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Whoops, This happened!

There I was today minding my own business, killing time before popping in to see my mate and this happened…

This is one of the games played by a few people at the Sunday Club, which is Shetland Wargames club, the original Shetland club is called Thule Gamers. Anyway I digress.

This box was packed to the top with stuff…

There are eleven miniatures. One set, the dark colour, are a Beastman faction and the other, the green sprue, are a fey Force, part of a wild hunt type force.

The game needs special dice supplied as well as various cards, both miniature and also objective, ploy and upgrade. There are 102 cards, not to mention a whole host of tokens.

The figures themselves are lovely…

These are snap together and don’t require glue, we shall see how that pans out! If I had one criticism of these is that a couple of them are balanced on. Single point of contact. The centaur in the background, although in a superbly dynamic pose, is poised on its front hoof. The plastic itself feels a wee bit softer than some of the older plastics, but possibly it is because I am more used to Perry’s plastic miniatures and haven’t had a good look at the GW stuff in a good while.

Regarding GW, although never a total fan boy, I did have a fair bit of their stuff, then, as everybody knows, they went a bit weird and started doing weird shit regarding pricing and the like, this turned me off them to be honest. This is my first real foray back into the company (apart from their paint – which frankly dries up as soon as you open the pots). So fair play to them this box is a full game, yes you can buy lots of bits and bobs for it, but it is a game with both sides.

Still not super cheap, at £45, but there again not silly expensive. The amount of figures within is not daunting…eleven in total. The other thing GW has is their TV channel where they show you how to build the forces and also paint one of each type up.

I have sprayed the fey with white earlier and I will have a go at painting one tomorrow.

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Ugg and the Mammoth Clan

These things have sat in a semi finished state for about five years at least. I bought them from Magister Millitum for my open day Mammoth hunting game yonks ago. Part way through the build I changed my mind and got some Magister Inuit instead and used them. The plan was that I would have various clans. As it happened I just used one lot for the Games.

So here we have the mighty Ugg and the rest of his hunting party (minus the dogs).

Once again these were done in Contrast paint for speed. It took about an hour to get them from white to painted. I resprayed them white when I did the goblins the other day.

Once again I am back to the ‘what the heck do I cover the bases in’ conundrum.

The following photos show some games my kids and I played a while ago…based on the bottom photo I used some of the cavemen miniatures as fire starters in the game (I thought I was missing some). The Inuit can be seen taking on a Mammoth (the rearing Mammoth was converted from the standing ones. The baby Mammoth are 6mm irregular miniatures ones, the older ones are Pendraken and the rest of the fauna are Magister, apart from the mighty gorilla in the wood, he is a 54mm Britain’s zoo animal. Works really well as a King Kong substitute in 10mm.

Not sure what I am going to paint tomorrow 🤔

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Nasty Orkses all Finished

Tonight I decided to get these done and out of the way.

They need some kind of basing material on them but the proof if colour concept seems to work and I am happy with them. Once I get the Samurai done, I will get some more if these.

Apologies for the naff photo.

Popped in to see my mate today and he seemed a bit better than yesterday, still struggling with vocabulary, but looking better in himself.. other good news.. my wife got a tax rebate as she had paid too much plus, the insurance came back with an acceptable value for the wrecked car…phew!

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Nasty Orkses

Today I decided on a change of scale and genre…

I had based up a few 10mm orks from Pendraken and gave them a white bSe coat then set to work on them. I dithered about colour.. standard ork green or a More Tolkien style of colour… so I gave them both a try…

As you can probably guess by the photo above, the swarthy Tolkien version won.

so a quick spray later they are ready for their proper colour…

I got a bit of a scary phone call today, my mate had been admitted into hospital, he had gone in feeling crap and whilst there had a stroke. He has had a couple of minor ones of late and had been put on medication for diabetes. He thought the meds were making him feel poorly so went in to check…

He was able to talk to me to some extent, but has lost a lot of vocabulary.

Scary thing is, is that he is in his late forties.

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Thule Gamers Open Day

Well that is it over with for another year… the action with the tanks quite often place at very close range. Below we see part of the table set up

Anyway I got possed every game of the three I played.

In two cases I was destroyed on the first hit!

The Char B above finished off my MKIII then turned its attention on my MKII. If it had survived the honey was waiting to finish it off.

Things got up close and personal between these two, with the MKIII eventually coming off worse.

Other games were Bolt action…

Some Pod Racing action…

Some board games…

And some Magic the Gathering card games which I didn’t bother photographing.

We also had a ZTV game that never got off the ground as the organiser of that was also our meet and greeter.

It was a bit disappointing in terms of numbers, last year we must have had fifty plus people attending. This year was ten. Two of them were my children. In hindsight the middle weekend of the October half term (we get two up here) probably wasn’t the best, but for three weeks before we had the fiddle and accordion week with wool week (which sort of stretched to two) before that. The next few weekends are Halloween parties with our venue being booked out again. We decided there is no right time As whenever we choose is going to clash with something going on.

On the up side we met eight potential members for the club. Everyone was impressed by the 3D printed stuff and general terrain, Personally I was a bit miffed with the lack of consistent mat arrangements 😱.

Well now that I have finished painting tanks and making terrain I thought I had better paint something else…

Therefore I decided to paint some orks.

These are 10mm Pendraken. It is all I have of these, but I will give them a test paint and if I like them then I will get an army pack to fight my elves.

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One More Sleep…

Well that is it, all the preparation for tomorrow’s convention are almost done.

I almost forgot to put the wash on the road, but luckily remembered in time, it has darkened down nicely, but is still light enough to be seen as a road. I found photos that showed really light roads amongst darker desert and this is what I was aiming for.

So here is the finished village…

I also got my display boards done too…

Regarding the firing rules, I have come up with a change that I think will work. Under twelve inches needs a 5 plus to hit, twelve to twenty four inches needs the 6. Up to thirty six is the 7 then beyond that is an 8 on 2D6. To aid with this I have a piece of dowel 36 inches long, this has been coloured in sections to aid distances for firing. There will be photos of it in action tomorrow.

From what I recall, there are the following:

Rapid Fire,

Zombies

Pod Racing

MTG

My Tanker game

There may be more too.

Whilst I remember, I go through bucket loads of superglue sticking things to bases etc. I decided that enough was enough with the 5g pots (sometimes 3G).

On the left 5g of superglue for £3.95 …. on the right 150ml of superglue for £7 posted.

I reckon it should keep me going for a while.

Tomorrow I shall regale you all with tales of our little convention 🙂

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Walls with added Agriculture

Today everything got a second spray with watered down PVA. Once it was dry I added some vegetation of sorts.

I pretty much looked through my tufts to see what might be useful. Don’t ask me what anything is meant to be as I never got round to googling crops in the desert, well okay I just have…

 Crops grown in the desert include watermelons, apples, green onions, cucumbers, corn, hot peppers, melons, bell peppers, radishes, carrots, cabbage, soybeans, pears, tomatoes, squash and spinach.

 Many farmers raise alfalfa as feed for their animals. It uses four times as much water as wheat. But wheat is also wasteful because so much of the plant ends up as straw.

So now I know!

Anyway everything is pretty much ready for Saturday.

I hunted out my palm trees…

The one conundrum I now have is distances.

A player rolls 2D6 and has to get higher than six for ranges up to 48 inches and needs a seven beyond…Now do I half everything as I am playing 15mm. Therefore gun range becomes 24 inches for the six and over 24 becomes the seven. I would keep the movement distances of 2D6 the same.

I think this would work as although range has reduced, it means crews fire at a more effective range. As can be seen below there is no reductions for range apart from the 48 inches.

Therefore 24 inches will work just as well… I hope… I don’t want to go down the inches into centimetres route and thought this would make it easier.

What do people think?.

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Walls, a Village and some Camels

Tonight I got some watered down PVA onto the fields, below you can see it pooling…

I also managed to get sand onto the village, I intend to darken the road a bit, probably with a wash…

I also printed out the cards and records sheets and laminated both…

I now have enough of everything for six players using tokens or eight players using dry wipe pens.

I also found some camel riders from my Sudan wars games, although my armies are in 10mm I have a mini game involving 15mm miniatures. This idea is found in the Science Versus Pluck rules. If things go horribly wrong then each officer has a miniature and needs to fight a skirmish game to see whether they make it or not.

Anyway here are my Peter Pig Ansar that I painted this evening. Well I felt that I needed some camels as the game is taking part in the desert 😂. Sadly I couldn’t find my 15mm sheep and goats that would have graced the table.

For speed, once again, these were done in Contrast paint.

Tomorrow I will add vegetation to the fields and spray the PVA mix onto the village.

I had a look at my ga I got mat today and suddenly realised that it was a lot smaller than I thought it was. I have a sand coloured piece of felt that is bigger. I will also put a shout out to the club and see if anyone has anything bigger. If not then I will go with what I have.

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Walls, Conundrums and a Christmas Card idea

Well tonight I got some more work done on the walls, they were dry brushed lots and then sand was put on the bases.

These will get some colour variations added then will get a spray with watered down PVA… oh and then I will get some vegetation on there too,.

The following is going to be my Bethlehem scene with Mary, Joseph and ickle wickle baby Jesus…

Still the sand to add, the well is just about visible under the shade of the palm tree.

Sadly I don’t have any 15mm middle eastern civilians, plenty of 10’s but no 15’s.

So onto the conundrum…. drum roll please…..

WaT requires a board to mark everything on, whether a tank is loaded, acquired etc. As I said yesterday I was going to print off the Thingiverse one and here it is…

The hexagonal tokens are the universal tool that shows how far a turret can turn for each appropriate dice. 60 degrees rotation per successful dice. Now Cura, the slicing software, gave a time of 5 hrs 30 minutes to print, it was actually closer to seven. My new roll of PLA hasn’t arrived yet and I reckon I can probably get another one out of the remainder of this roll. This type needs a plasticised sheet behind it so it can have things written on it in the blank boxes, which is again more work.

Option 2 is to simply print out the ones from the book and cover them with the laminator…

Option 3 is to basically use what I have already

The problem with this last option is that I made them double sided…

The only issue would be making sure things didn’t get wiped off and having somewhere for the temporary damage dice to go…

To be honest for ease, I will probably go for option two or three. I also just remembered that I need to make a crib sheet for all of the different attributes.

Today I had to go and get all of my crap out of the crashed car. It did look a bit broken, however when I was there I noticed this…

All of the other tyres were inflated and this one has run on its metal rim. It looks like it had a blow out on the back driver side. Either way the car is totally buggered.

Tomorrow I will carry on with the village, hunt out the palm tree bases and generally crack on with things.

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Walls, Cheat Sheets, Photos and a Well

Today has been, what can best be described as, bitty.

The walls were nice and dry so I gave them an undercoat of grey primer, only to find I still had enough desert yellow in the can, so they got a blast with that too when the grey had dried.

Once the undercoat had cured, I gave the walls a wash with home made sepia wash with a home made black wash over the top of that.

Once the wash has dried, I will get going with some dry brushing.

When that is done it will get some vegetation added. This will be a mix of green and desert yellowish colours. The green will be used as crops etc on the inside of the walls as these areas would be watered.

The small well for the village can be seen in the middle of the walls.

The other thing I managed to do was make some support materials for the game…

Firstly I printed off a simple map for the Battle of Sidi Rezegh which took place in late 1941. I also added a pile of photos showing various axis and allied tanks in operation Crusader.

The other thing I wanted to do was a cheat sheet for the gamers and lo and behold I came across these.

This has certainly saved me a shit load of work… so a big thank you goes to:

https://onseanstable.com/2018/06/08/what-a-tanker-full-metal-dashboards/

He (I reckon he is called Sean) added PDF’s to the page, which means I can get it sorted super quickly. His had metal in between the paper to make them magnetic. I am going to print dashboards out on the 3D printer. Each one will take over 5 and a half hours each. I am kicking of with them tomorrow. Tonight I am printing off the WaT Universal tool. I am printing off six, these are taking me a couple of hours to do (in total thankfully). They still have an hour to go so no photos until tomorrow 😉. Hopefully you can keep your excitement in check until tomorrow evening. 😁