I saw these on line some time back and commented that I’d like to get my hands on a set. To my surprise the person who commissioned these figures found me at Cold Wars and handed me a set. I couldn’t wait to get them painted. To my embarrassment, I can’t remember my benefactor’s name, but I greatly appreciate the gift.
I have been looking for the Plasticville gas station for my Pulp town of Granville. It turns out that in O scale, Bachman doesn’t make it any more. On Ebay, the price was crazy, because people are selling it for collectors in boxes, etc. It turns out that two things make the gas station collectable: the box and the cardboard insert in the window. Chris Palmer found the gas station in less-than-mint condition without a box at Cold Wars for $5, and he bought it for me. It was my big “score” for the convention.
I worked on it a little at a time since Cold Wars and finished it up this week. I’m pretty happy how it turned out.
At the same time Chris found the gas station, he also found the Plasticville super market in a bag for $5. Since I already have a grocery store in town, I decided to convert it to a clothing store.
I took the name for an up-scale store that used to exist in the Detroit area. This is where men went if they wanted to get good clothing.
I went online and found some pictures of store windows and mannequins from the 1930’s to put in the windows of the store. The lamps in the front hide slots in the store front where the original supermarket sign used to fit.
A few posts back you can see pictures of the motel I made. At Cold Wars I went by the RLBPS booth and got a bunch of resin bedroom furniture to fill out the rooms in the motel.
If you’ve seen the recent Marvel movies, such as Iron Man, Captain America, and the Avengers, you’re familiar with the adaptation of these comics for the “big screen.” I found the three figures above at Cold Wars and thought about putting together a group of “Avengers” for Victorian science fiction games. These figures are imported by Iron Wind Metals, which also carries the old Ral Partha figures.
This will be Black Widow, or Natasha Romanoff.
My Captain America figure is meant to be a cross between Captain America and Uncle Sam. I haven’t decided if I will add a shield, but I think I’ll ad one that is more Norman knight looking, rather than round.
This is Iron Man. I decided not to paint him red. I thought that brushed metal would be more “Victorian.”
These are the figures I haven’t chosen yet. I shouldn’t have trouble finding a figure with a bow and arrow. I’m not what figure to choose for Thor just yet; although, I’m more interested in the picture on the top right instead of the one in the top center. I could use a generic Viking, I guess, but I’ll keep looking until something jumps out at me. There is a Pulp figure of a big bruiser that I might get a second copy of in order to paint him greenish and call him “the Hulk.”
Stay tuned for the adventures of The Victorian Avengers!
This weekend, Chris, Duncan, and I got together to inventory the various donations we’ve received. This project, begun with figures from the estate of Wally Simon, is designed to get unused figures into the hands of younger gamers to help grow the hobby. Since the first iteration, we’ve had many folks donate figures to us. The challenge has been that rarely are the donations complete enough.
What we do is get four or more player’s worth of figures painted. Then we run a game for kids under 10 at Historicon. All participating kids walk away with full armies, rules, and usually some other odds and ends to take home and play with their buddies. This is our third year.
We finished inventorying what has been donated. After I type up the inventory sheets we can determine which armies are closest to completion for Historicon 2014. (For 2013 we’re giving away 54mm ACW skirmish “armies” with some really neat paper terrain constructed by Chris Johnson.) I’ll be posting the inventories along with “wish lists” later in the week.
My buddy Sam Fuson found these figures on the Victory Force Miniatures Web page. He is painting them up for a GASLIGHT game. I couldn’t resist getting a set myself. These are The Scarecrow as a sniper, Dorothy and Toto (Toto has a grenade in his mouth), The Lion, and the Tin Man. These will have to make it into a GASLIGHT game soon.
Chris found a huge batch of 10mm fantasy figures on line and gave me the ones he didn’t want. They are Pendraken figures that are supposed to be Elves, but I’m going to use them as Humans.
I haven’t figures out how many points each of these units will cost, but this will make an imposing-looking player’s worth of figures in an upcoming fantasy game.
I’ve also been working on painting and assembling a Plasticville gas station and supermarket in O scale for 28mm figures.
Friday night at the HAWKs meeting, Greg ran a first game with Muskets and Tomahawks, which he bought at Cold Wars. It was a good excuse to get my Old Glory 28mm FIW figure son the table again. We were all fumbling through the rules, because it was the first time we had played them.
Roger, Dave, and I were the French, facing Mike, Chris, and Tank.
The game has an interesting card-based mechanic that is somewhere between Piquet and The Sword and the Flame. In fact, it has a lot in common with an idea I’ve been mulling during my morning runs for a major revision of Beer and Pretzels Skirmish. There is a deck of cards that are used to control activation. Different types of units (e.g., regulars, militia, irregulars, indians, civilians) have different cards in the deck. These cards indicate that the unit can perform one or two actions. Better units have either more cards or more actions on their cards. Though in our single game this led to an extended dry spell for the French, the idea is intriguing, and I’m anxious to try the game a couple more times before forming an opinion.
This week I finished the office and the road sign for the motel. The road sign was created in PowerPoint and printed from some ideas I got browsing for “vintage motel signs” on the Internet. The flower box is an old Copplestone Castings box painted to look like stonework.
The office was made from a Plasticville Cape Cod house.
This evening I finished the Plasticville trailer park kit. Now my town of Granville has its own trailer park that will be situated near the outskirts of town.
These kits were very easily assembled. The plastic on the Plasticville kits doesn’t seem to want to take paint, even after being washed. It took several coats of paint to get the basic colors to fully cover the base plastic.
These will be nice in a zombie game as well.
The kits come with a flag pole, but the plastic had warped. I’ll eventually make another flag pole for the center of the trailer court.
I mentioned to Duncan a couple of weeks ago that I was looking for the Bachman Plasticville motel in O scale. He works near a hobby stop and found two for me. I spent some of Sunday afternoon working on them. I made a sign that I will print out and affix to foam board, but we are low on color toner right now. The motel will be on the outskirts of town in my next Granville game.
A little at a time during the week, I’ve been working on some 10mm skeletons. I finished them Saturday morning and flocked them on Sunday.
I don’t know the manufacturer of these figures. There were in a big lot that Chris got on Ebay. There are more figures in the pile that I’ll work on a little at a time. I’m about to switch gears again, I think, and work on Russian Napoleonic figures in 10mm.
These dismounted, heavily-armored figures were part of that batch as well.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a picture of crystal formation made of plaster. Chris found a couple of smaller crystal formations by the same folks. You can see them in the background of this shot.
My buddy Sam Fuson hosted “FusonConII” at the War Horse Farm in Gettysburg yesterday. Dave Wood, Chris Palmer, and I ran games. Most of the gamers were Sam’s friends and co-workers, but Duncan Adams (of the HAWKs) came along as well. Among those attending were a couple of husband and wife pairs, a couple of father and son pairs, two brothers, and a niece and uncle pair. There were sixteen gamers, all told. The plan was for Dave, Chris, and me to run four games. Chris ran two back-to-back GASLIGHT gamers, Dave ran a Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars game, and I ran a Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II game.
Dave was play testing his Battle of Laon (1814) game as a play test for Cold Wars. Dave wanted to show how you could easily make use of an old 25mm Napoleonic collection to demonstrate that the barrier to entry for LSNC: Napoleonics is low. You can see from these pictures that the old 25mm Minifigs, originally mounted for Empire rules, look very nice placed on magnetic “sabot” bases.
Dave didn’t remount any of his old figures. They were mounted on metal bases three or four figures across. He stuck two of those “strips” of figures onto a magnetic base and then also affixed the LSNC: Napoleonics label to the magnetic base. With a minimum of effort Dave was able to pull his old Minifigs out of mothballs and put on an enjoyable game.
This shot show how the “sabot” bases for cavalry look.
Dave and I are working on a series of 1814 scenarios. I ran one of mine, Vouchamps, last Friday night at our club meeting. He ran Laon yesterday. Vouchamps needs a little tweaking, but Laon went very well. It was a near run thing. When time ran out and we counted casualties, the Prussians had lost 6 bases, and the French had lost 5, while retaining possession of the road that would be used later to facilitate their retreat.
After lunch, I set up a six-player Poland 1939 game using LSNC: WWII and my 10mm figures. The game was supposed to be a Germans attack to seize a town along the Polish line of communications.
Instead, Duncan in the Polish center went on the attack with his horse-mounted cavalry. Duncan smashed through a German infantry battalion. Then he got greedy and tried to run down a German anti-tank gun. He took some casualties, and his heroic cavalry ran for cover.
Meanwhile the German armor was trying to push their way across a river. There were three bridges, and the crossings were only lightly defended by some Polish armored cars. The German armor seemed hesitant to take casualties and did not advance aggressively. As a result, most of the German armor was still on the wrong side of the River as Duncan was smashing the German center. It doesn’t happen often that a player is completely wiped out, but in this game Alicia’s (orange sweat shirt) entire German infantry battalion was reduced to a single anti-tank gun section. The game was a convincing Polish victory.
While these two historical games were going on in one room, Chris was running his two GASLIGHT games in the other. I didn’t get pictures of Chris’ first game, but check out his blog (link at the top of this page) for his AAR. This game was a Burroughs-only Mars game. (Typically we do a Verne, Burroughs, Wells, etc. mashup.)
Even Sam’s bride-to-be got into the act. This picture was taken just before a great white ape crawled out of cave and attacked one of Sam’s units in retribution for Sam poking fun at the GM’s singing.
