Stuka and 88 for Bolt Action

Next week I will run another WW2 scenario using Bolt Action - these rules are simple and fun, easy to pick up and run at the club. I will run the Across the Meuse - Sedan scenario from the Skirmish Campaigns scenario book on the 1940 Meuse campaign. These books are generally excellent, and this one is simply outstanding.

For this scenario, I needed an 88 flak gun and Stuka support, as well as a bunch of bunkers for the French defenders. The 88 and Stuka are from Zvezda's new Art of Tactic range and are excellent, simple models. The bunkers I made from 6 of the many empty Minifigs clamshell packs kicking around with my reusable packing material. Hey - the price was right!

Late Roman command and cavalry

The last few stands for my MayDay game are complete, these a couple of stands of cavalry and a commander. Foundry again, shield decals are Warlord auxilia leftovers but do the trick:

Auxilia palatina

Slow month on the paint table, busy month at work including a week in a hotel conference room in Ottawa adjudicating a national research grant competition, followed by a week of recovering from a nasty rhinovirus one of the other group members brought back from Africa. Thanks for that!

But I did finish a few more stands of late Roman foot for my MayDay game in the meantime- these are auxilia by Foundry. Now I just have a few stands of mounted to finish and it's ready to go.

Carpi Campaign

 I have decided on a theme and rules for my MayDay Game - it will be a Hail Caesar game set in 272AD around the time of the Roman campaigns of Aurelian against the Carpi, a Dacian tribe on the eastern edge of the Empire that was not subjugated by Trajan in the Dacian Wars. This setting allows me to use my Dacians with allied Goths and Sarmatians as foes for my late Imperial Roman army. For the past few weeks I have been working on Dacians and a few stands of Goths (to me these are generic warriors, fully clothed, with round shields, example below) to fill out the forces, and in the near future I will start working on filling out my Late Imperial Romans.

I also decided that the theme for the DBA tournament at MayDay will have an elephant theme - "Pachyderm Pandemonium" - any army with an elephant element can be entered and player score bonus points for elements destroyed by elephants. I have Sassanids and Abysinnians to choose from, but there are some very formidable elephant lists in DBA, so this should be very competitive.

Dacians

First batch of Dacians, here we have 4 bases of warband and two of skirmishers for my MayDay game - system to be determined. I am currently leaning towards Impetus.

The figs are a mix of Foundry and Warlord.

Warlord Auxilia

I finished a box of Warlord Games Roman Auxilia - these guys - in 28mm for my MayDay game.

Nice figures, really nice, but they are a bit over-animated for my taste which makes them hard to rank up. I based them on 30 x 60mm frontage so they can be used for DBA.

I am thinking of running a Dacian Wars battle for my big MayDay game. I have some Foundry and Warlord Dacians, as well as a horde of Sarmatian cavalry. My quandry is which ruleset to use - I picked up the Hail Caesar supplement over Christmas and it has some nice ideas for scenarios, and Hail Caesar is a good participation game for a Con. Although I prefer WAB ... I dunno...

Happy New Year, Comrades!

As the year wraps up I can recap what came off the bench this year, about 1500 figures (although quite a few of these are wee):

6mm: 90 foot, 67 vehicles - all WW2 and modern microarmor

10mm: 655 foot, 37 mounted - all Imperial Romans
15mm: 135 foot, 45 mounted, elephant - a couple of DBA armies
1/72: 225 foot, 47 mounted, 7 arty, 3 guns, 2 tanks - mostly Napoleonics and WW2
28mm: 193 foot, 57 mounted, 3 monsters, 2 chariots, gun - Some fantasy stuff for HOTT and ancients
Total: roughly 1500 figs - 1308 foot, 185 mounted, 86 other

I also managed to play 39 games of DBA with the following armies, and the dice were kind 31 times:

Early Achaemenid Persian: 2-0
Late Achaemenid Persian: 1-0
Abysinnians: 5-3

Early Imperial Roman: 8-1

Sassanid Persian: 2-0

Ancient Britons: 5-2
Teutonics: 5-1
Later Swiss: 1-1
Dacians: 1-0
Marian Rome: 1-0
New games I tried this year included Fireball Forward (a keeper), War and Conquest (meh - not sure if it tops WAB for me), Lasalle (good), Fistful of Tows (OK) and I played a lot of Command and Colors (Ancients and Napoleonics) and Memoir '44. 

Over the holidays I finished this batch of 1/72 Soviets for a 1941 scenario I think I will run using Fireball Forward at the next club night, the guns and infantry figs are from Plastic Soldier Company and are very good, the BT-7 and BA-6 are Pegasus, and the ruined building is a very nice Italeri kit that I picked up from chum Mark- nice!

 

Happy New Year from the boys (should have named them Jeff and Akbar...)