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Top notch Tau Siggy! absolutely stunning work and all together is simply something else! bravo!

Awesome. Just awesome

Wow, that group of Tau is stunning... The blue makes a nice contrast with the rest !!

@Dr H: Thanks very much! It's all freehand. When it comes to painting I really am not the one to go the "easy way" of materials, little tricks and all of that stuff. It's cute if people airbrush patterns and stars and whatnot onto their Falcons but at some point 'proper painting' has come in as well.

@Gitsplitta: Thanks, old chap!

@nerdfest09: Cheers, I have to admit that I find the army picture quite impressive myself.

@San76: Thank you!

@Yggdrasil: Thanks, the colour scheme did work out rather nicely. I never thought I'd ever do a full army with OSL effects (mostly people it's expensive on the client's part :p ) but it does look really nice.




Last night saw another game of Chain of Command in the Northern African deserts! This time with more terrain (and really pretty looking one at that!), more troops, a new scenario and company HQ granted us both at least a bit of support this time. I chose a 3" mortar battery (off-table of course) and forward observer team, the Germans brought a Medic.



The scenario: Rommel whipping his Afrikakorps through the desert, attempting to drive the British army back as far as possible and beyond that. The mission objective for the attacker (Germans, played by my regular gaming nemesis/buddy) is to get any unit to the defender's (British, played by yours truly) table edge, no turn limit. The defender's job is to keep the attacker from achieving that, either through breaking their force morale or making them retreat voluntarily.

Patrol phase: The scenario (Scenario Two from the CoC rulebook) has the defender (me) place four patrol markers up to 12" from his table edge and up to 12" from each other while the attacker gets a few moves with his patrol markers for free before the defender can react. The patrol phase was mainly the Germans advancing to secure a forward Jump-off point, cleverly avoiding the village which was crawling with British recon. Their plan was just to buzz by and not get into too heavy engagements. My patrol phase was mainly trying to rush patrols in their direction to lock down their positions, otherwise it would be a short game.

Once the patrol phase was done and Jump-Off points (those are the points from which units are deployed) were placed and battle lines drawn the situation was as such:


German patrols had done a good job and one of their jump-off points was dangerously close to my table edge.

A few phases later, thinks didn't look too bad for the British. Both sides had most of their platoon deployed. The Germans had two full sections and half a section deployed, I had No.1, 2 and 3 section on the table, plus the platoon Sergeant and a forward observers team with a battery of 3" mortars on hold.


After a sublime phase of firing from No.1 section in the ruined house (and a bit of help from No.2) the most forward team of Germans broke and was driven back. The more cautiously positioned German base of fire gave covering fire for their comrades to retreat and rally while two German fire teams started running around the dunes to start a flanking attack against No.1 Section and the forward observers in the ruined house. Then the mortar barrage started coming in.



Most of the German platoon disappeared in a huge cloud of dust, shrapnel and bits of ground flying about, pinned and unable to move until the barrage would end. It didn't even help that the Leutnant himself ran into the shelled area to drive his men on. The last German team entered the table via the forward-most Jump-Off point, leading a desperate assault against No.2 section (who had been taking quite a beating over the course of the game). The old storm trooper tactics developed during the last war worked scarily well and No.2 section was badly mangled and almost driven off the table but the next phase No.2 section came storming over the dune, taking care of the German fire team. The German attack had been thwarted.



Review: This could have been a very short game if things had gone a little differently. I rolled exceptionally well for the most part of the game I have to admit, especially in terms of activation dice. Over the course of the game I rolled two sixes three times, meaning that each time I pretty much got another turn to activate my units before my opponent got to do anything. No.1 section in the ruined house rolled amazingly throughout the game, the mortar fire didn't deviate too far and it's just plain nasty with the auto-pin on everybody in the square with 18" sides. It didn't cause too much damage but the pinning and denial of LOS is pretty big, especially if most of the platoon's cought in it.

In the beginning we had planned for this to be the first game in our campaign but things were pretty one-sided (as they are most of the times when we play. It's just usually one-sided in the other direction ) and one of the other historical wargamers had joined to have a look at Chain of Command. He seemed to like the rules quite a bit, as do the rest of us. Credible results and tactics, credible forces, really fast and clever rules. Good stuff, not the least due to a great looking table.

Wonderful report Siggy. Congratulations on turning away the German tide of war!

 Sigur wrote:
@Dr H: Thanks very much! It's all freehand. When it comes to painting I really am not the one to go the "easy way" of materials, little tricks and all of that stuff. It's cute if people airbrush patterns and stars and whatnot onto their Falcons but at some point 'proper painting' has come in as well.

Fair enough. There is a time and a place for airbrushed things indeed. I don't have the money as yet to get myself and airbrush and I'm in no rush to either. I am always looking for ideas, tips and techniques to further my painting though, but sometimes, just more brush control is all that's needed. Great job again.

@Gitsplitta: Cheers. Let's see how it goes next time.

@Dr H: Thanks and indeed, there certainly is a place for airbrushing stuff but recently people seem to get rather carried away with being all clever, using little helpers and such and of course all the companies who sell ever new things release all that stuff ... In the end it always comes down to patience, experience and skill though.


Alrighty a little ACW update if you please.

The as of yet unnamed brigade commander:




Major Wheat's 1st Special Battalion, Louisiana Volunteer Infantry 'Louisiana Tiger Rifles':





One of the if not the most famous and oft-depicted unitsof the Confederate army. Similar to the 14th Louisiana which I painted earlier, the men of the 1st Special Battalion (Wheat was always on the lookout for more volunteers to turn his formation into a full regiment but never quite made it so settled for the 'Special Battalion' designation) were mostly recruited around New Orleans' docks. More than half of the men were of Irish decent, Germans being the second largest group amongst the ranks. In total there were men from 17 nations to be found in Wheat's Battalion. The famous Tiger Rifles uniforms were only worn by one of the companies and were phased out in favour of Confederate regulation dress (if available) as the war progressed but they make for a great looker on the table and you can't really play a Confederate army without those guys. The Zouave style (after the French light infantry troops) uniforms were very fashionable and especially so in and around New Orleans (due to the great French influence on the city and the whole state of Louisiana) where several Zouave units were raised. The red fezzes were part of the uniform and probably were worn in camp while in the field straw hats (probably because they used to be seamen's usual headgear at the time) were worn. The miniatures (Perrys ACW Zouaves plastics) only come with a variety of fezzes and at that point I had run out of hats so only about a third of the models are converted to wear the hats. It also would have been a shame not to have them wear fezzes of course.


Major Roberdeau Chatham Wheat (looking a little like Paul Bearer)

Wheat's Special Battlaion were commended for their performance at the first battle of Bull Run and got a reputation for fearless shock troops. The name Louisiana Tigers was later applied to the whole Battalion and subsequently to all troops from Louisiana serving in the army of Northern Virginia.





Hope that you like them!. Next on the list: some artillery.




P.S.: I'm in the latest issue of Henry Hyde's Wargames Miniatures magazine, hooray! (me and a mini of Empress Maria Theresa I painted, we're both to be found in the feature about last year's VIVAT show in Austria)

They look fantastic!!

@Gitsplitta: Thanks!

Alrighty, Tau finished, no additional army shots for now I'm afraid. I've been working on the Steam Gargant which is finished now and I went on to doing some more Mordheim figures to add to the warband I built/converted and painted.

Here's a little reminder just in case you forgot:


And here's the first WIP shot of the new additional characters:


An elven ranger, a down-on-his-luck knight and a Warlock. That knight is such an amazing model. As you may remember, the blister comes with a horse-mounted version of the guy as well and guess what - his right hand is completely miscast. Not as in "boo-hoo, I have to apply basic modelling skills and cut off some excess material" (as you read quite a lot these days on certain Facebook groups. People see a millimeter of excess flash on a resin(!) model for example and think about ringing up the manufacturer to ask for a replacement. It's mind-boggling), it's proper GW metal miscasting, i.e. somehow it looks like they poured way too little metal and half the part is missing and what's there is a misshapen lump of metal. So tomorrow I'm meeting with the client, I'll have to present him with the problem and ask wether I should resculpt the hand or see that I can maybe replace it with a similar part and model it so it looks fitting or something like that. Such a shame because it's an OOP model and all. Even bought quite a while ago as the blister still had a price tag giving a price in German Mark so it's pre-Euro days.

Anyway, the colour scheme concept is like with the other mercenaries in that warband (the other Elf, the Dwarven Slayer and the Ogre) - they should stand out as looking different to the rest with some subtle colouring pulling them a little into the very tight colour scheme of the rest of the gang. On these three I'm mainly using the purple simply because I really like painting purple. The yellow is showing up too a little on the new elf and the Warlock also has some of the blue, albeit a lot more muted. Speaking of the Warlock: it's the Avatars of War Necromancer with the scythe blade clipped off the staff. It's one of AoW's first models and certainly not one of their best but it's not bad either. It just looks rather flat. Anyway, that moment you paint a Necromancer and mid-way through you realize you recreated Skeletor's colour scheme... At this point nothing but the robe was painted and I considered painting the face in a greenish hue, same with the flame in his hand but opted against it. Would have been too silly and there's no green in the gang's colour scheme so meh. So I'm saving the Skeletor theme for another day.



Tomorrow: Another game of Chain of Command in which we give the vehicle rules a try with just half an infantry platoon per side and instead a few more vehicles. The rules set is based on engagements between infantry platoons mainly but looking through the rules makes it look like it's working really well for armoured combat as well. Vehicle crews are treated basically like infantry teams with a junior officer each for the vehicle commander and he can spend his initiative points to activate single crewmen and such. Sounds good to me.

Speaking of tank battles - a few weeks ago I ran across this AMAZING rules set for one on one armoured combat. One on one tank that is with about four to five players per team, each team depicting the crew of one of the tanks. Just by reading it I MUST play this game at some point. It sounds like a ton of fun and the guy I play wargames with already started working on turning it into a participation game for the VIVAT wargames show. Should be great. Here it is: http://www.jimwallman.org.uk/wargame/tankduel.pdf. Check out the other free rules sets on the guy's site. Some very interesting stuff on there.


Anyway, I hope that you like the picture and have a look at that rules set. It's the complete antithesis of what you think a wargame from the 80s, early 90s works like.

Well, last night's game came and went. As announced we decided to mainly test the vehicle rules and look how the game would work with mostly vehicles. I basically had all of my vehicles at my disposal (one Morris CS9, two Matilda IIs, an A13, a 2pdr portée, one Bren Carriers, two carriers with anti-tank rifles) plus one section of infantry led by a junior leader and a team with a Boys anti-tank rifle. The Germans had a section of Grenadiers a Panzer III, two armoured cars, two Pak36, three teams with anti-tank rifles, an infantry gun and another armoured car for the senior officer to drive around in.





The mission we chose was just two patrols meeting in the desert (scenario 1 from the CoC rulebook). The patrol phase was unremarkable, the germans had the inintiative and stormed forth as usual, my patrols crept up on them to lock their patrols down. After the patrol phase the situation was as such:



The objective of the scenario was to get the enemy force morale down to less than three. (In Chain of Command you have to roll on a "Bad Things Happen" table each time you lose a team, support choice, officer or section (routed or killed), when you lose a Jump-Off point and so on.



Well, the whole thing went about as well as could be expected. Remember, British tanks at the time didn't carry any HE grenades for their main guns and for 90% of the game I was up against enemy anti-tank guns. Both our infantry units were tied down.



In the back you can see my infantry sitting in the bushes, not really having a chance to do much at this point. Earlier on they were just up against one enemy team (with an LMG but still not too bad) so I might have broken through but what then? My infantry would have been sitting in front of the enemy supply route (and we didn't really rule any cut off options for that even though it would be cool as we discussed after the end of the game) and within the firing arc of the German infantry gun.

So the Germans basically were free to put their guys into Overwatch and bring on supports with my lads only looking on...




At one point in time the three carriers arrived. One was quickly shot up by the enemy Infantry gun but the other two pressed on.


A little uselessly to be honest, as the one that was killed obviously was the only Bren Carrier, the other two only brought anti-tank rifles. I basically had 80% anti-tank weapons because that's what British Vehicles did and. My force was painfully one-sided and the Germans brought an unhealthy mix of mainly anti-tank guns with some support so perfectly suited against my bunch. A recipe for desaster.

Activation dice were about equally odd between both players. Of course activation is a bit askew with non-regular, vehicle-heavy games but not as much as you'd think. It acutally worked really well (would have worked better if I have had a slightly more balanced force).

I rather quickly accumulated two Chain of Command dice (over the run of the game you acquire Chain of Command points, once you got six you get a weirdly-named Chain of Command die which basically is just a token you can use for all kinds of cool things. I used mine really unwise, only getting slight and basically useless extra turns of shooting while my opponent used both his CoC dice (the second one he got way later in the game) very well. With the first he moved his furthest Jump-Off point to the front which allowed him to deploy a Pak36 way to the front, being a major pain in the hind regions for my vehicles (vehicles all deploy at the table edge rather than a Jump-Off point).



This thing hit my first Matilda in the front, of course doing no damage but the driver panicked and retreated off the board. This was a point of discussion because we were not quite sure how to deal with such a situation. The table edge is a very artificial boundary so just because a unit retreats to the edge plus 1" doesn't necessarily mean that the vehicle just drives home, especially as a LOT of combat results concerning vehicles include retiring a bunch of inches but otherwise being a-okay. They're handled like many systems handle the reaction of cavalry to failed morale saves, depicting how cavalry is less likely to stand and fight on because that's not their job and they're much more prone to quick retreat, reform and attack again rather than going for prolonged combat. Oh well, I'll ask on the Lardies forum.

Later on in the game the very same anti-tank gun knocked over the shoddy armoured car my senior officer showed up in.


Stiff upper lip, what! A cuppa and the world is well again. Next time we'll show Jerry what his Majesty's Armoured Divisions are capable of: Bring along some stout-hearted infantry lads and artillery with them that is!


Yeah, next time it's regular organizations again. It was very interesting though focussing on the vehicle rules for once. There are some really nice mechanics in the rules and again, Chain of Command gave us a highly credible result to our scenario, pretty much exactly along the lines of what both of us had read about the time.

Slowly, slowly things proceed. Here we got two cannons and crew. Everyhting is about half-finished at this point.

Alrighty, people, here's quite the update!


Washington Artillery of New Orleans, including Sergeant T.Potter:










Perry Miniatures plastics set, gun barrels are magnetized for pulling the old switcheroo.


...and here's the dismounted 2nd Louisiana Cavalry to go with their mounted version from the earlier page:






Those are mostly Perrys metals. I smuggled in three plastic infantrymen (one of them converted to hold a shotgun), trying to hide the fact that most of the cavalrymen brought twin brothers to the unit because there are just six different sculpts in the Confederates cavalry on foot set. I also like the serene smile on the face of the horse holder. In case things go badly he knows he'll just take off with the horses and sell them on the way home.



Unfortunately this weekend's big ACW game was postponed as some unionist players had to cancel the appointment. Not highly gentleman-like but oh well.

As the boys were all giddy to get out and the weather was nice I put them up to take a few shots of the whole brigade:













Hope you like them.

In the back you can see a little field and some fences (renedra) I did over the past two days between doing commission stuff.



Next thing: Battle Report/AAR

Last week Thursday gaming night was extended to afternoon and night and as we had a lot of time to play that day we decided to do a whole Pike&Shotte game. Here are a few impressions:


Last week my gaming nemesis and I had another go at Pike&Shotte. Differently to the usual gaming night which runs for about three hours we started in the afternoon and played the game from start to finish. Here are a few impressions:

The setup. Lines indicate battalia, the unit descriptions are somewhat hovering above/underneath the respective unit.


As I provide both armies we rolled for who would get to play which side. This time it was my turn to take the imperial-catholic side. Other changes we made from the last game is that one of the cuirassiers units joined the protestant side who also got a brand new unit of Finnish cavalry. They also brought most of the available artillery.

The catholic troops in the bottom of the picture set up pretty much in a linear (one could call it a protestant) fashion, with the light cavalry to their left, a centre of pike and shot, swordmen and the medium artillery and heavy cavalry in the right along with some Cossacks for support.

The Swedish and protestants set up in two lines (more or less), light cavalry on their left side, cuirassiers and Finnish cavalry in their right on a hill, along with the medium cannon and their general. And in the far right they had placed a powerful flanking force of veteran Swedish Blue and Yellow Guards regiments.


The light guns, according to Gustav Adolph's orders, were used as 'regimental guns' and stuck with the infantry centre.


A colourful mix of the protestant alliance's troops. Swedish light cavalry wing, mercenaries from Hesse-Kassel, the Palatinate and Veterans from Saxony.

The imperial-catholic troops were no less colourful and had even dug up an old formation of swordsmen:






The catholic right flank certainly looked the most dangerous with two units of cuirassiers in black (ehem) armour and a unit of Harquebusiers, all under the command of nasty old Heinrich Holk:


Here's a lovely shot of the clash of light cavalries on the left side:


Due to Swedish light cavalry being a bit more squishy than Croats, fire support by the Dragoons on the imperial side and some poor dice rolls things were settled rather fast on this side the the imperial-catholics got a lot more freedom of movement on their left flank.

On their right the heavy cavalry attempted to charge right into the enemy cavalry (who were outnumbered almost two to one) before the Swedish blue and yellow regiments would hit home.



Of course the plan failed and things ground to a halt as catholic cuirassiers got ground up in a horrible crossfire between Swedish and Palatinate regiments to their sides and enemy cavalry to their front.



In their defence, they did a really good job not breaking and bound half the protestant army in place for quite a while.


In this picture you can see another problem the imperial-catholics had to face - the idea was for the infantry centre to rush forward and hit the inferior protestant German troops hard and fast. However, half the infantry didn't get the memo and as the centre left rushed ahead the centre right barely moved at all.



Lateron the imperials actually made it over, a unit of Bavarian veterans immediately started a push of the pike match against Hesse-Kassel troops and disintegrated. However, in the end the catholic side were able to take away a very close victory.

The game took us roughly seven hours to finish but it has to be said that in the beginning we took some time with looking up rules and taking photos, calibrating the cameras and so on. It was the first time we used this fleece blanket to cover the table and it came out rather weirdly in some pictures. In the flesh it's more green. Still, not a bad blanket at all. The game wasn't bad at all either. Each time I play Pike&Shotte I get renewed faith in the rules set. It's a brilliant compromise between "realism" and "speeding things up" where it counts.



Now that we're done with that stuff, let's get into the tasty Sci-Fi/Fantasy stuff, shall we.

Mortheim characters:




That guy's finished.

Now for the other two... this knight for hire is almost finished, but I'm not happy with the metallics in some places so I redid them. So these are 98% finished WIP pictures:





Now the elven ranger. She's as good as finished as well but came out really crappy in the pictures. No idea what went wrong there.






Now for the Space Marines:








Right, and that's that. Lotsa pictures, hope you like them. I took a break from painting Space Marines, currently working on a fleet for Dystopian Wars which I hope to finish within the next ....well, week or so?

One of the best updates I've seen Siggy. Loved the new troops and thoroughly enjoyed the battle report. The little bits of cotton are amazingly effective as gun smoke.

Lots of pretties. Good work.

I like the swirls inside the Elf's cloak in particular.

So much tasty goodness. Excellent stuff all around, Siggy!

Thanks for the pics dude! lovely work as usual with the historicals and the scenery set up! the raven guard I'm liking so far, trying to see how you progress painting blacks, looks like black and a single highlight so far? so what's next? :-)

Your models are as nice as usual, Sigur !

Also, coming out of a squad of Marines in black, I have to admit your mastery of painting black is wayyyyyyyyyy higher than mine... It just seemed impossible, while your edge highlighting technique seems perfect !

Great job !

Also, that scout's camo cloak it pretty cool. Suits you, sir, suits you!

@Gitsplitta: Thanks very much, good Sir! The game was very enjoyable indeed and I absolutely agree about the little cotton bits for smoke. It adds so much to the look of the game.

@Dr H: Cheers. I really have to get better pictures of that elven lady.

@nerdfest09: Thanks, mate! The black got two or three layers of highlights so far at that point.

@Yggdrasil: Thank you, I appreciate your comment a lot. In fact I was asked (as part of that specific commission) to write an article on how to paint Raven Guard Space Marines for an up-and-coming 40k-related site which will feature a number of model I painted for this specific customer so far. To be honest I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of painting a fair amount of black (and basically only black) Space Marines but after some complaining to friends, doing other things first and cursing I finally gave in and actually got productive about this and once a recipe or plan is worked out things get a whole lot easier.

@Meph: Cheers! I really just toyed around with the colour combination of the camo cloaks but somehow it worked out right away. Sometimes you're just lucky I guess. And I really like this combination for urban camo, mostly because it's not too grey (and thus not pretty to look at). It's kind of work intensive but it does look nice.


Alright, so much for that and on we move to something completely different once again! I put the Marines aside for a bit in favour of a commissioned Dystopian Wars fleet!

It's a fleet of the League of Italian States and these are the ships finished thus far:






There's a whole lot more coming up at full steam (hur hur hur) so stay tuned for that.


In other news - remember how Osprey came up with this little set of rules named Ronin last summer? Well, plans for actually playing these rules materialize. I swapped a bunch of my treasured oldie-times (actual oldie-times, so late 1980s up to 1995) Warhammer figures with a friend for some Perry Ashigaru, ordered a bunch more Samurai and am currently trying to find some time to actually paint the fellas (planning for a Bushi warband, i.e. a 'regular army' warband of the Takeda clan. I also got six samurai in everday clothes because they look amazing. Not sure if I have much use for them but I wanted to have a different warband possibility for a martial arts school as well. Only afterwards I learned that in-game, the martial arts school warbands aren't even designed to be able to compete with regular army ones. Oh well. ).

So, after getting some figures to paint and showcase online (which I basically am obligated to do and very much enjoy doing of course) I of course need some stuff to put around the figures for displaying reasons. So naturally I had to get one of 4Grounds' feudal japanese buildings:







It's a really pretty kit and I didn't do much to it, assembly aside. However, the white parts I had to repaint because there are burn marks all around the windows and such. I never was too impressed with 4Grounds' pre-paint policy and results, especially seeing as how with many periods you have to add some texture to the buildings anyway to make them look nice. However, with some things, like japanese houses or Wild West houses, the "bare" MDF/HDF works really well. For stuff like Dark Ages, castles especially, many european buildings and so on, the bare MDF/HDF just doesn't look too great I think. This one's pretty cool though. The teddy fur came with the set and it looks a bit better in real life. So much so that I decided not to colour it or so anything to it. I may have to give the front and back roof a wash/drybrush though. The doory (three in total) are all free to open and close and the inner slidey door actually has a piece of thin paper in it. Very neat.

Hope you like all the stuff!


P.S.: Tomorrow evening I'll have another game of Chain of Command. Very much looking forward to fhat!

Quite the armada you've got going there Siggy!

That house is pretty sharp. Very much looking forward to what you do with the Japanese minis.

wow an amazing update of stuff.. Never disappoints!

 Sigur wrote:
@Yggdrasil: Thank you, I appreciate your comment a lot. In fact I was asked (as part of that specific commission) to write an article on how to paint Raven Guard Space Marines for an up-and-coming 40k-related site which will feature a number of model I painted for this specific customer so far. To be honest I wasn't looking forward to the prospect of painting a fair amount of black (and basically only black) Space Marines but after some complaining to friends, doing other things first and cursing I finally gave in and actually got productive about this and once a recipe or plan is worked out things get a whole lot easier.

Hey, be sure to post a link to that tutorial !

@Gitsplitta: Thanks, so far I'm hating the guys. Well no, I just think that I'm a little gak at painting them.

@Solar_lion: Thanks very much! Tell your friends!

@Yggdrasil: Hehe, surely will do once it's done.


Phew, things are slowing down around here. Not in the good way. My dad had an accident, I need to drive him around now, do some additional stuffs and such. Eating into time schedule and such. Those DW-ships do also cause me some headaches. It's a kind of painting that reminds me why I prefer doing painting things with faces and eyes and such. It's a kind of painting that's very much "paint along these very thin lines very, very often and they look the same on all of the ships, just scaled up or down. They do look rather nice all together when painted due to the colour scheme and stuff. The ships in the picture are all finished except for the carrier (obviously):



That's all the ships for now. Next up: a ton of tiny escorts and flyers once the carrier's finished.


Here's the scouts:


...and some of the first Ashigaru, very much WIP:


Yeah, that's them. Clan Takeda and...yeah, the other two guys play black dudes (led by a samurai lady ) and blueish guys so i thought red was a good third colour.

I built two small bamboo groves as terrain/for presentation of far eastern stuff in general.



Not pictured with any of my Japanese minis because I put them away so I don't get tempted to work on them while I should paint Necromunda, Dystopian Wars and Space Marines stuff and couldn't find them at the moment.

Hope you like the terrain!

That looks great Sigur, what did you use for the bamboo?

Nice work. The ships look nice.
Good progress on the others.

How did you make the bamboo?
Or did you buy it?
Looks great.

Thanks, guys!

I got these here http://www.amazon.co.uk/Approx-100Pcs-Scales-Plastic-Bamboo/dp/B00H33D6IK/ref=sr_1_8?s=kids&ie=UTF8&qid=1395407912&sr=1-8&keywords=bamboo+train off amazon. A lovely guy over on Warseer posted them in his painting log and sparked a lot of requests for where to get them. 100pieces, 50% of which are all just soft plastic and therefore to be handled with care, the longer ones have wire in the shaft which makes them way more useful.

Only thing you have to do is remove the mould lines running along the shafts and maybe cut off the leafs here and there for some irregularity. Otherwise they're really easy to work with. I didn't even wash them in soapy water or anything, just remove mould lines, prime, paint, done. On the above terrain pieces I didn't even use half of the bag.

Love those! Thanks for the tip!

@Gitsplitta: You're welcome, buddy. It's really funny how popular these are. Anywhere I post the pictures I get the question where I got the bamboo (at this point I usually just post it along with the pictures).

Okay, since I gotta take care of several things on top of usual stuff since my father had the little accident I get way less done. It's really embarassing because it's not that much at all. Anyway, still slaving away on that Dystopian Wars fleet and last night I managed to have a game of toy soldiers again after skipping the past two weeks.

We had a game of Chain of Command, first in our little campaign. So, using the At the Sharp End campaign supplement of Chain of Command we both rolled up our officers, along with their background, age, character, build and where they're from. My platoon leader is 2nd Lieutenant Deaglan Fitzpatrick, an Irishman of average build with an unremarkable biography so far (good school, university, a promising civil service career), aged 22. my platoon Sergeant Callum Graham, Scotsman, aged 20, a barrel of a man, attended a minor public school only, joined the army right away as the only real chance of a career.

All these above things were just quickly rolled up using the tables from the "At the Sharp End" supplement. For additional character traits (and especially motivations, etc.) of course you could consult the - also Too Fat Lardies published - campaign book "Platoon Forward" which I reviewed a few months ago. These two books go together really well because they don't cover exactly the same things. There is some overlap but they both are highly useful if you're playing anything platoon to company level in the 20th century and like campaigns.

I also rolled up characteristics for the single squad leaders.


On to the game in which 2nd Lieutenant Fitzpatrick would meet his nemesis - Herr Leutnant Lechner, from some village in Styria, (formerly) Austria.

So the scenario was scenario one from the rulebook again, The Patrol. Two patrolling infantry platoons taking a peek into no-man's land, meet and try to drive off each other to secure important points of interest and just preventing the enemy from being nosy (= reduce the enemy's force morale to 3 or less or force them to retreat). The setting of course was once again Northern Africa, some time mid-1941, right after Operation Sonnenblume, the landing of Rommel's force in Africa. I completely botched my force morale roll and my opponent rolled a six, resulting in my lads' force morale being 8 and the Germans bringing a force morale of 11 to the party. From that point on it was clear that this was going to be interesting. Historically, the force morale ratings make a lot of sense though.

We both opted for three patrol markers and this is how the Jump-Off points were laid out. (the shot is from somewhere in the middle of the game which is why there are so many figures around):



Support was rolled for, resulting in me getting seven points of support total and the Germans getting two points. I had been pretty impressed with off-board medium mortars so I got a team of forward observers again as well as a Bren Carrier with a crew of three and a junior leader. The Germans, anticipating that somewhere in those whopping seven points might lie an armoured vehicle, brought an anti-tank rifle team.

The Germans started by putting their Grenadier squads on the table, placing a good portion on overwatch to open up at any of my guys who would stick their head out of the sand. So I set up two infantry sections in cover, Platoon Sergeant Graham was set up along with Cpl.Dover's (Ben Dover - get it? HA! HA!) and Cpl. Percy Appleton' sections behind the dunes whilst 2nd Lt.Fitzpatrick had set up base in an old marketplace or something, along with Cpl.Miggins' section, the platoon's 2" mortar and the forward observers.

Leutnant Lechner was standing on top of his command stand on a little hill, along with a junior officer (who was twice his age) and his section. They were lateron joined by the anti tank rifle team.
Some shots were exchanged but nothing much happened. The Germans drew together a bunch of teams for a flanking maneuvre so the British forward observers called in for a mortar barrage immediately which - much to my luck - hit spot on, sending almost the whole platoon to the ground in a huge cloud of sand, dust and shrapnel. The actual damage done was minimal but it kept the enemy down and occupied for a while. Or so thought a certain young Corporal Percy Appleton as him and his section started a mad rush across open field to one of the enemy jump-off points, in the hopes of capturing it, costing the enemy force morale and maybe earning himself a medal very early on in his career.

Unfortunately my opponent used his quickly generated Chain of Command die to end the turn and thus my barrage. Furthermore he deployed his third infantry section right at the jump-off point Cpl.Appleton and his boys were dashing towards, immediately opening fire at my lads and mowing down half the section before they could turn on their heels and dive back into cover. Surely not the best idea I'd ever had.



Appleton's boys right before the mad dash. Only half of them would make it back.

The premature end to the mortar barrage of course was a bad thing, especially looking as to the difficulties involved with requesting further artillery fire. You have to roll for the availability of the off-table battery and on my next phase got the result of "not now, ask again later". So all I could so really was dig in, pop some smoke rounds from my 2" mortar and hope for off-board artillery support. In the mean time the Germans, reorganized and slightly annoyed about that shelling incident, opened fire at the houses my commander, the forward observers and one of the infantry sections had taken position, killing two and lightly wounding Corporal Miggins. To draw some of the attention off them, the Bren Carrier was brought on the field, helping Miggins's men return fire at the German stronghold, and to quite some effect. In fact, the old junior leader got killed, along with approximately five more guys in total, reducing the German force morale to 8. Seeing as how another off-table mortar barrage was just about to get ready and real life time running very short as well the Germans withdrew in order (except for one guy who we still have to dice for).


Leutnant Lechner overlooking the situation

A minor victory for the British, if only because they were the last to go home. In terms of Force Morale both forces had 8 in the end, the Germans having caused two more casualties but lost an NCO as well.

Very eager to find out how the campaign goes on!

Hope you enjoyed the little after action report, even though there were just three pictures this time. The table looked great again so thanks to my opponent for that (along with a bit of patience while I looked up the light mortar smoke deployment table for the what ever how many-est time). :p

I'll see that I can post pictures of the newly painted DW ships this weekend as well. The carrier is mostly done now, I did 12 bases of torpedo boats and started painting the masses of airplane bases.

Looks like an fun game, with lots of interesting mechanics... And the board probably helps !