Adventures on the Wargames Table

Club night and Steve has kindly put on another gorgeous looking game of What a Cowboy. It’s a second warm up game ahead of the start of a campaign next month. Here’s a few pics before our gangs set to. The “spades” gang was Simon, Mike and Rob whilst the “hearts” gang (and self-styled heroic good guys) were myself, Jordan and Ken. The objective was simple … shoot the other gang. Umpire Steve assures us that campaign games will have more complex objectives. I’m sure he’ll have a few surprises up his sleeve too. Here’s a pic from a few turns in. Ken’s lads have camped on the shed roof whilst one of Jordan’s men swaggers towards the railroad halt, no doubt intending to tip his hat to the lady standing nearby. Some of the other figures in the pic are “civilians” and they can act in a variety of ways when the lead starts flyin’. Opposing them were Mike and Rob’s men and they were advancing quite cautiously thanks to their dreadful rolls on movement dice. On the other side of the parked up l...

More fun in a galaxy far, far away! Sunday night is club night, so Simon and I set to. He had his splendid rebels and I the glorious might of the Empire. The mission cards were resolved as “Battle Lines” for deployment (very convenient), “Clear Conditions” (Phew! See later) and “Recover the supplies” as the objective. I was especially pleased to get clear conditions as my leader is General Veers and he has a fantastic command card, “Maximum Firepower”, that you really need to play in the first couple of turns due to the long minimum range involved. Here’s a couple of pics of Simon’s lovely figures. I especially like Chewbacca and the squad of Wookies! The early part of the game saw a lot of forward movement as each side sought to capture one of the five vital supply tokens. However, I’d been a bit more cautious and so was able to put a lot more shooting on to the Rebels. This seemed like a good idea, at least to begin with… Veers’ Maximum Firepower card had damaged the AT-RT, though it...

If you’re in the hobby then I doubt you haven’t heard about the latest offering from TFL, “What a Cowboy”. I didn’t much enjoy What a Tanker so wasn’t sure if these new rules would be any good, at least in my opinion. I watched the YouTube videos and thought “hmmm, maybe?”. Some gamers I noted had mixed reactions after their initial games. But then chum Steve kindly offered to put on a game for a group of us at the Bristol Biguns club last Sunday and I couldn’t resist. Here’s a little slice of Texas. Steve has put a lot of effort and skill in to creating this lovely table. Thanks mate! There were six of us playing: Dave, Ken and Jordan versus Alan, Simon and myself, with Steve running the game. Each of us had two characters, a “greenhorn” (the lowest skill level) and a “shootist” (the next level up). Here are my chaps, Billy Bob Wrigley (shootist) and Chester Tubbs (greenhorn), kindly supplied by Steve. Very nice! I won’t give a description of the game mechanics as you can get that fro...

Normal posting to resume shortly, all being well. In the meantime…

This marvellous kit has been in the painting queue for a little while. To be honest I was procrastinating slightly as it’s a big kit (and not exactly inexpensive!) and seemed a little daunting.  I started off by following Sorastro’s YouTube video but it went a bit awry so I had to sort of rescue it with a range of greys: GW Standard Mechanicus as a base followed by Foundry Slate Grey B then C, then GW Celestra Grey. To help with this selection I painted up a test card, initially sprayed with GW Mechanicus Grey then painted in the “same” colour from a pot (quite a difference as you can see, spray showing on leftmost side). Colours painted over the pot version of Mechanicus Grey are L-R, top to bottom: Foundry Stone triad, VMC Neutral Grey, AP Warpaints Uniform Grey, Foundry Slate triad, GW Celestra Grey. The vision ports are painted in using VMC German Grey and the weapons were washed with diluted black. I do find large flat areas or panels a little tricky, although I have tried to ...

Before tackling the AT-ST I felt I really ought to polish off the rest of the Stormtroopers. So, here’s another squad with an extra trooper plus a DLT-19 upgrade And here’s a Captain and a T-21 Stormtrooper. However, after basing them and putting them back in the storage box I realised that were still a few more to do 🫣 I’m not sure I’ll need all those HH-12 rocket launchers but an extra DLT-19 trooper, a RT-97C trooper and comms specialist would be handy.

I ordered these ages ago as they’re rarely in stock for long. Anyway they arrived the other day, much to my delight. All from the GF9 Battlefield in a Box range. Here’s a couple of closer pics. They really are ready to go on the battlefield straight from the box, although I may add a little more weathering etc. I intend to leave them un-based so that they’ll look fine on any type of battlefield from the lush woodlands of the forest moon of Endor, or the ice fields of Hoth to the arid deserts of Tatooine.