November Update

I've been slow to update my blog for the past few months. I was able to do some hobby stuff in late October, but a recent setback in my cancer treatment kept me from doing much in November. I'm finally getting around to posting the photos of some troops I finished in late October. I was able to get out for a little while this weekend to see the NHMGS Game Day at the Museum of Flight. 

First up the painted troops. After some diversions, I finally finished the mounted troops for my Sage Norman army (I talked about the foot troops in this post). The mounted troops took me a little longer than normal because I seem to have trouble getting my horse colors to turn out right. But here they are finally done. 

Mounted Normans

The figures are from the Gripping Beast Saga Norman starter box. Here are some close-ups of the leader and two hearthguard units. The shield transfers are from Little Big Men Studios.

Army leader

The first hearthguard unit

The second hearthguard

That gives me a 5 point Saga army. I would like to add a banner and maybe some mounted javelins. But it will probably be a while before I get those. Here is a photo of the whole army. 

Saga Norman army

As I mentioned above, I had to slow down in early November due to some treatment setbacks. After a few weeks of resting up and working to get back on track I decided I could use a short outing. I took the opportunity to spend a little time at the Seattle Museum of Flight for their hobby day, which included the NHMGS game day. It is always fun to see gaming under the aircraft at the museum. Here are a few photos I took at the event. 

Overview of the game and model areas

The DBA gamers were able to coax some museum visitors into trying out a game.

Maybe some new recruits?

The camp for the Jewish uprising army was some great eye candy too.

Romans Go Home!

There was also some air racing.

All bunched up on the last lap

And some other games ...

Northwest Indian Wars using the Brother vs. Brother rules

There was another gaming period in the afternoon, but I was already gone by then.  

It seemed like there were a lot of people stopping by to ask questions and take a look at the games. So I would say it was a successful event.

 

As always, thanks for looking in on my blog. Due to upcoming treatments, I don't expect to get up another post until the end of the year.

Saga Normans

In my previous post I mentioned that I had picked up a Norman army for Saga. I spent the better part of the month working on the troops and I finished basing up the foot units this weekend. The mounted units are still a WIP, but I wanted to put up a post to show that I am making progress.

I had purchased a Gripping Beast boxed 4 point and added a group of warriors. The army box comes with two mounted Hearthguard units (each with four figures), one warrior unit armed with crossbows (with eight figures), a 12 figure levy unit with bows, and a mounted leader. Here is a group photo of the foot units.

Norman foot units with crossbows (left), warriors (right), and levy archers (center forward)

Here are a few closer photos of the units. First up the levy archers. The Norman army looks to be a shooting and mounted charge type of army, so the archers will play a big role in a game.

Archers ready to use that Volley Fire action

The crossbowmen are included in the army and fit with the shooting style. But the rule that crossbows can't shoot without taking another action may limit their usefulness. Some of the stuff I've read online suggests that crossbows may not be the best choice in a low point game.

Crossbows ready to shoot, hoping the +1 shooting bonus is worth it

Finally, here is my warrior unit. This is not part of the 4 point army box, but most of the people in the area that play go with 5 or 6 point armies, so I thought I would add them in. They also gave me a chance to practice putting shield transfers on kite shields.

Warriors ready to mix it up

The shield transfers are from Little Big Men Studios and are designed to fit on the Gripping Beast shields. The transfers look suitably battle-worn. I was really pleased with how they turned out.

I've still got some work to do to finish up the mounted figures, but they are close. I'll get photos of them up when they are done. Eventually I'll round out the army by adding a unit of mounted javelins and bannerman to go with the leader. But that will be a later project, since I have a couple other projects on deck. One is finishing up my Mexican troops for our group Mexican - American War project and the other is some 1/1200 ships. My friend Kevin recently came into possession of a plethora of Superior 1/1200 ships. So we are looking at doing some small night action battles in the scale. We'll see how that goes, but it did get me to order some 3D printed ships to go with the project. But more on that later.

Back to the shipyard!

December Wrapup

I had been planning to save my final 2021 post for the planned DANG games, but the winter weather intervened and I had to postpone the games. 

My front yard after the snow

We had a snow storm on Sunday, with more scattered snow showers over the past few days. But what really killed my planned games was the temperatures. Since Sunday our high temperature was 28 degrees F (that's around -3 C for those outside the US). The low temperature prevented the snow from melting and made the roads a mess, so I decided to postpone the games. I'm looking to reschedule for sometime in January, when the temperatures get back to Seattle normal. So, more on the games in January.

With no game photos to share, I thought I'd show off a couple books I recently received. First up is British Submarines in the Cold War Era by Norman Friedman.

This book came out earlier this year and and covers Royal Navy submarine programs from just after World War II up to today. The book also talks about sensors, weapons, and budgetary concerns. I was never able to see much of the interior of Royal Navy subs while I was in the U.S. Navy (I had a tour set up once, but shifting schedules caused it to be cancelled). So far, I've found the book pretty interesting. It even came in handy during the week as my wife and I watched the BBC series Vigil (we both enjoy a good mystery/thriller and the submarine background is a bonus). My wife thought the submarine looked strange and I was able to pull out the book and show some photos of the Vanguard class. The series was good, but had some weak moments. But it is good to know the BBC has the same issues with the interior of submarines as Hollywood (although maybe the BCC thought the sub was like the Tardis).

Next I picked up a copy of The U.S. Cavalry 1865-1890 by José Antonio Mayoralas.

The book is similar to an Osprey Publishing book and was recommended for its descriptions of uniforms and equipment. The books certainly meets those goals. The publisher, Andrea Press is from Spain and there are a few translation issues, but nothing major. The local group has been discussing a Plains War project and this book will come in handy for that.

That's all for now. In my next post I will do my look back at 2021 and look ahead to 2022.

Early December Update

As we roll into early December, I wanted to post a quick update and talk about the return of DANG.

First up, my recent project. After one of our late summer games David Sullivan (of the I Live with Cats blog) brought up the idea of a group project for the Texas Revolution of 1835-36 or the Mexican - American War of 1846-47. He was really wanting to do the Texas Revolution, but the group headed off in the direction of the Mexican - American War and I jumped in too. I expected this to be a slow progress, Winter project. But in a flurry of action, everyone else started making orders to 1st Corps for figures. I had decided to go in a slightly different direction by getting figures from Old Glory (although I did order some American Volunteers from 1st Corps, because Old Glory doesn’t really make them). I decided to get figures for both the Americans and Mexicans, so that I could play games in the future without having to worry about an opponent showing up with an army. We are going to use the Rebels & Patriots rules for the games, so the number of figures needed to field an army isn’t too huge.

A U.S. Sgt leads some troops

Compared to the others in the group, I am a slow painter (you can see many painted figures for the project on David’s blog and Kevin’s American and Mexican blog posts). Being more used to painting ships and planes, I often find people figures more challenging to paint. After man discussions about uniform colors, the purchase of a book with lots of pretty pictures, and such I finally got to work on my Americans (the Mexicans will come later). Here are a few photos of my first couple of infantry units. I’ll be posting more photos as I finish more troops.

A group photo

And from a more overhead angle

Overall, the Old Glory figures work well for the period. The 1st Corps figures are nicer and have more variety of poses. The Old Glory figures are either marching or advancing but have there are different heads, so they don’t all look the same. I do like the sergeants that are included in the Command pack. I think they have good poses and add some character to the units.

Marching poses

Sergeant figures

Flag/Command figures

The figures are turning out okay. I expect the later ones will turn out better as I get the painting down a little more.

The Return of DANG!

For those of you that aren’t familiar with DANG (Dave’s Annual Naval Game), the paragraph at the end of this post has links to older games.

With all the restrictions and uncertainty of COVID I had cancelled last year’s DANG. But with things looked somewhat better this year, I decided to bring it back. However, instead of the large, full-day mini-campaign, this year I will have two smaller (single scenario) games. That allows me to keep the gathering smaller (per recommendations from local Health Departments) and the games a little more manageable.

I did give the players a choice of scenarios (as I normally do with the mini-campaign) and the winning ones are a World War 2 coastal force action in the Black Sea and a hypothetical pre-dreadnought Franco – American battle off Haiti. The games are planned for the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. I’ll post some updates and the game recaps later.

DANG started in 2002. Since I’m doing two games this year, I’m going to say I am getting to DANG XIX (nineteen) and DANG XX (twenty). Here are links to recaps of DANG from before 2010, the 2010 Lepanto game, the 2011 American Civil War river game, the 2012 War of 1812 Lake Ontario game, the 2013 Operation Landcrab game, the 2014 Cogs of War game, 2015 The Shores of Tripoli game, 2016 The Big Stick game, 2017 Seastrike game, 2018 Siege of Charleston game, and 2019 WWI The King's Ships were at Sea game. It is a little surprising that I’ve been able to keep things going for 20 years.

Regia Marina

I've been a little slow in working on my projects, due to various reasons, but now I can report some progress on one project. 

Back in January, I had posted that I was working on the World War 2 Italian Fleet in 1/6000 scale. The Figurehead pack come with 77 ships, including all the major Italian warships and 40+ destroyers. 

A Littorio class battleship with an escort

I did a basic paint job on the ships in February, but it took a while to do some detailing and get the recognition stripes done. Part of the detailing involved putting camouflage on the ships, but with the ships being so small, it is pretty hard to see. I looked at several ways to do air recognition stripes (those are the red and white "barber pole" stripes normally on the bow of the ship). It was especially challenging to think about doing the destroyers, most of which were only a millimeter wide. After failing to consistently paint stripes, I finally settled on using a marker to do the stripes. I think they turned out pretty well, even if it felt a little like cheating. 

 

Here are some photos of the completed ships. My camera did have some trouble focusing on small ships with my lighting conditions, but hopefully it gives you a good idea of the final look. The mat in the photos has 2 inch squares, so you can get an idea of the ship size. 

Littorio class battleships

Conte di Cavour and Andrea Doria class battleships

Italian heavy cruisers

A representative group of Italian light cruisers

A few destroyers

The whole fleet

While the photos aren't that great, I think the ships turned out pretty well. I'm planning on mounting the ships on some clear plastic stands. That will give players something to grab when moving the ships and a place for me to put ship names.

 

I'm hoping to get the ships out for some action this summer.

Looking Forward and Back

It has been a while since I last put up a post. Normally I would have been posting about the preparation and playing of my annual naval game - DANG (here's a link to last year's prep and game posts if you aren't familiar with DANG). However, the current COVID situation squashed that. 

 

So, what have I been doing? Well... not much. I've mostly been dealing with work and not finding much hobby motivation. I continued to mess around with some VASSAL and other computer games, but my miniatures projects have languished. 

 

As 2020 ends and we move on, it is time for the obligatory look back and ahead. 

A quick look back at 2020 

Most of my 2020 plans were focused on projects for Enfilade, the big local miniatures gaming convention. When that was cancelled, I didn't really have much to focus on. 

 

But my friend Kevin changed that by getting several of us involved in a 1/1250 scale pre-dreadnought project. My contribution to the project was a French squadron of battleships and cruisers. 

 

With indoor gaming opportunities being limited by COVID restrictions, I bought a pop-up canopy to set up for gaming on my lawn. 

 

This gave us a chance to have some small, socially-distanced gaming sessions through July, August, and September. This certainly helped make things a lot more bearable for me. 

 

The end of summer ended the lawn gaming (and is giving my lawn a chance to grow back) and since then, not much else has happened. 

 

Looking ahead in 2021

 So what is in the works for 2021? Right now I've got one new project in mind and then I will see which unfinished (or un-started) projects catch my eye. 

 

The new project I'm working on now is a 1/6000 scale Italian World War 2 fleet pack from Figurehead. The fleet pack includes all the battleships and cruisers, along with enough destroyers and escorts to fill out about any battle you would want to do. I will put some camouflage patterns on the ships, but I'm not really looking forward to painting red and white ID markings on the ships (especially for the destroyers and escorts). 

 

Other unfinished and un-started projects include (in no particular order):

• Black Seas sailing ships. I have several frigates and brigs that are mostly painted, but still need the final mast assembly and rigging. I also have several unassembled 74s and more frigates/brigs. 
• 1/300 coastal forces. While I bought a number of Warlord Games Cruel Seas ships, I was mostly able to limit my purchases to ships for the Black Sea/Baltic. I already have a lot of 1/600-700 scale ships for coastal force actions, but they were mainly for the North Sea, Channel, Mediterranean, and Pacific. So getting Russians and Germans works out.
• 15mm tanks for North Africa. In 2019 I picked up a copy of What a Tanker from 2 Fat Lardies and have been slowly accumulating tanks. I like the game system, but I think it needs some more scenario drivers (other than just shooting up enemy tanks). 
• Airplanes! I have a lot of unpainted planes and scenario ideas that I could work on. 

 

I also expect that I'll start some lawn gaming again once the weather turns nice in the spring. So discussions about what games to play will probably help determine what projects I work on. 

 

It looks like Enfilade 2021 will be moved from Memorial Day weekend (at the end of May) to Labor Day weekend (at the beginning of September). Hopefully things will be open enough to actually hold the convention. I expect to run the games I was planning for the 2020 convention then. But there is still time to finalize plans. 

 

As always, I try to remain flexible with my plans and expect there will be some new, bright/shiny game or object that will catch my attention.

 

While I know that it will be a while before things even start to get back to normal, I'm hoping for better days in 2021.

Catching Up

March turned out to be a very strange month. We had just finished up with Drumbeat (my last post) and I was doing my preparations for Enfilade 2020. Then the COVID-19 stuff popped up and turned things upside down.

The world upside down image lifted from another website (hey, don't judge me)

My work started out by asking everyone to work from home, if they could, for a couple weeks. That shifted to a mandatory order the following week and we've been told to just keep working from home for the foreseeable future. The Washington state Governor has extended the Stay at Home order until May 4. I'm expecting that to get extended into June. So, it will be quite a while before I expect things to start to return to normal. Working from home isn't too bad, more of an inconvenience and something I have to adjust to. I do feel lucky that I am able to work from home and keep my job (and paycheck), when so many others have been furloughed or laid off.

What else have I been up to for the last month? It took me a little while to set up a home office, get into a working routine, and adjust to being home all the time. These changes also disrupted hobby time for me and, for whatever reason, it has taken me a while to get back to my projects.

So what am I working on? I started work on the 1/700 scale sailing ships from Warlord Games Black Seas starter set. The starter includes 3 frigates and 6 brigs. The plastic kits were easy to put together and the frigates have some variant pieces so they don't all have the same figurehead and stern. I expect I will get some more of these ships, so I decided to do 2 frigates as Royal Navy and other as French. For the brigs, I'm making 2 each of Royal Navy, American, and French.

In progress shipyard work

The Royal Navy is getting a yellow ochre strip, the Americans get white, and I went with a brick color for the French. I'm not sure I'm happy with the brick color, but the French used reds and yellows, and I wanted something a little different from the standard yellow and blue colors.

I'll give the rigging layout from the rule book a try, at least once, to see how that goes.

I'm also looking at another diversionary project. At the beginning of March I picked up some paint sets from a sale at Miniature Market and I also saw a box of Robotech Valkyries in the listings and decided to pick up a box for fun (they were only $5.50).

On sale goodies

I was only a semi-fan of the Robotech series, but I always liked the transforming Valkyries. The game these figures were associated with, Robotech Tactics, seems to have had a lot of issues. But since I wasn't getting them for that game, I wasn't too concerned about that. The one issue most people had with the kits was the number of small pieces needed to assemble each Valkyrie. I will say the reviews were right about that, the manufacturer made these much harder to put together than they should have.

Sprues with lots of pieces for 6 figures

Putting them together will occupy for a while, but if I get frustrated I can always just put it aside.

On the gaming side, I've been looking to online alternatives for playing. There are some good games out there. But, just like in-person gaming, the there are issues scheduling time to play. Right now I'm sticking more with play by email games using VASSAL. I have a game of Wing Leader going right now. 

American B-24s raiding Wewak airfield

I'm also getting pulled into a baseball game using Baseball Mogul. So far it is a slow go on this, since none of have run an online league before.

The league is mainly aimed at being the general manager for a team and making deals throughout the season. I normally prefer to play games as the field manager, but it is still fun and a good diversion since all the real games have been postponed.

Hopefully it won't be another month before I get up another post. Until then, I hope you're keeping busy with your own projects and staying sane. 

Enfilade Project Updates and more

I haven't been keeping up the blog lately, but I have been working on a few things. Mostly getting together stuff for my Enfilade games.

Last weekend Kevin and I set up the Ploesti terrain and did a quick walk-through of the game. Since the last version of the game was done on a hex mat, we needed to see how the layout would work without one.

Refinery layout looking toward the American entry side

A view from the oblique

We think we came up with a good way to put out the refinery components. But we decided that having the building directly on the grass looked a little off. So I'm getting some gray felt as a concrete base for the buildings. I'll also see about making a few roads.

We were also trying to decide if we need anymore flak batteries. Right now we have 11 bases with a mix of heavy (88mm guns) and light flak (37mm and 20mm). Kevin was a little worried that there wasn't enough. But after laying it out on the table, it seemed like plenty.

The big battery of heavy flak

Kevin has some planes to finish up, while I finish the terrain and rules. Overall this seems very much on track.

For my Shores of Tripoli game, I need to repair a few ships and put together the paperwork (quick reference cards, ship cards, etc.) for the game. So this project is also on track.

Going through my box of sailors to make sure no one has jumped ship

Drumbeat, the NHMGS mid-winter game day, is next Saturday (February 22). I'll be there to get in some gaming and help out with running an event. You can see a list of the Drumbeat events at this link.

On Saturday, I took a trip over to the Museum of Flight to look at the Northwest Scale Modelers show. I always enjoy seeing what they are putting together. While there are a lot of aircraft in the show (it is at the Museum of Flight), there was still room for land and sea vehicles too. Here are some photos from the event.

While I really enjoy the modeling aspect of the miniatures gaming hobby, I also like to play with my models. I still do some non-gaming models from time to time, but I don't really have good places to display them. So my main focus is on stuff I can use in games.