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:

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.

Disposable Heroes Not-Really AAR

I hosted a game of Disposable Heroes at the last Trumpeter Society meeting on June 1. We played a scenario from Iron Ivan's scenario book on Market Garden.

The game went fairly well, but seemed to be largely decided by dice rolls. The Germans were also caught out in the open by a Para ambush, and a whole squad was wiped out... bad news for a force that only comprises two squads plus support!

Special thanks to Thomas Robson for helping me muddle my way through the rules. The rules are quite simple to use and seem like a good choice for club games, but I had a few quibbles. There is no provision for fog of war or command and control, which really eliminates any sense of reconnaissance or suspense. Aside from the single ambush, which is not dealt with especially elegantly in the rules, there is no suspense or surprise.

So, I'm still undecided whether DH or Troops, Weapons and Tactics are going to be my rules of choice. Or possibly some frankenrules stitched together with parts of both.

Anyway, on with the interesting part: the photos!

The calm before the storm: Paras may deploy in any building or wood on the board, and the Germans enter from the north street (the street at the end of which you see them parked, awaiting their turn)

Several turns in, and not a lot has happened. The Paras have laid a small smoke screen in the centre of the board, and the Germans have all advanced onto the board, but don't get far before they start trading fire with the Paras.

The Paras' Vickers MMG sprays lead at the Germans as they try to advance through the buildings on the East side of their entry street.

On the West side of the street, Germans occupy the buildings and make some cautious advances towards a British fire team in the South-West park.

The StuG only ever got this far onto the board, then spent the rest of its turns trying to get acquisition on the Paras' Vickers. It finally achieved acquisition, but to very little effect. I think I may have been using the wrong stats for the StuG, but it likely would have made very little difference to the game, considering how long it took to get its bearings, and that the deciding fights were happening elsewhere.

Massacre in the courtyard! The Paras' ambush team deployed in the building fuzzily visible on the right of the photo as the Germans tried to run across the open space of the courtyard, and absolutely reamed them, then moved on to the Germans' HMG, wiping them out as well.

By this time, the game was pretty much decided. A German team and a Para team destroyed each other in the West, but by this time it was pretty clear that the Germans would just be throwing their lives away if they continued pursuing the advance, and they withdrew.

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?

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...

Trenches and Bunkers

Earlier this year I took delivery of a set of trenches from Grand Manner in the UK:

This is just a representative sample... I have more than a metre of trenches all together, with a variety of zigzag sections, corners, gun pits, junctions, and (as above) a section of command entrenchment.

I didn't paint these (except for the gun and crew in the bottom photo, that was me). Grand Manner offers their scenery painted at an additional cost, and I decided to have them sent to me all dressed. They were (very!) expensive, but I couldn't be happier with them. The detail is really nice, the paint jobs are fantastic, and the resin is heavy and seems tough. My only regret is that I don't have more! I would love to do a larger entrenchment, but with what I paid for these, it will be a long time before I add to the collection. Price aside, the photos speak for themselves. A+


I also recently bought some bunkers from Baueda:

These ones I did have to paint. I used my airbrush to give them some subtle colour variation, with patchy areas of green-ish and brown-ish. It's not super obvious, but I'm happy with the effect. The bunkers were very nice casts and required no clean-up at all before I primed and painted them. I have a 'Tobruk' bunker as well, but I need to build a little hillock to put it on first.

The vines are SceneMaster Botanicals, which I bought at a railroad store ages ago. I was excited to get them home and use them, but when I opened the package I discovered that there was very little foliage to be found, especially for the price I paid. So the vines sat in their box for quite a while before I found something I was willing to use them on. They were a bit of a pain to shape and glue on, and it remains to be seen if they will be strong enough to withstand wargaming usage. They look pretty nice though.

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.