Stug IIIs

Panzer IVs

Panthers

Tiger Is

and Jagdpanthers

Now to paint some Panzergrenadiers.

I have a general rule with wargames projects which is to always start with the most common types of troops, so that will be a normal Grenadier company, with a few supports.  Well here they are.

Three Platoons, each of three squads, plus three stands of tripod mounted MG44s and three Panzeschrecht stands.

Close up of a single Platoon (above) and the MGs (below)

As I have discussed in a previous blog posting, I’m not a big fan of the cards that are normally used in Lardie games and much prefer to use chits drawn from a bag.  I reckon they’re easier to shuffle and more random than cards, which have a tendency to stick together when shuffled.

So I’ve made up a set of chips for IABSM.

Work on the scenery for games continues.   I’m up to sixty feet of bocage hedges and Jim has been making up woods and painting houses.   Photos soon I hope.

At the South East Scotland Wargames Club tonight they were in play as a Scots village under attack by Vikings, sometime in the early 11th century.   This game was a dress rehearsal for a display we’re putting on at the National Museum of Scotland’s Viking Wargames event  on Sunday.

The picture below shows  the Scots militia are forming up to defend the village..

Here’s some close ups of the individual buildings.

OF16 – Chapel

OF22 – Large multi-chambered Pictish house.

OF24 – Multi Chambered Pictish house.

OF26 – Pictish hut.

More pictures after the event.

Then I glue on a length cut from a wooden barbecue skewer to start forming the earthen ..

I cut a bit off the top of the skewer and taper the ends.

Use filler to build up the sides of the bank.  I use B&Q All purpose powder filler.

Drill a hole which will later take a model tree

Paint the thing brown, I use emulsion paint from Dulux.  Just over £2 for a 250ml sample pot and they can do you just about any colour you want.

Textured with Budgie grit stuck on with PVA glue.  Sand would work just as well.

Then I seal it all up with a 1:1:1 mixture of emulsion paint, PVA glue and water.

And leave overnight to dry.

Drybrush to bring up the texture.

A tree is glued into the hole.   You can buy trees like this on Ebay.  They come from China and you can get 150 of the things for about £15.   If you don’t want to wait a couple of weeks or are reluctant to take your chances with a Chinese Ebayer called WeHonest  (99.9% positive feedback on 38,000 sales) , then you can get what look to be the same trees from Minibits in the UK.   Some of the trees come in a rather luminous shade of green, I tone then down by dipping them in a mixture of Acrylic paint, PVA glue and water.   This gives them a better colour and the glue holds all the flock together and stops bits of it falling off the armature.

The hedges are made from small pieces of Woodland Scenics Clump-Foliage, I glue them on  to the base using a hot glue gun.  You can get Woodland Scenics products from model railway shops and it’s also available in larger branches of Hobbycraft.  I use mostly Medium Green and Light Green.

The vegetation on the side of the banks is Golden Straw Fine Ground Cover Turfs from Hornby’s Skale Scenics Range.   You’ll get this stuff in the same places as you’ll find the Clump-Foliage.

That’s the bocage hedge finished, though I always slather on copious amounts of diluted PVA glue to bind it all together.  If you don’t do this then bits  of the Clump-Foliage will fall off over time.

Materials

• Lollipop sticks
• Wooden barbecue skewers
• Filler
• Paint (whatever you normally use on your bases)
• PVA Glue
• Sand or Budgie git (again whatever you normally use on your bases)
• Clump Foliage for the hedges
• Flock for the sides of the bank

The hedges in use.

So whilst getting together a big order for Ros-Heroics for me and some friends I’ve been making scenery, in particular bocage hedges.  About twenty feet made so far, with another six feet almost finished.  The eventual target is sixty feet at least.  Here’s some pictures.

And, just to continue my current obsession with all things bocage, I’ve  put together a few web pages outlining some of the thoughts that lie behind how I chose to make my terrain.  And I have a bit of a go at what I call Mocage, wargames terrain that bears little resemblance to the real thing.

I’ve now  posted a tutorial showing how I made the hedges.

Noble Raiders:  Unlike the normal Pictish Raiders these troops are armoured.   Figures from Gripping Beast Pictish Nobles – PCT01 Noble Command One and PCT04 Nobles Attacking

War Hounds:   A one shot fire and discard weapon the War Hounds charge in ahead of other units disrupting the enemy formation.   Gripping Beast PCT 14 Pack Master & 3 Hounds.

Shield transfers from Little Big Man Studios

Well it’s because cards stick together even when they’re well shuffled.  And most wargamers can’t shuffle properly making the problem even worse.   That sticking together can have a big effect in games and when the same combinations keep coming up turn after turn it gets annoying.

Some people use poker chips instead of cards, but I’ve decided to make my own custom tokens.  Here’s some I’ve made for Dux Britanniarum.

They’re 50mm x 25m  pill bases, painted and gloss varnished, with home made stickers for the writing.    The stickers are created using Corel Draw and printed on A4 sticker sheets before being covered in the transparent sticky back plastic sold for covering books and stuck on the pills.

I’m planning on the following for each side.

• Lord
• Leaders 1-4
• Missiles 1 & 2
  Skirmishers 1 & 2
• Lt Cavalry 1 & 2
• Foederati 1-4
• Blank

Please leave a comment below if you can think of anything else I’ll need.

You can download a pdf of the stickers I used to make these chips. 

That’s the Lord (on the stand with a standard) two Leaders and a Champion (black and white shield).  Figures are from Wargames Foundry.

More to follow.

Where?  – Musselburgh, just next to Edinburgh, Scotland

When?  – June 22nd, 2013.

Further information here on this website.

Up until now we’ve been playing with the toys on single bases, but we decided to go for sabots to make moving them easier.  This was complicated by the fact that people at the club have their Dark Age troops based in three different ways. Jack  used to play a lot of Warhammer Ancient Battles and has hordes of troops based on 20mm square bases.   I never really liked WAB and like to base my skirmish troops on one pence pieces.   A lot of people have Vikings, Saxons, Welsh or Normans based on the 2p pieces we decided to use for Saga – a game that’s been little played since  Dux Brit appeared on the scene.    Richard of TooFatLardies promises us a Viking supplement sometime, “Easter” has been mentioned as a release date (an in-joke in the TooFatLardies Yahoo Group, that means it will be out sometime).  So we wanted to get sabots that could be used with these base sizes and which could differentiate the Mass and Shieldwall formations used in the game.

Here’s what I came up with.

Pictured above are standard sabot shapes I came up with that can fit with 1p, 2p, 20mm square and 25mm square bases (nobody’s got any, of them, but I though I’d fit them in anyway) and portray troops in both Shieldwall and Mass.    All of them can be made for the standard six  man Groups or the eight man groups that can arise when a successful Lord attracts new followers.  I got the things made by Martin at Warbases using mounting cardboard for the bottom layer rather than his usual 2mm mdf.  This makes them slightly thinner than his standard sabots, which can make troops look like they’re standing on a raised platform.

Here are troops on 1p pieces, 20mm squares and 2p pieces in mass formation.

The same troops on the Shieldwall bases.

I’ve already painted and textured all the bases needed for my starting Pict force, which is based on one pence pieces, and you can see how they turned out in another blog post. Here’s an sample pic.

A word of thanks to Martin of Warbases who listened  to my ideas, discussed the details with me and then went on to do the detailed design work that turned them into the final product.  I have been involved with him on other projects for custom designed bases (Muskets & Tomahawks for example) and I can recommend his services without reservation.

If you want to get some sabots to these designs for yourself, just ask Martin and I’m sure he’ll oblige.