Perilous Island: The Temple Of Futility

After an unplanned but predictable hiatus, Bryan and I returned to Perilous Island this weekend. We played at Bryan's house and took the game in a slightly different direction than previously: this time, we set up a huge dungeon using Bryan's Dwarven Forge sets and fought it out in there.

We chose the Jungle Trail scenario, which seemed appropriate to appropriate for this setting. The scenario has the leagues chasing "Native Youths" around the table, trying to catch them and question them. It looked like it was going to be easy for us to corner the youths in the dungeon, with the limited paths available, so we decided that the youths knew secret passages and tunnels that let them travel freely. More on this later...

The initial layout. The She-Wolves of the SS entered the table at south center, and The Shadow entered from the northeast. The Native Youths started in the northwest and southeast corners of the temple.

Black Sascha and the She-Wolves approach the entrance with optimism. Native youths? Easy!

A few of the She-Wolves head off to catch the Youth in the northwest. "Hey, I thought this temple was abandoned? What's with the raging fires?"

The Shadow heads for the Youth in the southeast, easily avoiding the perils of the fire. The Youth cowers, Blair-Witch-style, with his head in the corner.

Black Sascha and her lieutenant, meanwhile, head off The Shadow's two lieutenants and some of his mooks at a central doorway. It will soon prove to be a black day for the various junior members of the two leagues...

The Youth in the northwest has just popped through a hidden passage and landed quite close to Emma and Inge. They get ready to leap into action and subdue him!

The Shadow is less lucky, as his quarry actually climbs out of the temple altogether and starts running around on the lawn outside. Damn kids!

Things begin heating up in the center! Black Sascha and Gertie jump on Andre, while two German troopers exchange fire with Mr. Wu and The Shadow's less-glamorous hangers-on. The dead cultist with the dagger was a hostile bystander who suddenly appeared from the shadows and interfered with Mr. Wu just long enough for the She-Wolves to set up a blockade in the doorway.

In the northwest, what looked like a fairly ordinary perilous fire suddenly exploded, thanks to a card played by Bryan, applying the fire's peril to everyone within 3 inches, and rendering that area extremely perilous for the rest of the game. Despite some heroic, escapes and even more heroic returns into the inferno, none of the people you see here ended up surviving. Half of the She-Wolves team, felled with one card!

In the north, the Youth pops through another wall, leaving him just inches as the crow flies from the burning She-Wolves, but several long turns of running through the corridors, even if the She-Wolves still had their skins and eyes and a desire to run. Still, one German trooper gamely runs north, trying to head him off.

When a team catches a Youth, a new one spawns nearby. When one team has caught three Youths, they win the scenario. At this point, maybe six turns in, neither team has even come close to catching one of the Youths.

Mookageddon has come in the center - Andre lies wounded next to a dead German trooper, more mooks are bleeding out in the corridor, while Gertie faces off against a wounded Shadow. Mr. Wu takes off, making a play for one of the Youths, but BS runs him down and begins flogging him mercilessly with her whip.

The Shadow tries to beat up on Gertie, but...

...he is not particularly successful.

Gertie returns the favor, landing a solid blow! When The Shadow tries to shrug it off...

...he is not particularly successful.

Meanwhile, outside the temple to the north, Boy Tarzan (a temporary recruit to The Shadow's team) tries to reason with the Native Youth. This is the first and only time one of the characters manages to make contact! This could be the game winning play!

Unfortunately, he is not particularly successful.

The game ended with everyone on The Shadow's team dead or dying, and just Black Sascha, Gertie, and an irrelevant German trooper left standing on the She-Wolves' side. The leagues managed to capture zero Plot Points between them, and retreated shame-faced from the Temple of Futility.

Saga Irish: Half Way

With all the new excitement at the local club around Saga (hooray!), a bunch of the guys are building Saga forces. Unfortunately, like most other places, the preferred scale at the club is 28mm. So I decided to put together a 28mm Irish force so I have something to play with!

I chose the Irish because they have a few interesting things going for them that other teams don't: first, war dogs. In the game, the dogs count as Warrior units, with the added ability to move through rough terrain without penalty, so they will be very mobile. Second, the Irish can field Curaidh, which are champions or lieutenants to the Warlord. Each Curadh figure counts as a unit unto itself, but with better combat stats than an individual Hearthguard. 

The figures I got are from Gripping Beast, the "official" Saga miniatures line. The figures themselves are a bit of a mixed bag. The casting is good, but the sculpts are sometimes great, sometimes not so great. On a few of the figures, the hair is just a semi-spherical lump with dimples poked in it, and some of the figures' hands are pretty undefined - the thumb might be just a paddle sticking out the side of the hand, and the fingers aren't separated. Also, the poses of some figures are pretty uninspiring - the Warlord that came with the warband is in a really strange pose, with his right arm sticking straight out and up, and his head kind of leaning into his armpit. Not sure what's going on there. I ordered a set of Scots command figs along with the warband, and I used a couple of them for my Warlord instead. Unfortunately, that pose is mirrored in one of the Hearthguard figs.

For these guys, I decided to paint the shields freehand, rather than using transfers. I don't think the result is quite as nice and clean as I would have had with transfers, but I find that miniatures with shield transfers all end up looking a bit samey, and I wanted to do something a bit different with mine.

Anyhoo, here are the pics. I have my dogs and handler out front, the warlord in the centre, and a unit of Hearthguard with an associated Curadh on either side. Still to do: a unit of 8 Warriors and a unit of 12 Levy.

Zoom in to get the full details.

Bolt Action photo log!

I had a game of Bolt Action with Jim yesterday. Here are some photos of his Americans attacking my German gun battery.

A bazooka guy trying to decide if he wants to pop out and say "Hi" to my StuG. Hmm, maybe not.

Panzer R35s

I painted a couple of captured French tanks pressed into German service for this month's game at Trumpeter. They are resin tanks from Bolt Action, and they were super simple to assemble and paint:

I ran into the same problem I've had with several of the vehicles I've painted, namely overdoing it somewhat with the weathering powders, and then being unable to clean them off. The tanks look a bit better in these photos than they do in real life, where the camouflage is almost hidden beneath the dirt. 

Stronghold Terrain: Normandy Stable review

One bit of scenery that keeps cropping up in all of the scenarios I want to play from the Skirmish Campaigns book I'm working through is a Normandy-style barn. I had been looking for a while to find a model I liked, with no luck, and had essentially given up when a new kit from Stronghold Terrain popped up on The Miniatures Page. The photo looked decent, but the company is in Germany and I wasn't super keen on ordering something from that far away. Still, having a proper barn would be better than just using a random, not-at-all-barnlike building from my Mordheim box, so I went for it.

The kit arrived in 7 pieces: a base, 4 walls, and a 2-part roof. The base and walls are cast in what they call "hard stone plaster." It is a heavy, strong, almost cement-like material that feels like stone and is a bit porous, with really nice detail and no casting flaws that I could find. The roof is fairly thick and strong resin, with no casting flaws either. It is detailed on five sides, with the underside just smooth, but nobody is going to look at the underside anyway so who cares.

I should add that the stable arrived with a hand-written thank you note and a little baggie of barrels and crates for my "bitsbox." It was a really nice touch.

The stable assembled easily, though gluing the two pieces of the roof together at the correct angle took a bit of patience. The walls didn't quite fit perfectly... there's a small gap visible in the corner of the last photo. I don't know if that's a result of the model or my building skills, though.

I primed it with black spray paint and got to work with my regular craft acrylics:

I decided to experiment a bit and tried to get a gray, weathered effect out of the wall boards, rather than the usual brown that I usually paint wood. It felt wrong painting the wood gray, but after a couple of washes I think it turned out really well. There is a lot of detail on the walls, with cracked plaster, bricks, and even a little shrub molded in. The windows and doors are molded in, without actual apertures, but if I was really keen it wouldn't take much to drill / saw / file them out. For my purposes I'm happy to leave them as-is.

Likewise, there is no internal detail in the stable, but again I don't really care about that. It wouldn't take much to build individual stables out of coffee stir sticks if you needed that.

Overall, I am really happy with the Stronghold stable. Good detail, nice materials, a very robust-feeling final product, and great service.

Late update: German HMG and Stug

These pics have been sitting on my camera for more than a week, but better late than never I suppose!

I ran a game of Disposable Heroes at the last Trumpeter Society meeting, British Paras defending against a hard German push in Arnhem on Day 2 of Operation Market Garden. It seems that no matter how much I paint, there's always one or two more things that need to get done before I can fill the rosters for the scenarios I want to run, so I was busy the week leading up to game night. This time it was some German support.

HMG team:

I decided with this team, unlike my mortars and other HMG teams, to dispense with futzing around with blue-tacking the minis to the base on the off chance that I want to put them somewhere too restricted for the full team base. These guys are permanently welded on.

Stug:

This one was a bit of a rush job (as rush a job as an airbrushed model with pigment dust can be), but I'm really happy with the result, especially when sitting in a light box and viewed through the magic eye of my camera. It's another really nice Bolt Action model. I'm impressed at how solid the schurtzen feel, so much better than my 15mm FoW Panzer IVs, which feel like they are going to crumble to dust in your hand. They are way, way too thick to be properly in-scale, but they need to be able to withstand the rigors of game night.

I have been reading a lot of AFV modeling websites lately in advance of starting on my 1/35th Tiger, so there are a lot of places where I could have poured my life into more detail and better weathering, but it's a game model and most of that disappears at game-viewing distance anyway.

Barbed Wire

This was a quick little project to prepare some defences for my 28mm table:

These are paint stirrers (free from the hardware store), with 1.5" nails for posts (a few pennies each...?), and old discarded window screen cut into individual strings for the wire. This is just a representative sample, I have a bunch more.

It would be easy to go crazy with more interwoven wire, and it would look a bit better for it, but I didn't have the time or the patience. Stringing one wire past another is super fiddly, because all of those little cross-bits act like velcro on each other, and the wire doesn't slide over itself at all. Also, looking at some illustrations of actual WW2 German wire defences, I could have modelled them a lot more horizontal than vertical... similar criss-crossing shapes, but laid out a foot or so above the ground, to make it really tough to walk through. Maybe next time... I'm a long, long way from running out of window screen!

Pretty easy and relatively quick, and I think the window screen works really well for barbed wire. I used the same materials for my 15mm FoW defences, but I think it's more suited to this scale.

BMW Motorcycles and Sidecars

Well I thought my next post was going to be a divergence from my regular WW2 shenanigans, but I have a club night coming up and need to finish a few items for a game I plan to host there. So here are the last of the actual miniatures I needed to paint for club night:

These guys were a bit fiddly to put together, and I feel like I could have done a better job of painting them if I had taken more time and care, but like I said, I have a deadline approaching. They look cool on the table, and they can be pretty nasty with their MGs!

Plus, what's cooler than a sidecar?