Adventures on the Wargames Table

Legionary is almost my local show as Exeter is only 60 ish miles away so when Orange Dave floated the idea of us partnering with Rob at Scarab to put on a demo/participation game of Zero Hour my interest was understandably piqued.   The French advance through a shattered wood. Germans man the trenches. More about our Zero Hour game in a later post. Dave has put a huge amount of effort in to this project and I think it shows! The show is hosted in the Matford Centre which is spacious, bright and airy. The people running things were readily available, efficient and very helpful. It’s easy to find too, so we arrived in plenty of time and headed for a McBreakfast (thanks Dave!) before unloading the car. Here’s a few pics of some of the games:   Blood & Plunder from Firelock Games. This game drew quite a bit if attention - just look at the galleon ... Arrrr me hearties! Devon Wargames put on this large game of TFLs "Kiss me, Hardy!". The boats are from Warlord (I think) and ar...

A quick post to show some figures I've recently completed for good chum Orange Dave. Some Scarab WW1 French Chauchat teams. The Horizon Blue uniform is actually the Foundy Night Sky triad. Rather enjoyed painting these characterful figures. En avant mes braves!

I trimmed these articles from Wargames Illustrated back in May (ish) 2000 and over the years I’ve often been tempted to put Gary Chalk’s brilliant tutorial in to practice. A tidy up of storage facilities here at the table now gives me the opportunity to begin what I expect will be quite a lengthy project! The first step will be make some generic coastline tiles, to which end I’ve sketched some ideas for Colin at Charlie Foxtrot Models to work his magic upon. My technical drawing skills are limited so I hope he can make some sense of my scrawl 😂 A mixture of some resin pieces plus scratch building in balsa and coffee stirrers should give plenty of terrain to represent a little quayside or harbour. Having some sort of coastline, harbour, etc will add an interesting extra dimension to our games of Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, Bolt Action, etc. A bit of common sense should see us through any rule adaptations to bring ships in to our games. Indeed, I’m already drawing up some simple i...

No, not exploding broccoli ... it's one of Orange Dave's new blast markers! Having seen mine, Dave asked if I could make some for him. These will initially be featuring in games of Great War action. Three smoke "blasts". A couple of sprays of grey primer, followed by a couple of pure white. Three explosion "blasts". A couple of sprays of black primer, followed by a light spray of grey. One poison gas "blast". Spray as smoke the hightlight with some green. This pic might show the green-ish hue of the smoke a bit better. Simply a quick drybrush with Foundry Phlegm Green light. These are the armatures on to which I stick the Woodland Scenics foam, using smelly all purpose glue from (UK) Bostik or Uhu. MDF bases with holes drilled for kebab or cocktail sticks. A trick to help make them slight more durable is to prime the foam with very thin PVA before spraying. Make sure you allow plenty of drying time tho. Thanks for looking!

I hope to be running some intro games for potential new recruits to Sharp Practice soon and I thought these would help avoid any confusion as to which card represents which leader. Designed and manufactured by top chum Colin of Charlie Foxtrot Models.   All of my Leaders are based on 2p coins, so the 4mm magnet will hold them quite firmly. After my usual basing recipe (Americana Honey Brown, VMC Tan Yellow, VMC Dark Sand and Foundry Boneyard light) I picked out the numbers in thinned black just to help make them clearer.

To complement the set I made for my Union forces (and as a rest from all the Mediterranean goings on) here are some casualty/shock markers for the Confederates. All metal Perry figures.

Game four of our exciting "Kampfgruppe von Crete" Campaign sees some of the Australians of  2/1st Battalion diverting from the main attack on Pervolia to tackle a German force holed up in an Olive Oil factory. I got a hefty 13 points of support for this battle and was very tempted to bring along either the Matilda or the MkVI again, but as this action was initially considered to be a sideshow to the main performance, I felt that the scarce armoured resources should be unavailable, at least to begin with. This seemed to fit the narrative best. So my choices were: Additional section of regulars with JL,Vickers MMG & emplacement, Universal Carrier with Bren Team & JL and Crafty Cretans - Stavros the elderly sniper. Dave chose an LG40 recoiless gun & JL. We kept our choices secret as that seems more fun. Morale: I rolled a measly 8 whereas Dave edged ahead with 9. Clearly my Aussies were disappointed to be missing out on the advance to Pervolia! Here's the si...