Month: September 2017

For many months, Sally 4th has been selling sets of cards for many of the platoons whose orders of battle are posted for free on the Combat Patrol(TM) rules Web site (http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/Combat_Patrol.html).  These include U.S. Armored Infantry and German Panzergrenadiers.  These are professionally printed cards with all the information already filled out and ready to play.  While not strictly necessary, I find them extremely helpful in setting up scenarios.  Deal out the cards, point the players at the figures, and start playing.

With help from Zeb Cook and Don Hogge, I have been working with Chris Abbey at Sally 4th to create sets of vehicle cards for all the vehicles listed in the rulebook.  (The rulebook does not include every vehicle and variant, but most of the common ones.)  The first five sets go to the printer in the next couple of days.  These include a German set, a US set, a British set, a Japanese set, and a Russian set.  From the center card in the above image, you can see all the sets planned.  The first five will be available soon from Sally 4th.

You can get some for FREE!!  In addition, if you post a battle report to an on-line forum, such as The Miniatures Page, The Wargames Website, or Lead Adventure Forum, or if you publish a battle report in magazines like Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy, Miniature Wargames, or Wargames Illustrated, we will send you five cards from one of these sets for free.  You just need to send us the URL to your battle report and your mailing address.  Battle reports should be approximately 500 words and include at least two pictures.

I recently purchased this package of ducks form Archive miniatures on Ebay.  Yesterday I had a chance to paint the.

 

As the original date for Barrage 2017 approaches, I wanted to remind everyone that, due to a scheduling conflict with our venue, that Barrage 2017 will be held 19-20 January 2018.  This will still be referred to as “Barrage 2017.”  Knowing that weather in January can be somewhat unpredictable, we have scheduled the following weekend, 26-27 January, as show days.  Mark your calendars for a great two days of gaming.

The dates for Barrage 2018 are set for 28-29 September 2018.  Mark your calendars for this event as well.

This weekend I had a chance to do some gaming and also do a little painting.  Greg found something called the “rust bunker” in MDF from a company, called Impudent Mortal.  Instead of painting it in post-apocalypse rusted metal, I painted it in gray to be a bunker in some Star Wars games.

Greg turned me onto this company.  They are Eastern European.  They seem to make mostly 1:48 scale airplanes, but they have a handful of 1:48 scale German vehicles.  I picked up two of these SdKfz 222’s.  They are pretty simple kits, but the plastic is a little brittle.  I broke some of the parts just snipping them off the sprues.  The decals seemed old, and they tore easily.  The final outcome was pretty good, however.

We also got together to plan this year’s HAWKs Armies for Kids project and to run two play tests for HAWKs games at Fall In!  The first game was Chris’ Dr. Who game involving 18th century pirates and cyber men.

The mission of the pirates and cybermen was to kidnap townsfolk to turn them into more cybermen.  Meanwhile the Doctor was running around town looking for the stuff he needed to invent a weapon to defeat the cybermen.

After the Dr. Who GASLIGHT game, we cleaned up the troops, reset the town, and prepared for Dave’s WWII Combat Patrol(TM) game involving American paratroopers fighting Germans.  I was playing in this game, and I forgot to take pictures.  Rob (on the left in the above picture) had a squad of Americans that quickly got the upper hand against my team of Germans defending the wall.  I never quite recovered, and was eventually wiped out.  In the meantime, the rest of the Germans moved toward the buildings we were supposed to stop the Americans from capturing.  We did pretty well, but in the end, the game was judged a U.S. victory.

After most of the folks left, Dave and I spent an hour or so working on spotting rules for Look, Sarge, No Charts: Science Fiction.  We made good progress on the spotting rules — enough that we are ready to put troops on the table soon for a play test.

I have been working on a stack of kits that were sitting on my war room floor.  These included some Bandai plastic kits and some Blitzkrieg Miniatures resin kits.  This is part of my campaign to be able to walk into the war room.

All of these kits will find themselves in a Combat Patrol(TM): WWII game soon.

Much of my WWII ETO gaming is early war — Finland, Poland, and France.  I painted these in the early war paint scheme.  I’ll add some hand painted crosses to these this evening or tomorrow evening.

These late war tanks will get their crosses this evening as well.  This gave me a chance to get out my new airbrush and do the camouflage.  I have found the results are very dependent on the viscosity of the paint.  The Vallejo Model Air paints go through the brush like a dream, but I could NOT get the cheap craft paint to flow.  The Pz. IV skies are probably too fragile for gaming.  We’ll see.  I also plant to apply some foliage clusters to the front of the Hetzer for some visual interest.

These were really fun kits to assemble.  I don’t game the desert campaign.  I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to use these.  On a recent trip to the Bovington tank museum, I bought a little book that showed this paint scheme for the Matildas in France in 1940.  I painted them in those colors for that campaign and also for some hypothetical Sea Lion games.

I also assembled this for the upcoming Star Wars supplement to Combat Patrol(TM).  This was a fun kit.  I may get another one.  I generally like to employ vehicles in pairs.

Last Friday night we played another Combat Patrol(TM) game to test the soon-to-be-released Star Wars supplement.  This scenario involved droids versus clones.  I had recently gotten my hands on a couple of droid and clone tanks, so this gave us a chance to try — and correct — vehicle stats for the supplement.  This was our first test with a LOT of vehicles on the table.

You can see that we make heavy use of the old Star Wars collectable miniatures games figures — and anything else we can get our hands on that is within scale..  The droid AAT tanks are from Revel.  The clone tanks are a Transformers toy that is in the right scale for 25mm figures.

We played one of Greg’s stock scenarios.  A ship has crashed, and both sides must recover the droid that has important information.

The clones rushed forward with a speeder bike scout unit, reaching the area well ahead of anyone else.  The damage important droid (the objective)  moved randomly, and unfortunately he moved away from the speeder bike unit.

There was a large melee between droids and clones on the clone left flank.  The droids got the better of the fight, eliminating a squad of clones, but the clones sent more forces forward to turn the tide.

The droid with the important information wandered aimlessly, moving away from the clones on the speeder bikes, but right to Yoda.  Yoda gave the droid a force push into the arms of another clone squad.  At this point, while the combat casualties were about even, the clones had the upper hand in the scenario, because they had possession of the droid.

We uncovered some items we needed to fix regarding the Star Wars vehicles.  I think that the supplement has really come along well.  Combat Patrol(TM) with Greg’s modifications gives a pretty good representation of Star Wars-era combat.

Yesterday HAWKs member, Greg Priebe, and I got together to take some illustrative and filler pictures for the nearly-completed Star Wars supplement for Combat Patrol(TM): World War II.  This supplement is nearly complete and should be released in a couple of weeks.

We also had a chance to review the vehicle and weapon listings and correct some inconsistencies.  I think that this will make a very popular supplement.  The rules will allow much larger games than the Star Wars collectable miniatures game, Imperial Assault, or Legion.

The Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers are launching the Battle in a Box contest for Fall In! 2018.  Pass the word!

See more information here:  http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/Battle_in_a_Box_Contest.html

My dad has been collecting Britains and other similar figures as long as I can remember.  He must have 10,000 of them in show cases.  In recent years, he has been collecting the Collector’s Showcase French and Indian figures.  He sent me these pictures today of his “pseudo diorama.”

He doesn’t enjoy gaming, so these figures (and the rest of his collection) are in display cases.

Almost a year ago I found these goofy octopus tentacles in a bin at a store and immediately decided they would be useful for gaming.

I finally got around to mounting them to heavy washers so they would stand up.  I then used ModPodge to create some texturing on the bases.  Then four coats of paint in progressively lighter shades, and here they are.

They are all the same shape, so I put some sticks inside a few to make them stand a little straighter, and I bent two and glued them.  This was to provide a little variety.

Yes.  Thanks for stopping by.