and 20mm gun are fully detailed, as is the internal compartment. The wheels were a nightmare to assemble and fit onto the chassis, as they are made with a softer, more flexible material, presumably to allow the modeler to model the vehicle on undulating ground, which will show off the individual suspension of the vehicle. In my case what it ended up as was saggy wheels, which fortunately is not very obvious at tabletop distance and point of view.

With these models done I am temporarily out of WW2 vehicles to assemble or paint. I am waiting for PSC to release their German trucks in 1/72, whereupon I will purchase a box along with their RSO tractor.

Elhiem Miniatures Red Army Scouts

I still have to paint the shields and glue them onto my Iron Wind Metals Chaos warriors, but in the mean time I decided to paint up the Elhiem Red Army Scouts I bought a while back.

As you can see from the photo above, some of the figures look better than others, but over all they are nice figures that fill a niche.

They blend well enough with the Zvevda figures I already painted. Here they make up a Soviet Scout Squad under the Chain of Command rules: a sergeant, and two teams each with two men with rifles and two with SMGs.

I think the Scout rules offer an interesting tactical option for the Soviet player, and I hope to borrow wahj's Soviet platoon for a game against my own Germans soon.

Zombiecide: Black Plague

Fg and I played a game of Zombicide: Black Plague this afternoon.

The basic gameplay is very much like the "modern" version of the rules, but the fantasy theme makes it more fun.

The game components are also of a higher quality than the original version, as you can see from the photo above. The dashboard is now plastic, with recesses for the character and equipment cards. There are also slots for equipment cards which are not currently in use - these keep your cards upright so you don't forget them under the pile. I think a similar set-up will be nice for games like X-wing.

The terrain tiles are also of high quality, but not as evocative as the ones in the modern version.

Over all my impression of the game is largely the same as for the original version: the co-operative nature of the game and the difficulty of the scenario means that the players need to work together to find the best strategy to win each scenario, and oftentimes this means playing a game by committee.

April Giveaway

This month, I am giving away my copy of Battle for Empire, a set of colonial rules.

I understand that these rules are now in their second edition, but if you want to own a copy of this edition, here is your chance.

Let me know if you want the above by leaving a comment, and I will draw a winner on the 15th of the month. This is not a first-come, first-serve offer.

This offer is free; once I let you know you have been drawn, do let me have your email and mailing address, and I will mail it off to you. You don't even have to pay for postage. I am doing this not to get some money back. but to give these toys a good home. If you want to pay back somehow. I ask that you make a small donation to a local charity, or consider doing the same thing I am doing and give some gaming stuff that you no longer need/use a new lease of gaming life.

Thank you.

Iron Wind Metals Chaos Archer and Chaos Knight

When I started planning for another Lone Wolf RPG campaign I started looking for figures that I can use to represent the Drakkarim warriors, a race of evil humans aligned with the Darklords.

In the LW fluff the Drakkarim are famed for their archers, who are heavily armoured and used black bows and arrows. In the art in the Mongoose "period" the bows are depicted to have spiky bits. It can be hard to find archers in heavy armour holding spiky bows, and of course the original Mongoose figures are hard to find too. Fortunately, I came across the Iron Wind Metal line, which has to me the perfect archer model for the fluff.  They also have several melee-armed chaos warrior-types. I was planning to get a few of each of the two models you see above, but they came in bundles of a dozen each, so I bought a pack of each instead.

After I bought them I realised they can also be used as hurlocks in my Dragon Age RGP, and that with two dozens of them I have the core of a Dragon Rampant Chaos Warriors warband.

The models are crisply cast in what I think is pewter, with minimal flash and mould lines. As you can see they have integral bases, so I decided not to rebase them. I painted these two to try out the colour scheme, and hopefully the rest can be churned out in production-line fashion over this weekend and next.

I also ordered a Reaper chaos warrior type to use as the leader of the warband - Reaper has many figures fitting the description and it was quite a while before I decided on the one to get.

At the same time, I have been thinking about the Heavy Gear kickstarter my friends and I have backed. The models are in the test sprues stage, and I am expecting to receive 10 models while the other guys in the group are getting 15 models each. Our original plan was to use a modified version of the Mech Attack rules with the models, but I am concerned that the level of details in the modified rules we use will make the game too slow if we are to field 10 to 15 models per side.

Then just last week I read about the upcoming set of sci-fi rules from Osprey:

picture from Osprey

There aren't many reviews of the rules, but they do look interesting, so I pre-ordered a copy and also took advantage of an Easter sale on The Dice Shop to get some extra d12s required to play the game.
I already have a "desert" mat and have made some cork hills to go with the mat, but I do lack buildings for the project. I emailed Brigade Models to ask them if they plan to release their Desert Domes line in 10mm - hopefully they will reply in the affirmative.

Other than the Heavy Gear models we are getting, I reckon the Dropzone Commander Resistance models fg and I painted can form a faction of their own in the game too, so hopefully within a few weeks of the kickstarter being delivered I hope to play a test game and post a rules review.

Legio Heroica 15mm Late Imperial Romans

I apologise for not posting anything other than the Giveaways for the past two months, but as I mentioned in my New Year post, I have gotten back into RPGs and GMing, which really takes up a lot of time and focus. I realised that I don't multi-task too well when it comes to gaming too: when my mind is on RPG, my wargaming suffers.

Sadly, RPGs don't make interesting blog posts, unless you are into session reports or "actual plays".

The figures in the photos are Legio Heroica 15mm Late Romans. They don't look as good as the ones in the photos on the Legio Heroica website, and the fault is all mine. Thank godness for Little Big Men Studios decals.

The 4 units represent my share of the Roman-Sassanid Wars project the four of us in the group are working on. We are using the Dux Bellorum-Impetus mash-up rules, and we are planning to use the deep formation rule which allows the rear unit of archers to shoot counting from the front edge.

I had a rather hard time painting these figures, despite the relatively small figure count. There was quite a bit of flash of them, and the fiddly pattern on the tunics didn't make it any easier either.

Next on my painting list are 24 figures from Iron Wind Metals: a dozen chaos warriors and a dozen chaos archers - heavily armoured archers holding spiked bows are hard to find, but they exist. These were bought primarily for my RPGs to represent Hurlocks in my Dragon Age game as well as Drakkarim in my planned Lone Wolf game, but it will be an easy task to stat them for a fantasy skirmish game like Strandhogg or Dragon Rampant.

March Giveaway

This month, I am giving away my copy of Osprey's Of Gods and Mortals.

I bought the rules with high hopes for some inter-pantheon mayhem, but unfortunately they didn't quite hit the spot with me. Instead of just letting the booklet gather dust on my shelf, here is your chance to own it!

Let me know if you want the above by leaving a comment, and I will draw a winner on the 15th of the month. This is not a first-come, first-serve offer.

This offer is free; once I let you know you have been drawn, do let me have your email and mailing address, and I will mail it off to you. You don't even have to pay for postage. I am doing this not to get some money back, but to give these toys a good home. If you want to pay back somehow, I ask that you make a small donation to a local charity, or consider doing the same thing I am doing and give some gaming stuff that you no longer need/use a chance for a new lease of gaming life.

Thank you.

February Giveaway

With the holiday season over, I would like to start my monthly giveaway once more.

This month I am giving away a few sprues of 1/72 figures/parts from Plastic Soldier Company. They are a combination of an error on the part of the store, and my clicking on the wrong item when I made the order...

The large sprue is the 1/72 Sd Kfz 251/D Variants conversion bits - there is no vehicle in the sprue, only bits to convert a PSC Sd Kfz 251/D to one of it variants.

The two smaller packs are of German self-propelled gun crew (from their Marder set) and Russian Artillery crew.

I may also throw in other loose bits that I no longer need.

Let me know if you want the above by leaving a comment, and I will draw a winner on the 15th of the month. This is not a first-come, first-serve offer.

This offer is free; once I let you know you have been drawn, do let me have your email and mailing address, and I will mail it off to you. You don't even gave to pay for postage. I am doing this not to get some money back, but to give these toys a good home. If you want to pay back somehow, I ask that you make a small donation to a local charity, or consider doing the same thing I am doing and give some gaming stuff that you no longer need/use a chance for a new lease of gaming life.

Thank you.

UM Grille M and MMS Marder III M

I finished two models today - both open-topped self-propelled guns based on the 38(t) chassis. OK, I still need to paint up some crew figures, but the vehicles themselves are done.

The first is a UM Grille M. It's a pretty detailed kit and comes with etched brass part, including the fold-into toolbox you can see on the left side of the hull. I left a lot of details out as the crew compartment is really cramped and I won't be able to fit any crew figures in if I put the ammunition in.

It was a difficult model to build as the track-and-wheels assembly is not separate from the upper hull, which is usually the case in AFV models. This meant I could not paint the wheel separately, or assemble the tracks with ease. The link-and-length was a struggle to put together, and as you can see I botched it up.

The second model is an MMS Marder III M which Martin passed to me. This was also a difficult model to build as the instructions were unclear. The wheels-and-tracks pieces were also poorly cast and the spaces between the rear running wheels and roadwheels were filled with metal which I could not remove without risking destroying the whole pieces, so I just hid it with extra mud.

Again, the crew compartment is small and I left the ammunition out.

I bought the Grille model as a proxy for a 15cm sFH auf Lorraine Schlepper for the "Kampfgruppe von Luck" campaign Martin and I are planning to play this year - it mounted the same gun and was made from a "captured" chassis, which pretty much describes the Grille. The Marder would proxy for a Pak 40 auf S 307 (f), which mounted the same gun and was also a captured chassis.

I painted both models in the same two-tone camouflage and gave them the same unit markings to reflect the fact that they are from the same unit, but the effect is somewhat ruined by the fact that while the UM model is 1/72 in scale, the MMS model is 1/76. The difference is quite obvious when the models are placed side by side.

With the vehicles done, I have pretty much all the figures and models I need to play the campaign (after the crew figures are done - but I only need to paint four of them because that's how many I can squeeze into the crew compartments). I do need something in the order of 40 actual feet of brick walls though to play the campaign, something which will take one or two full days of hard work to do. Well, no one said miniature wargaming was an easy hobby...

Rampant Self-Promotion 2

I received a copy of Dragon Rampant in the mail today - a gift from Dan for contributing to the book. There was also a copy of Osprey's En Garde! rules in the package - thanks, Dan and Osprey!

What was my contribution, you ask? Well, I submitted a few photos of my figures, and two of them, reproduced in this post, made it into the final product.

I am, of course a regular playtester for Osprey and have been published in a print wargames magazine before (none of those *online* so-called "magazines", I assure you, no siree!), and my photographs are regularly lauded on Flickr (do people still use Flickr these days?) and have (okay, one has) been praised by none less than David duChemin in one of his podcasts, but this is the first time my two hobbies - nay, crafts! - have come together in a single medium.

But seriously, it's all been quite fun and I think Osprey's series of wargame rules have really provided an opportunity for wargamers to participate in the production of a set of wargame rules in a collective, grassroots kind of way.

So do get a copy of the rules - the artwork inside are beautiful - and I hope to be posting battel reports soon.

Italeri M-8 Greyhound, ACE Model M-5 anti-tank gun, and Valiant Miniatures 6-pounder anti-tank guns

Right, here's proof that I haven't abandoned miniature wargaming altogether.

The model is from Italeri, and can be built in the "standard" fashion, or in a "quick-build" wargamer's kit fashion - instead of fiddling with individual wheel and suspension, you glue four pieces onto the chassis.

It was overall an easy kit to build, with a very detailed 0.50 cal machinegun.

I have built the kit for fg's US army, mainly because I like the way the vehicle looks. fg will be painting up a crew figure or two for it.

I also bought, built and painted three anti-tank gun models for fg, as we are planning to play the Old Hickory campaign by TFL. This requires a maximum of four M5 75mm anti-tank gun models and two M3 57mm anti-tank guns.

The 57mm guns are from Valiant Miniatures - these came as British 6-pounders with British crew, and to convert them to US 57mm guns you simply cut off the muzzle-brake and use a different hub cap (provided in the box).

The 75mm gun was harder to come by - the only kit I could find was from ACE, a Ukrainian company. The details are not good, the plastic a little brittle, the instructions unclear; I was rather confused by the difference between what was shown on the instructions and photos of the gun I saw on google, until I realised that the kit was of the gun mounted on a rarer, older carriage.

Again, fg will be painting the crew figures for these.

Also in the assembly line are four German AFVs, which I hope to complete and post photos of soon.

New Year, new beginnings

As I mentioned in my previous post, this year will see me going on part-time, putting me on a four-day work week. I get every Monday off, but instead of just having an extended weekend every week I will try to build some structure into the day: two hours of reading on professional matters, two hours of housework and exercise, two hours of hobby time, and two hours of non-hobby-related reading, on top of things like running errands and helping with family matters.

One other new thing I am starting is the hosting of a Monday evening RPG session.

If you have read my Origins: post, you will know that I was a RPG gamer before I was a wargamer. This year marks thirty years since I first became a game master. Over the years I may have wargamed more than I played RPGs, but I have always kept an eye on RPGnet forum and bought modules on RPGnow once in a while, in the hope that someday, somehow, I will get a group together again.

Then last month, while taking shelter from a sudden rain, I went into a library. With perhaps an hour to while away, I naturally gravitated to shelf 793 - Dewey Decimal for indoor games. There, on the shelf, I picked up Of Dice and Men, and before I knew it I have gone through half the book.

When I got home, I bought the ebook and finished reading the remainder of the book. The book awakened something in me; like the author, I craved a game of RPG. My last campaign was in 2013 and it only lasted two sessions as the players had difficulty meeting with the regularity that an RPG campaign required. If I wanted to get a group together, I had to look elsewhere...

I googled around, and in the end found a local Meetup forum for D&D. After a couple of days looking for a game to join without success, I posted my own "wanted" post. There was silence for a couple of days afterwards, but in a week I had three players signed up, and the next two more asked to join, but I have decided to stop at four (the first three from the forum plus fg) for a start.

So over the last three weeks I have bought a new set of rules (Dragon Age by Green Ronin), a fluff book (World of Thedas Volume 1), created the player characters with the players over email (three of them wanted to play a Rogue - is this some sort of Assassin's Creed thing?), bought, printed, cut out and pasted to PVC foam boards twenty-two 10 x 10 terrain tiles, bought and read half a dozen modules, read two ebooks on game mastering (three if you count Of Dice and Men), ordered six more Gamescience dice (so I have dice in three different colours and we can roll for damage in the same toss when we roll to-hit... plus I can always use more d6s for Chain of Command), prepared Quick Reference Sheets in hard clear plastic cases for everyone, and even made an Initiative Tracker out of bits left over from materials I bought to make movement trays.

I am pretty excited about the whole project, and admittedly all this planning and preparation comes at the expense of my wargaming. But rest assured that I will continue to paint and play wargames and share my works and games with my readers, and when I can, I will get back to my monthly give-away again.

2015 in Review and Looking Ahead

Another year, another review post.

We played a total of 21 games in 17 sessions, which is fewer than what we did last year, but perhaps not surprising due to our various work commitments.

Most of my predictions for the year did not come true: we did not play any Warhammer game (despite the large number of figures I painted or refurbished - although I am still optimistic for 2016), we have not played a single game of Black Powder (but that is due to Martin and I playing Chain of Command whenever we have a session), and rather surprisingly, we did not play Frostgrave even though fg bought a copy of the rules.

Also did not happen were the Bronze Age heroic warfare game (my fault, that) and the Blood Bowl tournament.

The first third of the year was spent mainly on painting figures for Warhammer Fantasy and playing our dungeon crawl game. The second third of the year was spent painting up the Rohan figures (which have not yet seen any action, come to think of it) and the 15mm War and Empire figures. The final third of the year was dominated by Chain of Command, and for me the acquisition, building, and painting of vehicle models.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed painting vehicles, and since August I have been building one model after another, either something I bought myself, or something wahj or Martin bought themselves a long time ago but never painted and then passed to me. At this moment I have seven models in my building/painting queue, and I am eyeing a couple of releases from Plastic Soldier Company next year.

Chain of Command looks set to be the main course for 2016 too. Wahj, fg, Martin and I each have our own platoon (Martin has two, in fact), and we aim to play two of the Pint-sized campaigns from Too Fat Lardies over the course of the year. To achieve this I will need to complete the vehicles in my list, and also produce some 40 feet of walls for the tabletop. This will be a major enterprise.

The other period we are also painting for is the Roman-Sassanid War in 15mm, which will be played using our own Impetus-Dux Bellorum mash-up rules. My own contribution for this project is small (amounting to 54 figures in total), but Late Roman infantry is proving to take longer to paint than I had expected.

Our focus for the next year seem a lot narrower, which is probably a good thing.

That said, another thing that is likely to demand our attention in the second third of the year is the Heavy Gear kickstarter, which will likely deliver in the first quarter of the year. Again, my part in this is small (only 8 models), but I do look forward to painting and weathering some mecha models.

Another side project possibility I am keeping an eye on is the Immortal rules from Broken Spirit Wargames. The release of the rules have been delayed, but hopefully the result will be worth the wait.

The year 2016 will also see a few other changes.

I will be working fewer days each week, which will give me more time to spend with my family, on the hobby, on personal and professional development, exercising, and generally just keeping my place tidy.

One of the things having an extra free day a week allows me to do is to get back into role-playing games. RPG, specifically fantasy RPGs, have been a major passion of mine since I was a teenager. But as my friends and I get older and take on more responsibilities it became harder and harder to find the time it takes to game at the regularity that a campaign requires to maintain its momentum. Now, I have taken the leap and posted on a local meet-up forum and found myself a few players who are willing to play in a campaign I will game-master. Hopefully this will work out.

Have a good New Year, and thank you for reading.

Everything I painted this year

With just a few days left in the year I doubt I will have anything else painted, so I will sum up the year by compiling the photos of all the stuff I painted this year in a single post. Here they are:

28mm Fantasy/Medieval:

20mm WW2:

15mm Ancients:

Others:

10mm Sci-fi: