Sainte-Mère-Église: AHPCX #9

 

This model has been an albatross around my neck throughout the AHPCX, without exaggeration there is probably over 300 hours of print time here with multiple failed pieces. This is a model from 3d-print-terrain, there are 14 pieces to print, the longest one clocking out at 38 hours alone. I had multiple problems throughout with both adhesion and extrusion problems. Anyway, I suspect most of you shall have no idea what I am talking about, so I shall stop. The fence come from the same set and I found the headstones on Thingiverse.

I needed a church, as I sold my massive Italeri hard plastic one, this is much nicer and of course Sainte-Mère-Èglise is one of the classic WWII Normandy set pieces. I based it on two old placemats and added a small cemetery as you can see.

 

 

 

I will treat it as 3 separate units in respect to bombardment for CoC, the two large roofs come off, and the centre tower comes off. Difficult to say whether the ground floor windows can be used as firing positions but there are 3 doors, one large and certainly the tower would be an excellent firing position. Funny how I think of terrain in game terms!

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Some Terrain for Epic: AHPCX #8

Myself and Iannick are planning to have our first 30k Epic game in three weeks, I have never played before and I do not think that Iannick has played Epic Armageddon since he was a young lad.  We are planning to use 2000 +/- 100 point forces and are playing the NetEA rules with the Horus Heresy lists. I am playing the Blood Angels and Iannick the Emperor's Children. I believe the plan is to play on a 4x4 terrain with no spaceship's, but everything else goes. I have my list together but keeping it a secret in order to confound Iannick. as we had no terrain, I have been keeping the CR10S busy. I already have a desert mat and some hills (from Rommel) as well as some 6 mm roads and rivers which will do, I really can not imagine the 30k world being a lush, verdant one, but of course I really have no idea as I know nothing about this world! I am looking forward to getting my force on the table though and the rules themselves do not look too complicated.

A Warhound for scale, I am hoping it is right

Ruined buildings, some objective markers and game tokens, all done on the 3D printer.

Regimental HQ in bottom left. I will make an orbital blast marker later but only needed this one for our upcoming game.

Bit of a challenge to match colouring with mat but pretty good I believe.

Detail of markers and and objectives.

Wish us luck in our game.

Black Seas: Catch the Prize

 

This past Friday, myself and Adam had a go at Black Seas, this was Adam's first game and my fifth. He is planning to put on a game a small con at the end of the month and want to playtest the rules as well as his scenario.

He decided to go with Scenario 5 from the books with the only advanced national rules being in play. The scenario pits a frigate and a brig against other, he elected to go with French and US ships, with one force escorting an unarmed merchant ship across so treacherous waters. Here are a few photos from the game.

 

These are all Adam's ships which were very nicely done. We played the scenario twice with us each taking a turn being the defender, and in both games the defender (the escorting force) winning. Both games took around 60 minutes, cementing my belief that this is an excellent set of rules which give a fun game. We used my off table card holders which obviate the need for wake markers. I think Adam has decided after the game to remove the bases, they do making measuring and turning using the included templates a little more difficult. I used my linear laser for the first time to decide which ship is closest to the wind, thus going first. With the wind gauge in the middle of the terrain this is an absolute plus and I highly recommend it. 

It was a fun game!

African Kingdoms for Congo: AHPCX #7

 

One of the last piles of 28mm lead, I have are the figures I bought for the game Congo, which I have yet to play. I painted up the Explorers box in a previous AHPC, but still had the African Kingdoms box. I have a very small lead pile and to be honest all I think is left is some Perry Samurai figures.

Certainly I have some plastic and resin figures lying around from some games like Mansions of Madness, some Games Workshop figures and a few Carnival figures. Hopefully I will get to play the game soon.

King and Wardrums

Askaris

 

Married Warriors

 

Young Warriors

Scouts

 

Princess and Hostage

 

Hostage

 

Bearers

 

Fanatical Warriors

Witchdoctor

Warhorn

Prince

 

War Leader

Nice to get them done.

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Train Tracks: AHPCX #6

I need some train tracks for several Chain of Command games that are coming up and it has been something missing from my collection for awhile. I could have gone with 3D prints, as I have several STL files which look quite nice but it does take a lot of time to print something like this.

I was going to buy some real HO track but found some very cheap plastic tracks on Amazon and I got some rail bed from a Train Terrain company. The whole thing was less then $30 and I probably have another 8-12' of track materials still left but what I needed was a something to cross a 6' terrain table.

 

 

 

It was a bit more work than I thought it might be. The track was a little too wide for the bed but I plan to improve that when it is set up with clumping foliage. I used PVA to glue the track to the bed which is some sort of foam and then sprinkled the ballast on the wet bed, it was not really the best method but with some repairs I moved on. Once dry, I airbrushed the whole thing with black, followed by a green brown followed by a light brown. I then drybrushed the whole thing with a light sand colour. I then washed the rails with black followed by a drybrush of a dark metal. I then used a brown ink from Scale Colour to paint the wood, which really worked quite well. I finished off the tracks with a rust wash.

Picketts's Charge ACW Campaign: Game 1-Bull Run

 

Last Friday we finally got in the first game of our ACW campaign, our 3rd return to Bull Run!

Starting Forces

The US right flank.

A wider view

The centre attack

 As usual I completely forgot to take photos but as you can see I set up 1 brigade to take the confederate left flank while advancing my other brigade up the centre. It was going to be a difficult victory for the US forces as they had 8 turns to get more undispersed units within the fenced area on Henry's Hill then there were confederates. My initial probes went well and I was having pretty good luck with my firing and initiative rolls but as the game progressed my dice rolling failed and there was not one time when I got 4 possible ADC's out of 4 in the whole game. I believe I got 3 once, but most of the time I had only 1 or 2! I ended up taking a pretty good pounding and as you can see below I lost quite a few troops.

 

I have to say that I really enjoy playing this ruleset, it is a lot of fun and once you get going the game goes quite quickly. I think we finished 8 turns in less then 3 hours. I am already looking forward to our next game.

Click for a downloadable pdf of our ACW Campaign.