Pooch's March update

Wait, March is done too? This is getting ridiculous. I don't have a good reason for why it's taken me two weeks to get this post written. Life I guess? Shrug.

Luckily, painting has still managed to carry on!

1. Paint a platoon of DAK each month

This month is one of my favourite vehicles for the Afrika Corps- the Diana!

Marrying up a captured Russian anti-tank gun, with some slabs of armour plate on top of a half tracked prime mover- such fun! In game terms they are fine- they get overshadowed by the Marder, which does the same job better, for a point or so more. Regardless, rule of cool means I bought Diana, not Marders!

Oh so cool!

With crew, and ranging rulers

2. Add something to armies I have already painted

This month it's Adeptus Titanicus, where I have finished the biggest, and smallest models for the game!

First up is the Warbringer, equipped with two massive Plasma Destructors, with magnetised small weapons on it's shoulders. It's the shooty version of the one that McZ finished up a month or so ago!

And along with the Warbringer, I also finished some of the lovely Armigers from Forgeworld. These little cuties are potentially useful in game, especially when I added the two 3d printed ones I finished up at some stage last year.

Such a big stomy titan!

And not so big and stompy!

Next month... not sure!

3. Finish up a table of terrain

More progress on my 28mm Moderns table, this time with buildings from the amazing Corvus Games! We have a local club member who has started into the 3d printing game, who is doing exceptionally good work at it. Combine that with some really high quality designs from Corvus, and you have a recipie for some really really cool terrain for my table.

The two new buildings, plus some locals

A close up of the back of the Corvus Games building

And the oh so cool donut shop!

I also managed to find a mould I had lying around for some Jersey Barriers, so I cast up a set from DAS Clay to add to the table too.

Next up? More from Corvus Games!

4. Play a game a month, that was different to the last month

This month it was a brand new game for me, Altar of Freedom! McB and I got out our shiny new 6mm ACW and refought the second battle of Kernstown.

As a ruleset we both really liked how the game played- there was a lot in it both strategically and tactically, and while units were outright destroyed only rarely, there was a lot of push backs and exploitation moves. 

Union Dismounted Cavalry hold the hill, with infantry in reserve

The Union defensive line on the hill, with the Confederates advancing

The fight on the Union left flank

Definitly a game that we will be playing more of this year. The other important conclusion that we came to was that we would need more 6mm ACW (oh no....)

5. Paint a new historical army

With my 6mm ACW completed (for now), I have moved on to the next new historical army for the year, a 15mm Thirty Years War Catholic army for ADLG-R. I have gone with the lovely Khurasan miniatures, and have set about buying them in small(ish) batches, so that I don't become overfaced and demotivated- learning some lessons from finishing up other Ancient armies! 

Nothing is yet finished, so here is a taster for how we are going- some Dragoons!

Some cuirassiers are up next, and maybe some basing?

Progress is..... acceptable....

Pooch

And I thought last week was bad...

She was a busy week in real-life-land this week so not a lot's been happening hobbywise. Although with Easter coming up, I'm hoping to remediate that and get a bit of building and painting time.

Workbench...

 I've tentatively lined up a game of Victory at Sea with Blogger Pooch at our next club day so I thought I should probably get moving on the Emanuelle Filiberto and my BA201 Dive Bombers.

 

 

Apparently I also forgot to document any of my palette decisions or techniques when I painted the whole fleet last time so it'll be a bit of a process to figure out how to match up with my existing fleet. I'm also mildly nervous about doing candy stripes again...

 

So while I waited for inks to dry and procrastinated about candy stripes, I started a new big build: 

 

This is the core of a Knight Errant for 40K - a project that'll finish up my small 3-vehicle Knight detachment and enable an entertaining knight + Imperial Guard army I want to play. I'm debating building the pilot's cabin, which I kind of want to do, but putting the rocket pod on with the hatch open feels like it might wind up looking a little silly. Anyway, I'll keep building and this model will be a blog feature for the next wee while as it'll be assembled and painted in parts, a valuable lesson learned from building Titans.

... and at least one thing got finished...

 I did my ADLG camp! The excellent print that Blogger Triple T (over here at Potbelly Minatures) did for me came up a treat. The white's a bit rough, which is kind of fine given that it does a good job of matching the rest of the army.

 I 'primed' the tent with Mod Podge which covered up the print lines, especially on the tent roof, and while I lost a bit of the detail, I'm pretty happy with how it came out. I've also started Mod Podge-ing the islands I bought from Battlekiwi in advance of probable boats in a couple of weeks.

...and a game!

I had a game of Late War, 100 point, Flames of War with clubmate BB and his able die-roller, BB-Junior.

BB wanted to try out a US M18 list in an offensive, long table game and in advance of our annual club competition in a couple of months, I wanted to give my Jagdpanzer IV/70 another run with some relatively recently painted Hummels going in for the prior Wespes and dropping two of the four Pumas that had been in the list. 

We played Escape, with the Allies attacking. I left the Jagdpanzer IV/70s and the Pumas off, knowing they would come on the short table edge behind BB's deployment zone.

Soon to be Sherman Crocodiles

BB attacked vigorously up his left flank under cover of smoke, part of his cunning plan running 2 Priest batteries and a 105mm battery. I got no reserves till turn 3...

I ambushed my StuGs in turn 2 in an attempt to remove some M18s (to prepare for the certain arrival of my Jagdpanzers) and that resulted in a couple of turns of us shooting marshmallows at each other and my not dealing with the Sherman Crocs. My Hummels put some serious hurt on his infantry platoon though and even had a crack at some of the M18s.

Underprepared for Flame Tanks

When the Flametanks finally arrived on the objective (when I lost the game the first time but we carried on playing), they slowly set about removing my infantry on the objective alongside my Quad AA guns. The AA and 251s easily prevented the remnant infantry platoon from holding the objective but I also singularly failed to remove enough of the Sherman Crocs due to my over reliance on my Jagdpanzer HQ which eventually cost me the game the second time!

This should have gone better than it did

The Jagdpanzer IV/70s had three turns in the rear of BBs army, including two turns surviving M18 hits to the face and side, and managed to do a sum total of nothing, despite having a good chance at breaking the fairly fragile M18 company. 

In the end, my poor StuG ambush choice and BBs aggressive use of his Sherman Crocs won the day for the Americans although a post-game analysis suggested that had I deployed my StuGs better, BB would have had a much tougher time. He said afterward that having a crack at the company break to save the game (in a turn where every Jagdpanzer shot missed instead) has led him to rewrite the list and I really like where he's gone with it.

 All in all, a delightfully chill game with a mate which I very much enjoyed. 

Next Time

More Knight and the finished boats I'm sure. 

Not the most productive week...

 For some very good reasons! 

I did paint one thing this week which has been sitting around on the painting desk for a while. One M113 FIST for TY / Seven Days to the River Rhine.

 

 

I've rambled before about using Vallejo Model Air colours on these models before and having done AAPV7s and Sergeant Yorks, an M113 was relatively easy by comparison, even with it's slab sides. I picked this up many many moons ago with a view to testing out a digital camouflage scheme that I'd still like to try one day for some 1980s Jordanians but never got around to it. 

I have managed to do a bit of prep this week too and have a few things hitting the primer in the upcoming week too, some of which make lots of sense and a couple were things I just picked up on a whim. 

Having watched the 'Old Bale Eye' episode of Hammer and Bolter this weekend, I'm super keen to get Yarrick done and the not-April-Fools that Squats are coming back to 40K is moderately exciting given that I have two of the four extant Permitted Abhumans in my Guard army already, adding in the other two would be awesome.

Unfathomable

I have also played some games of Unfathomable, a Cthulhu-framed reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. 

 Blogger Pelarel has done an amazing job of painting up the Deep Ones, Mother Hydra and Father Dagon. He's mentioned wanting to find a decent set of figures for the PCs too, which would make this extra cool.

I've lost a bunch of games of BSG over the years, and the first couple I played as a Cylon were completely disastrous! Mechanically, Unfathomable is similar enough that comparisons with BSG are easy. It has the same sort of model where the characters do the things and then have a crisis with a couple of macro games (the make-ship-go track and the make-monsters-away track) but for me I think it's a better game than BSG. There are slightly fewer moving parts in the game but the characters feel a bit more like there's a point to them other than your particular combo of skill cards. 

It seems especially successful for the traitors. It feels slightly easier to hide than BSG and if you are exposed being sent to the Brig doesn't become a massive drama and you've got a lot more chance to interact with the game even when you are exposed. Every time I play this we spend heaps of time putting the hybrids into the Brig or the Sickbay and they keep coming back.

I'm not sure we've won this yet, but we're getting there. This last game we made it through the full travel requirement for the first time and it was the last one that sank the ship. Rude. 

Next Time

I'm hoping to have the Teutons on the park this coming weekend although convincing some of my gamer friends to take on the Knightly Orders might be a bit optimistic...

And like that, the thing that happened was done....

 The army is done!

I have a couple of shield transfers to do (I just have to find where I carefully stored those...) but that's easy enough. I went a bit more heavyhanded with the green on the bases on these ones - more than I usually do on just about everything. A lot of that is to disguise the absolutely terrible basing filler but actually I think I've been under-flocking some of these things so am definitely going to keep doing this this way. The white of the Teutonic Order knights definitely stands out so much more!

The baggage is not done yet. Blogger Triple T has kicked off doing a bit of 3D printing (over here at Potbelly Minatures) and printed me off a tent and some crates to drop on my baggage elements. The crates are amazing and the tent print is stunning but a touch short for the almost 32mm Fireforge plastics so hopefully he can do some wizardry and make it a touch taller. 

Workbench

TINY KNIGHTS! The other thing I got with my Stig Shambler (still very much a work in progress) was some Knight Moiraxes for Adeptus Titanicus too. They're super cute and I'm looking forward to painting them up this week. Like everything Titanicus, the level of detail is stunning as well.

Star Wars Legion

 I had a game with Blogger Pel at the club and I was VERY tempted to borrow his brilliant summary of the game for the title of this blog. But then I decided the internet didn't need that and I'd just caption this one photo I took during the game:

Daddy Issues...

The game didn't go all that well for Pel - lots of squishy, small Rebel trooper units were kind of hard-countered by what my list was trying to do and my luck crit-fishing against his armoured units (which is getting stupid) continued with my Death Troopers and Iden Versio between then cobbling together enough critical hits in one round of shooting to destroy a snowspeeder. That particular interaction was a really good chance to explore the way the hit assignment worked as I was trying to make best use of Iden's Critical 1 and Marksman to basically get crits.

For me, it was an experiment in applying suppression markers in large numbers across the board. The only things that didn't have the Suppressive quality were my Shore Troopers and honestly, they don't need it. The plan sort of worked but I found I didn't have enough command cards giving out orders to my units (I over-used Iden and Vader command cards) to make the best of the combination between the Shores and their Mortars which wasn't great. I'm going to give the list another go though, with a few other tweaks in kit and content to see what happens. 

Next Time

Goodness knows. I'm hoping to get the Teutonic Order out for a run of ADLG in a couple of weeks - after that I'm not especially pressed on anything project wise. Something. Next Sunday! 

So this happened....

 Yes, longtime readers, I have done a stupid and made myself a pile of work. Again.

I have de-based all my Teutonic Order from Kings of War and rebased it all for ADLG. Some days I am genuinely forced to wonder what is wrong with me. I swear I'm never going to paint another army in white several times over and yet recently I was having another conversation with Blogger Pooch about armies we'd play in Horus Heresy and I'm once again forced to admit that I'd play World Eaters. 

Why? Well, I haven't been playing a lot of KoW and this army was always intended to be an ancients army so I have decided that rather than buy and paint another army for ADLG, I'd reconstitute this one since I got enough spare bases for a second army when I rebased the Byzantines.

This was a very careful exercise in basing as both the Teutonic Bruder and the Crusaders only go together in the rows that they're in now. Base sizes for ADLG are something of a meme in our gaming group and this was clearly one of the ranges of figures that the last edition recommended wider bases for... 

I've also made up these two bases of mounted crossbow out of some remnant light cavalry so remembering how I painted the grey and buff Order Sergeants is going to be an interesting challenge but I'm really looking forward to putting this mad crew on the park and maybe, finally, playing them in an ancients game where they don't just straight suck.

Other WIPs

 

I've made some progress on my Platoon-a-Month and picked up the CO stand and the extra two Rifle/MG stands for my existing platoon and aiming to finish all those too. I'm struggling with these a bit as they're old casts and they're just not as crisp as they were when I first did a platoon of these way back in the day.

MASTER/BLASTER

 I bought a Cawdor Stig Shambler for Necromunda too - I love this ridiculous model and it was one of those things in the rulebook that I was genuinely waiting for. I'm still doing a bit of thinking about how I can mount both the heavy stubber AND heavy flamer and I think it's going to need to be a clever magnet arrangement if it's going to work (and I'm not sure that it is!) The assembly is going well so far but there's a bit of gap filling to do around the waist before he's ready for painting.

Next Time

I'll do the snow and some highlights and thus finish up the Platoon-a-Month and call that done and hopefully have based up most of the Teutonic Order as well. I'm not sure what I'll be playing at club day but if it turns out to not suck and I take enough photos, you might get a game report!

Seven Days? More Like Seven Turns

 Brads

 So late on Friday before club day, I put the finishing touches on 4 Bradleys for my first games of Seven Days to the River Rhine.

The BF Bradley kit is really nice and I really enjoyed painting these. I have another five to do, but they probably won't get done until I next decide I want to play a game of TY. There are a few dudes at the club getting going on it again with very much the view (which I share!) that it requires a bit of preplanning to get a fun game and everyone agrees not to bring 40 Humvees...

Seven Days to the River Rhine

Pel and I managed two games at 500 points, and a leisurely lunch, in a shade over 3.5 hours which was rather pleasant. Here's a run down of the second game, after I learned a few things having been completely smashed in game one! My fairly conventional list from a TY perspective hadn't really panned out so I rebuilt with something that looked more like his list and was considerably better balanced for this game.

Our scouts lead the way into an escalating engagement between the B.A.O.R and the US Marine Corps.

A Marine LAV carrying an FAO takes an overwatch position (I had the Precision Guided Munitions tactical advantage and hoped to use it on Pel's arriving supports!)

A brave Humvee Scout zipped out towards the board centre and opened up on the British MILAN team hiding behind the garage. He did well and scored 2 morale markers. Pel promptly recovered one and a MILAN went through the Humvee like the proverbial through the proverbial.

Turn two was pretty much a wash as we brought on our first lot of reserves and spent a lot of orders doing it (see below about this.....) 

The game ground to a halt in turn three when we both had to bring on  the remainder of our reserves. Pel played Electronic Warfare on me (and my Intelligence Coup had already saved me from angry West German partizans from blowing up one of my M1s) and removed 6 of my 8 orders, meaning 4 of the 6 units I had off the board couldn't be brought on. It turns out we got this wrong so this felt REALLY back breaking despite Pel having to spend most of his order pool bringing on his final reserves as well and neither of us really doing much with the turn at all. We learned in game three that when units come on from reserve, their orders are immediately available. Oops.

As a small amount of revenge, given that Pel had also blown most of his order pool on his reserves, I snuck my CO out and he called in some CAS which absolutely ruined a Chieftain (it's the smoky black smear in the back of the photo!)

I decided to take a risk and try and get rid of Pel's second Chieftain so one of my M1s took up a hull down position and sent a bunch of lead downrange. Pel's reaction dice were on fire and the two tanks exchanged several shots before one from the M1 hit home and the Chieftain was destroyed.

On the right flank a single squad of Marines held up the British advance for the whole game and held on for dear life in the apartment building under near constant fire from a British fireteam and a Scimitar. In turn 4, Pel played his ace and coming in from his Divisional Reserve, a CHALLENGER! It roared up his right flank where it was engaged by one of my M1s and from the back of the board, a LAV-AT that had arrived from reserve. The TOW from the LAV-AT bounced off the Chobham twice before an aggressive attack from the M1 froze the Challenger crew and a lucky shot from the M1 knocked it out. 

That was rather the final act of the game as having brewed up both Chieftains and the Challenger and having shot Pel's Lynx down with some Marine Harriers, I ran down one of his Scimitars and one of the Swingfires and the game was over. It was a win for me on the scale of Pel's win in our first game! He's taken me through a bunch of new games over the last few years and learning games with him is always a pleasure.

Not a Review

Rather than a massive essay from me, as much I like to write them, I'm going to imagine this as a Q&A. So: 

Did I like 7DttRR? Yes. Very much. It's a lot of fun.

How does it compare to TY? It doesn't. They are completely different games, both in style and mechanics.

Loves? 

• Driving around in a tank and not fearing a horde of transport vehicles with ATGMs is great
  
• Actively making reactions to my opponents actions (and having that done to me too) and having to radically replan on the hoof makes for an unexpected amount of depth
  
• It comes as a PDF although I will note I grumped that there is errata but the PDF hasn't been updated!
• There is no way to fail a 2+ firepower roll. If you penetrate a vehicle it's destroyed or REALLY destroyed.
  
• A WARPAC army for this will be cool to do as it doesn't involve painting 8000 of the same vehicle.
• Overall, the game is light, quick and interactive and it's hard to be really out of a game
  
• There's a cool online community and great support from the author.
  

Dislikes? 

• The rulebook has some textual ambiguity in some places but Pel and I guessed at a few things and found they'd either been well clarified online or we could come to a conclusion that made sense to us both. 
• The one really silly thing I found is that an AAPV7 carries one infantry unit like all transport vehicles. I put a two-man Dragon team in an APC that seats 50 people. Silly. 

I will definitely be playing this more and when Pel suggested that this was something we could play a campaign with, I was immediately on board. It's an easy game to learn and it wouldn't take long to get a bunch of people up to speed to do a thing like that.

Next Time

WIPs wise there's all sorts of stuff going on so next week will almost certainly be a workbench miscellany of things I'm currently working on. I *should* really get the HMG platoon done for my Platoon-a-Month but, you know me, I probably won't.  

1:1 painting is not hobby time

 As it's late summer, I've been oil staining the decking at home and the prep and work time has rather ruined my hobbying this week. I've managed to get a couple of tasks off the to do list this week though. 

RPGs

This Hasslefree, Jessica-Jones-inspired model, will play Adelaide, the snarky pilot in our Expanse campaign but might also do double duty in a  future possible game of Shadowrun where I have an idea, inspired by both the model and Jessica Jones, for a fisticuff wielding, cybernetically enhanced StreetSam.

Team Yankee

I've built 4 more Bradleys, and Blogger Pooch has promised me one more, which will give me the 9 I need for a workable TY Recce company. In the meantime, Blogger Pel and I will be having a blat at Great Escape Games Seven Days to the River Rhine at the club in a week's time so I'm hammering out the first four Bradleys so I can have some infantry zipping around in those.

So the fist two base coats of IDF Sand are on with a third to go tonight and then I can get the MASSTER on and do the detailing. They're coming up surprisingly quickly as there aren't any smooth surfaces so the airbrush IDF Sand is going on well.

Platoon a Month

 

Here's a WIP and no mistake. Just the first base coats on my platoon for March which I think might actually see play in 4E Grenadier companies, especially with scary Russian hordes running about the joint. 

Another Warmaster?

No?! I'm not made of money, patience or time. :) Pooch seems to like having his titans stomping on the remnants of mine so he rustled me up a Reaver carapace which I have dutifully enpurpled and enreddened so that his Warmaster can be striding over the wreckage of one of my many Reavers.

Next Time

I'll do a bit of a review of Seven Days to the River Rhine and try and write a proper battle report to go with it.

Pooch's February update

And with that, February is now gone. A very busy work month, but still good progress across my five goals....

1. Paint a platoon of DAK each month

One of the things I am producing my DAK army for is a doubles tournament later this year. The core of my part of the force is going to be the mighty early Panzer III! So this month, here is a platoon of four of them.

Four more Panzers, ready for combat!

I went a bit further with the weathering on this set of four, I think I might have gone a touch too far- it's made them look particularly battered and bruised! 

One of the most weathered, compared to one of the least weathered!

I don't mind it as an effect, it just might be something I need to watch when I finish up the final 5 Panzer III's for the army that I need to get the balance of weathering right across the force.

Next month... Dianas!

2. Add something to armies I have already painted

First up in this category is some figures I have had for a long time and done nothing with, a set of Wild West zombies from the Dead Man's Hand game. I plan on using them for Dracula's America, which is sure to appear on my monthly gaming list in due course. I've got some ideas in mind for scenarios using them that I wrote when I first bought the models, so I'll need to pull those out and prep them for the other nerds.

The models are mostly done, with the exception that I have run out of the static grass I use, so they will need the grass before I call them complete!

The whole horde

The Baron, the one controlling them. I'm particularly happy with the snake around his shoulders

The first six zombies....

And another six zombies!

Secondly this month, is some good progress on the thing that I needed to clear the Titanicus painting table for.... a Warmaster Titan! It's a little behind in the build than McZ's, but will be finished soon enough....

Stompy legs are stompy.

3. Finish up a table of terrain

I finished up the first of the buildings for my city table, a 1950s style american diner! The model comes from the Plasticville O scale series, and I have a bunch from that to work through. It's.... fine? I used a rattlecan for the silver, followed by an ink wash and a highlight, which came out well I think. 

Next up is some 3d printed buildings from Corvus Games I think!

4. Play a game a month, that was different to the last month

Continuing the trend from last year of playing games with things that I finished last year, but didn't get a chance to play, February was Star Wars Legion Skirmish month!

I managed to have a couple of practice games, and then played a couple of rounds of a semi-tournament we had at a club day at the end of February.

Overall, I think I like the game, but know that I need to do some more practice with the game so that I know how to work with some of the other parts of the game- the likes of an AT-ST or Han Solo caused me no end of strife, and i wasn't experienced enough with the game to know what to do about it!

No clue what next month's game is going to be.....

5. Paint a new historical army

Progress continued on my 6mm American Civil War army, with a further two divisions done, meaning that the entire Second Corps at Gettysburg, and all of my 6mm ACW is now complete! 

The whole 6mm Army

The two new divisions completed this month

Close up of Hall's Brigade, with the 1st Massachusetts Sharpshooters

Next up? Well I have another historical army to make a start on, and this one will take longer than 2 months!

On to March!

Progress is..... acceptable....

Pooch