Italian Breda 37 machine gun and crew from Perry Miniatures

My final minis for our participation game at Gothcon, now I only have to finish some terrain pieces.

These guys from Perry Miniatures will help their German allies against the unprovoked aggression of the British forces.

I haven’t had time or reference books enough to get the colours the way I want them. I usually prefer to go from photos of the real thing and try to match that, but this time I based the paint job on Osprey Men-at-Arms 349 The Italian Army 1940-45 (2) Africa 1940-43. Good enough.

Paints used:

Uniform and headgear: Vallejo 977 Desert Yellow, a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink, heavy drybrush with 977, light drybrush of 819 Iraqui Sand.

Ammo pouches – 984 Flat Brown

Belts – 988 Khaki

Shoes and straps – Formula P3 Bootstrap Leather

Puttees – 886 Green Grey

All above washed with AP Strong Tone ink

Collar insignia – 975 Military Green

Badge on helmet – Citadel Mechrite Red/White/975 Military Green/Bronze

Avanti!

Italian Autoblinda AB41 from Warlord

Another Italian AFV in 1/56 scale (or 28mm), this time the Autoblinda AB41 from Warlord.

A very nice metal and resin kit that goes together easily. I painted the wheels separately to reach every part of them and the car.

Paints used:

Body – Vallejo 912 Tan Yellow, a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink, a heavy drybrush with 977 Desert Yellow (I made a mistake here, in my mind I used 912, but the result was so good I will stay with this combo), a final light drybrush of 837 Pale Sand.

Wheels – Vallejo Panzer Aces 306 Dark Rubber washed with AP Dark Tone ink.

I haven’t brushed any pigments on this car yet as I have an idea of painting some signs on it, but that will be after Gothcon during the holidays. I don’t have time for that now.

AB41 and CV35

Another camera than my usual, this one is a Canon Ixus 140, a small compact that works surprisingly well. My old one died this weekend. Rest in peace.

Hey! You should really check out Con Man on Indiegogo. I’m just saying Firefly and Serenity. 

Brimstone – Hungry Dead

Hey. Stop! Turn! Dammit, it doesn't work.

These are my least favourite minis from the two Brimstone boxes. I have quite a few other zombies to fill this roll and I’ve used those so far in our games. But I wanted all of the Brimstone minis to be finished and these were slowly cleaned, glued, green-stuffed and finally painted.

In the Swamps of Jargono box you'll get 12 Hungry Dead in total. 3 with axe, 6 shambling ones and 3 females.

Paints used:

Skin is Citadel Rotting Flesh.

Paints for the males were a mix of mainly browns, greys and different sand-tones.

Our favourite victim has just met three femmes fatales (or fatalities)

The females have dresses painted:

- 896 German Extra Dark Green drybrushed with 879 Green Brown and a final drybrush of Coat d’arms Unbleached Wool

- 812 Violet Red + drybrushed with Unbleached Wool

- Citadel Foundation Necron Abyss drybrushed with 904 Dark Blue Grey and Unbleached Wool.

They are all very dead and had ‘rested’ in corpse piles. Sounds dirty so everything got a heavy wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink.

Not very excited about these but now they are done.

There is only the huge Harbinger left still unpainted.

Click here for the rest of my painted Brimstone minis.

Italian CV-35 Tankette by Perry Miniatures

This Christmas I got two presents from my gaming pals Thomas and Laffe. I had my suspicions.. they were probably trying to snare me into another period with some cool figures. Been there, fallen for it, got the T-shirt (or at least a whole lot of stuff for my plastics/resin/tin-mountain)

I was right, the small boxes came from Perry Miniatures and contained a tankette and a machine gun with crew. Italians for the Western Desert and in 1/56 scale. Coincidentally the scale those two gentlemen are building British and German Desert War Chain of Command forces for.

Vrom! Vroom! Poor victim. No-one loves him.

I will not fall for the temptation! or something like that was heard from me.

Well, I will not buy a whole new force but we do need more units for our participation game at Gotcon.

Now this kit is quite nice. I have this soft spot for early war crappy AFV:s and this little tankette hits just the right buttons. Tiny, armed with twin machine guns (in the kit there is also an option for a 20mm gun and it also includes two crew-members), with paper-thin armour.  What’s not to like?

Anyway the metal kit assembles easily, it’s just a few pieces.

Paints used:

I undercoated it all with Vallejo Foundation White and a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink.

Then a coat of Vallejo 912 Tan Yellow followed by a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink, a heavy drybrush of Tan Yellow followed by a lighter one of 837 Pale Sand.

Tracks were Vallejo Panzer Aces 304 Track Primer drybrushed with 863 Gunmetal Grey.

Rubber is Panzer Aces 306 Dark Rubber

Finally a dusting of AK Pigments AK-041 North Africa Dust.

Ready to take a beating J

Brimstone – Order from Chaos or how to store all your stuff

I had a conversation on this topic just now and thought I might as well show how I store my Brimstone cards and tokens.

My boxes of Shadow of Brimstone City of Ancients and Swamps of Death contain a lot of stuff. A huge lot of stuff. Cards, tokens, more cards, dice, even more cards and a token or two extra. With all expansions there are going to be even more.

As soon as I opened the boxes I understood that I had a catastrophe in waiting here. It was going to be a real mess if I didn’t have everything organized.

I went to Clas Ohlson, every hobbyists best friend (if you live in Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK and UAE where there are stores), to find suitable storage systems.

For my tokens I use this box. 

The orange dividers are removable to suit your needs.

My cards go into this box. 

I’ve tried to sort the cards into suitable stacks to have an easy time setting up the game and finding for example world-specific cards. I've still got a bit of optimization to do.

Tiles go into one of the Brimstone boxes. I store the minis in Alex and for travelling I have some carrying cases for the smaller ones.

Welcome Google+ follower Aaron Martinéz with LA Cueva Miniaturas, where he shows off his miniatures. Very nice stuff that! Lots of talent.

Hey! You should really check out Con Man on Indiegogo. I’m just saying Firefly and Serenity. 

Dust – Kommandotrupp

As I was painting  my Axis troops and reading Dust Warfare rules I noticed one thing lacking in my big box of unpainted Dust minis - a command troop for my Axis. I already have the heavy command troop but an ordinary (cheaper) command troop was lacking.

I found a box at my trusted FLGS Alphaspel and here they are, painted in my usual German Dust scheme.

Ready to battle the evil SSU or the equally evil Allies.

Here’s the TKS next to a soldier for size comparison.

Dust - TKS Nebelwerfer

I was looking through the Plastics mountain a while ago and found some forgotten 1/35 plastics kits that could be useful for Dust Warfare. Suitably Dustified of course.

The first was a TKS, the polish tankette, from Mirage Hobby. It is, as I mentioned, in 1/35 scale and Dust is 1/48. But looking at it I thought it would pass as a modified 1947 vehicle. My thought is that the German industry uses whatever assets they’ve got and the Polish factories are churning out modified tankettes to help the war effort.

Anyway, I built the kit with some small modifications. I had to re-position the exhaust and remove some items from the back of the tankette as they were in the way of the Nebelwerfer 42 that I borrowed from a Lothar medium walker.

In-game the gun will probably represent a 30mm gun or something like that. I haven’t decided yet.

An easy little conversion project and I’m very happy with how it turned out. More stuff for Dust and one less kit in the mountain. Win-win.

Creating your own cards for Shadows of Brimstone

Me and my son David have a Brimstone campaign going. Great fun! But we have one problem now as the heroes start to get upgrades, mutations, equipment, one-adventure bonuses etc. How the heck to keep track of it all?

Our attempts with paper and pen is sort of okay but not very visual.

I’ve used the free program Magic Set Editor previously to make cards for I Ain’t Been Shot, Mum! and it works well there. Time to try it out for Brimstone.

Cards to show the upgrades and also the cumulative stat changes and other info for our heroes. As usual, click on the picture for a close-up.

David and I sat down yesterday and made the cards we needed for next game and it was easy, fun (trying to find good illustrations) and gave great results.

Special ammo and auras for next adventure, a piece of equipment we bought in town, the mutation my character got due to too much darkstone and a reminder of the bounty we can earn the next adventure (we place a numbered chip on it to remember with monster gets bounty this adventure)

Next step is to laminate the cards that will be used most frequently and also making cards for the treasure we carry around so that the original cards can go back into their respective decks.

Welcome follower Rattlesnake from Little Wars wargaming club. Brien has blogs of his own, The Brien’s Great Adventure on American Civil War re-enactment and Wargaming in Sverige! - they are well worth a look. We had a great game of Naval Thunder the other day at the club. Well, great… both of my battleships sunk L

29 Let’s Go – a Chain of Command campaign - first game

Thursday evening we had a great game of the Chain of Command campaign 29 Let’s Go by Too Fat Lardies. It’s one of their pint sized campaigns – for the price of a pint (£3.50) you’ll get a 32 page campaign set in D-day +1 when the US 175^th Infantry Regiment (played by Thomas) pushed in-land to try to link the beach-heads Omaha and Utah. Against them I played the 352^nd Infantry Division, tasked with delaying the aggression of the overseas imperialists against the unified Europe.

Spoiler Alert!

If you want to play this campaign the following might spoil your fun, so don’t read further than this. I think it is safe for Thomas to read, though. (I am withholding some information for his sake J)

The board from my side. There's an orchard on the left side of the road this side of the hedge. We had no more trees left, though.

We played the first scenario – Probe at la Cambe. Unfortunately our terrain was spread in different locations so it was a bit improvised and I forgot to take pictures most of the time.

My mission was to hold the line and not let any enemies exit the board on my side. My problem is that I have to conserve my forces as I only got one infantry platoon and losses from that will spill over into later games in the campaign. So if I put on an all or nothing defence and lose a lot of soldiers they might be lost permanently or temporarily. I got very limited support and no AFV:s in this scenario. 

Against me I have an enemy that will pump in a fresh platoon every new game and also have a lot more support than I have.

I started really scared of the US firepower that can really punish you and I was anxious not to lose any men this early in the campaign.

Oh, no! An unpainted gun. It will surely die.

Anyway it started very well for me as I deployed my PaK 40 the first round and knocked out one of Thomas’ Shermans immediately. 

My unpainted gun killed his unpainted Sherman. Poetic justice.

The tin-foil tank exploded. Really satisfied with that. 

A painted tank this time. Unpainted ammo can't do nothing against that.

I damaged and shocked the other tank before my heroic gunners were killed or routed. 

Stangely enough everything from Thomas' side of the board targeted my poor gun.

Anyway that destroyed half the enemy armour and had the other half covering and hanging back for a long time.

Coward!

Then I didn’t do much other than collect Chain of Command dice for a long time as Thomas advanced slowly over open fields with his infantry. I had no men on the board and was just waiting for the right moment to unleash hell on him.

Finally he moved his remaining tank forward and I sprung my second surprise on him – an off-board 88 (the real thing, hehehe) from the flank. At that point I had four Chain of Command dice and I had to use one for every shot with this gun. Three misses on three turns but with the forth I got him. 11 dice penetrated and he saved one. Extra nice explosion as he was close to his own infantry giving losses and shock.

Kaboom!

At this time I deployed another support weapon, an MG 42 on tripod mount. Deadly against infantry in the open. Also one of my squads behind a hedge and another one in a house. The combined firepower was horrible against the men in the open and a few rounds later they had sustained very heavy casualties and some units routed off-board. Thomas called it a day and the Americans ran for their lives (or made an orderly withdrawal, depending on whom your talking to)

My losses were one man down from my platoon (I think). A victory to be proud of.

Thomas looked shell-shocked.

As you can see from the pictures Thomas used more unpainted figures than me – an obvious receipt for disaster and lost games.

Next game will be worse. Much worse. Same scenario, even more Americans this time as they really want to break through and this time they will know what they are up against.

Thank you Laffe for umpiring this!

Burrowing Horror from Reaper and Open Combat

I have a lot of things half-finished on my painting table at the moment but this one is now qualified to move into Alex.

It’s loot from the Reaper Bones II kickstarter, the Burrowing Horror sculpted by Jason Wiebe. In D&D you would call it a Bulette or Land Shark.

I had an idea in my head how I wanted it to look and the result is a bit off from that idea, but I am rather satisfied with how it turned out anyway.

Paints used:

First a coat of Vallejo 904 Dark Blue Grey all over.

The scales were heavily drybrushed with 983 Flat Earth and finally a light drybrush of 874 Tan Earth.

Belly and underside only got a heavy drybrush of 874.

The backside of the large fin on its back looks like a grille on a car and in my mind it’s a breathing organ, something like gills. I painted the depressions with 944 Old Rose, progressively thicker the deeper into the grooves.

The mouth also got a coat of 944.

Teeth and claws painted with Vallejo Game Colour 034 Bone White.

Eyes 948 Golden Yellow and pupils drawn with a Staedtler pigment liner 0.05 pen (great for painting pupils!)

Everything got a wash of Army Painter Strong Tone ink and finally a matte varnish.

Don’t miss the kickstarter for the Open Combat rules. I’ve already bought the PDF-rules and they do look like a great set of skirmish rules for pre-gunpowder historical or fantasy settings. You essentially build your own force with whatever miniatures you have with a very easy points system. It really looks great and I’m very keen to try out the rules.

Anyway, here’s the chance to kickstart the physical rules-book and at the moment you’ll get a hardcover book for a good price. I can really recommend this relatively cheap kickstarter that end on March 21^st.

You can listen to two Meeples and Miniatures podcast on the rules and the kickstarter for more information. Links on the kickstarter page.

Welcome follower Gordon Richards with the blog I have wrought my simple plan… Pulp miniatures and games, snaring ones children into gaming, what’s not to like? Recommended for all parents and everyone else J

Dungeon Décor from Reaper Bones

The scared explorer is here just to give you a feeling of the size of all this stuff. 

I continue to try out the Reaper Bones material with more easy-to-paint minis. This time I took all the dungeon décor thingies – two pillars, two boxes, two barrels, urns and bags.

The right one does look a bit crooked... I should have dipped it in boiling water and reshaped it.

They were all easy to clean (well, the pillars actually took some time as they are rather intricate) and they do take paint very well. A coat of paint, a wash and maybe some drybrushing, simple as that.

More scenery elements for my games. I really like all these small items to clutter my gaming table and all but the pillars are very dual-use - they will be seen in pulp, wild west and fantasy settings. 

Just wait until all the dungeon scenery from the Twisting Catacombs kickstarter gets here… 

Robots from Johnny Borg Castings

Loot from another kickstarter, Salvage Crew by Johnny Borg Castings. Some of the figures are really nice and especially so the robots that will serve as generic robots in pulp and SF-games.

Quick paint-jobs on them all, a coat of metallic paint, a wash of Army Painter Dark Tone, a light drybrush of a lighter metallic tone and limited detailing. Based on transparent 20 and 25 mm bases from Sally 4th.