Two by Two , Hands of Blue

 I haven't had much time for painting in my down time of late, but I managed to get some colour on the final sculpt of my Firefly homage minis, River Tam. She joins the four other figs from Mike McVey's Sedition Wars Kickstarter exclusives and is a nice representation of the character from the film, "Serenity" which was supposed to be a conclusion of sorts to the Firefly series. I'll not go into just how well, or not, that film filled that role as that's old news now but it did expand on the River character a LOT so I think she was a good inclusion in this set. My only complaint on this sculpt, like the others in the four-some is her soft facial details, so sadly I did not attempt to add better definition with freehand or some such as, damn, that face is a small one! (From far away, she looks fine I think in any case.)

I searched online for reference pics of this dress to work out which colour was correct, but there aren't many clear ones and others where some show a royal blue and others a green or turquoise. I went with the Turquoise-ish look in the end. 

Only one film homage sculpt left to do, so that's coming up, though not sure when exactly as I'm now got 4 WW2 commandos that I'm about 30% done with, so hopefully next post I'll show those off. 

Hope all are well and staying safe out there,

- Dai

Wash, change course and go for hard burn. We’re runnin’.

 Been a busy couple weeks, but I found time this weekend to add some paint to more of my Kickstarter minis from Sedition Wars by Mike McVey. These three are all homage sculpts to beloved sci-fi series and video game, cast in restic and so not even worth attempting to get mold lines off of. Paint jobs were all done quickly for a tabletop level in order to get them done and off the "Unpainted Mountain".

First up is Zoe Washburne, First Mate onboard the Starship "Serenity" and Captain Mal's right hand gal and closest friend. The sculpt was pretty spot on to the screenshots from the series, though her facial details were very soft, but from a distance, she looks the part I think.

Went with colours that were closest to the pics I googled. Love that she has her iconic carbine holstered at her side.

Next up is a nice simple sculpt to represent Caprica 6 from Battlestar Galactica. I think this is a pretty good representation of Trisha Helfer's character and she painted up quickly. Again, her facial detail was sadly a little soft but I feel she'll do. I previously painted her "tech-zombie" version a "little while ago" (5 1/2 years ago! O_o) which can be found HERE.

Platinum blonde and red dress, how could any hetro-male say no?

Lastly is a fig of a not-Isaac Clarke from the Dead Space video games. Not a bad sculpt and was simple to paint up. Though I was aware of them, I never played the Dead Space games as I'm not much of a fan of horror games, but I liked the look of this fellow so he was next on the paint table.

Next up will be the penultimate homage mini from my Sedition Wars Kickstarter collection. 

Hope all are well out there, stay safe and healthy - Dai

Getting awful crowded in my sky

 Two posts in two weeks? Not bad. 

Today's offering is a Kickstarter Add-on from the much maligned Sedition Wars boardgame produced by Coolminiornot back in 2012. Lots went wrong with that Kickstarter that I'll not go into as it's ancient history now, but I will say that all the minis that looked like they were going to be amazing from their initial sculpts, ended up being pretty bad due to them being produced in Restic. That stuff is just plain awful to work with (And because of that, I didn't do one darn thing with any mold lines), nuff said.

The first in this series, (An effort to further reduce my unpainted mountain.) is a "Not-Captain Mal" from the Western-Sci-fi series Firefly. I LOVED this series and it was a crying shame that FOX did the dirty to Joss Wedon, causing his pet project to be canceled before it had a chance to show more of this very entertaining setting. 

Mal has his classic duster longcoat and sidearm. As he's the crew's captain, he's also pointing. I stuck with the classic colours he wore throughout most of the series which was nice and simple. Not my best painting but he's good enough for gaming and rpg's.

Lots more detail on his duster than int he show and I didn't want to add too much extra to it so stay true to the show. The base is a Sedition Wars specific base with nice subtle detail and just got a metallic treatment with black wash and some green added to the little circular recesses for a little spot colour.

Next up the final piece from the British/Commonwealth Support Group boxed set by Warlord Games, a Vickers MMG team. Also painted in Canadian greens, this team is going to add some nice small arms support to my Canadian Bolt Action lists.

Added a larger rock to this base just to make it more interesting to look at. LOL There were no Large rocks on Dieppe beach in the pics I could source, so a little artistic license on my part.

Next up, some more Firefly characters and some other theme'd sculpts from beloved sci-fi titles.

Painted things and another Tournament

Greetings from the far off land of allergies and drought.

What's painted to date, not including the Heavy Mortar Squad pictured way below.

Last weekend was a 2000 point Tracks and Turrets tournament at the local Gaming con, ConQuestSac. I took a list from the Market Garden source book, British 11th Armoured - 1ic & 2ic Shermans, 3 platoons of 2 Shermans/2 Fireflys, full platoon of M10 17pdrs, a Sherman ARV and Limited Air Support.

Over all, I had a really fun day, though only won one of my three games. Here's a swift round up.

Round One had me up against Brad and a bloody horrible list with 6 Konigstigers and some AA vehicles that didn't come into play. Of course there were delayed and scattered reserves (No roll for reserves until turn 3 and on a random place on my table edge!!!) involved, so only half our forces were able to start on the table, the other half being rolled for later on. Seeing as he only had two platoons, he stuck his 1ic & 2ic Konigstigers and his platoon of.... 4 more Konigstigers (KT for short.), leaving his AA guns in reserve. I chose to place two of the Sherman platoons down and kept the third and the M10 platoon in reserve. If you haven't already guessed or are clueless as to what this situation is, I started the game facing 1800 of Brad's 2000 with only 850 points worth of my own. Trouble from the start.
He camped his 1ic and 2ic on his objective and had his platoon in position to move toward the objective in my deployment zone. I figured I'd only have a chance at all versus his 40" range and armour 15 front tanks, if I ignored the platoon of KT's and rush my whole starting force (10 tin can Shermans and fireflys) at his defended objective, hoping that come turn 3, I'd be lucky enough to have taken his objective and roll for one single platoon to come contest versus his KT platoon. Funnily enough, my rush of wee tanks rushed through and killed off his 1ic and 2ic and holding the objective. Unfortunately, what happened next was a fine example of Piss Poor Planning/Preparation on my part and I totally shot my self in the foot, losing the game.
I rolled on turn three to get a reserve platoon and lucky day of all luck days I got one! So i grab my M10's with their big Tiger killing guns hoping to shoot his big cats off the objective and look to see where they deploy. Okay, 1-2 was rolled, so my bottom left corner, not perfect, but hopefully I can maneuver well enough to get the job done. Here's where it went wrong - neither of us could figure out just how big the deployment zone was and saw mistakenly 8" from the corner. So sadly, I couldn't get close enough to the objective to contest and I was only able to kill two KT's, losing the game. Deal was, reserves actually come in on 16" from the corner..... *facepalm* O well, lesson learned. So this was a sad 1-6. (O and my planes did bugger all through the game.... You'll see a pattern here.)

Round Two was a fateful showdown versus my Flames of War mentor, Eric Riha (Often mentioned on the wwpd.net podcast.) and his American Patton list. This game was over before it started. My dice were abysmal and Patton's Spearhead moves (Everything in his line of sight get's a pre-1st turn move, like a recce team = shenanigans) had Eric's tank platoons in my grill almost turn one. By the time I was able to roll for reserves (Again on turn 3 - damn you delayed reserves!!!!), I had already lost enough in my army and was forced to have to roll (And fail) a Company Morale test and the game was done. Another 1-6, but at least this time it was both against a far superior player than I and not due to my own lack of preparation.

Round Three saw me going in tied for last place in the rankings. Seriously?! *sighs* I was to face a very fun chap called Joe, who gave me my first taste of Russian Heavy armour. (Thirteen IS-2's I think.) Funny thing is, This was my first and only game all day where I got to be the attacker, so (finally) I got to start with ALL of my platoons on the pitch! Hoo-rah!
The 1st turn saw me move all of my Shermans and M10's in and line up in wheat fields so that I got to take 10 17pdr (AT15) shots at his ugly Soviet armour. Now, odds are that this should have taken out at least 4 of the 7 tanks camped on his objective, but per the rest of the tourney, Lady Luck had other ideas. Boom and bang went all those lovely armour cracking guns and when the smoke cleared..... I'd managed to bail just one. That's it. Conceivably I could have won the game in my turn one, o well. The rest of the game though did see my fortunes turn around somewhat for the better though and using the far better maneuverability of my own tanks versus his slow heavies, I managed to both keep his reserves at bay and keep the objective for a 4-3 win.

All in all, the tourney was super fun, if frustrating and I got to watch a lot of super cool games with a LOT of wonderfully painted heavy armour forces after my own 1st and 2nd games finished so abruptly. :) I did learn though, that armoured companies are not my thing - much prefer to play my Poor Bloody Infantry! Next tourney I plan to attend is in June, a Mid War affair and I think I'll be bringing some Kiwis from the Italy lists. Lots and lots of stuff to bog Nazi armour down with.

This is my Hawker Typhoon, fully painted with markings and all. I'm too cheap to buy decals tho, so I freehanded the markings instead. The "F" is taken from the Battlefront "How to Paint a Typhoon" webpage, the DE... well, are my initials. :)

All of my Shermans are painted now. Just need to add weathering and markings, but for tabletop play, they are good enough.


 

Since my original tournament in February, I've managed to get my good mate Densmol interested in Flames of War. He's a big Nazi Tigers fan and so has amassed an impressive collection of heavy Nazi armour in a short amount of time. He went to the above written about tourney as well (His 1st) and almost took the 1st prize! It's good to finally have a mate who's into miniature gaming and that is as enthusiastic as I am, and also who's up for playing on a regular basis too.
We got a game in last night where he played his same list he took to the tournament versus a Canadian infantry company I hastily put together - 2000 points. I won, though it was touch and go for a bit there. Here's some pics:

My boys camped the Nazi objective on the hill early on. Stupid Sherman's hid in the woods bottom right almost the whole game....
 

On the other end of the table, Otto Carius and his best pal burnt to a cinder as my M10's, Infantry and WASP carriers advanced on the other Nazi objective. Please note the scary Elefant heavy assault guns! o_0

Right before I managed to contest his objective right side of the pic and rush my WASPS to camp my own in the mid right for the win.

This game gave me the opportunity to bring out and show off my completely finished 6pdr platoon;

and my newly touched up and rebased Heavy Mortar platoon, that were a horror when I bought them off of Ebay and now look decent enough for tabletop I think.

I'll close out with a few pics with different views of the Typhoon and latest painted Shermans. Cheers if you kept reading this far down! :)

*"Where's the 40K stuff gone?!" I hear you ask? Well, I've not forgotten, nor abandoned my other projects, merely set them aside to get myself enough painted Brits so I can play multiple lists in Flames of War. Watch this space though as I can feel the Grim Dark creative juices a-flowing!*

Tournament Report for 23rd Feb @ Gamescape North

How my boys felt going into this tournament.

My first tourney was on Saturday. A long day, started out with me getting up at 6:30am to be at my mate's at 8. Then from there four of us car-pooled down to Gamescape North in San Rafael. After some awards ceremonies for last year's circuit, the first game got underway.

(First though, let me say - I had played exactly 3 full games of Flames of War up until this point. 3..... *facepalm* )

The tournament was a Late War 3-round escalation format, 1st round starting at 1280 points, then 1530 and the last round 1780. My lists for this were thusly:

2nd Canadian Infantry Company

1280
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Universal Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 105
6x 6pdr Anti-Tank Gun Platoon - 215
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon - 165
3x Sherman 1x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 385

1530
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Full Rifle Platoon- 190
Universal Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher, 1x .50cal Machine Gun - 115
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon w/PIAT launcher team & Lloyd Carriers - 190
2x Sherman 2x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 435
4x M10C Achilles Self Propelled Anti-Tank Guns - 380

1780
Infantry HQ - 30

Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Full Rifle Platoon - 190
Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 105
Additional Carrier Patrol w/PIAT launcher - 100
4x 6pdr Anti-Tank Gun Platoon w/Lloyd Carriers - 155
2x 3" Mk II Light Mortar Platoon - 75
4x 4.2" Heavy Mortar Platoon w/Lloyd Carriers - 170
3x Sherman 1x Firefly Armoured Platoon - 385
4x M10C Achilles Self Propelled Anti-Tank Platoon - 380

(Hope the lists make some sense to those not familiar with Flames of War and WWII Commonwealth army load outs in general?)

Game 1 - American Engineer Company - Fair Fight

My opponent was a nice bloke called Sam from Los Angeles who had recently moved up to the Bay Area. As soon as he started plonking down minefields during his deployment all over the fucking board, I knew this was going to be a dirty game. Funnily enough though, I should have wiped him clean off the board. I had WAY more stuff on the board than him and he had very little long range kit that could damage my own troops.
Some clever maneuvering and piff paff poof(!) one straight forward win for me! Right?

Not if my dice had anything to do with it....  I've never rolled so many 1's in my life. Sam even pitied me and offered jokingly to "take it easy on me". I smiled, declared I would roll one more "1" before games end, picked up a dice and did just that.

A poor performance perforated with poo rolling left me losing most horribly and scoring a measly 1-6. Not a good start.

Game 2 - Panzer Lehr Company (I think) - Surrounded

Second opponent was a thoroughly fun and cool chap called Stewart. Him running a Mech' list and me an Infantry one meant I had to defend in this game, which is hard as hell in this mission as my boys were stuck around two objectives in the middle of the table and he was able to deploy from either table-end to come take them from me. Stewart ran 2 platoons of 1/2-tracks filled with a load troops, a small Puma Recce patrol, some NebelWerfers stuck back in the corner of the table and a scary 3-tank unit of Panthers that ended up being more scared of me in the end.
(I had my platoon of M10's in ambush)
I tried to spread my boys well enough between the two objectives but laid out a shite deployment anyway, leaving one poor Infantry platoon to have to hold back two full platoons of Nazi infantry AND their attendant machine-gun toting 1/2-tracks until everything I could run over to them finally arrived to back them up. In the end, they did hold off Stewart's crazy mad rush of assaulting troops long enough for my 2 regular Shermans to roll over along with my Universal Carriers and M10's and machine gun the heck out of the enemy to try to force them off the objective (My 1st brave platoon of infantry ended up dying almost to a man in the process.) and win me the game.
The best part of this game was the complete uselessness of his Panthers, who (2 of them at least) spent the whole game hiding behind a church, terrified of the two fireflies who had killed their 3rd team member in the first turn for being so cheeky as to poke it's nose out from the church and think it could even begin to win a long range fire fight against them.  

I ended up scoring a 5-2 on this game.

Game 3 - British 11th Armour - Breakthrough

Last game was my closest and another example of just how much effect "luck" has on tabletop games.
My final opponent was Forest, a gentleman of a Kiwi and we fought Brits on Canadians in a weird mission with lots of running frantically for objectives and delayed reserves and so forth. I don't particularly like the Breakthrough mission, but that's beside the point.
I started this game really strong, taking out a full platoon of 2x Shermans and 2x Firelys in my 1st turn. I then went on to roll full reserves every turn until the 3rd turn and looking like I might kill off the game before Forest's own reserves could arrive. Sadly, once again, my dice decided otherwise. Not only that, so did Forest's dice. In the corner of his deployment zone, he had placed a typically weak 2 fun Sexton battery. (Only 2 guns means he had to re-roll any hits he made on against my troops.) Only, the bugger kept rolling hits EVERY SHOT, and then RE-ROLLING them! Then 6's for firepower tests every time and two supposedly crappy guns started to make mincemeat of my force. (The artillery had a plane spotting for them and I had nothing to shoot it down with.) Couple this with my two infantry platoons failing all game to roll to un-pin and you might get the idea of how well this all went.
He also had a Typhoon buzzing about strafing and my boys were mangled. They held up in time for his reserves to come on - 3 full infantry platoons eventually - that I just couldn't hold back from the objectives for long enough, or kill enough stuff to at least get a strong loss on this one.

I ended up losing 2-5 this last game.

So in the end, I finished with 8 tournament points and was about 1/2-way in the standings of 24 players - not bad really considering how inexperienced I was at the start. I had a smashing time and an enlightening experience of it all compared to the pants Warmahordes tournament experience I had suffered prior to this and which scared me off tournament play for the past 6 years or so. I didn't have a camera to take pics, though wouldn't have had time to snap any shots even had I brought one, so apologies for that. I do know that the TO's took pics throughout the day and I'll shove some pics up here once they post them on their forums.

If you've read this far down, then thanks for keeping with it. I'm now feeling a bit more confident about the rules to this game and have even managed to get a mate at work interested (He's chosen to play King Tigers..... of course.) so I can get some more practice in before I go out to any further tournaments. For now, there are still LOTS of painting to be completed for my Brits, though I have some commission work to get on with beforehand.

Cheers.



About as competant as my boys ended up being.

I was killing Germans before your number was dry. (Part 1 - 1st Sherman Platoon Complete!)

As the title says, the first Sherman platoon is done. I've decided I'll get everything painted to basic tabletop standard before I worry about unit markings and so forth.

(Forgive the harsh lighting - it's swallowed some depth to the green for sure.)

Sneaky RT Imperial Guard Command Squad and Plague Marine in the background....

 

 

Did someone mention "Don't glue magnets to turrets whilst inebriated or else you end up with wrong hulls on the wrong tanks"? Oops.

 

My attempt at the wierd effect on these gun barrels.... not sure it looks right and might have to come back at a leter time to tidy it up.

 

 

 

 

 

Now that they are done, to change it up a bit, I've started on the 6pdrs and almost finished the guns. Just the mass of gunteam figs to go. :)