Saturday 31 August 2013

Terraclips Dungeon Essentials 28mm terrain

I’ve played around a bit with Terraclips terrain, and why not give the different boxes a short review each. Terraclips are made by World Works Games in cooperation with Wyrd Miniatures.
Terraclips is cardboard terrain, and all components are made of very solid, durable, cardboard. All pieces are printed on both sides.
The larger pieces are stuck together with clips, sold separately, and the smaller pieces are supposed to be pushed together. The latter works so-so, and I have started to super-glue the small pieces together. This of course means that the pieces takes more space, compared to if everything is stored flat, but I think the fact that I actually will find what I need when I need it more than compensates for this.
So what will you get in this set?
Walls, with and without doors: 18 x 3” walls, 18 x 6”
Walls for angular floor sections: 8 x short (approx. 4”), 8 x long (approx. 8”)
Double sided floors: Eight 3”x3”, four 3”x6” and eight 6”x6”
13 angular floor sections and 5 angular corridor sections
Removable wall toppings: 3 long and 5 short
Doors for all the door openings
7 chairs, 2 tables, 2 bookcases and a lectern
2 stairs
2 spike traps
One dungeon entry portal
14 columns
51 tokens
With the stuff from this box you could build quite a lot, on multiple levels. I even had pieces over after building this.
Here a party surrounded by undead.
Or this, from our last D&D session, with a sarcophagus from the Vaults of Ruin set.
In D&D you usually see 2” corridors, and that can easily be solved by resting the walls on the clamps, and placing them free-standing on your board. This could be used for rooms also, and gives a much more flexible solution. Good for your average D&D session, when you might need to build new corridors and rooms on the fly, as the party advances.

As you can see this is a very useful set if you happen to do dungeon adventures. Highly recommended!

Other sets, that might be reviewed sometime...:
Vaults of Ruin
Prison of the Forsaken
Building of Malifaux
Streets of Malifaux
Sewers of Malifaux

Thursday 29 August 2013

Pz I in 1/72 from Minairons Miniatures

Got one Pz I A from Minairons from Thomas of Learning by Doing. I've been interested in this company for a while, so this little gift was most welcome.
A box comes with three tanks, each comprising of 9 parts (and an alternate turret). This is obviously a fast-build and as such it is somewhat simplified, as you can see. With the kit is a sheet of decals – early German, Koumintang Chinese and Spanish Nationalist. The crosses on this one comes from my own stash. 
The kit went together easily, and I painted it, as usual, as an early war tank. Checking my references I norticed that many Pz I:s were without numbers on their turrets, and being lazy I skipped them on this one - I concentrated on fast in fast-build...
All in all a very useful kit. Strongly recommended if you’re interested in early war Pz I:s for your wargaming and isn’t bothered by it being a bit simplified.

An variant with a 20mm Breda anti-tank gun, used very sparingly in the Spanish Civil War. Four made, I think.

Tuesday 27 August 2013

Beer, trucks and a dice-cup

I had a short business-trip to Copenhagen in Denmark last week, and luckily got a guided tour of the Carlsberg brewery. Very interesting, and well worth a visit.
They certainly made some factories with class in the old days
Game-wise I made a bit of a find, a dice-cup with dice in a separate compartment. Nice.

Don’t drink and dice… or at least do it moderately…
You can never have to many dice!
Some random shots of trucks and wagons used by the brewery through the ages:


Finally, a very nice lunch of smørrebrød and an excellent beer.

Sunday 25 August 2013

Liralith – a dark elf in 28mm from Hasslefree

This is the HFE005 Liralith Reduox figure from Hasslefree. One of my favourite companies, been with them from the beginning.
I’m not too happy about how this figure turned out, the colour of her clothes and her lips just didn’t turn out the way I hoped. But this is what you’ll get.
Paints used (Vallejo unless otherwise noted)
Skin – 822 German Camo Black Brown
Boots/tights – Citadel Foundation Fenris Grey
Body – Citadel Foundation Necron Abyss
Sword – 865 Oily Steel
Hair – 883 Silver Grey
All above washed with Army Painter Dark Tone ink
Spider – 992 Neutral grey washed with Dark Tone and Devlan Mud
Handle – 876 Brown Sand washed with Devlan Mud


I bought a bunch of different dark blues after this. Something to experiment with.

Sunday 18 August 2013

Oil-cistern and… Cinzano…

The LRDG-project is sloooooowly going forward. 
After a month without miniatures I made a quick terrain project.
Every nice airport being raided by LRDG needs something to go up in flames. We thought about a fuel-dump with lots of oil-barrels, but that takes a long time to make, so I made a cistern from an empty can. When I was at it, I made two.
I guess desert airfields usually didn’t have these cisterns, but it will look nice on the table.
Cans hot-glued to used palette-CDs
DAS modelling clay – excellent for your terrain projects
Clay on CD to get the cisterns embedded
I spray painted the cisterns with Army Painter Color Primer Desert Yellow, drybrushed with Vallejo 865 Oily Steel and made stains with Citadel Devlan Mud and Vallejo Gamecolor 68 Smokey Ink.
Ground painted with a mix of cheap paint and fine sand, and the grass tufts are Army Painter Battlefields Wasteland Tuft 6mm.
I found documents and photos on the net about the Italian oil-company AGIP, and the signs were made from these.
Being an Italian airfield I thought they needed something really worth protecting. A cistern of Cinzano, of course. A bit whimsical, but who says we have to be dead serious all the time.
Wonder if it is good or bad to blow that up? Morale will certainly take a hit, but on the other hand the troops will probably be more combat worthy.
The Cinzano-sign from “Italian signs from Chris Woffenden” which you can download here. Lots of great, free, WWII-signs there, well worth a visit.
The map, “Imperio Etiopico”, is a road-map made by AGIP which a found a photo of. Great for character, but I wonder why nobody has removed it from the cistern. Nostalgia, I guess.
A fast and simple project, with nice results. Just as they should be.

Welcome follower James Brewerton with blogs Akrotiri Nomads Wargames, where we see what happens in his wargames room, Exiles Wargames Painter, great blog on painting, and finally The wonderful world of Mackie and Toddy, about Mackie and Toddy…

Also Paradox0n, with Paradox0ns Wargaming Blog, on terrain, minitures, tutorials, reviews and more – good blog, should have more followers (actually just got one more, me)

Saturday 17 August 2013

28mm Gnome Infiltrator from Chainmail

A ‘28mm’ Gnome from the long since defunct Chainmail game. It’s one of many very nice figures from that range, and has gone from the tin-mountain to my painted ranks.
Paints used (Vallejo unless otherwise noted)
Pants – 880 Khaki Grey
Leather armour – 875 Beige Brown
Skin – 955 Flat Flesh
Metal – 865 Oily Steel
Stock – 843 Cork Brown
Scabbard and pouch – Citadel Founation Calthan Brown
Belt – 983 Flat Earth
Hair – 912 Tan Yellow
Everything washed with Citadel Devlan Mud


Welcome followers Sean with Sean’s Wargames Corner,a blog to my taste with a bit of this and that, and Anne O’Leary with O’Leary Miniatures, a fantastic painter of miniatures (and I’m her 400th follower).

Wednesday 14 August 2013

Vacation, Chain of Command and crowd funding

Been at the summer place in the Stockholm archipelago for the last four weeks, so updating has been rather low. No models, no paints and no reliable internet connection, meaning nothing much has happened on the modelling front.
Sunset from the island
But I’m back in town now and itching to paint and do wargaming stuff.
First off I have started to unpack some Terraclips dungeons, and you will see reviews of all of their terrain shortly.

I didn’t jump on the Call of Cthulhu Indiegogo campaign, it just didn’t take off. Unfortunate, but I think their set-up asked for it, it was simply dangerous to jump in early. They made a somewhat better deal, but not enough to spark interest. I might buy some of their miniatures when they become available, though.

Still waiting for my stuff from the Otherworld Indiegogo. Hugely disappointed at Otherworld at the moment. Why?
- Shipments are delayed. First batch should have started shipping in January. That could be OK, but the thing is that shipments of the first of two packs started about five months ago, and it is still not finished. We’re talking about less than 250 backers, so he’s sent about two packets a day…
- Communication – or rather lack off. Very infrequent updates on the campaign homepage, not good when you’re massively late. Also no mail to the backers when he has sent a parcel. So, maybe he sent mine five months ago and it got lost.
- You can now buy a lot of the figures in Otherworld’s shop. This is, I think, a deadly sin for crowd funding. Your backers should get their stuff before you start to sell them.
So I’m not happy about this, which is unfortunate as I really like what Otherworld produces.

Some good news. Too Fat Lardies will release their new platoon-size wargames rules Chain of Command on August 21st. Absolutely recommended, and you can find a lot of information on how it plays from their Lard Island News blog, among other things a few very informative videos.
At the moment they take advance orders that seem to get good value for your money. I just ordered the Big Bundle and look forward to the PDF on the 21st and the dead-tree version a couple of days later.