More Bolt Action reinforcements!

I have completed some support options for my 28mm Bolt Action forces. As always, I'm super happy with the figures and I think they look fantastic when they have been painted and based.

First, a mortar team for the Germans:

And of course, the Germans can't have a mortar unless I give one to the Canadians as well... it wouldn't be fair!

With these models, unlike the Canadian Vickers MMG I painted a while ago, I have created a textured base for them to live on. The figures are just stuck on with blue-tac right now, so if they need to rearrange in order to fit into a narrow space on the table, I can do that easily. The bases turned out nicer than I thought they would, and I may still add some details, like the crew's small arms and other things.

Also, since I don't yet quite know how I am going to use these guys from an organizational standpoint, I didn't give them the full insignia that I've done on my other models.



Next, I painted up a Nebelwerfer rocket launcher and crew:

The plan for this model is to use it more as an objective (silence that gun!) than as working artillery. Rocket artillery would never have been used (I don't think could have been used) at the ranges represented in a 28mm game on a 4x4 table. I will likely design a scenario around it. 


And finally, one of the sexiest beasts of the war, the SdKfz 234 Puma armoured car:

The Puma was fairly heavily armed for an armored car, packing enough heat (but not HEAT) to be a threat to some of the more lightly-armoured Allied vehicles, if not tanks.

The Bolt Action Puma was a lot of fun to build and paint, especially the weathering, though I wish I had done something different with the transfers... the 'transparent' part of the transfers is anything but, as you can see from the photos.

Mordheim: Back to the front!

The game we most often play when I go home to the frozen north is Mordheim. It's easy, fun, looks good, and there are a million options for everything.

My regular game group here in Burnaby have recently (re)-discovered Mordheim and we have had a few games recently. Here are some photos of my Marienberger mercenaries facing off against Bryan's cavemen. The Marienbergers had a fairly easy time with the cavemen, due to some imbalance in the army lists and Bryan's newness to the system.

The mercenary force ready for battle

The mercenary force ready for battle

The cavemen sneak up on the right flank

Mercenaries advance up the centre

Cavemen falling victim to the hired sniper on the Mercenary side

Mercenaries advance on the left flank

More cavemen shambling out of the ruins on the right flank

Dark Sun characters

When I'm not being a nerd by fighting wars with little army men, or being a mega-nerd by playing super-complex board games like Advanced Squad Leader, I like to be an ultra-nerd by playing good old Dungeons and Dragons. Right now I'm hosting a DnD game set in the old-school campaign setting of Dark Sun. The good thing about Dark Sun is that it's full of awesome background and flavour; the bad thing is that regular fantasy miniatures really don't suit the characters. So, why not go with some miniatures that were designed for the setting?

I bought these miniatures from a guy on The Miniatures Page, who threw in a pack of Dark Sun elves to go with them. Because they were made a long time ago, the miniatures are quite a bit smaller than the current, GW-fuelled standard of cartoony, 30+ mm fantasy figures. They are really cool sculpts with lots of Dark Sun style, though, and they work really well for our game.

Games Workshop Fantasy Fences

Fantasy fences? Wouldn't fences in a fantasy world look pretty much like fences in a regular world?

Well, you would probably think so, but in typical Games Workshop style, these ones have been pumped up with a bunch of extra, ostentatious details to let everybody know that these are fantasy fences. At various places you will find skulls, gravestones, strange holy symbols, and steel morning-stars bolted, for no apparent reason, to tree branches. Some of the details were a bit much for my games, so I snipped them off... the holy symbols and morning-star had to go.

Overall, though, the fences and walls are really nice models, with really good detail and lots of interesting character, even after the extraneous silliness has been removed. They will make a good addition to my gaming table for sure.

Nazi Checkpoint

I saw this model on the Warlord Games website and decided I needed to have a checkpoint. I'm not sure what function, if any, it will have in my games, but it was too cool to pass up. Maybe I can use it as an objective in a scenario, or just as window dressing on the Germans' board edge.

The two soldiers that came with the set are very Hollywood - one is standing by with his rifle slung over his shoulder, smoking a (no doubt terrible) German wartime cigarette, while the other examines someone's papers, with his SMG ready to hand.

Even if I don't use it for one of my wargames, I'm sure the set will make an appearance if we ever get back into Savage Worlds pulp role-playing.

Mechwarrior mechs

Mechwarrior, the sci-fi miniatures game that is just about as old as metalworking, went through a bit of a renaissance among our gaming group before I went away to South Africa for a month. I offered to Bryan, who owns the rules and miniatures, to paint a couple of us unpainted mechs. The results are below:

I had considered doing a bit of camo work with the airbrush I have on long-term loan, but I don't think I have the airbrush skillz to do something that fine-scale quite yet. I played around a bit with my weathering powders, with predictable results - they look okay for dust, but my attempts at rusting up the khaki-coloured mech met with limited success. I don't have a technique for using the powders that lets me get fine enough detail for models of this scale.

One thing that worked surprisingly well is that I tried to paint the glass fronts of the mechs several times, using different techniques, but I didn't get anything that made me happy. After I had painted them so many times, though, the paint was thick enough that I could scrape it down to bare metal with ease. So now the mechs have shiny reflective cockpits!

1920s Panel Board Truck

Well it has been a long time since I updated this site, so I have quite a lot to catch up on.

First, a resin and white metal panel board truck I picked up a while back at Imperial Hobbies.

The model is decent enough once it has been painted. I was going for a wrecked and abandoned truck to have on the street where my tiny little men are fighting, so I bent the front axle and added some bullet holes. 

I don't know what company made the model, but it came in a plain white box with a photo of the finished truck on the top. The casting quality was adequate, though nothing special. The model itself suffers from some warping, so that the box on the back doesn't really sit straight on the bottom, but because I'm just using it as a wreck, it's no big deal for me.