Review - "Miniature Wargames" issue 362

Scarily, it must be a month since Salute.

I can tell this for a couple of reasons. First up, the credit card bill's arrived - cue the 'you've been spending money again' cries from the Keeper Of The Privy Purse...

Next, and far more satisfying, issue 362 of Miniature Wargames dropped onto my electronic doormat yesterday morning. Unlike a real postman, it doesn't knock or bang the letterbox flap at 3am, so I was somewhat pleased by that!

This is the second issue under the guidance of former Battlegames editor Henry Hyde, and I have to say? he hasn't let the standard slip from the previous one. Plenty of articles on a wide range of topics, including an interesting piece on an ECW campaign setting in 1644 (which rather appealed after our club campaign last year), a pirate rescue scenario which I'm awfully tempted to try out with Legends of the High Seas sometime and another one of Diane Sutherland's excellent terrain-on-a-budget pieces.

More interesting, a couple of very thought provoking 'meta' articles on the nature of 'realism' in wargames rules, and on the 'top down' vs 'bottom up' approach to a wargaming project. I'm all for more of these in MW, as I really do enjoy talking about the meta stuff around gaming.

One small criticism of the digital edition? The contents items aren't clickable, as far as I can tell, on my iPad.

In a nutshell? If it was a brand-new gaming mag with no history attached to the title? I'd buy and subscribe like a shot.

Onto the next! (like I think I said last time!)

Brief Review - Plastic Soldier Company Warsprays

At least, that's what I assume they're called. The cans are labelled very prominently 'Army Sprays', but the supporting literature calls them "Warsprays".

Anyway - to the right we have British and US tank sprays as well as British khaki and German Feldgrau. Initial impressions? Cans feel slightly chunkier than the Army Painter ones, and are a damn sight easier to open.

The colour is indicated by three things:

• the icon on the can (which helps you distinguish half the range from the other half)
• the coloured ring around the spray head (which probably helps you distinguish most things, but I'd hate to have to tell US, British and Russian tank colours apart in poor light)
• a printed description on the coloured ring, which looks like the same kind of print 'Best Before' dates are put on things like milk cartons with. I'd be a little concerned as to whether it rubs off before I've emptied the can!

The only one I've tested is the Feldgrau, on a company's worth of 15mm Battlefront metals and plastics - in fact the force for the second scenario in the IABSM rulebook.

Impressions?

Covers well, sprays nicely, dries pretty fast (tens of minutes tops). If anything it feels a shade thicker and stickier than the Army Painter stuff its apparently based on, but this isn't a problem. Looks like it should be a decent match for the Vallejo Feldgrau should I need to do any touching up.

In summary? You need to paint WW2 stuff? Go out and buy some! Does what it says on the tin :D

Terrain part 6 - hills

As I have said in the past, I am a firm believer that the small, rather sad looking polystyrene, or similar, pimples that adorn many wargames tables are not hills in any reasonable sense of the word in any ground scale that's even close to 1:1. Time to build a big hill and put my money where my mouth is.

That's most of an A1 sheet of 10mm foam board: essentially it's about 2' x 3' before the shaping. The ribs are more foamboard, and the plateau is a chunk of 50mm craft foam I had spare from another scenery experiment (of which more later).

It's designed to fit a board corner. The next stages are screwed up newspaper, some more ribs and some masking tape, and then some Woodland Scenics plaster bandage.

My one worry is keeping it flat - that size of foam board tends to flex, but the plaster etc. should keep it rigid once it's done. Sadly, the workshop floor isn't quite flat, so before I apply any paint or PVA I'm going to have to clear some space and move it to the bench.

Feeling kinda pleased with myself

I'm rather chuffed (as we say up North) to reveal that as of (probably) the beginning of next week, I am officially a published wargames writer.

Ok, you could make the case that I am already if you count this blog. And the publication in question is PDF-only. 

But...

My piece entitled 'If You Go Down To The Woods Today' will be in the 2013 Too Fat Lardies Summer Special when it comes out, which Mr. Clarke assures us is Real Soon Now. I've seen (and approved) the final proof, complete with a nice little snippet from my partner in Dux Britanniarum crime, Mr Andrew "Andrucius" Hawes, and a couple of photos of our battles.

Hopefully the first of many.

Battle Report - 21 May 2013 - Chain of Command

It's not often we run out of hedges before we run out
of places to put them!

Last night was the club's 40K campaign night, so some of those of us who don't, ah, partake, as it were, gathered for another run through the Lardies' Chain of Command.

This time, we decided to start the mini-campaign suggested in the rulebook, so basically a platoon a side - we decided to skip any reinforcements. And of course, since nearly everyone else was playing 40K (barring Andy and Paul, and I suspect he'll tell you what he was doing on his blog later!), we got to use ALL the nice new Last Valley 28mm Normandy terrain we wanted.

View of the battlefield from the German right - the red
roofed house nearest the camera and the grey roofed one
a little further down the road at the T-junction were the
main scene of the action.

Gary and Chris took the British, and AndyM (rapidly turning into a veteran of things WW2 and Lard) the Germans: the patrol move phase was, once again, interesting, and once again I think both players perhaps missed out - I really AM going to have to play this damn game rather than umpire, sometime! The Germans got beaten to a couple of spots, and the British did manage a rather nice jump off point out on a flank, but were a bit compressed otherwise.

Germans pick their way past the (rather stagnant) pond
to the house.

Action focussed largely in a small cluster of three buildings off the end of the river bridge: Andy managed to locate squads in two buildings on his side of the main road, but did cop a fearful pounding from two British squads in the gardens across the road, who basically drew a bead on the windows and let fly with everything they had, for several phases.

After a few phases of this, Chris deployed the held-back British squad out on the British right, where Andy's reserve squad managed to draw a bead on them out of the top floor of a nearby building. Cue use of smoke (not for the first time) by the British to block their line of fire... were it me I'd have taken advantage of that and moved closer, but Gary and Chris chose instead to start to bring that section round to join the assault on the building at the t-junction.

The third British section makes its way
round to lend a hand.

By now the Germans were a little under the hammer, and another volley of fire caused them to be pinned. Gary fired off another 2" smoke round to block them from shooting as his lead squad charged the building, and we got to try out the close assault rules!

End result - 12 dice to the Germans (24 dice before the halving for being pinned, which does very effectively demonstrate the need to suppress the living bejaysus out of a defensive position before assaulting it, especially if they're in hard cover with 2 big men, 2 MP40s and a MG34!), 11 for the Brits. 5 kills, 3 shock to the Germans, 3 kills to the British. Which resulted in both forces retreating in opposite directions leaving the building unoccupied - the British because they lost, the Germans because they now had twice as many shock as figures!

Lots of smoke - I forgot the cotton wool again, so raided
some scrunched up loo roll.

That was pretty much it. We continued on for a few phases in which Chris' section got shot at, but as it was getting towards 2230, we called it a night, and a marginal victory to the British. For all they'd driven the Germans out of one of the buildings, and forced them to keep their heads down in the other, they'd taken a fair amount of fire doing it, and weren't exactly in the best of shape.

I might even get to run another game next week!

A nifty app for iOS users

Courtesy of a poster on the Meeples and Miniatures group on Facebook, this is a handy little app - iModelKit.

What's it do? Well, it has colour swatches for an awful lot of paint ranges: of the popular modelling ones the only one I couldn't find (grr) was, you guessed it, Army Painter. It also has a neat colour mixer app, and the ability to scan a colour to try and match it.

Now, admittedly, you're restricted by the colour quality of the display and how good the source colour samples are, but they've done the best they can by taking them off the makers websites. There's also a scale calculator, just in case.

I've had a play, and while it's not a replacement for the Mark 1 eyeball, it's quite useful as a guide.

Cost? Free, if you don't mind ads. £4.99 for an ad-free version. Sadly, not available for Android yet.
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In other news, Tamsin's last giveaway of her 100,000 views prize draw is a box of Warlord Spartans. Which would, I have to admit, go nicely with the other four boxes of Hoplites in unpainted Ancients box number 2 :D.

WIP - more 15mm WW2

 Didn't get as much done today as I'd have liked - playing bass for two different church services and getting waylaid by the Domestic Authority to help weed the back meant I got to steal half an hour before breakfast and a bit more before supper.

Did manage something, though. First up, and like the rest waiting on the PSC Field Grey Warspray, 3 German 80mm mortar teams: most of the crew come from a Battlefront metal set, but they only provide three figures per base, and IABSM standard is 5, so I had to scavenge from spare Open Fire sprues.

The StugIIIG's, on the other hand, are from the Open Fire box - they go together pretty easily except that a) it's quite hard to get the tracks parallel in the vertical plane and b) the tiny part for the muzzle brake is exceptionally fiddly. So far, just undercoated in Army Painter Desert Yellow, which is a pretty close match to Dunkelgelb. I'm currently debating which of the many camo variants to apply: the standard brown/green wavy pattern is nice, but there's a few photos of StugIIIs in what's more green and brown 'blobs' which looks tempting...

And for those of you wondering - this is the 15mm WW2 stash. The 18L box is mostly unopened PSC boxes plus a few Battlefront tanks, and a large pile of halftracks and the like in blisters The bottom 9L box is Battlefront platoon/company boxes and blisters, and the top is the sprues from one complete Open Fire box and bits of two more.

With the addition of the Battlefront Easy Company and Para Warriors of Market Garden blisters (also in that pile on top of the 9L box) I have pretty much a company of US Paras, though I suspect it's a bit light on supports. Flames of War organise their Paras differently to IABSM, so I'll need to do some counting.