Month: February 2017

No longer gathering dust!

I’ve had a pile of minis in various stages of painting on my desk for the better part of a year. I started a LRDG/Desert Rats force for my friend Murph in 2015 and made some serious progress on it. He changed directions with it and some of the men got put aside as I assembled and finished more Thompson armed troops. Late in 2016 we both switched over to making late war German grenadier armies and these troops got pushed further back into the shadows of the painting table. Time came to finish these guys up and get them off to Murph.

First up were the Desert Rats and SAS. These were all base coated and only needed to be washed and high lighted. 7 riflemen, one officer and a radioman from the Desert Rats are ready to go along with two SMGs and a Bren gun for the SAS.

Next were two sets of Black Tree Design American .30 cal gunners I also posted earlier. Washed, highlighted and sealed they’re now ready for action!

Rounding out the group are a couple of stragglers. A German medic that was waiting for decals and the officer from a pack of Warlord Gurkhas. I’m not a huge fan of doing decals, despite how much I like the look afterwords. So I was waiting on doing some vehicles so I could just sit down for a couple hours and do a bunch at once. This past week I got the decals done (pics from the vehicles later) and this guy is finally off the desk!

It may seem like a lot, especially after my last post earlier this week, but these guys were about 90% done, just sitting there. It was nice to be able to get these off the desk without doing a whole lot of work.

Group shot!

So that’s 20 or so guys off the desk! I have a whole bunch of German Pak40 crew and mortar teams on there now and the remainder of these Desert Rats that were only primed. I’m hoping by the end of next week I can have them all base coated and ready for a wash.

 

This week’s progress!

With the new year I’ve been making a lot of progress on painting and assembling minis. I had started 14 minis last week for my friend Murph’s late war grenadiers and just finished them today. I also found 7 that I had finished but not sealed or added washers to and finished them up last night. I like the mixed nature of the late war German army and with the first batch of minis I made for him I had mixed up the gear a lot. I added pouches and packs from Russian and American sets and gave them Russian SMGs and painted them grey. This batch that I’ve started on I switched up the uniform color to a more green Field Grau, to emphasize the supply problems and mix of uniforms. The grenadier set already does a good job with the weapons, including a good mix of kar98’s, gewehr 43’s, MP40’s and PPSH submachineguns.

First off are 2 Panzerschreck teams from Black Tree Design.

Next up are two panzerfaust armed troops. One of them is running with an armload of panzerfausts. The instruction sheet that came with the box had a fellow made up similarly and I loved the idea. I have quite a few panzerfausts laying around since the sprues come with one loose one and one in the firing position, plus some leftovers I have already. Not enough to make a boatload of guys like this but enough to make one or two. I have a guy waiting to be primed that has a panzerfaust in one hand and a teller mine in another. I think it adds a little character to the squad.

Four more riflemen, you always need more riflemen.

One trooper with a STG44 assault rifle. The assault rifles are a little worse in Bolt Action v2 than in v1 so we don’t need as many.

3 men with MP40’s, two with caps to signify that they’re NCOs. Also, they’re pointing, NCOs always point…

And a group photo!

 

The figures I found:

Five riflemen, this brings the total up to 18 riflemen. Probably enough for awhile.

An officer with a map and field glasses, and a lone machinegunner.

I also mistaken discovered the best matte spray I’ve found yet! I use my airbrush to seal my minis and I grabbed what I THOUGHT was the matte varnish but would up being the matte medium fluid. Hot damned it cuts down ALL the shine on the minis! I went back over it with the matte varnish becuase I’m not sure how well it protects them, but I finished it off with another layer of the matte medium fluid and I’m really happy with the results.

 

I have a pile of half finished guys sitting on my desk waiting to be done for next week. About a dozen Perry desert rats and some Black Tree .30 cal US troops. I need to move my painting desk so the pile of half done things I was slowly working on in between Germans gets bumped up in priority.

 

 

Schenectady Wargamers Association Feb Bolt Action Day

The NY/NJ Bolt Action escalation league continued at the Schenectady Wargamers Association with another Bolt Action day. We set up three tables and had five players come by for a day of gaming. I’ve been trying off and on to get a Bolt Action community going in the area for a couple of years now with little success. A new game store opened in Perth (Guardian Games) and they had a fist full of players actively playing at the same time we announced the joint NY/NJ escalation league and several of them jumped at the chance to join! This combined with the 4-5 other players in the area who are interested have given us the critical mass to get this off the ground! Th league continued into month 2 with 750 point single platoon lists on 4×4 tables. Me and my friend Murph have been busy buying and making more terrain, but keeping the tables at 4×4 certainly helped us fill them up. We’re confident that we will be able to fill 4×6 tables by next month and we’re looking forward to fielding 1000 point armies full of toys to play with!

We initially put together 3 tables, with Bruce from Guardian Games bringing some of his own terrain to fill out a fourth table with a factory setup that’s going to look awesome once painted.

We had four different German forces and one American force. I unfortunately lost two games and won only one. I narrowly missed drawing one game due to figure placement. I had to be 3 inches from the objective and I was 3.5, my opponent took a very hard fought win with American and German dead scattered around the battlefield. The highlight of that game was my Nebelwerfer hitting twice, one hitting two units directly and splashing damage onto a third squad of airborne TWICE,  dealing four casualties and FIVE pins to them. That squad never recovered and was eliminated on the next round. My nebelwerfer also managed to nail a sniper team that was positioned to take the objective. Runner up to that was three rounds of a .50 cal armed jeep and a bazooka team firing away at a kubelwagon at point blank range and either missing or failing to do any real damage to it. The game ended on the 7th turn with his LT on the objective and my mortar team having run up to great cover that was half an inch away from the objective.

I was taking pictures of the other games when I could, but didn’t pay too much attention to them. The highlight of my friend Murphs game I did catch was his opponent sneaking a Puma to point blank range behind his Stuh and missing, only to have a squad with a panzerfaust take a long range shot and blow it up! The Stuh got to live and rain HE death down upon some Waffen SS dogs!

 

Some more pictures here

Airborne: The Battle of Carentan review.

I’ve only been wargaming seriously for about six years now, and have only been playing 28mm WWII for three years. Compared to a lot of people I’m like a babe lost in the woods. After a year of playing Bolt Action my desire for something more historical lead me to Chain of Command and growing interest in the battle for Carentan shortly after D-Day. The problem with Carentan seems to be that it was a relatively short battle and, although pivotal in securing Normandy and linking several forces together, it went fairly quickly and without too many problems. It seems to get glossed over and aside from some chapters in what amount to biographies of men or units there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of academic style writing on it with maps and non-anecdotal reports. This past year was rough and I was planning on picking up a couple of books I had found out about and doing some more research to make a series of linked scenarios around Carentan for Chain of Command and Bolt Action. I was just starting to think about it again and trying to figure out when to start to get ready for an October convention when I see an ad on The Miniatures Page for Britton Publisher’s Airborne: The Battle of Carentan, procrastination won out once again! After a little searching and an unkind utterance in regard to the website I plunked down my $11 and bought the PDF.

The book has 12 scenarios ranging in size from a single squad to company level engagements. A quick count shows 1 squad level scenarios, 4 platoon level scenarios, 3 company level scenarios and two scenarios each that are either platoon vs company or squad vs platoon engagements.

It starts off with several pages describing the background to the battle, the German forces involved, how they rate the troop qualities, and describes a number of important considerations such as the hedgerows, marshes, bridges and the Belgian Gates that held off and funneled the American troops as they approached Carentan. Throughout the book there are some very good contemporary military maps, aerial reconnaissance photos and modern satellite images and in a couple of places some photos of gaming table setups.

Every scenario has a paragraph or two of the setting and lead up to the scenario, a solid breakdown of the forces involved, the victory conditions and the historical outcome and aftermath. It also has GM’s notes and deployment rules where needed, and also has footnotes and citations to the books referenced in the sources section. This book is well researched and a treasure trove of information for the battle of Carentan.

This is the fourth book in their Airborne series chronicling the battles from D-Day though Carentan. They’re $11 for the PDFs or $17 for the printed versions. With 12 scenarios in each book you could spend years fighting these battles out! This is the first scenario book I’ve read that wasn’t from a games manufacturer and I’m very pleased and the variety of scale included in these scenarios, a friend of mine wants to try out Nuts! and I think the smaller scenarios would be perfect for it. I’m very happy with this book and will almost certainly pick up the rest in the series.

 

Forgot to add links to the books the first time around!

Britton Publishers Facebook page

https://www.facebook.com/brittonpublishers/?fref=ts

Britton Publishers storefront

http://brittonpublishers.com/Skirmish_Scenarios.html