Wellcome to another work in progress Wednesday. Above we start with a close up of Tony’s 1980’s Canadians, Tony said these were “in their 3-colour camo’ scheme (plain olive green for the tanks). The infantry have had a base coat of Army Green – the Canucks had plain green uniforms with US Vietnam-era helmet covers, so relatively easy to paint.”
This is swiftly followed by Mark’s progress on the opposing forces of some Cold War British forming the 7th Armoured brigade. Mark says the paint scheme is “abandoned Berlin camo scheme and have done black disruptive”.
Next up Stephen has added to his sci-fi collection with an interesting miniature he’s named “Captain Selwyn Froggit of the good ship Magic R Morris”
And last but not least this week, Marcus gives us a window into his current work desk and resident projects of planes and various vehicles and terrain for more scuba action.
Stephen ponders on hills and describes his latest terrain piece…
Hills. They just never look right on the wargames table.
Look at a games table and you may see two or three little dumplings, big enough for a few elements.
Those are hills, apparently.
In reality, whole armies and battles are fought on hills (e.g. Hastings). But not on a wargames table where Mother Nature has to conform to a terrain feature that is no bigger than L on any one side and where diagonally it can be no more than L+S. Or some such tortured formula.
So what is a ‘hill’ on the wargames table?
Not really a hill, that’s for sure. I should say that I don’t play too many mass battle games, so the focus of this project is what a hill could be on the skirmish table.
I suspect most of us use modular, scatter, terrain rather than game boards with fixed terrain features. So we are looking at terrain features that can be plonked down anywhere on the table. Which, like it or not, gives rise to that dumpling hill effect.
I had a thought about what those lumps and bumps could be. Yes, it could represent undulating terrain, the majority of which is gently rising. The odd ‘steep hill’ could be a rocky scarp or rise that is covered in broken ground and brambles.
Yeah, that works.
But I thought of what else it could represent, and something that would add character and theme.
The answer seemed obvious – burial mounds and chambers! Yup, that would explain why they are dumpling shaped. It’s not a ‘hill’ so much as a burial mound – game effects are exactly the same.
So that’s what this project is – making a burial mound/hill.
I based this model on chambers such as Wayland’s Smithy – a stone-faced entrance into an earth mound. That would give it a bit more character and presence than just a plain green mound.
The entrance way was made using embossed styrene from Wills Scenics. Rather than just cut the sides diagonally I then went and trimmed the styrene so it conformed to the shape of the stones to make it looked like the stones had been laid. This was then stuck to two layers of 5mm foamboard. The main mound was going to be made from a piece of EPS foam.
The base was cut from modellers light ply and the foam mound was glued to that and the entrance way was glued to the front. To give the entrance a bit of depth I tore away some of the foam (this would later be lined in air dry clay to smooth it out and make it easier to paint).
The entrance, showing the foam board and trimmed edges.
When that had all dried it was out with the Miliput. This was used to make the trilithon doorway and also to cover the top of the foamboard to look like stonework.
Trilithon doorway and top of the foamboard covered to look like stonework
On to painting. I used my standard way of painting stone – start with a khaki undercoat. I couldn’t use spray on this because it would melt the EPS foam, so I slapped on some Revell acrylic khaki with a brush. And, as ever, this was washed in GW Agrax Earthshade.
Undercoated and washed.
I’m not going to go in-depth on the painting – I’ve covered my stonework process before. But, in brief, the whole is then given successive dry-brushings with a mix of khaki and grey and a bit of white. Then a bit of weather – Agrax Earthshade to re-establish edges, and dark green for damp.
After dry-brushing and further washes
Then on to the flocking. It was given a base cover of a mix of railroad ballast and sand. After that it had static grass applied. I think it looks best to leave patches of the ballast or other basing materials on show – a blanket of velvet static grass just looks too much. To add to the texture of the model I then stuck down bits of clump foliage, to suggest brambles, nettles, and other weeds.
The finished article.
And that’s it! A really simple modelling project and now that little dumpling hill has a reason for looking the way it does.
We start this week with some great paint jobs from Eric. Above we have a Chaos Cultist and below a nice close up (sorry Eric, I thought it deserved it) of his finished Custodian Guard Shield Captain.
Next up Mark has made a bit more progress on his British 1970’s infantry, as well as quite a debate among members over the length of the recoilless rifle.
Mark’s son has also painted some impressive Polish from the Napoleonic era.
And speaking of Polish Andy has made some more progress on his 10mm versions.
And last but by no means least this week Stephen has painted up some mutants, he may have a plan for these but they will work nicely for Stargrave.
We will see you next week for yet more progress from club members.
Jeremey takes us through an unusual wargaming project from many years ago (2009 to be precise!)
I like a bit of Fantasy wargaming but never really enjoyed the most popular rules Warhammer Fantasy. I tried 2nd and 3rd edition, but soon gave up. I tried a few other fantasy systems but nothing gripped me so I ended up mainly playing Science Fiction games, Space Marine, Full Thrust, Dirtside etc.
But then Warmaster was released and I like the look of the massed battles in 10mm. Rather than buy the Games Workshop Warmaster miniatures i went instead for the 10mm Fantasy miniature from Pendraken Miniatures. I bought enough miniatures to field an undead and barbarian armies.
However on reading the rules I just didn’t feel like I wanted to play a system with rigid rank and file units, needing to move around according to dozens of rules. I hadn’t encountered those kinds of rules and at the time was looking for something extremely simple.
Others would have at least given Warmaster a fair crack of the whip but my twisted approach to wargming meant I came up with my own set of rules and in a radical move decided to base the units on round bases!
Although I really liked the end result and with the round bases meaning units were more mobs and so didn’t need complicated movement rules, basing miniatures in this way was hard work. I had to poke the brush with glue for the flock between the legs. In fact after the first few bases I instead stuck a few on, flock that bit of the base, then stuck on the next group and so on until the base was completed.
But I persevered and completed two complete armies. At this scale it was easy to represent monsters, along with the usual spearmen, archers and cavalry for the barbarians i also had a couple of woolly mammoths and for the undead I converted a couple of 28mm skeletons to act as undead giants.
I took the game to one of the society meetings where a fellow member and I gave the rules a go.
Each unit had a number of hits it could take before being destroyed. To represent this I created a series of flags that were stuck on each base with a number of skulls representing hits remaining. I made lots of flags so that as the unit suffered hits you could replace the flag as appropriate.
The rules worked well enough (Sadly I’ve no idea what I’ve done with them), here the woolly mammoths are attacked by undead cavalry after charging in against the undead giant. The games worked on a fairly basic roll to hit, roll to save using D6’s.
I still have all of the forces I painted up but even if I could find the rules the idea of people rebasing their armies onto round bases was a bit of a non-starter. Practically every set of wargame rules from 15mm down to 6mm are based on rectangular bases which appears to have come from the original DBA/DBM rule sets. Still I thought it was a good idea and still think it looked cool on the table top.
I may yet dig the forces out again and see if I can recreate the rules for another game.
We start this week with a great looking truck for Gaslands from Eric. Eric has also painted another Chaos Marauder.
Next up Marcus has somehow acquired yet more fighters, although he claims this selection of 1:200 Spitfires and Me109’s are for his son.
Now we have the start of 15mm British and Canadian forces from the 1980’s.
Mark is painting up the British and Tony the Canadian’s for a future game they are calling ‘Blue on Blue’.
Next up, I’ve been busy replacing the wound/hit dice that I integrated on the bases of my Wars of the Roses units. The tiny grey dice I originally went for has proven to small for the standard wargamer size fingers. Luckily I’ve been able to replace them with a slightly larger dice.
And last for this week, we leave you with an intriguing start from John for his new scratch built radio mast for a planned Zona Alfa building.
Back to the normal schedule, a short roundup of games at the last meeting…
Firstly, our second game of Barons War, this time a 1500 point a side affair with Jeremey & Stephen facing up to John & Andy
Opening positions.John’s crossbows await the onslaught of Jeremey’s troops.Stephen’s Lord all on his own.Near the end.
One of our regular Field of Glory games, Italian Condotta vs Late Hungarian in 6mm.
The FOG battlefieldSerried ranks of KnightsKnights outflank Light Cavalry
Another 6mm game, Napoleonic Peninsula with a British, Portuguese and Spanish force attacking a French held town.
Allied forces approach the French positions. Where are the rest of the French?View from the French linesThe Spanish prepare to advanceBattle in full swingThe Allies take the townClose up of an Allied Brigade
And finally, Alan ran a Sudan game in 28mm using Sharp Practice.
The head of the British relief column enters the “empty” battlefieldThe first of the BritishMhadist reserves await their turn.Mahdist leader and escortMhadists outflank the cavalry
After a gap of 17 months (for the obvious reasons) Jeremey and Stephen finally got to field their Wars of the Roses armies again. Here Jeremey takes us through what happened.
Both Stephen and I agreed on making this a 700 points per side battle using the Sword and Spear rules. We invited other members to take part and ended up with the Lancastrian forces commanded by Stephen and Tony, with the Yorkist side commanded by myself and Andy.
Here we have the main bulk of the Yorkist forces, with the usual number of archers and billmen. The Yorkists didn’t bother to bring any unusual units like artilery, but did have welsh spearmen and archers to swell the ranks. I took the Yorkist Left flank facing the Lancastrians commanded by Tony, which left Andy facing Stephen’s lancastrians on the right.
The Lancastrian forces had a similar make up but went for some artillery and handgunners. Both sides drew up their forces in typical formations. Tony on the Lancastrian right had command of all the Lancastrian cavalry units.
To add a bit of flavour to the game I created a number of event cards, these were sort of successful but on drawing the cards the lancastrians came off worse with both the artillery and handgunner units being forced to join the battle after a set number of turns. This was due to having event cards designed to show the chaotic nature of forces during this time getting lost on the way or being hesitant to join the battle.
The initial activation of the armies saw both sides move up to longbow range and engage in an archery duel. It was at this point that a general theme of the Lancastrians (specifically Tony) having the most appalling dice rolls ever began.
The archery duel didn’t last long and saw the majority of the Lancastrian archers wiped out for no loses on the Yorkist side.
Faced with the archery disaster the Lancastrians under Tony started an outflanking move with their cavalry, a mixture of mounted men at arms and currours.
This caused a bit of panic in the Yorkist ranks (well me really) who quickly brought up more of their billmen and cavalry to counter the move.
Having riden within range the Yorkist horse charged against the lancastrians attempting the outflanking move, the first charge nearly destroyed the Lancastrian cavalry. They were soon dispatched in the following turn.
However this didn’t discourage the Lancastrian who then charged with their mounted men at arms straight at a unit of billmen. Again Tony’s dice rolling saw the Lancastrian cavalry completely destroyed for just a single point of damage to the billmen.
Meanwhile on the Yorkist right flank the Lancastrians commanded by Stephen managed to buck the trend and shot Andy’s welsh spearmen to pieces. This put the right flank in danger as the Yorkists had fewer archers to try and even the score.
The alarming gap in the Yorkist forces where the welsh spearmen used to be. Facing the potential of another arrow storm Andy decided drastic measures were needed.
Much to my surprise this saw Andy charge the archers with his Northern Boarder horse. It didn’t go well with the cavalry being wiped out.
Having so far suffered only two points of damage to my units I felt emboldened and charged my billmen into the remnants of Tony’s archers scoring a number of hits and pushing the Lancastrian loses towards breaking point.
With the Lancastrians on the brink of breaking I charged the final unit of Lancastrian currours with my mounted men at arms. As was typical for the game so far the Lancastrian cavalry were wipped out handing victory to the Yorkists.
It’s always nice to win a battle but this game was one of the most one sided I’ve ever played. My Yorkist forces on the left flank had managed to almost wipe out the Lancastrians for the loss of no units and only suffering two points of damage. I must say the victory felt somewhat hollow and we were all left amazed at just how badly the dice can sometime go against a player.
I promised Tony a rematch just to throw off the dice rolling curse he was clearly suffering from.
It’s Wednesday and another offering of what members are working on.
I’ll start with me for a change, above I’ve almost finished my Vikings. These are the quickest I’ve painted a group of miniatures for many a year. I need these for a game of Saga and so have put in the time to get them done.
Next up Mark has been painting an assortment of miniatures. The first being a bunch of mutants for judge Dredd.
Next we have an Elf Mage complete with fire spell effect. Apparently the spell effect comes as transparent plastic which Mark has painted with a suitable ink wash to look like fire.
Felix has also been doing a bit of painting with a Halfling Thief.
And lastly for this week Stephen has started a dungeon project. Stephen hasn’t decided what to do with the dungeon but promises there is more of this to come.
That’s it for this Wednesday, see you all next week.
A tad delayed, but here’s a photo round up of our first meeting of 2022. In addition to our AGM, we had a SAGA battle day, involving 8 players, a FOG Renaissance ECW game, a Lords of the Rings Game and some Spy-Fi action.
First up a SAGA-fest with Scots, Bretons, Welsh, Vikings and Anglo-Danes. In addition to some experienced SAGA players we had a couple of prospective members join in for their first games.
Andy’s Anglo Danish face off against Stephen’s WelshJames’ Vikings vs Jeremey’s Anglo DanesTony’s Bretons vs John’s ScotsJames’ Vikings vs Jeremey’s Anglo DanesJames’ Vikings vs Jeremey’s Anglo DanesClose up of John’s ScotsTony’s Bretons
Moving on the the English Civil War, 15mm figures using Field of Gory rules.
ECW Armies line upCuirassiers chargeColonel John Lamplugh’s Regiment of FootRoyalist Regiments
Moving from history to fiction, Marcus had a try out of his underwater Spy-Fi rules.
Marcus’ seascapeDivers and mini-subMore divers hiding behind a shoal of fishThe two sides fight over the lost missile.
And finally to Fantasy, a Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.
The scene is set.Dwarves advance across the bridgeUruk Hai advance with a Troll in supportDwarf Heavy MetalDwarves holding the Bridge against the Uruk Hai
The Wolf Tamer is no more. Owain of Bangor is dead!. Ambushed and killed by English bandits, Owain the Benevolent, Owain the Peaceful, Owain the Thrice-Blessed, now lies in Heaven.
The Death of Owain
Though his body now lies in the earth his soul and spirit still lives. Bleddyn ab Owain, his beloved son, has made his way back to Bangor. He has left his studies at the abbey of Llanbadarn Fawr to take up his rightful place as heir of his father’s demesne. With him he has brought the ways of the men of Deheubarth – pony riders skilled in making war from their mounts.
Next we have an Elf Mage complete with fire spell effect. Apparently the spell effect comes as transparent plastic which Mark has painted with a suitable ink wash to look like fire.
Felix has also been doing a bit of painting with a Halfling Thief.
And lastly for this week Stephen has started a dungeon project. Stephen hasn’t decided what to do with the dungeon but promises there is more of this to come.
That’s it for this Wednesday, see you all next week.
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