Commissions (Densmol - Part 1)

My good mate Densmol gave me these to paint 4-5 months ago and I've really been procrastinating on getting them off my painting desk up until this week. but I decided I needed to remedy that so have gotten half way through already.

These are 28mm WW2 German Kriegsmarine. Naval servicemen put into use as ground troops once Hitler's half-arsed navy was no longer viable. In war, they tended to be rather untrained, but extremely stubborn to budge in the field and fought bravely against a superior opponent.

The minis are by Warlord Games and are a very characterful lot with a good mix of uniforms and water-proof jackets and trousers, helmets and caps. So far, it's been fun painting such a motley crew!

The squad Leader with the pipe and beard was already shown in a past post I believe and once the full squad of 10 are done, I'll do a post with better pictures, but these are the first 5.

Confederate Brigade (And some other things)

It’s been a bit quiet on the hobby desk of late in Chateaux Dai. Moments to pick up a paint brush have been a bit few and far between in the past… 2 weeks or so since my last post. Until that is, this weekend….

Exciting, eh?

Not much done mind, but enough for a wee post I think. First off, the flags I ordered from Stone Mountain Miniatures arrived for my Confederates. Of course, silly ol’ me neglected to order some classic Army of North Virginia “Diagonal Blue stripes over Orange background” Stainless Banners (Not that every Southern army born them in any case, but they are certainly instantly recognisable)… But they do have some earlier “Stars’n’Bars” efforts for the now (And a Florida State flag.) which will serve for our earlier games in mine and Stewarts’ (Who’s playing the Union boys) campaign next month.

Pedisclaux's Brigade

Better pics of the starting Brigade were promised and here they are – the campaign will follow a fictional duel between two brigades over the years of the war in 9 meetings (Per the Longstreet “Grand Campaign” rules.). The Campaign encourages that we both name our Brigade commanding General and it’s component regiments, which I’ve done below. Each side begins the campaign with 3 infantry regiments of 10 bases, 1 cavalry regiment of 8 bases and a 3-gun battery of artillery. 

Everyone's eager and ready to kick in Northerner face. 

Artillery on the left. LA 3rd and 4th infantry top and bottom at center, with the 12th FL in between. On the right are the 26th Florida Horse with their "Dismounted" version at the rear. 

My splendid boys marching on.

Guns ready to deal out death to the Northern invader!

The dashing and debonair  General Jean-Claude Pedisclaux moving his boys onward from horseback. Although generals play no part in the Longstreet rules, it's fun to at least have a fig on the table to represent them.

Stewart and I will get the first games of our campaign started on June 18th in a day long (thedaybefore)Fathers Day gaming extravaganza! AAR to be posted thereafter. 

I also finished up a couple of Dark ages figs - a Saxon Thegn and a Jomsviking Warrior.

Saxon Bondi to bring my Saxon Thegns up to 3 units of 4 for Saga. Shield's a bit pants, but I just wanted him off my desk.

Jomsviking warrior with a large red shield. His face was a crappy sculpt with almost no nose whatsoever, so I left the red wash on heavy so it looked (At least to me) like his nose was all scar tissue after a nasty wound or something.

Some work got done on my commission too. A 40K metal Ogryn and a sculpt that's pretty fun to paint. I liked this version of the Ogryns as they were less cartoony than their previous releases. Still to do armour/metal plates and ammo-belts. No idea what colour to paint the plates though...?

Lighting makes his skin look well messy, but it's not in real life - promise.

And last, but certainly not least - I finally (After a year of sitting on my shelf) fixed my mate Dave's Heroclix Great Cthulhu mini/statue. This thing's huge! It was handed to me after his son and my own were sneaking into Dave's hobby room (Whilst we played Kingdom Death) and one of the little sods knocked it off it's shelf, breaking off the wing... Dave tried to fix it with some pinning and wire, but the wing was far too heavy and it bent right off in no time. So I offered to sort it out and with a wood screw and some grey stuff (dries harder than Greenstuff) along with a little paint on the putty it looks pretty good and as long as it's not dropped again, should stay on there for years to come!

The Great Cthulhu's very presence will drive a man mad. And take up far too much space on his hobby desk.

And that's it for now. The Ogryn commission is my priority right now, then back to some more Confederates in case my brigade is lucky enough to receive reinforcements between games in the upcoming campaign. But otherwise, my focus will be 28mm Soviets for Bolt Action. 

Ciao.

Six of Seven

Six out of seven ratlings are done! (The seventh had a mishap, and so I’ll have to start from scratch on him.)

But I’m calling this one done done done. The models weren’t cleaned up or anything prior to me getting them and I refused to do it myself after goods had already been exchanged and hands shaken. So they were painted au naturelle so to speak. Tabletop quality was requested so that’s what you see here. Nothing special, but good enough to get them laid down and ready to snipe out enemies of the Imperium of Man.

To celebrate, I also finished up another miniature I had promised a mate I’d do up for him over a year ago for a roleplay game character (From a campaign that we have since long finished…. *facepalm*). The figure originally sported a nice bo-staff to go with it’s “Brotherhood of the Wolf” look, but the character it represents hacks his enemies apart with a hand axe, so a simple weapon-swap was done. (No back view as it’s just a plain black cloak, which is…. Boring.)

 Once I get the final ratling done, it's on to my Desert 8th Army Brits. I have all but one truck (Out of 15 needed....) out of the models required for my Mid War list and I can't wait to get painting it. Stay tuned!

Loss - Draw - Win

A bit of a lengthy post ahead due to me not posting for a bit:

Was given these aviators after a recent visit to family in Texas. These were my Grandpa's sunglasses that he used whilst posted with the US Airforce in Burhma in the early 40's. Cool eh?

The title describes my day and result yesterday at the Flames of War tournament at ConQuestSac, a great day of gaming at the Red Lion Hotel in Sacramento. I think there were around 16 or so players with some great looking armies and players coming from as far as Reno NV. This was the 2nd tournament of the NorCal FoW circuit (the 1st was last month at Gamescape North in San Rafael which I'll talk about below.).

The tournament theme was Normandy setting (So lists could only be taken from the Overlord & Atlantik Wall books and Normandy era pdf's.) and Infantry companies only at 1650 point lists. Three rounds saw us playing the No Retreat, Encounter and Counter Attack missions in that order.

Including the T.O. (DaveP) there were almost equal amount of both Axis and Allied lists and he tried his best (And succeeded for the most part) to match up Blue vs Red each round.

I faced a new (To playing Infantry companies)-ish player John in the 1st round who brought along a German SS Kompanie that he'd never used before having only played Tiger companies prior. So.... this game ended up being a very much teaching game to help John understand his options where playing and using infantry platoons are concerned (And he really didn't like infantry as a game mechanic - too fiddly I think.). In the end, John won 5-2. He was a really cool chap and it'll be cool to see him at a future event and hopefully he'll have some more games under his belt to make the play flow better.

These are the only gameplay pics from this game I got. Kind of got into the moment after this and forgot to pull out the phone-cam. Please note the Panzer iv's on the left having just ambushed and blown the shermans at the bottom of the pic to bits.....

With my Carriers burning in the background all hopes of winning the game through objectives are done for so my men are thrown in to last ditch assaults to claim whatever kill points they could before the game ended. The Panzer iv's bottled and gave me the single point to not end up a complete loss.

My next game was against Densmol and his own SS. We played on a table covered with bocage hedgerows. Up until playing this game I had the intention of picking up a bunch of these terrain pieces as they look so cool but after playing this game.... No. No bocage for my home collection. Our game whilst being fun was a very slow and frustrating affair. The bocage rules make for a very frustrating and stuttering gaming experience. Thankfully playing against Densmol (Our first time in a tourney setting!) we were able to see the fun side of it all and played out the game to a 3-3 draw.

For those not knowing, this is bocage. You can't see through it unless you are right up against it and it provides concealment and bullet proof cover - infantry were super tough to dig out. In real life with these things in mind, The allies had a nightmare of a time trying to dig out the germans hiding in behind this stuff.

My third game was against the TO himself and his son, some sort of mixed unit list with Luftwaffe troops and all sorts. This game went far better and my plan worked out from the 1st turn. The Naval Guns bombardments in this game really did a number on DaveP's infantry and along with some nasty flamethrower-ing by my Crocodile tanks, I ended up with a 5-2 win.

So in all a day that got better (points-wise) as it went along. I didn't place even close to the top of the rankings, but it was a really fun event with some very cool opponents. When awards were bring given out, I surprisingly ended up winning Best Sport! Quite the honour and a prize of 4 Jagpanzer iv's means that I may well start a German force afterall so I can teach my son how to play too.

 Next up some variable quality pics of some of the armies that were there:

My own Canadians posing as 50th Tynes & Tees for the day.

Really would love to pick up one or two of these pontoon bridges - so cool!

These are Ziv's Brits. He's based them to look like they are trudging through the Polder in the Nederlands. tres cool!

So that was yesterday. Seeing as it's been so long since I've posted, there a little more to report on.

Last month was the 1st tournament in the 2014 Circuit and was held at GamesScape North in San Rafael. It's a nice little shop with a good stock of just about everything you could want and run by some stand up chaps who put on a good event. The day was super fun and I was horribly betrayed by my dice losing every game throughout the day and almost ending up last place out of the 24 or so players attending! >_< But there was a silver-lining and that was that I was voted Best Presentation (Painted, etc)! I've never been awarded such before and it meant a lot to me that my hard time and effort spent on my hobby was appreciated enough by my peers to earn me an award. :)

With this month's Best Sport that makes two awards in as many tournaments which is also a first. Now if I could finally win consistently and win a tournament..... heh. This is one I'll have to keep working on. New dice were bought yesterday and they rolled pretty well, so I can't blame dice rolls anymore. No more excuses I guess, eh?

On the hobby side of things, I'm still working on my final commission. It's been a slog because I am not at all enthused by these figures even though I consider them to be wonderful sculpts. Considering they are just 7 ratling snipers, you'd think they'd be done by now eh?I also have all but 3 trucks for my Mid War 8th Army Desert Brits. So once I have finished the ratlings, it's on to something completely new - the next Mid War tournament is in May at KublaCon and I'm hoping I can attend and display these new toys in all their sandy grandeur.

That's about it chaps and chappesses, if you got to this point, then I applaud your tenacity. Ciao!

by Request

Admiral Drax, this one's for you mate.

As requested, my painted guard figures all in one post.

These are from a Rogue Trader's retinue, traveling about the dodgy parts of the galaxy, searching for new planets to claim in the name of profit and the God Emperor, and so forth.

Grand High Commander - Plutarco Etcheverria de Dios Otero Antormarchi and his motley retinue.

Chosen men with their long las' rifles, Bombardier General Horatio Vanderbilt and one of the 'Trader's Gretchin bodyguard.

Ship's Captain Gulliver Bevingham-Nixon and Navigator Armaud Destrierre strut their stuff on the right flank.

Trader Prince surrounded by trusted subordinates.

Sergeant Lorch, Overseer of the Mutant Penitents squad

Commander Isiah Tholme and Pay Master (Commissar) Scheiner of Platoon Command Squad #1

Squad #1 of 1st Platoon. (2-3 more of these in the pipeline)

Lieutenant Sayyid and his band of misfit Mercs take care of a lot of questionable duties that no regular trooper in his right mind would accept.

A wee diorama:

On the now re-discovered planet Oso XII, the Lord Trader wishes to investigate the possibility that ancient artifacts may well remain in the ruins left behind. 1st Squad of the household guard is sent to safeguard the area of the ruined mission.

Sergeant Coomes sends his squad inside.

Commander Tholme watches on, eager to get off this graveyard world and back into the comfort of his barracks. Pay Master Scheiner looks on to make sure all is carried out according to doctrine.

Meanwhile, in a small administrative ruin, self-styled Lieutenant Sayyid  and his band of mercenaries secure  their objective.

"All clear!"

Watching the treeline from the 2nd floor.

Not everyone is busy, Corporal Cointreau takes the opportunity to smoke a quick Iho-stick whilst others of his squad move supplies and ammo in from their lander.

Everything seems to be going as it should.

The area designated safe, the Lord Trader himself prepares to enter the ruined Mission building to seek the artifact, flanked by loyal Gretchin bodyguards and his faithful mutant standard bearer.

Overseer Lorch and his Mutants are fully trusted by the Lord Trader. Here he organises a patrol.

The Chosen men are ready with their sniper weaponry, scanning about for any threat that might pop it's head out.

Ship's Captain Bevingham-Nixon and Bombardier General Vanderbilt attends the affair, hoping to be amongst the first to set eyes upon any discovered treasures.

With bodyguards in tow, the Lord Trader sets about his self appointed sacred duty......

Little does the landing party realise, but they are being watched!

Skirmishers move in from hidden foxholes!

Airborne units alight upon the higher reaches from the skies!

Stealth units materialise from the shadows!

I wonder what will happen next!? Feel free to finish the story in a comment or some such. :)

Lastly, I think the Librarian commission is done!

 

 Per usual, the client prefers to do his own basing, which suits me fine. I hope he likes what he sees. I've not yet given it a coat of flat varnish in case he requests any changes be made.