28mm Round Sand Bag Emplacement

This was a quick, simple project. I've had this resin sand bag emplacement in my 'terrain to paint' box for maybe a decade. Recently I've decided to start actually working on this backlog and this piece floated to the top. Manufacturer is unknown. I primed it white and painted it with contrast and speed paints. Finishing touches with Mig streak and grime, Mig rust streak (on the corrugated metal and barrels) and a light dusting of Mid 'Europe Dust' dry pigments.

This is sized nicely to fit a good portion of my man-packed weapons teams as shown below. Due to the modern materials and 55-gallon fuel drums, it's only really usable for World War II and later. This will count as one (1) terrain piece for my annual painting totals. Expect to see more terrain sprinkled throughout my blog posts for the foreseeable future.   

Two Electronic Brigadier Games at Historicon 2022

I ran two sessions of my Battle of Monmouth scenario at Historicon 2022 last Saturday in Lancaster, PA. It was a marathon day but well worth it! The players seemed to have a great time and I got to show my rules to a bunch of new players. The experience has me re-energized to push forward with finishing up Napoleonics and to work more on getting the game master portion more public ready so I can start letting others use the rules.

More photographs can be seen in this gallery. 

This YouTube video shows the table between games. 

Also, if you're on Facebook, I've started up a group there for Electronic Brigadier. Announcements on when and how to become a play tester will likely be broadcast to that group first. It's an open public group. Feel free to join!

28mm WWII Finnish Weapon Teams & Misc. Infantry

My recent completion of my Crusader army for Saga by painting the last units of crossbows for it has motivated me to return to my Finnish WWII army project to hopefully make a big push towards completion of it as well.  This is a collection of mostly specialty weapons teams but also includes a handful of semi-random infantry figures just to help with economy of scale when painting. I find that I'm most efficient when painting WWII when I'm doing 18-24 figures. 

This tripod-mounted Maxim machine gun and crew are 3-D Printed. I purchased them on-line already printed. I'm assuming that these were sculpted to be able to be used for all three Finnish conflicts: the 1939 Winter War, the Continuation War and the Lalpand war. This assumption is due to the winter coats and mittens. I will mostly be using these as Lapland war troops, so I've based them on some spring ground, but kept my 'dead grass' tufts for a slightly more tundra feel. Finland is cold in the spring even when there isn't snow on the ground.

This 81mm mortar team and forward observer is from the Warlord Games Finnish army box. Looking at their web store, I'm not sure this box is still available. I'm sure you can still buy the team in blisters though.

This Panzershreck team is from a Warlord blister pack. I think they're great sculpts with the loader holding the next rocket and carrying the ammo in a canvas bag. I much prefer this to Warlord's German version of the same team. The Finns re-painted their shreck launchers in Finnish colors. I went for a hasty Finnish green for mine.

Two more snipers. The one on the left is 3-D printed from the same vendor as the Maxim MG, the one on the right is a Warlord figure. I'm not sure if it came in the army box or if I picked it up in a blister. Surprisingly I had previously already painted a sniper and observer using Warlord figures, so this is a second team. I like that the figure on the left has binoculars, but also a scoped rifle making him a perfect spotter for the other sniper. In a pinch I am also happy to use these as standard riflemen.

This is a group of three LMG gunners. The left-most is my favorite and is using a captured Russian Degtyarev DP-28 'record player' LMG. Even at the end of WWII this was the most plentiful LMG in the Finnish army. This resin 3-D printed model is the reason I placed the order for all of the resin figures. The sculpting is excellent and the scale of the weapon is spot on. He even has a captured Russian ammunition case with spare 'record' magazines. The middle figure is from Warlord and has the same DP-28 LMG, although it is barely recognizable as such. This might possibly be one of the worst Warlord models I own. The right figure is also a Warlord figure carrying a German-provided MG-42 and bandolier of rounds. I quite like the sculpting on this figure. 

Here's a close up of this awesome sculpt. With independent sculptors doing this quality of work, I'm very encouraged for the future of our hobby when it comes to 3-D printing. Interesting thing about this photograph. The camera in this extreme close-up can pick out the layers of the 3-D print, but I promise, you cannot see them in person, even under a visor magnifier. When I looked at this photo the first time I was confused to what I was seeing until I remembered this was a 3-D print. 

The last group is a five-man infantry 'section'. The Finns didn't really do infantry sections, but these five figures were tossed in to round the batch of figures up to an efficient number. My next batch will add additional riflemen to go with the other LMGs in this batch and also will round out this squad to the full nine men it should contain. These are all Warlord figures from either their army box or an additional infantry blister. Note the rear right figure carrying another poorly sculpted DP-28, albeit slightly less awful than the prone figure carrying the stupidly short one. He also has an excellently sculpted face and head which partially makes up for the poor sculpt of the weapon.

I'm counting this as 21 figures, counting each of the larger weapons as one figure. This helps me catch up vs. the purchased painted figures for the year. Next up on the table a large group of just Finnish infantry. It may be a while until I finish it as I prepare to travel to Historicon in a week and a half to run a couple of Electronic Brigadier games there.  For fun, the photo on the left is a group shot of my Finnish army so far. 

28mm Crusader Crossbowmen

These are the last figures that I plan to paint for my Saga Crusader army. I didn't need two more units of crossbowmen, but I had the figures, and I'm going to start running some lager multi-player games so I thought it would be nice to be able to field multiple four-point armies for those. 

These figures are a mix from two different bags of Old Glory figures. My uncle and I split two bags to give us each some additional variance in poses, etc. His are fielded in his Templar army, mine in my Crusader army. Old Glory figure have several great qualities: they're good serviceable figures with good pose variation, they're lead which I prefer over plastic or resin, and with the Old Glory club card, these run $0.60 USD per figure. That's a deal you can't feel as an old boss of mine always used to say. 

These were painted in two groups of eight to represent 'warriors' in Saga, but they are just as likely to be fielded in a single unit of twelve as levy so I kept both units consistent with each other. The buff coats are an experiment. Some were painted using traditional methods, some were contrast paints, some were SpeedPaints, and some were a mix. To be honest, all of them came out fine and mix well. I think my techniques with the transparent contrast and SpeedPaints is slowly improving. 

This will add sixteen more figures to this year's painting totals. Each year I strive to paint as many figures as I buy pre-painted. This year I'm not likely to achieve that goal, but these will help get me a step closer.  Next up on the painting table are some terrain projects and a return to my 28mm Finnish WWII Continuation War / Lapland war force. Returning to the Finns should help boost my productivity as WWII figures are pretty quick to paint up and I'm very motivated to work on that army so that I can start running games with it.