Adventures on the Wargames Table

Last Sunday Orange Dave, Steve, Rob and myself gathered for another game of Zero Hour . To give the game a bit of a theme we chose part of the battle of High Wood during the Somme campaign in 1916. As Steve has mentioned on his blog , we’re aiming to take an enhanced version of this game to some shows next year to bring Zero Hour to the public attention. We have some grand plans for scenery etc, so please keep an eye on the blog(s) for more High Wood antics. The basic idea is that the Germans have a secondary trench line running through a wood and it's up to the British to dislodge them. For our re-fight we had two British battalions (Rob with mostly cavalry and me with infantry and a Mk I for support) against Steve's Germans. Dave kindly umpired and provided tactical advice and guidance. Deployment - we all held part of our forces in reserve - although in Rob's case that was actually most of his army. The cavalry were clearly intent on clearing the local wine cella...

Another squad for my Chain of Command Late War Germans. Not the best photos, just couldn't seem to get the lighting quite right, but you'll get the idea. This brings the total to four squads, i.e. three plus one as a support option. It may be the way I play ;o) but I've often found that having a few more chaps would be handy. All Artizan figures I picked up at Salute; but I've been too busy with my British to get them done until now. All painted and based as described previously (check the painting page if you're interested). Right, now back to that building!

This post aims to explain how to go about constructing MDF buildings, specifically those from Charlie Foxtrot Models . In subsequent posts I'll go on to look at how to paint them too. I decided to do this after chatting to a few people at Colours. Some seemed a bit put off from making and painting them, but if you can build and paint figures ok then buildings should be no problem. My first example will be one of Colin's lovely farmhouse kits (a bargain at just £12.25, or about 17 euros). Here's the official picture. Here are the components. I usually begin by building the ground floor. A very important point to bear in mind is to always 'dry fit' any components before gluing. That is, check out how well they fit and how it looks by holding the pieces together - or maybe use some blu-tak. It's a good way to check that it all fits and looks right. Here's the ground floor. It all fits nicely, so it's time to get out the glue. Use good qu...

Just a quick one today ... Too Fat Lardies make some perfectly good counters but here at The Wargames Table I fancied making something to fit in with the figures. They are simply 25mm x 50mm MDF cavalry bases to which I've glued some prints of "overwatch" (with 45° lines), then sanded, painted and scenic-ified the 'spare' bit of the counter just like any figure. Easy and cheap as chips!

Saturday 12th September was show day for the Newbury & Reading Wargames Club , at Newbury Racecourse. The ground floor was the usual scrum of gamers and traders. I must say that upon entering the building I was surprised at the ... err ... rather rich aroma pervading the hall!!? Floor two was a mix of traders and games. The top floor was tournaments and demo/participation games. The mix of traders was pretty good and I picked up a few items - some WW2 Paras and a few MDF buildings. A lot more on both of those in future posts hopefully :o) Here's a few pictures of some of the games... A Bolt Action table set up for a game themed around 'Allo 'Allo. Sadly though there was no one 'manning' this table so I've no idea about how they were running things? There was some sort of sci-fi tournament going on... A game called "Infinity" I think. Not my thing but this table looked quite impressive. Clearly a lot of effort went in to it. A gam...