Wrapping up my first 350! 2019 painting in review.

2019 is almost done and I haven’t blogged since the beginning of the year! I set out in January with a goal of painting 350 28mm miniature figures, with my major projects being a WWII Soviet army, Terminator Genisys miniatures and a mix of zombies including some Nazi Zombies for a convention game in my hometown I attend every October. I never got to the Soviets, as a matter o fact I’m trying to sell them off since I don’t think I want to do the Warlord Games plastics, they’re too fiddly and the weapons are too prone to breaking. and I didn’t do nearly as much as I thought I would of the other tree. I wound up only getting 16 Nazi zombies and 8 modern zombies done, and only 28 of the Genisys miniatures completed. Considering how easy the Terminators are to paint that’s a pitiful amount.

I took on two commissions from friends, one a continuation for Murph of his German WWII army and another from a new player at the club just south of me for another German WWII army. It helped fund some hobby purchases and is part of the reason I got so many of my own Germans done this year but it did cut into my painting time, I was worried I wasn’t going to make my goal but I picked up speed as fall hit and the convention stuff was done.

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The road to 350

2018 was a slow year for me. Between finishing up a degree, having a baby and starting a new job miniatures and gaming took a back seat. 2019 is upon us, the baby is almost a year old and I’m settling into the new job pretty well. I started thinking about what I want to get accomplished this year and decided to set myself a goal. 350 miniatures painted by the end of the year.  This sounds lofty, but there are several reasons I think I can get this done.

  • On a normal week of painting a couple hours a night for 2-3 nights I can usually get done about 10 figures if it’s batch painting uniforms, 6-8 if they’re individual characters.
  • My main project of the year is a Soviet WWII army. This will require me to paint over 100 soldiers, which I’m going to use ‘The Dip’ method on to speed up the process.
  • The other project I’m working on this year is the Terminator Genisys game. I have a little over 60 Terminators, which are easy as pie to paint up by the dozen since they’re simply prime black, drybrush gunmetal, wash, drybrush silver, paint eyes and the plasma gun. The resistance is almost as easy since I’m sticking to batches of 16 figures with a simple camo pattern (it’s the future, I can make it up!) and armor. The sculpts are pretty basic but well done so they should paint up pretty quickly. My guess is once I get going it’ll be 8 resistance and 8-16 Terminators a week.
  • I have two batches of zombies and one batch of Nazi zombies to finish up. This totals about 50 figures  and most of the zombies are simply going to get basecoated, dip’ed and then a simple highlight. They’re zombies, they’re dirty, and they’re meant to die by the bushel load.

These three projects account for roughly 250 of my 350 goal. The rest will consist of D&D minis, finishing up the German and US WWII armies I have, finishing up some German minis for a friend and a whole bunch of 6mm stuff I dug out of storage when my Ogre Minis II pledge showed up.

The second part of my New Years pledge is to not buy hundreds of minis this year. I’ve made several allowances if the prices are right. For years I’ve been drooling over two lines of minis. I missed out on the Starship Troopers game when it first came out and Dreamforge games makes a line of Eisenkern minis that I like. I have some of each already now and keep looking out for good prices. I still need some vehicles for my Soviet army, and if Warlord runs another sale after my raise comes in I will grab a couple vehicles. I already have enough to paint for this year though.

The year has started well, it’s the last week in January and already I have almost 60 minis finished for Terminator and another couple dozen random minis that were assembled and primed so I could clean of the paint desk.

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.

 

Chain of Command 2v1

Last week before the big Bolt Action event I played a game of Chain of Command with a couple guys that I meet up with occasionally. The last half of 2016 was a little rough and I hadn’t played anything for awhile so I was eager to get in a game when Dan suggested Chain of Command. I already had to pack up the car for the weekend so I just brought everything along and threw the table together while waiting. We did a simple attack/defend scenario with two regular German platoons defending against one American attacker.

 

Dan used his Americans, with a .30 cal and a mortar for support, plus an extra squad if I remember correctly. Howard and I had only a tripod mounted MG42 to back us up. The German counter attack came quick as I had a couple of good rolls and took three activation’s, locking down a side of the board with one squad and started throwing some pins around and kept the Americans behind a hedgerow with two squads taking cover behind a stone wall. Howard’s platoon took the long way around the board and eventually did some real damage to the American platoon by rushing a hedgerow and creating a crossfire, decimating a squad with a hail of grenades. The Americans eventually took the flank that I was holding down with a lone squad and threatened a jump off point, but had suffered some morale loss during the turn.

We had to call the game due to time, but the outcome was clear: The Germans were threatening two jump off points and the Americans had two broken squads (or what was left of them). I had a full Chain of Command die and could almost certainly end the game with a good round of fire and then use the die to end the turn, routing the broken units and cause a complete loss of morale. The Americans were at 5 morale and even good rolling on their part would have brought them to 1 or 2 morale, severely limiting their activation dice and just prolonging the end.

I’ve played several 3v2 games and the suggested balancing of adding a full CoC die to the side with fewer players worked well enough. I think Dan was simply out activated, an extra chain of command die wasn’t nearly useful enough to balance the game. I think next time we do a 2v1 game we will make the lone player elite, with six activation dice. I originally thought that an extra die of support would do, but without the dice to activate that’s not much of a help.

Just another wargaming blog!

2017 is upon us and after an unproductive 2016 I’m hoping to get a lot of hobby work done and document it here on my fancy new blog! Maybe if I’m lucky I can be massively successful and become independently wealthy on advertising revenue and stock my shelves with free product from manufacturers. Mostly I’m looking to finish several projects that have languished in 2016 due to numerous unexpected events.

My main focus lately has been 28mm WWII games, mostly Bolt Action and Chain of Command. I have a growing US Army that includes two platoons that I am planning on finally decal’ing up to represent the 29th ID and the 2nd AD, my main interest being the Normandy invasion and Carentan in particular. I also have a sizable amount Airborne (getting close to company sized) that I’m using to represent the 101st at Carentan. I plan on also doing the 101st in the Battle of the Bulge, but I need to start from scratch with winter troops so that will probably be a 2018 project.

My German forces include a couple of platoons of Wehrmacht, I’ve yet to decide what specific unit to represent with them for my D-Day forces. I also have almost two platoons worth of Fallschirmjäger to represent the 6th Fallschirmjäger Regiment at Carentan.

Both the Airborne and Fallschirmjager units are 90% finished for infantry and mostly only need support weapons and any characters or specialists left to do.

I also have several armies laying around waiting to be started. I have a sizable Soviet army along with a British army and a separate British Airborne army that I was luck enough to get on sales or from people who wanted to get rid of them cheap. These are all 2018 projects at the earliest though.

I’m also wrapping up one commission for a friend, a Desert Rats army, and starting a German Panzer Grenadier commission for him.

I got started wargaming several years ago with 15mm sci-fi and amassed several hundred troops and dozens of vehicles, but that got put aside when I got bit hard by the WWII bug and Bolt Action. I have had a number of 15mm walker-style mecha sitting around though last year and just didn’t get the chance to do more then glue a couple together. I’ve looked at a set of rules called Mech Attack and bought bases for my mechs and I’m planning on running a 15mm combined arms game at the local convention in October. So it’s also time to fire up the airbrush and get some stompy mechs made! I also have a couple of platoons worth of figures that got dropped and are in desperate need of repair and replacement.

Busy year ahead!