Adventures on the Wargames Table

One of the defining features of Great War battlefields is a great number of craters. Making them for a model battlefield is simple - especially if you make use of the GW 40K plastic craters set. Here's how they were made. Apply some PVA glue around the edges and add the odd splodge around the rim of the crater. Then build up the texture in layers starting with chunkier grit / gravel. (click for a larger image) Then add some sand. (click for a larger image) Painting is straightforward too; start with a good layer of Vallejo Flat Earth (983). It may need two coats to properly cover the grey plastic. Next, paint the crater itself with a darker brown, e.g. Vallejo Leather Brown (871), make sure you drybrush out towards the edges as this blends the two colours nicely. Then drybrush with the following colours, all Vallejo, Gold Brown (877), Tan Yellow (912) and Dark Sand (847). The crater should be drybrushed but more lightly. Finish off with a small amount of static grass around...

Even with all the War & Conquest excitement I couldn't resist playing a game of WHW's "The Great War". When Rob last visited he kindly brought along another batch of Great War Miniatures Late War Germans, which gives me almost 500pts of the fellows. Of course they're not painted yet which is why you'll only see a few of them in the following pictures. Hurriedly unpacking new figures, blu-tacking them to bases and getting on with a game really brought back memories of when I first got in to Warhammer Fantasy Battle many, many years ago. Anyway, before I go all misty eyed and start rambling even more, here's some notes and pics from our game. The basic scenario for the game is that the German Spring Offensive of 1918 has run out of steam and the Allies are vigourously counter-attacking, in this case somewhere near Amiens. A small force of German Stellungsbataillon have been pushed from their original lines on one of the quieter sectors and have hastily...

With a few days off what could be better than a day spent play-testing some more of the forthcoming War & Conquest from Scarab miniatures! Rob brought perfect wargmaing with him again - it was chucking it down with rain. Re-painting the window frames will have to wait for another day :o) Whilst the rules are still in development they are very much at the fine tuning stage. As such I won't go too much in to the mechanics during this post. There's a bunch of clickable photos shown below, but first I'd like to say that I had a superb day of playing wargames, nattering about wargames, eating good food and marvelling at Rob's seemingly endless knowledge of Rock music. He used the phrase "anorak" - not me! Both games were straightforward pitched battle affairs, though we did move the scenery around a little for the second game. The game plays very well with a good balance between detail and abstraction. It actually felt like I was in command of a large force o...