Bolt Action Time-lapse

I had a game of Bolt Action with a few friends yesterday. It was a similar scenario to last time: Red Devils Paras, plus a Cromwell, trying to destroy a German artillery battery. We had 2 people playing each side, and I was the only person who had ever played a miniatures game before! The game went long (and the battery ran out on my GoPro before the end of the game) but we played it to a razor's edge conclusion, where it pretty much came down to the commander of the German forces trying to hold off the commander of the Paras before he finally surrendered.

The time-lapse isn't very informative, in that you can't see the figures or really tell what's going on in the game, but whatever. Here it is.

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. 

TW&T at Trumpeter

This month at the Trumpeter Society I hosted a game of Troops, Weapons and Tactics. We played a scenario from the Red Devils Of The Orne book from Skirmish Campaigns. It is the "sequel" to a scenario I hosted two months ago, also with TW&T as the rules. I find I'm becoming more comfortable with these rules as I play them more, and the more comfortable I become the more I enjoy them. The fog-of-war and command-and-control aspects are especially well done, and they make for an unpredictable, chaotic, and very fun set of rules. 

Anyway, on to the pictures:

A newly-arrived German squad advances into cover.

Two captured French tanks advance cautiously down the road towards the gatehouse.

These troopers apparently like the cover they have in this house, because I haven't been able to make them move from it!

A German halftrack with infantry gun in tow heads cross-country down the German left flank to cover the pillbox there.

Traffic jam in the village! One of the tanks got stuck in the alley as the German troops crossing the road were pinned down by mortar fire.

A view  from the German deployment area, over a tank and some troops, looking at the Para defenders in the gatehouse.

A German MG team sets up behind a fence to harass the enemy mortar.

The remains of the German HQ team jump over a hedge and close-assault a Canadian bren gunner, the only survivor of the Allied MG team that was rousted out of a house by tank fire.

A German MG team that tried to jump the hedge and close assault the Canadian mortar position, only to get caught in the open and suffer some murderous fire.

The Canadian HQ team, handing out the murderous fire.

The German tanks slowly advance towards the gatehouse. Moments after this photo was taken, one of the tanks was knocked out by the Paras, manning a captured Pak-40 anti-tank gun.

The game ended when we ran out of time at the end of the night, with the Paras still in control of the key building at their end of the table. This is a really fun scenario - things look very grim for the Paras at the start, as they are faced with an overwhelming number of the enemy, who has tanks and an infantry gun in support. However, they do have the advantage of elite status, more dummy blinds and good defensive positions, and thus the Germans are forced to move with some caution or risk getting mown down.

Edit:

By request, here are the photos again, this time in full colour:

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.

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?

German Big Guns

I went a bit nuts taking photos of these guys, but they look pretty inspiring set up in the trenches:

I have thought about adding some camo netting to the poles sticking up around the gun pits, but I'm worried about it causing playability problems. It's one of the many, many items on my to-do list, though.

My next post will be something very different, I think...

German Guns

I need a variety of Jerry guns for the paras to attack to play through the scenarios in the Red Devils scenario book. The first scenario is built around the attack on the Merville gun battery on the night before D-Day, so I'll need a gun or two to put in the massive casemate... but more on those in a future post. 

For today, I have a PaK-40 anti-tank gun:

This is a pretty nice mini, but I feel like the gun barrel is out of scale... it's as big around as the crew members' heads. That said, though, the mini is nice and should look fairly imposing as it lobs shell after murderous shell at the Tommies.

I decided not to make a base for this gun because I plan to put it in my fancy Grand Manner trench system. I may still build a base for it.  The figures are unbalanced enough that they have to be leaning against the parts of the gun in order to remain upright, so it would be nice if I could put the whole thing on a solid foundation, but it would have to be a base where I could remove the gun itself, which would be tough... I wouldn't trust Blu-Tac to hold it.


Next, an le.IG 18 infantry gun:

This is a fun model. The gun was fairly easy to assemble (though putting the shields on the four guns I built in the last week all felt a bit sketchy... the connection points are small and I don't know how strong the glue is), and the crew figures are cool - especially the guy yelling his Aryan face off as he pulls his little box. I put the figures on washers and based them as normal, because an infantry gun like this is fairly portable and will probably move around quite a bit, unlike the PaK and the artillery. 

As a final note, I wish the Nazis had given the crazy capitalization on their acronyms a rest. Seriously, le.IG 18? Either capitalize everything or nothing. No wonder everybody thought they were dicks.

Dead Cows

Yep. Dead cows.

I'm not very happy at all with how these poor exploded fellas turned out, but I didn't want to commit a lot of time to repainting them. They are just dead cows.

I guess you can't win them all.

German Third Squad

I actually painted these guys when I went up north for Christmas, but never got around to finishing their bases until I needed them for a test game I played last week. I had hoped to get my big order of paras by Christmas, but they arrived the day after I got back. Oh well, I can always use more plastic Germans.

Paras Command Section

This is the command section that came in the Red Devils boxed set. I'm pretty glad I only got one of the boxed sets, because I'm not sure I would have much use for two radio operators or bugling Frosts at the scale I'm playing, but they will be nice, distinctive figures to use in my games.

Paras MMG team

A bit of support for my poor, beleaguered paras. This time, a Vickers MMG.

As with my mortar teams and other weapons groups, I made a plastic base to contain all the figures. They are stuck on with Blu-Tac (you can actually see it in the first pic) so they can be removed as needed, or just used individually if I need to set them up in a window or whatever.