28mm Morris Quad Tractors

These are two Morris Quad Artillery Tractors to pull my British 17 pounder AT gun and a 25 pounder artillery piece I've yet to paint. The one with Stowage is a Warlord Games resin model the other is from another manufacturer that I've forgotten the name of. The stowage on the Warlord model is quite nice, but the other model has great texture on the surfaces and a commander's hatch that opens. The commander is a loose Berlin or Bust communications figure I converted and pressed into service.

This adds the first 28mm vehicles to this years totals. This project was a request from a viewer on my Twitch stream. Thanks to 'Dragoonity' for the project pick. I'm always taken back by how much the rear of these look like modern Humvees.

28mm Late-War British Weapons Teams (2)

Here are my first completed figures of 2020. Sixteen figures making up a Vickers HMG .50-cal gun, two 2" light mortars and four two-man Bren gun teams.

This is a true mixed bag of manufacturers. The Vickers MG is from Warlord Games,  the 2" mortars are from Crusader Miniatures, and the Bren gun teams are from West Wind miniatures. It's fantastic how well all three of these figure lines work together. Additionally I've had equally good luck matching up Artisan 28mm WWI British into this mix of manufacturers.

These were a straight forward paint up done on my Twitch stream over two full and two partial sessions. In addition to my normal block paint and wash, I added some flesh highlights and some highlighting on the gunmetal parts of the Bren teams. I wanted to 'pump up' the quality, but not so much that these figures would look out of place with the rest of my previously painted British WWII figures.

Subject matter on my painting table right now is all over the map as I try to work up a portfolio of painted figures on my Instagram page to show people what things I like to paint. Next up on the painting table are some Roman principes and velites.

28mm British WWII Engineers

This month I'm running a WWII skirmish game at my club using some house rules added on to Iron Cross to aid in faster multi-player game play. The game will be a British assault to capture a bridge defended by a German garrison and a pillbox. Think Pegasus Bridge with a much more modest bridge. The action is set around the dash from Carentan into the heart of France.

With a pillbox as a primary terrain feature, I really wanted the British to have tools to assault with. To me, this means some engineers and primarily a flamethrower team. This is Warlord Games pack WGB-BI-49. Nothing particularly special, with the paint job. It is my normal block paint with sepia wash. Quick and dirty, finished just in time for the play test tomorrow night. They still need a coat or two more of flat varnish to cut down the sheen. They're likely to get that after Friday night's play test game.

These will count as five figures in my annual painting totals. Painting has slowed to a stop for me during the spring, as I coach high school pole vault. Now that track season is over, and the summer heat wave has hit, I expect painting to resume to it's normal (aka slow) pace. Next up on the painting table, 16 crusades spear-men to act as warriors in my Saga crusades army.

28mm Stone Walls - How many are enough?

A couple of weeks ago while visiting Adler Hobby, I purchased one package of round stone walls and three packages of block stone walls, both made by Pegasus Hobbies. These are a great value and can you can easily put them directly on the tabletop from the package. They come with a simple grey base color and light dry brush which is quite acceptable. The links above can be followed to see the 'before' pictures.

Not willing to leave well enough alone I picked out random stones on each piece and colored them one of three different shades, gave them a dark 'magic wash', dry-brushed them and then coated them with Mig weathering powder, Europe dust to finish them off. The round walls received a heavy dusting, the block walls a lighter dusting.

I think the extra work is definitely worth it. As a note, the Mig dust powder serves to de-saturate the colors as recommended by Mel the Terrain Tutor as I pointed out in my February 15th post which included his video.


The title of this post asks how many stone walls are enough? The answer is probably that you can never have too many. I have a 6'x12' table. Each of these are 6" long. That means the 24 pieces shown only cover half of the length of the table if I line both sides of a road with them. The photo to the left illustrates the point. I have another 12 pieces of the round stone walls already, but that's still a few apples short of a bushel. With buildings, and other items I think I have enough to do the trick for a couple roads going across the width of the table or one road going diagonally lengthwise if I just stop a couple feet short of each end. There's always the option of only putting a wall on one side of the road, or using them to outline fields, etc. I'm counting these as 24 terrain/misc. since each one is painted and weathered taking considerable time.

Also arriving in the mail today was a recent Ebay purchase, a Warlord plastic Churchill tank that I purchased pre-painted. There was some shipping damage so I had to replace the turret antenna and re-glue on some small bits on the fuselage. This tank was nicely painted and detailed but I did choose to give it a coat of Mig Europe dust to help it better match my other British armor. I didn't NEED a Churchill, but the Ebay auction was a good deal and the model was painted very nicely, so Bob's your uncle.

28mm WWII British Armor

My previously finished figures were German, so giving equal time to the Allies, here are four pieces of armor to help the British, including a lend/lease M10 that I built up with generic markings to hopefully allow it to do double duty with my future American forces. The vehicles are, left to right, a Humber scout car, which I've up-gunned to a US .50-cal HMG, a Daimler Mk I, a Sherman Firefly, and an M10 Wolverine. All of the vehicles are Warlord resin kits with the exception of the M10 which is a Rubicon Models plastic kit. I've filled the lower hull of the M10 with epoxy and lead shot to give it similar weight to the resin models in my collection.

I've given these a healthy coating of mud in the tracks and a nice coating of 'European Dust' from Mig. There are four ex-tankers in our club and every one of them agree that no armor in the field isn't covered with a healthy layer of dust and grime. I can't see why WWII armor would be any different.

The Humber comes with a personality command figure in it so I figured I had to give him a good effort on the paint job. The .50 cal is mounted with a tiny magnet so I can swap it out for proper British kit should I want to use the vehicle with rules that care about that sort of thing. Considering all the lend-lease equipment in the European theater, up-gunning the Humber isn't much of a stretch in my mind.

These latest British vehicles put me over capacity in my current storage, so I had to split out my AT guns, Bren carriers and Jeeps into one tray and the heavier vehicles in a second tray. Even doing so the new tray looks almost as crowded as Bovington! It's a silly amount of armor for skirmish gaming, but at least I don't plan on using it all in a single game.......or maybe......evil grin.

More WWII British Infantry and Support Weapons

These will likely be the last figures posted for 2017. The year started off well with me doing quite a bit of 28mm vehicle conversions for WWII skirmish gaming, but personal events kept me away from the painting table for most of the year. With a game to put on tomorrow, I found the motivation to base up these figures which have been languishing on the painting table since late spring.

The infantry in the force consists of ten rifle-armed infantry, two Thompson-armed NCOs and a crouching figure suitable as an officer or forward observer as needed. In addition to the grunts, there is another 3" mortar and a 'Six-pounder' anti-tank gun. All figures are West Wind figures (from Old Glory here in the USA) with the exception of the two NCOs which I believe are Artisan. They are block painted and finished with my home made 'magic wash'. Grass tufts are Leadbearer's tufts which I highly recommend. I'll count this as 21 figures for this year's painting totals counting each special weapon as a single figure.

28mm Late-War British Weapons Teams (2)

For my upcoming club WWII Iron Cross game, I wanted to start off with a scenario that featured mirrored armies. This will allow me to scale the game to the number of players I get easily. It will also remove some complexity in the scenario design. I'm new to Iron Cross so I'm not confident enough to make a balanced scenario with different force compositions on each side.  Hopefully soon that will change. In order to match what I have for German weapons teams, I needed to paint up a British mortar team and a 17 pounder AT gun. The latter is the closest in the British TO&E to the German Pak-40. I painted these up Wednesday evening and based them up on Thursday - just in time for Friday's game.

The mortar team is from West Wind's 'Berlin or Bust' line. They describe the pack as 'Medium Mortars'. I believe this means they should be 3" ordinance mortars. Since they're nonspecific I suppose they could also be lend-lease US 81mm? Either way I'm particularly happy that I did my research and painted the mortar bombs with the appropriate colors and striping on the heads. I think it dresses up the stand a touch.

The 17 pounder AT gun is from Warlord Games. I like the looks of this gun and the figures. The seated figure on the gun trail gave me some trouble. He's supposed to sit on the gun's seat to sight the gun. For the life of me I couldn't get him to fit there after assembling the gun. Sitting him on the gun trail seems quite natural for me based on the historic photo below that I found while doing my research on how to assemble and paint this gun.

First Iron Cross 'Big Game'

Last Friday I asked ten of my friends to my home to play test a scenario I plan to run at our club next week. The scenario is 'Capture the Radar Station'. It's a blatant excuse to put my new Freya Limber Radar and Sd.Ah.24 Heavy Generator onto the tabletop.

When my friends Mark and Gordon (shown in this photo, the two at the left) found this rule set, it was everyone's hope that Iron Cross would be simple and 'fast play' enough for large games. All but four of the ten players tonight were new to the rules. Playing this large of a game with mostly new players was probably too ambitious. For the game night I'll be stepping the scenario back to eight players with the hopes of having a larger ratio of experienced players. Having six new players 'trained up' at this game sure will help the chances of that. Shown are the German players. Apologies are due to the British. The photos I took of their team were not usable. Apparently I'm a terrible war correspondent photographer!

To start the game, I had each army march onto the table. My fear was deploying on table with a rule set that has unlimited ranges for most weapons might put units into immediate peril before players learned the flow of the rules. This ended up slowing the game down as it took too long for players to get their troops into the action. For the game day I'll be using a deployment zone with players putting their commands down using blind markers with dummies. After everything is deployed, the dummies will be removed, and troops placed onto the table.

For big games in Iron Cross, each army (company) has a CinC (lieutenant). The rules authors state that this player need not have any troops on the table other than their command squad. I chose to give the CinCs in my game a small command which included a Mortar squad and an APC for their command squad. These assets weren't deemed as very useful by the players. The mortars in Iron Cross seem too ineffective to be worth spending a valuable command token on, and the APCs made the command squads too vulnerable to anti-tank fire. For the club game I'm going to replace the mortar squad with an infantry squad to ride in the APC. This will give each CinC  a mobile reinforcement to use where needed. This will let us test out the transports rule a bit more.

For the game, it was a tight affair. Early on Gordon's Panzer IV got in deep trouble trying to duel with the British Sherman I and Cromwell. Gordon used the 'Fall Back' move in successive turns and eventually saved his nearly-dead tank with a 'full recovery' company morale check. Later in the game Byron took out the Sherman with his Pak-40. This was revenge for Rob's destruction of Ralph's Stug III with the British 17 pounder. As the night got long, the British managed to get more of the village buildings on each side of the battlefield occupied than did the Germans. This allowed them to edge out a 1-point victory in the scenario victory points. My favorite moment of the game was when the radio operators in the radar bunker finally opened up on the approaching British. The surprise was worth the wait. The German players showed good discipline to wait to reveal them to save them undue casualties early in the game.

I'd like to thank everyone who helped me refine the game. First plays of new rules are always rough, and everyone took it with great cooperative spirit. I got a lot of excellent feedback and suggestions on how to make next week's game even better.

Late War 28mm British WWII Vehicles

I've been painting a bunch of 28mm late-war British infantry recently, and I thought it was time to get some vehicles painted up for them so I could possibly try the British out in Bolt Action, possibly at the local store's Thursday night games. These are all Warlord miniatures. I'm slightly disappointed in the final finish. I had covered them all in dust pigment, but when I put the final flat coat on them the carrier of the dull lacquer dissolved the dust pigment and made it look like a thin layer of 'muck' instead of dust. I was trying for a muddy look on the treads, but not on the hulls. I think I still have more to learn about weathering armor models. Either way, these are 'good enough' for the tabletop.

I'm mostly trying for lighter armor since Bolt Action is primarily an infantry-based skirmish game. That said, I'll need at least one medium or heavy tank for larger games. For the British, the Cromwell seems like the perfect choice. It's a good all-around tank and classically British. I couldn't resist putting the commander in a red Beret. I'm not sure it's 100% accurate, but he sure looks British in it!

A 'Honey' Stuart, as the British would call it. Or for us Americans, a lend-lease M5. I've topped it with the optional 50-cal AA gun on the turret. I'm a sucker for the Ma Deuce.

For reconnaissance, another lend-lease vehicle, an M8 Greyhound scout car. I've kept the British markings to a minimum on this one with the hopes that it can serve dual purpose in the hands of any Americans I choose to paint up in the future. The same goes for a pair of M4 Shermans that I've picked up off of Ebay in the past.

For transportation of the British infantry, and possible armed MG support, I wanted some Bren carriers. These are the early Warlord offering in resin. I'm hoping to find another pack of un-painted old stock of these, as the new plastic ones don't match up well to these in size.

These were an impulse buy. They're the Warlord 'red devils' jeeps. I've chosen head swaps that will allow them to be used with regular British infantry as well. A light recon choice, or transportation for officers and smaller teams. I picked them up because who can resist Jeeps, particularly with such great stowage included. Strangely they seem to be armed with WWI Lewis guns. The venerable Lewis gun was used heavily in the desert and during the early years of the war. It seems a bit out of place on lend-lease American Jeeps that could have easily been provided with US .30 cal air-cooled LMGs. Still, they look very British, so I used them instead of swapping them out for .30 cals.

Total figure count, 5 figures and 7 vehicles. Yes, I'm counting the drivers of the Bren carriers. Those guys are a huge pain to paint in there! Still on the painting table are a battery of French Napoleonic field guns, and while I have the WWII bug, some German armor.