This was a very busy weekend, but I had Monday off, so I worked much of the day on the Polish infantry for our Lvov scenario for LSNC: WWII at Cold Wars 2011.
In the evening, my wife, kids, and I went outside to play laser tag in the dark.
What a great day!
Last night I completed a regiment (three battalions) of 10mm Polish cavalry for the 1939 campaign. The figures are manufactured by Pithead. To my knowledge Pithead is the only company that makes Poles in 10mm. Most of my figures for Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII are Minifigs, but they do not make Poles.
10mm Wold War II figures paint very quickly. It’s mostly a matter of dry brushing. I base spray the figures black and then dry brush the horses and uniforms. I paint the hair and rifles and then add the flesh for the face and hands and the helmets.
The figures are mounted for Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII. In LSNC all the information needed to play the game is placed on the label at the back of the base. There are no chart cards. Additional information is provided by a handful of special dice. To help denote which bases (platoons and headquarters) belong to which units, I paint a small bar on the base in different colors for battalions and denote the company number with dots. In the case of the picture above, this troop is from the “brown battalion” and is the “third company.”
I can’t wait to get these troops on the table. Buck’s law says that the first time you use a newly painted unit in a game, they will get smucked. I’m anxious to get that over with so we can start doing play tests for the Lvov LSNC extravaganza.
As a Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II extravaganza for Cold Wars 2011, Chris and I are working on a large battle based on the fighting around Lvov in 1939. We’ll be taking a little license with the history. The Germans attacked the city around the 12th of September. Polish forces retook the city on the 13th with the help of the 10th Mechanized brigade, but the Germans maintained control of the high ground around the city. They set up their artillery on the city and shelled the town. The Russians arrived and completed the encirclement of the city on the 19th of September.
In our scenario, the Poles are in the town, but must attack to seize the high ground north of the city and destory the German artillery there. The Russians are attacking from the East to enter the city. The Germans are attacking from the West. It will be a three sided scenario, because the Russians and Germans are attacking from opposite sides. (In the real battle, there was no coordinated German-Russian attack.) The Russians and Germans are, in fact, competing for the honor of capturing the city first.
In preparation, I’ve been painting 10mm Poles like crazy. I am just about done with more Polish armor and a regiment of cavalry. I’ll post pictures of them soon. When I finish another regiment of infantry, I’ll have enough (minus the trucks) for a mechanized brigade and an infantry brigade. As the trucks are expensive, I think I’ll make my truck bases half sized and only mount a single truck.
I think we’ll have 8-10 players worth of Poles and another 10-12 player worth of Germans and Russians. If you live in the Baltimore area, consider coming to Barrage in Janaury for the first major playtest of the scenario in preparation for Cold Wars.
Before I came home from Iraq, I saw some information about these figures. I put together an advanced order from Eureka, and Chris picked them up for me at Historicon.
Many years ago, when I was living in Georgia and a member of HMGS Mid-South, I needed to put together a game for a small regional convention. I was just beginning to get interested in WWII skirmish gaming, and all I had painted were Germans. I was trying to figure out what kind of game I could run with just Germans, when I saw a television documentary about dinosaurs, narrated by Walter Cronkite. It occurred to me: what would a panzerfaust do to a Tyrannosaurus? Thus was born Deutschland and Dinosaurs, a real crowd pleaser, that I ran for several years. Experiments on Penemunde go bad, and a rag-tag group of German soldiers have to defend the research facilities from rampaging dinosaurs. It was always fun to see the dinosaurs pull the Germans out the top of the open-topped vehicles!
So… when Eureka announced these figures, I just HAD to have them! This weekend was reasonably slow, so I had a chance to finish them up. I actually started them last weekend, but I was gone on business all week.
I can’t wait to get these into a GASLIGHT game.
I’m not sure why the officers and NCOs are wearing masks, but that’s how they’re molded. The other troopers with SMGs are wearing goggles, but not masks. The sculpting on these figures is very clean, and assembly was easy. It took three hands to get the figures to stand straight on the two, separate legs while the super glue dried. Otherwise, assembly was very easy.
Sammy, my 11-year-old daughter and I finished another of the Litko laser-cut buildings today. This one is the small garage. On the pizzeria, Sam did the basic dry brushing, but I did the rest. In this case, Sam also painted the random, different-colored bricks.
I just found the vintage radiator repair graphic on the Web and resized it to fit on the door. I haven’t decided what kind of sign to put above the door yet.
This building is interesting because of the slit-type windows along the sides. Good places to shoot those Tommy guns!
I’ve been adding to my collection of buildings for Pulp games. In a very general, abstract, nostalgic way, I’m working on constructing the town of Granville, IL, which is a small town near where I spent my Summers as a kid. I’m not being overly “realistic,” but looking for the right feel of a 1200-person town with a single main street.
I’ve become a big fan of the Litko building kits. They are laser-cut, hard wood kits that have brick and other detail scribed into them. They assemble and paint quickly. For Christmas, my parents got me another of the 2-story buildings, the pizzeria, and the small garage. The garage is on the project table, but I finished the pizzeria. My daughter did the dry brushing of the bricks, and I painted in the detail.
I’ll post a picture of the garage when I finish it. I’m hoping to run a large pulp game in the Fall some time at a HAWKs night.
Since this project was announced by Hydra about two years ago, I’ve been excited about it. I’m a huge fan of the old movie serials from the 40’s and 50’s, having quite a few of them on DVD. While I was in Iraq, my wife ordered some of the ships for me for my birthday. By the time I redeployed, Hydra had released a few more ships and the rules. The rules and additional ships arrived while I was on vacation, but I was able to get them painted and ready for their first game for last Friday’s HAWKs night.
These ships were very fun to paint. There is enough detail to help with the brushing, but not so much detail that they get gunky when painting them. I was able to paint all four fleets in a weekend.
So… I signed up to run War Rocket at a HAWKs night before I had even primed the ships. There’s nothing like a deadline to increase focus. Having never played the game, I ran two iterations for the club. As this was our first go at the rules, I paired up the four fleets into two alliances (Valkeeri and Galacteers vs. Imperials and Zenithians) and ran a “meeting engagement.”
We didn’t play with the rule about delaying your actions until the next turn for this introductory game. We found that all the fleets had nice plusses and minuses to them that made them interesting. Our feeling though is that the forward only fire of the smaller Valkeeri ships put them at a bit of a disadvantage compared to the others. I think my favorite fleet is the Zenithians.
I made this planet from a styrofoam ring and ball from the floral section of the craft store. I like the effect.
Chris suggested that I put sparkly pipe cleaners sticking out the back of all the ships. That might be a neat effect as well.
I think we all had a good time with the rules. They’re simple, fast, and bloody, but there is enough nuance and detail to make the games interesting. It’s a step down in detail and complication from Firestorm Armada that the HAWKs started playing while I was deployed. I like the feel of the game and the speed of play. While we found a few typos in the quick reference sheet, we all picked up the rules quickly. With four fleets of about 8 ships per fleet, we were able to complete two games in about three hours.
I eagerly await the release of the missing ships and the two new fleets. A combination of Class III and IV ships are needed to complete the Imperial, Galacteer, and Valkeeri fleets. I have six Class I ships per fleet, a Class II, and where available, a Class III and IV for each. I think the right composition is six Class I, three Class II, two Class III, and one Class IV per fleet. When the new ships are available, I’ll purchase enough additional ones to put this together for each fleet.
This game gets a thumbs up. I recommend it.
Of course we saw Old Faithful Geyser. Old Faithful is not as clock-like reliable as it once was because of an earthquake in the 80’s that changed the underground “plumbing” of the geyser area. Still, if goes off every 90 minutes or so. Not far from Old Faithful, however, is a much more impressive geyser, the Grand Geyser, which blows about every 11 hours. We were lucky enough to catch the 15-minute, 40-feet tall event. Tremendous!
The next two nights we stayed in one of the cabins in Old Faithful Lodge. These too were quite small. Bathrooms and showers were in another building. It was fun going to the bathroom in the middle of the night with a flashlight hoping to not run into a bear or moose. In the evenings we gathered in Old Faithful Lodge at a small table in the common area. From there we had a picture-window view of the gyser. Since it was cold in the evenings, it was good to be inside. We had bought a brick of cheese and a box of crackers and played dominoes all evening while watching the occasional geyser eruption.
One of the best things we did at Yellowstone was get off the beaten path. We took a three-mile hike to find the Fern Cascades. The trail head was not well marked, but the trail was. We saw no other people for three hours as we hiked through the woods and found the “falls.” In fact it was so quiet, the kids and I started singing Kingston Trio songs to ensure we didn’t surprise a bear. We left Yellowstone after three days in the park. On the way out the South gate toward the Grand Tetons, we passed by the waterfall shown below. There was a lot of dead-fall stretching two thirds of the way across the river below the falls, so of course, the kids had to climb out on it.
We saw elk, deer, beaver, sheep, bison, and bear in Yellowstone, but we didn’t see any moose. Finally on our second day in the Grand Teton National Park we saw a moose during our float trip down the Snake River. We also saw three bald eagles perched in trees. The views in the Grand Tetons were superb.
After visiting Candy’s brother in Boise, ID, we headed to the Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. We only had a day and a half there, which was about a day too short. This place was probably the most scenic of any of our stops during the trip. Incredible views and hikes.
On the hike, Candy and I kept a leisurely pace while the kids rushed ahead and climbed rocks. Below is a picture of a hiding place that Sam occupied at one point. The four-mile hike began at about 9500 feet and climbed to over 10,000 feet.
From the four-mile hike we took another three-mile hike to a waterfall. The picture below shows Candy near the base of the falls. She and I stopped to take some pictures. The kids kept climbing. We looked up to see Sam dancing on a cliff just over the top of the falls — on the other side of the river. It was too late to do anything about it. We didn’t know how they got across, and they couldn’t have overheard me over the water if I had tried to call them down. On the way back, however, Sam slipped on a rock and fell up to her chest in ice-cold mountain water. Fortunately the water was only a foot deep there, so she didn’t get swept over the falls. You can imagine the conversation with Tommy about poor choices that followed. We let Sam stay in here ice cold, wet clothes until we made it back to the parking lot; we figured she’d remember the lesson better that way. 🙂
From Rocky Mountain National Park we stopped in Ft. Leavenworth, KS, and then spent half a day in Hannibal, MO, learning about Mark Twain’s boyhood and seeing many of the sites that inspired Tom Sawyer. The trip through the caves was intersting. We also spent a couple of hours at the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. The next day we stopped at a truck stop for gas and drinks. A man in the truck stop had just won a prize from the claw machine. Since his kid didn’t want it, he gave the chicken hat (seen below) to Tommy. He wore it all the way home, including trips into gas stations and restaurants.
It was a great trip. We have lots of photos and memories. It was great quality time. The trip home felt rushed, because I needed to get back to work. While the trip was already 17 days long, another three days would have made it feel more leisurely, and we would have arrived more rested.
Yesterday, 10 August, we headed set out after a really nice continental breakfast at the K Bar S lodge.
Our first destination was Devil’s Tower, WY. We were worried about getting into the park. There is a huge motorcycle rally going on this week in Sturgis, nearby. Apparently up to 500,000 bikers show up for the rally each year. The Rangers at Devil’s Tower were well prepared for the huge influx of people. Parking was well organized, extra stations were set up for people to get bottled water, etc. While traffic was heavy we were able to get into the park and find parking very quickly.
If you are not an excellent mountain climber, what there is to do at Devil’s Tower is admire the scenery and take a couple of different hikes around the base of it. The kids had fun climbing around the boulder field at the base of the monument for a while. We spent three hours at Devil’s Tower, about an hour longer than we thought we would, but some of that time was consumed in just getting in and out through all the bikers.
(By the way, while the vast majority of the bikers look “different,” they were well behaved, quiet, and made no trouble. Tommy wanted to know why all the biker women walked around half naked, to which we had no answer. This seems to be a case of not judging a book by its cover.)
While there is debate over the exact mechanism that created it, the scientists agree that Devil’s Tower was once the inside of a volcano. The outside eroded from wind and rain. The long streaks that you see in pictures are the seams between long columns of once-molten rock. These columns are actually hexagonal in horizontal cross section.
From Devil’s Tower we headed up into Montana to visit the Little Big Horn battlefield. At the visitor’s center, we saw the 17-minute movie, which was pretty good. The battle has a lot of maneuver, and I thought some better graphics and overhead maps could have helped understand what is a confusing engagement. There are no step-by-step descriptions of the battle in the visitor’s center. We drove the battlefield tour, some of which is on Park Service land and some of which is on the Crow Indian Reservation. The drive along with the descriptions of events in the park booklet gave a fair understanding of the battle. I would have liked more time there and some time with a Ranger; however, we had arrived late in the day and two hours was about all Candy and the kids could tolerate.
After two days of driving and site seeing, the kids enjoyed the pool with a long, curving water slide at the Rodeway Inn in Hardin, MT. Today we just have a three-hour drive to Yellowstone. I’m off for a six-mile run before everyone wakes up.
After returning home in July, I spent a couple of weeks getting settled into my new job, meeting people in my new organization, and doing battle with the IT folks. (After three weeks, they still haven’t gotten my Email working properly!) I didn’t go directly on vacation, because 1) the kids were in a series of Summer camps and 2) we planned for our vacation to begin with our family reunion in Mark, IL, (population 400-500, depending on the source of the information) on 6-7 AUG.
The reunion was largely planned and organized by my Cousin Linda and my Aunt Margaret. As usual, the Illinois part of the Serafini side of the family bore the brunt of the preparations. As the Serafini side of the family is Italian, the reunion involved a huge amount of food, which included Linda’s famous masticioli recipe, my Aunt Margaret’s famous canolis, and something called bognacalda (sp?), which is reputed to be the first food dip invented. Bognacalda is essentially garlic, anchovies, and butter cooked down into a paste with some whipping cream added at the end. You dip bread, cabbage leaves, and/or celery into it. You also don’t spend much time around other people for a day or two.
I also had a chance to visit the graves of my paternal grandparents and the old family house. My grandfather was born in 1914, and my grandmother was born in 1918. As I spent most of my Summers in Mark with my grandparents, it still feels to me that an era ended when my grandmother died two years ago, just a couple years after my grandfather.
From Mark, we headed West. The first day (7 AUG) was a killer, 12-hour drive. We stopped at Brooklyn, IA , where they’ve put up a nice display of American, State, and Service (e.g., Army) flags. On these vacations, we like to avoid chains and hit mom-and-pop places, so for lunch we bought some ham sandwiches at the local grocery store, just about the only place open on Sunday in the town.
On the 8th we continued West, stopping in Mitchell, SD, to see the Corn Palace. We arrived in Keystone, SD, mid-afternoon, after a stop for lunch at Al’s Oasis. Al’s Oasis had billboards along the highway for miles, like South of the Border (between North and South Carolina along I-95). It wasn’t nearly as large or involved as South of the Border, but it made a nice one-hour break. We spent two hours in the Badlands National Park, including a mile or so hike and climbing a few rocks (which was authorized). The scenery in the Badlands was amazing, something between the Bryce Canyon, the Grand Canyon, and the Painted Desert.
After checking into the K BAR S lodge in Keystone, SD, we headed up to Mt. Rushmore.
Arriving in the evening, taking photos was a problem as the Sun was to the left and behind the monument. We were able to get a few good shots. This photo, because of lighting, looks fake, like we posed in front of a green screen. We were actually there! In the evenings, they hold a nice ceremony. It began with the park ranger describing the hardships of the 1804 Lewis and Clark Expedition, a 10-minute movie on the history of the four presidents featured and the making of the monument, and a salute to veterans.
The presentation and movie included more political correctness than I would have liked. I’m getting really tired of revisionists who want to recast everything in terms of today’s social outlook. The description of the Lewis and Clark Expedition harped on the involvement of Clark’s slave. Lincoln’s achievements were overshadowed by the Emancipation Proclamation, rather than the preservation of the Union. Roosevelt’s position on the evils of big business were described, but there was only passing mention of the Panama Canal or the creation of the national parks. (By the way, it was the Panama Canal that was cited by the sculptor as the reason Teddy Roosevelt was included on Rushmore.) Finally, I really wish people would just sing the national anthem the way it’s written instead of “interpreting it” like some Vegas lounge singer.
So far, this has been a nice trip. We have a short drive today, with stops at Devil’s Tower, WY, and the Little Big Horn battlefield. Then we’ll spend a couple of days in Yellowstone National Park.
