Buck's Blog

Quite a while ago I invested in the the Terrains4Games Kickstarter. These arrived a few weeks ago. The pledge I made came with six buildings, a chicken coop, and a small shed. This weekend my wife and daughter were out of town, so I assembled and painted three of them. One of the things that appealed to me about these buildings is that the half-timber pieces are separate, so I can spray paint the buildings a base color and then spray the half timber pieces separately. That makes assembly fast and easy — even in Florida where the humidity makes it take a long time for spray paint to dry.

Later today, I finished the fourth building. Here it is. Two more to go.

I am really happy with the quality of the buildings. My only complaint is that the second story to two-story buildings is not represented. All buildings are empty shells.

As we announced the pre-order of Feudal Patrol(TM), I am still working on painting figures to play Viking games with the nearly complete Viking supplement.

I am pretty happy with they came out, and I am anxious to get all these figures on the table soon.

I ordered a Prusa Mini 3D printer in March. It was on back order until July — unrelated to the plague panic. I have had a chance to print a few items, including this Star Wars Imperial Troop Transport.

Early this morning I finished few more Anglo-Somethings to fight my Vikings. I have been facetiously calling them “Anglo Somethings,” because I will use them as Saxons, Danes, or whatever is needed for a scenario.

These were fun to paint. I am still not sold on plastic figures. I would much prefer to see plastic figures with metal weapons, as I think the plastic spears are unlikely to survive too many games.

These images turned out a little more yellow than I expected, but you can see that the figures are ready for battle.

We used these figures this weekend to play test a scenario. The scenario was mediaeval, but I don’t have any mediaeval figures, so I just used these. Buck’s Law says that the first time you put a new unit on the table, it gets spanked. That happened this weekend — lots of casualties.

I have been in airports the last two weekends on travel for work, so I didn’t get as much done hobby-wise as I would have liked. Still, I managed to get a few things done.

Recall that Greg and I purchased large 60-figure bags of Vikings and Anglo-Somethings (Danes? Saxons? Hottentots?) at Cold Wars in March. I finished the Vikings, but I am about half done (as of this post) with the adversaries.

Two weekends ago my Prusa Mini 3D printer arrived after being on back order since March. It was very, very easy to set up. My first 3D print (after calibration) was this little cannon for my science fiction collection.

There was an issue with the stl file. The cannon barrel wouldn’t fit through the armor plate. You can see where I cut the cannon, because it didn’t quite go together correctly. I think it was good when I glued it, but it moved while it dried (while I was on business travel). Well, it’s good enough, I guess. You can’t have too many ways to kill tanks when you began your career as an infantryman like I did.

I am working on a neat Imperial transport that I 3D printed, but I will show those pictures when it is done.

My kids got me some Albedo Combat Patrol vehicles for my birthday, and I finished painting them up. I decided to paint them in urban ops gray instead of green or brown like the bulk of my ACP 164 equipment. I spray primed with Tamiya gray primer (absolutely the best primer on the planet for the price — very smooth and great coverage) and then the rest of dry brushing. I am pretty happy with the outcome.

Now, I will start on the Anglo Danes…

We played a long Wars of Ozz game via Zoom yesterday, but I still managed to complete some Viking figures. Greg and I bought a bag of 60 Anglo-Danes and 60 Vikings at Cold Wars 2019 and split the bags. I have completed about half of my Vikings and hope to complete the rest this week.

I am still not a fan of plastic figures, because I think the weapons are too fragile for gaming, particularly the way clods pick them up by the handful at conventions. Ideally, I would like to see plastic figures with metal weapons.

Here are pictures of the few figures I managed to get painted. Much of the week was spent assembling, priming, and basing some Victrix Vikings.

Most of the beaches are open in Florida except for particularly hard-hit counties. Tom is allowed to travel up to 100 miles from Ft. Rucker, so we are going to meet him for a little beach time. It will be the first time we’ve all been together since Christmas.

This weekend I ran a social-distancing Wars of Ozz game to celebrate the launch of our Kickstarter. That chewed up most of Saturday between setup, executing the game, and then cleaning up. Saturday afternoon I worked off some items the honey-do list. I did have time to get some painting done, however.

Some months ago, I bought some Flintstone happy meal toys in flea market form Chris Palmer. My original intent was to use them to make a miniature golf course for my town of Granville I use in my pulp games. I saw a post on the Internet of someone who had repainted these buildings to replace the ice cream colors to stone colors. Since the Winkies live in caves in the Wars of Ozz rules, I decided to repaint them to be a village in Wars of Ozz games.