With no prospects of any games on the horizon for a while, I thought I'd do a bit of a catch up on what's been happening on the hobby front. So in no particular order:
Many Rivers To Cross
For years I've been meaning to make some smaller rivers/streams for my games, as many of the Grant & Asquith et al scenario books often require several running across the table. Also as mentioned before, my existing river is a bit too large for some of my Black Powder period games. However I just could not raise any enthusiasm to make the section required, so the project lay dormant until this year, when Pendraken released some road and river sections. Happy Days!
Now I could have just painted them blue and put some simple flock along the edge and 'Hey Presto!' they would have been done. But no I decided I wanted to chafer the edges and build up a bit of a bank on either side, to make them look better to my eyes. A fine idea but good God did it take a long time to do! Many a time I cursed myself for taking this route but, preseverance paid off and a few weeks ago I finally finished them all, as can be seen below.
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| Each straight section is 10"/25cm long, the longer curves 8"/20cm and the shorter ones 6"/15cm. They are about 1 1/4"/3cm wide. I should have enough to make two rivers across my 4'x4' table, or combine it with my larger one when using a 6' x 4' table to make two long ones. |
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| On my original river I used static grass along the banks which, whilst looking great, constantly sheds bits onto the 'water', which is a real pain to remove. So this time I stuck with fine clump foliage, hardened up with a coat of diluted pva glue. |
I still need to paint up a bridge for these sections and probably scratch build another. I deliberately didn't include any ford crossings on these to give me more flexibility on where to put them for a game. Roads leading to them or some form of marker will be enough to indicate where they are.
Built Up Areas
For years I've fancied to doing more BKCII games in BUA's and so have made a start on making more, especially ones that look more suited to France than my generic 18thC mid-European ones I currently have. After a spurt of making the bases, this has ground to a halt, but I did manage to finish an easy one, given that the houses were already painted.
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| The idea is that this will form a small town square or the like in front of the buildings. As always these can be removed depending upon the rules system in use. |
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| The walls were made from mdf 'sprues' from various buildings I've made over the years. Much easier to use than cutting your own. They were the covered in a mix of fine surface polyfilla (Spackle in the US?) and pva glue and simply painted on in a very random way. |
Air Support
Whilst I go a scale down for my buildings these days, for planes I like to go one level up, so 15mm/1:100 when using my 10mm figures. It is surprisingly hard to find affordable or available kits in this scale for WWII. Luckily you can, with a bit of searching and perseverance, find some good diecast options. With the Far East and Pacific War in mind, I added these two planes to my collection for when this project sees the light of day...
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| A bit of favourite plane of mine as I had the Airfix kit as a kid. The Hellcat would be a more usable plane historically, but this just work for me. |
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| Like I had a 'Zero Zen' but painted it white back in the day. This is a more usable camo scheme for sure. Both kits are very heavy, so I need to take care when tweaking the base supports to go onto to my normal flight stands for BKCII games. |
Books
Even if gaming or painting are limited or on hold, you can always read a good book! So some recent purchases:
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| Admittedly not that recent, but I've only started reading it a few weeks ago and what a corker of a book it is! It is a big tome but I'm not finding my interest flagging at all as the author writes a good book that keeps you fully engaged. Lots of really useful info for the wargamer in here, as well as other bits I've not come across in other books on the ACW. Highly recommended. |
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| I have a few other 'Source Books', which I've found to be very useful, so bought the one on the ACW to help broaden my knowledge of this conflict. |
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| I'd not heard of this until Norm Smith put it out on his Commander's website. It is a novel based upon the wargame run in the early 1970's by Paddy Griffith et al. This, and the ACW book above, I got for less than the price of a wargames magazine! |
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| A book I used to have or borrowed from the library, but I was reminded of this again by a recent Norm Smith post. An excellent read from memory and more wargaming material for Italy 1944 at some point in the future. |
ImagiNations-cum-'What If's'
These days I rarely buy a wargames magazine, as I struggle to find anything of interest in them to be honest. However in the past there were the odd gems to be had, and this issue is one of them. Packed full of ideas I've kept for future reference and the odd spot of bed time reading. Glancing at it a few days ago, it piqued my interest on a few periods, especially one by Barry Hilton and a sort of 'what if?' based around the Glorious Revolution. Whilst I don't have any figures even based up for this, my wooden blocks might get an outing in due course.
Cotswold Wargames Day
I've made a start on a basic British/Canadian Brigade for the day, which can be seen below. Sadly some 1:1 kitchen painting and other real life issues means nothing much more will happen to these for a while. But progress is still progress! At least the background fluff is pretty much there and all that remains is to sort out some sort of scenario to go with it.
What Next?
Whilst a game would be nice, I need to focus on painting the above miniatures and maybe some terrain too, to go with the setting we have planned. No fear of myself having nothing to do, that's for sure!
As always, thanks for reading and any comments greatly appreciated!
TTFN.
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