Paint Table Saturday: Nasty Nazis

The nasty orcses featured here recently have tromped off the painting table en route to the basing station.   I hope they don’t squabble and kill each other on the way.   

In their place, the nasty theme continues as I turn to Nazis for my Weird War Two pulp project.  

We have some grim madchens from the SS Werewulfentruppen (Bob Mulch Pulp Figures), a couple of sinister officers (Westwind, I think) and a trio of hapless Wehrmacht sentries to give S Commando some practice in hand to hand combat.

Blessings to your brushes and whatever you’re painting.  Go Blue Jays!

MP+

 

Some Perry 28mm ACW Figures Complete

Hello all:

I hope those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving last weekend had a good time.  Madame Padre and I welcomed my brother the Mad Colonel and his lovely wife, and ate and watched baseball (cheering for Toronto, of course) in between trips to the countryside in search of pubs.  

Managed to complete these three bases of Perry Brothers ACW plastic infantry, painted as generic western Union troops.  I’m fond of the the black hat look for Yankee troops, but didn’t want these fellows to be as formal as the Iron Brigade in their ribboned and badged Hardee hats.

Gamely marching forward.

Tried to do some faces.  Not entirely happy with the eyes on all of them, but some look ok.

Pour it into them, boys!

Also finished, this lonely Confederate gunner from the Perry Bros plastic ACW artillery set, standing by a limber featured in a previous post.

 

Thank you for looking.  Blessings to your brushes!

 

 

These figures bring my 2015 totals to:

28mm:  Foot Figures: 49; Mounted Figures: 10, Artillery: 2, Vehicles: 2, Scenic Pieces: 2

20mm:  Vehicles: 1; Artillery: 1, Foot Figures: 6

15mm: Armour/Vehicles: 5; 15mm Scenic Pieces: 5

6mm:  Scenic pieces:  7

 

Tuesday Night Boardgame: Castles of Mad King Ludwig

 The chaps at the club tonight had already finished Roll for the Galaxy by the time I got there. and had decided on playing this title, Castles of Mad King Ludwig, or Castles Made Me Mad as I came to call it.  This is a tile laying game with some clever tactical layers for them what likes tile laying games.

 

 

Players take turns being the Master Architect, who receives money as players spend their hard earned coins buying rooms which, other than having a given footprint, may have the desired attributes, or may not.    

  

 

My castle takes shape.   You get points for completing a room (having all the tile’s doors opening into another room, hallway, stairs, etc).  You get points for placing tiles (that big garden hex is worth a nice 5 points) but more points form completing a room (that garden has three exits, so it takes three more expensive tiles to complete it).  As the game goes on, the smaller tiles, which have fewer doors and are thus better for completing rooms, start to become more valuable.  Rooms also have themes which can generate points or cost them - for example, you wouldn’t want to put the ten-pin bowling alley next to the royal bedroom.

There is some luck in the kinds of tiles one draws, but there is no dice, and so the game is more about thought than about chance.

A clever game that clearly has more nuances than my poor head could appreciate on the first play.  It would be fun to play it again.  From Bezier Games, for 2-4 players.

Blessings to your tiles!

OP FIAT LUX Successfully Completed

No pretty minis to show tonight, but a little DIY success to brag on.  Back in August I reported on an upgrade to the lighting in the wargames room of my (newish) home.  Last night I replaced the last of four defective ballast units that prevented me from using all those wonderful fluorescent fixtures.  I got a quote from an electrician to replace all the ballasts at $100 a pop.  No thanks, I thought.  I can buy new ballasts at $30 each.

Here’s the last new ballast, all wired in (said he hopefully).

 

Then to put the covering plate (a fun job trying to hold it in place with one hand while screwing the ends in with the other), throw the breaker back on (no spitzensparken, good), put the new fluorescent bulbs in, and ..  IT”S ALIVE!!!

And here’s the wargames table, under full illumination.  Nice!   

Now to get a game going on that table.

Blessings to your brushes and die rolls!

MP+

Paint Table Saturday

On the painting desk this Saturday is another sprue of GW LOTR figures, in this case same nasty orcses to give those brand new Men of Gondor some chopping practice.  After just finishing a dozen Perry Bros federal ACW infantry (currently in the basing shop), these fellows are a little more challenging, in that I’m searching for the right mix of drag, scungy fabrics that one would expect an Orc QM sergeant to issue.  I was able to get the last lot of LOTR figs off the sprue after painting with some minimal touchup required, so I’m experimenting with the on the sprue technique again with these fellows.  Also experimenting with some rust effects on the chain mail - I figure the QM would issue stuff belonging to at least several deceased owners. 

 

Well, that’s that and a happy Saturday to you.  I’m off to a local gaming event in nearby Cambridge (Ontario, not the nice one - nearby in Ontario is Paris, Stratford, and London - not to be confused with the nice ones as well).  Hope to see some chums and see if there’s any more LOTR stuff at the Bring and Buy, because it’s getting hard to find now.  Not that there aren’t attractive substitutes to be had - more on that anon.

Blessings to your brushes!

MP+

Paint Table Saturday

On the painting desk this Saturday are some Perry Brothers plastic ACW infantry, getting painted up as generic Union troops from the armies of the west, in plain black slouch hats.  I think I heard Col. Von Daniken in the mess saying he needed more boys since the damned rebs were so well fixed for artillery.  Mixed in is the remaining Perry artillerist fro missed from the last sprue I did of that lot.  Hopefully they’ll be done by this time next week.  There may be a warg rider running around in the background.

We move outside to see the other paint table in operation today.   Via the Too Fat Lardies yahoo list, I came across this tutorial by US gamer Mark Luther on how he sets up his amazing 6mm tables.   Mark’s games always make me think a flight to Atlanta might be worth the chance to get in on one.   I wanted to do something similar for my 6mm Napoleonics figures.  Borrowing slightly from Mark’s SOP, I took an old Queen sized bed sheet that we were discarding during our move.  Using painter’s tape to mark off the fields and some craft store acrylic paint, I tried to create a bunch of colours that would suggest an agricultural region.  My inspiration was seeing fields in southern Germany during a train trip this summer.

 I am now almost 3/4 done and hope to be finished soon, if blessed with some more good fall weather.   Once it’s done, I intend to work on it with artist’s pastel crayons to give the fields a little more colour and texture.  I can either draw roads on it in pastel, or lay the roads out with play sand if I wish.  Hopefully it will provide a colourful backdrop for my Naps battles.  The paint has left it rather stiff and I need to find a way to soften it a bit so it lies flat on the table and can drape over styrofoam hills. Also, since it looks rather like the table mats made by Hotz and other companies, I suppose I could use it for WW1 dogfight games, should I ever feel the urge to buy some plains.  Or, I could use it as a quilt in the guest room.

So that’s it for this week.  Blessings to your brushes!

MP+

A Villain For Curt

While, like a Lannister, I try to always pay my debts, I don’t always pay them as promptly as I should.  Last winter I entered Curt Campbell’s Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge, knowing that the cost for entering was a painted figure, which some of my fellow contestants started calling Curtgeld.  Curt’s entrance fee for this competition was a figure representing an “antihero, rogue or person of dubious character but undeniable charisma”.  For each figure received, Curt would donate $5 to his local branch of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Curt likes the world to think that his heart is as black as his kettle, but those of us fortunate to know him know better, and are not surprised that he would put his “Curtgeld” to such charitable use.

Well, Curt, I am sorry it took me so long,  I started painting this chap between after finishing my thesis last spring and moving in the summer, and then it went missing.  He just turned up and I was able to finish basing and painting him.  He is one of the figures from a fellow Canadian, two-fisted pulp miniature maker Bob Murch, from his “Stahl-Mask’s Doom Squad” pack.

 

I don’t know how charismatic he is under that metal mask ...

 … but with that Luger in his hand, would you dare tell him he isn’t charismatic?

He’ll be in the mail on Monday, Curt.   Thank you again for running the Painting Challenge.

Blessings to your brushes!

These figures bring my 2015 totals to:

28mm:  Foot Figures: 36; Mounted Figures: 10, Artillery: 2, Vehicles: 2, Scenic Pieces: 2

20mm:  Vehicles: 1; Artillery: 1, Foot Figures: 6

15mm: Armour/Vehicles: 5; 15mm Scenic Pieces: 5

6mm:  Scenic pieces:  7