Adventures on the Wargames Table

A quick update on the painting for our North Africa project...  Another squad of Germany's finest have rolled off the painting production line.  I completed the painting just before I set off for a splendid weekend with good chum George, so this week I all I had to do was add some foliage to the bases. I wanted the MG34 team to be making the most of a little bit of cover.  The Perry kit comes with figures to have all three teams prone, so this one had to be a little different. The collapsed wall is simply an off-cut of foamcore board with a bit of sand and textured paint.  All figures painted using the same recipe as described here .

I've had these trees for a while now (Thank you, Colin!) but until recently I've not had much reason to do anything with them.  However, Orange Dave and I are looking to begin a series of games in North Africa... Monty versus Rommel of course!  This nicely aligns with the forthcoming Warlord/Osprey title The Western Desert .  Anyway, it gave me the spur to get them based up.  They range in height from 4cm to approx 22cm. To give the larger trees a firm fixing to the bases I found some 12mm flat headed nails.  These were glued to the round bases with Araldite.  The smaller palms were glued directly to the bases. These are not improvised caltrops! Work in progress.  I trimmed the bases of the larger palms so be flat then carefully drilled a hole up the stem.  The tree could then be glued on to the nail. Some blu-tak helps to keep them in just the right position whilst the glue dries. Here are the larger bases with trees in situ ....

Yes I've decided to start yet another Bolt Army to add to my Late War Panzergrenadiers, British Paras and British Regulars ... Here come Rommel's Deutsches Afrikakorps! I've only taken a couple of work in progress shots.  Here you can see that I have just gone for tidy block colours on top of AP Desert Yellow spray. The DAK uniforms were initially based on the tropical issue uniform but a combination of blistering sunshine and heat, wear and tear and supply issues meant that the uniforms varied from brand new field grey or tropical green, through a range of sandy greens, right through to almost pale sand.  The main colours I used were Foundry Moss shade/mid/light, Foundry Drab mid/light, VMC German Field Grey, VMC Grey Green, Foundry Boneyard shade.  Other items were as follows:- Flesh - Foundry Flesh mid Rifle - GW Mournfang Brown Boots - GW Scorched Brown Straps - VMC Leather brown (or Boneyard Shade for darker jackets) Bread bag - VMC Russian Uniform Tr...

Every year in July Battlegroup South host a splendid wargames show at the Bovington Tank Museum .  This year the show overlaps with the excellent "Bossfest" run by Scott from Boss Minis .  Now in it's fourth year, Bossfest actually actually runs from Thursday to Sunday.  Basically a group of easy-going, like-minded wargamers camp in a woodland clearing and play a wide variety of wargames and boardgames in the huge marquees.  In the evening there's music, a camp fire and (to be frank) quite a lot of beer and cider too! What a beautiful place to camp and play wargames! The weather this year made the event a real treat.  The secluded location really makes you feel like you're getting away from it all. Charlie Foxtrot does "glamping" ;o) Colin kindly let me share his tent.  It's an "air bridge" tent - basically the traditional poles are replaced by air filled beams that give the tent it's rigid structure.  Peg it out, pump it u...