New toy for photographing minis!

So I’m a professional photographer. I do mostly photojournalism and portraits. The newspaper industry is in the toilet and I’m retraining to get out, but that’s not the point of this blog… What I don’t do a lot of is product photography and until yesterday I didn’t have a very key tool for doing that, a light tent. I have everything else, flashes, strobes, hot lights, stands, tripods… Closets and cases full of stuff. I wanted to not only start this blog but also sell some stuff I’m never going to use again, so I bit the bullet and spent $20 on this.

I’m planning on selling the buildings/ruins I made here in a couple weeks after a large Bolt Action event I’m helping to run, so I figured they’d be my first subject!

 

These were all built to represent ruins (hard cover/obstacles) in Bolt Action for a very large multi-player game representing the battle in Achen. I donated a bunch to the club and don’t have the space to store these anymore.

First games of 2017!

So I started the year off with my first games of Bolt Action 2nd Edition for the escalation league I’m a part of. I played a lot of Bolt Action in 2015 and the beginning of 2016, but most of my year was taken up by ‘life’ happening non-stop in 2016. So with people getting their hands on the new rule book and things calming down for 2017 I got together at ToyWiz in Nanuet NY for their monthly Vets Night and got a couple of games in.

The two mandatory missions for this month’s league at 500 points were Top Secret and Manhunt. I’m not fond of Top Secret, but I think I had the perfect list for it, a six man squad and a two man LT group in a Stummel giving me that extra move to leap to the center of the board and grab that objective on turn two and use the first activation die of turn 3 to run back behind the Stummel for cover. My opponent tried desperately to kill my LT with the objective with withering fire from several squads and a machine gun. His fire was accurate on turns one and two, decimating a squad and killing the LT’s assistant. But once I had the objecting Lt Hans turned into Usain Bolt and was bulletproof! Turn 5 he ran off the board. I managed to get his sniper, since that is the bonus objective for this round of the league.

I had to proxy my engineer’s halftrack for a Stummel. I don’t have ALL the toys quite yet…

 

Game two was Manhunt against the Soviet horde! I was on the offense and had some bad luck on the preparatory bombardment. The objective is to capture the defender’s leader by assaulting and ‘killing’ him in close combat. Well my preparatory bombardment nailing him with a shell, killing him instantly and giving me a draw result before the game started! If we were a little more observant we would have read the part where it modifies the prep bombardment roll for the officer so he can’t be killed, but I guess we failed that perception roll! So I proceeded to fight for the bonus objective points and get more of my units to the center of the board than his. Considering he started off with more then I did and already had 4 of his 8 units there during deployment against my 6 units total, it looked like an up-hill battle. One unit of conscripts melted away on turn 1 to withering fire as the Stummel and a unit of engineers walked up to point blank range. Another unit of conscripts with AT grenades came dangerously close to my Stummel, but couldn’t attack it on the turn it came on. Lucky dice draws on the next turn had me sneak a squad of men behind the unit and force a morale check from casualties before it could activate. His Siberian veterans snuck in and SMG’d my LT to death and the rest of the game bogged down with me trying to dig the last units out of cover with withering point blank fire into the ruins they were ducked into. In the end a desperate close combat charge wiped them from the ruined building. His sniper fell to a Kubelwagon driving right up to him and machine-gunning him to death.

One win, one draw, two bonus objectives and two dead snipers for the tally at the end of the month! Not too bad for my first games in almost six months!

Time to get some more paint on these guys so there is less bare metal for the next games!

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!