Month: May 2020

Florida is starting to re-open in a big way, working to get life back to normal, so CINC Domicile is starting to push to get out of the house. The tremendous hobby throughput I have had during the plague panic will be slowing considerably in the next few weeks. But, this weekend, I completed a project that has been languishing for a while: science fiction tanks.

The project actually began many years ago by Greg. He has started to scratch build some GW-like vehicles from extra bits and plasticard. For some reason lost in the mists of time, he didn’t want to finish them, so I ended up with them. This weekend I broke out the plasticard and finished them. I also had a chance to get out the airbrush and do a little camo work; although, I am having a lot of trouble with water in the line, resulting in the occasional spatter of watery paint that screws up the paint job.

I started with some dollar store tanks that come in a bag with green army men. These are roughly M-48 or M-60 looking, but not quite. I cut off the gun and added a Company B Tesla cannon. I had a couple of bits left over from a Pig Iron kit that I used to put some sort of laser gun in the commander’s cupola.

The second project was a smaller APC looking vehicle (I don’t know what it was supposed to be in 40k), but I added a surplus Sherman turret and some additional details. I also had some rockets that I thought would look cool on the sides.

The last tank is really large. Again, I don’t know its intent in GW land, but I plan to use is as a lumber heavy tank or a tank transporter.

During the previous week, I had been picking away at the last few figures in my project box. These included some Pulp Figures characters from monster movies.

To guaranteed more longevity, I needed to replenish the project boxes. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, when I get back from a convention I usually immediately file, base, and prime the figures so that they are ready to paint when the muse strikes me or I have a couple of hours to spend. With the monster movie figures, I had pretty much emptied my project boxes, consisting of four 4L Really Useful Boxes. I was poking around and found a box of unpainted, unprepared figures that I must have just thrown in the box to get ready for the move. You can see that stack on the table getting ready to be prepared for painting. This weekend I filed, based, and primed this stack of lead and filled up three Really Useful Boxes. There are some odds and ends, like movie characters from Sally 4th, the recent Pulp Figures “dangerous dames” kickstarter, some dwarves that will eventually get duck heads, some Eureka French Revolution vignettes, and other odds and ends.

It wasn’t as productive a weekend as I would have liked. Next weekend, Friday through Sunday will be consumed with converting slides to digital files. I have about 30 carousels of slides that I have been meaning to convert. I found a place in town that will rent me the equipment to make high quality scans, so I’ll be cleaning slides and putting them into the machine while watching old black and white movies.

In a previous post, I showed the tanks inspired by Leonardo da Vinci that we plan to use in a What a Tanker! game in the near future. It was planned for Historicon in July, but Pennsylvania won’t allow gatherings of that size by July. As I continue to empty my box of primed and ready-to-paint figures, I came across these GW figures that are a combination of gifts from my buddy Greg and flea market finds. I thought I would paint them up for possible use in the da Vinci What a Tanker! game as anti-tank guns.

I started by painting an old GW war wagon and a kit-bashed rat-powered vehicle. I don’t know what forces, sides, factions, or races these belong to in Warhammer, but they are cool looking vehicles. In the background are some Reaper Bones civilians watching the “parade” pass them by.

I am not 100% sure that Don will be able to use these in the What a Tanker! game. I figured these wagons could have the stats of an open-topped tank destroyer, like the ones built on Pz 38(t) chassis by the Germans in the early part of the war. As What a Tanker! is focused on tanks, I don’t even know if there are rules to anti-tank rifles, but I’m sure someone has come up with home rules for them that we can leverage.

I started making the cannon, because some of the figures I was painting looked like artillery crewmen to me.

This gun should be like an 88mm or at least a 76mm in the game, but again, we’ll see how Don wants to stat things our or whether he wants to use them at all.

This weekend I recorded a number of short videos that I have stitched into three longer videos to share.

The first is a video of us conducting a virtual play test of Wars of Ozz via Zoom. This is a two-hour video that takes the game from start, through clear conclusion, to post-game kibitzing. See it here: https://youtu.be/jUIIVap_vR8

The second is a brief rules overview of Wars of Ozz. The production values are not the greatest, but they provide a reasonable overview of the activation, movement, shooting, and melee mechanics of the rules. I am, of course, biased, but I think they have a somewhat old school feel with streamlined and elegant mechanics. Games are quick and decisive. See it here: https://youtu.be/CDsfgoS32-Y

The last is a brief rules overview of Feudal Patrol(TM). I recently received the product quality cards for the Activation and Action decks. I used them in the filming of the videos. Again, the production values aren’t swell, but I think they provide a reasonable overview of how the game plays. See it here: https://youtu.be/SlpLbMdgVv8

I hope you find the videos informative, if not riveting.

The focus of this weekend was another Wars of Ozz play test game over Zoom. Chris and Greg were the opponents, and I was the game master. This time we recorded the entire game, and I have posted a video on YouTube. See the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jUIIVap_vR8 This is a full, three-turn game that reached a decisive conclusion. Three turns doesn’t sound like a lot, but since every unit activates twice per turn and since you do a lot of things during your opponent’s activation, it feels like a lot more than three turns of activity occur in three turns.

After the game ended, I stitched together the video that Chris recorded and the video that I recorded to make the video that I posted on YouTube.

Before we started the game, while I had the table setup, I also filmed a short rules tutorial video that I posted to YouTube. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDsfgoS32-Y The production values are poor, and I will have to reshoot them later for the Kickstarter, but this will give folks an idea of how the game works.

After replacing all the door handles in the house to satisfy CINC Domicile, and three hours of work for work, I did have a chance to do a little painting on Sunday.

I finished three regiments of 10mm Prussian dragoons that I had sitting around primed and ready to paint for a couple of years. All of the 10mm Napoleonic figures in my backlog are painted and ready for action. With my focus on Combat Patrol, Feudal Patrol, and Wars of Ozz the past couple of years, Dave has used my 10mm Napoleonic more than I have.

I am really scraping the bottom of the barrel to find things to paint after two months of government-forced captivity. I don’t enjoy painting the early Bones figures at all, but these were sitting in the project box calling to me. (When I get new figures, I typically file, prime, and base them immediately so that they are ready to paint when the muse strikes me. They go into one of four 4L Really Useful Boxes, called my “project boxes.”) I tried the contrast paints that worked so well on the Wars of Ozz figures, but there is something about the mushy detail on the early Bones figures that made them turn out poorly. Anyway, they are just waiting for flocking to be “done.” I think these GW figures will be fun to paint, and I intend them to be very colorful to go along with the tanks I built (see previous post). These really won’t have a role in the What a Tanker! Leonardo DaVinci game, but they will look good on the table. This week I’ll plink at these figures a little each night and hopefully finish them next weekend. Then I have about 90 Vikings and Anglo Danes to assemble and paint.

Sunday involved a fair amount of Mother’s Day activity, Saturday my daughter wanted me to teach her how the change the oil in her car, and Saturday night was virtual D&D. I also needed to sort through all my pulp figures and reogranize them from five Really Useful Boxes to six to make it easier to find figures I needed for a specific game. All of that limited my painting time.

I also made a good start on several regiments of Prussian Landwehr cavalry figures in 10mm. I hope to finish them this week and post pictures. When I complete them, I’ll just have two regiments of Prussian Dragoons to finish up all the 10mm Napoleonic figures that have been staring at me for a couple of years, filed, primed, and mounted on sticks for painting.

Several years ago I picked up a wooden display case at a craft fair (Bieglerville, PA). I made some backgrounds and placed some of my figures into the case.

You can see that the backgrounds stretched all the way across the shelves. You can see that some of the backgrounds didn’t make sense any more as the figure on display changed but the backgrounds did not. The second shelf from the top originally held some undersea figures, but those were consigned to a storage box, and the background no longer aligned with the figures on display. Also, since fanfold paper is no longer common and can’t be used in normal ink jet or laser printers, if you look closely you’ll see annoying, abrupt breaks in the backgrounds, which I tried to cover with trees and bits of foam. I decided it was time to revamp this display case.

I decided to print backgrounds and glue them to sheets of balsa wood in approximately 10-inch and 6.5-inch sections. The thought was that as I changed out which figures I wanted to display, I could just print a background and replace a single panel. When I painted some new figures I wanted to display, I could create a custom background for them.

I am pretty happy with the end result.

As you can see, many of these figures are ones figures that are unlikely to find their way onto the tabletop for a game but were fun to paint and make a good display for guests are not “into” wargaming. It was a fun, one-day project that I think turned out nicely. Now hopefully life will return to normal soon, and people can come over to game and see this in person.

I woke up very early this morning, and I managed to finish painting all the figures from the Whiteout Kickstarter from Sally 4th.

These were fun figures to paint. I used a lot of contract Apothecary White for the base and then painted in a few details.

Continued to be quarantined due to the plague panic, I manage to get a lot of hobby work accomplished. In addition to finishing up the editing of the 17th Century supplement for Feudal Patrol and get most of the editing done on the Meso-American supplement, I managed to get a lot of figures painted. As with most weekends, the week was spent on figure prep and base coats, and then I did the detail work while listening to movies streaming off my media server. This weekend, I listened to a bunch of the Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland musicals and a half dozen Hopalong Cassiday movies while painting. I also got my weekends mixed up and thought Sunday was Mother’s Day, so picked up IHOP family feast breakfast to go.

The “main event” for this weekend was to complete a platoon of British paratroopers from WWII. I had completed the first half with figures I had collected here and there over the past year, but I was missing a few more riflemen, PIAT teams, Bren gunners. I ordered Crusader figures from Badger for most of what I needed, but Badger also carries Artisan, so I was able to get their paratrooper PIAT teams, since Crusader doesn’t seem to make them.

When the smoke cleared, I had a reinforced platoon, including three PIAT teams, a Vicker’s machine-gun, and mortar, and a 6lb anti-tank gun. These are now ready for action!

Having completed my main objective for the weekend, I then started pulling some odds and ends out of the painting box and knocking them out.

A couple weeks ago I posted some pictures of the OWS smugglers and highwaymen that I painted. When I ordered my missing British paratroopers, I ordered five of the smugglers I was missing. I painted these in all red bandanas with the idea of making them an easily identified unit during a game.

I picked up this pack of looting Vikings at Cold Wars. I don’t remember the manufacturer. They were fun to paint.

I had a dozen or so Reaper Bones figures in the painting project box, that I have been delaying painting. I don’t like working with the original Bones material, and I think the features are mushy. One of these figures I have in metal too, the one carrying the tray, and that figure is so much nicer than the Bones one. I keep four 4L Really Useful Boxes of figures that are filed, based, and primed, and I decided to paint a few of these Bones figures to make room in one of the project boxes. Here you can see four of them. I really like the woman with the rolling pin. The figure second from the right is of unknown origin. I painted her to be my wife’s character in our D&D campaign.

Chris gave me this figure. It is Reaper Bones but in the new Bones Black material. While the details remain mush compared to a metal figure, the black material is WAY better than the old white material. This figure was fun to paint.

Over the years, I have painted a handful of figures that I just wanted to paint and am not sure they will ever make it onto the table. I usually just place them on a shelf in my painting room, where they gather dust. I came up with the idea of getting some baseball display boxes from Hobby Lobby (on line) and putting some figures in them for display. I will probably do a couple more, but here are the four I did early Sunday morning while everyone else was still asleep.

Months ago I purchased a Delorian from Back to the Future for an 80’s movie and TV game I plan to run in the future. It came in a plastic display box. I painted the surface gray and placed the Imperial Assault figures from Rebels on it fighting Darth Wader (Darth Vader as a duck). These are affixed with putty, so I could take them back out and use them to game.

Last, but not least, I bought into the Sally 4th Whiteout Kickstarter a few months ago. I ended up with 12 figures, a gyrocopter, and a snow mobile. Here are the first four that I finished. The others I’ll finish this week. These will be for a pulp game based on Ice Station Zebra. That game is deep in the queue for convention games, but I wanted to get them painted for when the muse strikes me.

It was a pretty productive weekend. This coming weekend, I should finish the Whiteout figures and the Bones figures. Next in the queue are some Pulp Figures iconic movie monsters and a group of Gypsy musicians. Then I hope to knock out several battalions of 10mm Napoleonic Prussian infantry and cavalry that have been filed, primed, and glues to sticks for a couple of years.