Together, They Chase Time!

A little diversion away from painting 15mm WW2 figures all the time. This is Reaper Miniatures Chronoscope 50178: Andre Durand, Time Chaser. Since I had already done up the other Time Chaser, 50001: Sascha Dubois, I thought it would be nice to have him, too. He's a nice looking figure-- could go Pulp or Steampunk with him easily enough, or even a 40k dude with a power fist. I, of course, actually have no use for him in any of those roles right now, but wouldn't let that stop me from buying him! He's part of a team-- He's a notorious womanizer with a steam powered bronze fist. She's vivacious mutant opera singer from a secret island of lost women. They chase time!

Trounced by Children, part deux

Huh. This is starting to become a habit! I ran a 1,500 point game of Flames of War with my son. I'm still a little rusty on the rules, so I will use that as my excuse, because I was routed handily again! This, despite me giving him the Americans that I had lost with last time. I forgot the scenario name, but either of us could win the game by starting a turn occupying one of our objectives on the other half of the board. Junior here got his Shermans on the road, and with great audacity, drove them halfway across the table in front of two platoons of Panzergrenadiers that did not have their Panzerfausts set up yet. He then ducked into the woods where he had placed his objective before I could turn my sIG 33 battery on him. While my Panzer IVs were blazing away futilely with their machine guns and ducking fire from four or five bazooka teams (which, coincidentally, can move and fire-- how fair is that?), his Shermans promptly machine gunned and assaulted my company command. I threw a few Sd Kfzs 251/1s at him to try and stay in the game for another turn, yet all was lost in the end.

Flames of War Pak40 (GBX23)

Finally got my Pak40s finished. I have some Old Glory Sd Kfz 251/1s on order to run these with my Gepanzerte Panzergrenadiers, but I don't have them yet. I complained about these figures before, but in the end, I like how they turned out. Oh, and for what it's worth, other than the metallics and wash, these figures are completely craft paints.

About Had It With Craft Paints

I have been a big proponent of cheap craft paints for painting miniatures for many years. The vast majority of the paints I have used for all my miniatures tend to be dollar a bottle craft paints, usually Delta Ceramcoat but maybe Apple Barrel or some other. I'm not picky. There have been irritations along the way, such as when Ceramcoat dropped one of my favorite colors, Palomino Tan, and of course they tend to be sparse on military colors like olive green, which I mixed up myself. But now, it is really getting infuriating. I recently restocked some core brown and grey colors, parts of my "triads" of those shades, and the paints are worthless. Thin little anemic wash that I can't use for anything. And they're really backbone colors of my painting, especially right now as I'm painting lots of WW2 Germans. It's infuriating. I'm wondering if I shouldn't just jump ship to some dedicated hobby paints.

More Concertina

Greg's Wargaming Blog shows an easier method for making larger scale concertina wire obstacles.

Concertina Wire

Armored Ink has a nice article on building concertina wire obstacles.

New Terrain Guy Sale

Speak of the devil, and he doth appear. The Terrain Guy blasted out a new e-mail about a straight 20% sale, although only on selected products. Looks like he is now an MBA retailer, with much of his stock at 20% off. Not bad, although I wasn't crazy about the 15mm MBA townhouses I bought from WarWeb. However, his wonderful hills are on sale, too...also, although not on sale, he has now included nicely thin 6mm roads...

New Terrain Guy Terrain

The Terrain Guy recently ran a summer sale which amounted to about 20% off. Actually, it was $20 off of a $100 order. What this amounted to was me making sure my order exceeded $100 by as little as possible-- I'm sure he would have made more money had it been a straight 20% off. Let that be a lesson to you retailers. Anyway, I have been really pleased with his terrain mat and hills, so this time I went for roads, fields and hedges. Overall, I'm pretty pleased, although not quite bowled over like I was with the mat and hills.

Battlefront, bah!

I've got my Flames of War Pak 40s out on the table and have slowly been poking at them a bit. This guy was a little irritating-- he has half a shell, inserting the round into the breech. Only, he's like a scale foot too high. Considering the fact that I could have bought nice Old Glory figures for about 1/3rd of the cost of these, it's something I don't really think I should have to deal with. I think I can work with it by sanding the base a bit, bending the angle down slightly, and putting the gun up on blocks before texturing the base. I had already decided to go Old Glory for transports; sounds like I will for guns, too!

Priorities for the rest of the year

I've been thinking for a while that 2010 was definitely going to be the year of World War 2 for me. I'm pulled by a few other interests, but not strongly enough to really shake that direction. I have a sense of what I want to accomplish before the end of year. Priorities for the rest of 2010 are thus, in rough order:

Trounced By Children

I had been threatening to run a Flames of War game for my son, pictured left. He's kind of lukewarm about the idea, but he had a friend spend the night. This friend is very interested in World War 2, so I whipped up a 600 point game of panzergrenadiers vs. US airborne with some Shermans. Too be fair, I wasn't really playing to win, but I also wasn't playing to lose by the margin I did! They whupped me badly. Just look at those Shermans burn... They enjoyed the game all the more for it, of course. Hopefully my son will get more interested in playing miniatures games with his ol' Dad.

Mickey Doggie

We have a new member of our household, a two year old rescued Miniature Schnauzer named Mickey, or Mickey Doggie as my two year old is calling him. After a difficult few days at first, he seems to be settling in extremely well with the family. He gets along really well with the kids and is generally very well behaved, although I'm not used to having such an energetic dog!