OK, so I didn't post anything in August.......

..... and now it is September. I've not posted anything, because I still haven't managed to paint anything because of the damned arthritis. However, I did go to the Lardy Workshop at Britcon in Nottingham back in early August, and here are some pictures from the event.

I think I've all the games, but if I've missed anything out it'll be my mistake rather than anything else. 

As you can see the quality of the tables and the figures used is superb. Lardy Days like this certainly bring out the very best examples of what can be done in wargaming.

The games covered everything from Middle Earth and the dusty plain outside Troy via medieval Japan, the 18th century Caribbean, Normandy in 1944 and Germany in 1945 right up to Vietnam in the 1960s, plus various other locations.

The rules on offer were Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, What A Cowboy, General d'Armée, Kiss Me Hardy, the soon-to-be published Midgard and the unpublished (but excellent) Until The Last Sword Is Drawn.

It was great to meet up with gaming friends old and new and my thanks go out to Don Avis whose ability to herd cats (i.e. wargamers) and organise the whole thing is pretty awesome.

A break from the 17th century; more 15mm Soviet armour from Zvezda

I've been feeling the need to paint something different, so here are four WW2 Soviet AFVs.

So, above are two T-34/76 tanks. I already have one of these but I need two more for a game that is being arranged for some point in the future. The gun on the left-hand tank looks a bit droopy, but I've straightened it up a bit. To be honest, it looks OK in real life, so maybe it is an optical illusion? 

Next, something I bought in case I get around to playing some Barbarossa period games, a BT-5.

Generally outclassed by German tanks and anti-tank guns, the BT-5 was very common in the early war period, and remained in production until sometime around the end of 1941. Equipped with a 45mm M32 20K gun, it was able to penetrate the armour of the PzKPFW III Ausf. D, E, F, and G variants at a range of up to 1000m, although it was more effective at shorter ranges. It was at a huge disadvantage defensively because it was only lightly armoured and could even be vulnerable to the German PzKpfw II's 2cm KwK 30 cannon at relatively short ranges. During 1941, the BT-5 and the BT-7 were gradually replaced by the vastly superior T-34/76.

Finally, here is the SU-85, a tank destroyer designed in 1943 to use the chassis of the T-34 but armed with an 85 mm D-5T gun to provide better armour-piercing capabilities against the German Tiger and Panther tanks. Originally intended for use in the T-34/85 tank, the D-5T was replaced as the T-34/85's main gun by the ZiS-S-53 in early 1944 until the end of the war. Production of the SU-85 was ended in mid-1944 as the T-34/85 became more widely available. Around 2500 SU-85s were produced.

I like these simple Zvezda kits because you can buy them singly, they have very few parts and you can get them made, undercoated and painted pretty quickly. Without a great deal of effort, you can turn out decent-looking tanks that easily pass the 1 metre away visual test.

Winter Wonder Lard 2023

So, yesterday saw a disparate bunch of Lardy gamers, and Richard Clarke of TooFatLardies himself, head down to Bristol Independent Gaming in South Bristol for a day of Lardy Goodness, followed by beer and curry. I was running a 15mm game of Big Chain Of Command with four players in the morning and here are a few pictures from it;

The scenario was based around the fighting near Bréville-les-Monts in the aftermath of the D Day landings in June 1944. In this scenario, the fighting was concentrated to the south-west of the village of Bréville-les-Monts between elements of 9th Parachute Battalion's C company and troops from the Festung Grenadier-Regiment 857 supported by armoured assault vehicles.

The terrain was deceptive, a ridge above a road lower down the slopes with plenty of dead ground, low ridges, hedgerows and interrupted lines of sight, small wooded areas and a paddock (visible on the upper edge of the first photo. The German objective was the crossroads halfway along the road along the ridge. Unbeknown to the British airborne troops, the Germans had a pre-registered target for their limited off-table mortar support (only two barrages were allowed) and that target was the objective itself. 9 Para would also suffer from an unpredictable availability of troops due to the dispersed nature of the airborne and glider drops on D Day itself. 9 Para had moved to the area around Bréville-les-Monts on 7th June following the action at the Merville Battery where it had suffered casualties.

The game itself was pretty brutal for both sides and resulted in a German win. Of course, in real life, the fighting would continue for several days more before Bréville-les-Monts was captured and the German offensive was broken.

In the afternoon, I played  in a terrific 28mm game of Chain of Command set somewhere in Egypt between 8th Army and Afrika Korps troops trying to gain control of the Ark of The Covenant. This was amazingly enjoyable, and featured aggressive camels, mysterious men wearing fezzes, blasts of ancient magic, reanimated evil mummies, Indiana Jones (who perished at the hands of the Chief Mummy) and many more pitfalls, as well as normal CoC things. The game resulted in a British victory, but it went right down to the wire in the end.

Here are a few photos;

The day was organised by David Hunter, hosted by Jim and Ellen at BIG and the curry arranged by Andy Crow, who all deserve a huge round of applause.

Cheap MDF houses

I bought a load of cheap MDF houses from eBay just before Christmas, because I needed a lot of basic houses that might do for my games. Specifically, I wanted houses that would mostly work for WW2 games, but maybe also be useful for earlier periods. I've finally got round to photographing them. There are thirteen buildings of varying sizes in total. Scroll down to see them all and read what I did to zhoosh them up a bit.

 As you can see, I've given them all a rough plastering with ready-mixed filler and roofed them with printed slate paper. I've also given some of them little gardens with bushes, paths and vegetable patches.

The base models were very cheap. The whole lot, plus a church that I've stuck together but not done anything else to yet. They came as a three separate plastic bags of bits with no instructions, so working out what went where took a fair while.

Quality-wise, they are very basic and I had all sorts of issues with getting them to fit together properly, the roofs being a particular problem. You can't actually remove the roofs, because they have to fit into slots cut into the end walls. Therefore, only the multiple storey houses can have figures put inside them. I converted one of the longer single storey buildings into a barn, which doesn't look that great, but it'll do on the table.

My aim was to make them look a bit run-down and bedraggled, which I think works OK. The main reason for this is because they lack any detail and I couldn't be arsed to spend much time on them and I also didn't have much time because I needed them for my 15mm Big Chain of Command game that I ran at BIG a couple of weeks ago. I'll do a separate blog post about that.