Back to the Dark Ages

Well I'm back from the summer cottage and got some painting done after a weeks break. I decided to speed paint a group of more Norse Gaels that I had laying around after I was delivered the wrong pack. I was originally supposed to get the Gall-Gaedhill blister, but ended up getting these guys. The correct box is still somewhere and I've more or less given up on it already after a few months.

It was nice to paint something quickly after a small hobby break, even if I cheated a bit at the cottage by playing Zombicide (with the missus though so it's not exactly breaking the no miniature related stuff rule) and reading all the blog posts being updated.

Nothing fancy here, but I did end up painting an extra highlight layer compared to what I'd normally do to make them pop out a bit more. Half of the shields are with Battle Flag decals and half hand painted. This was actually the first time that I ended up painting slashes and cuts on the shields. Turned out rather nicely even if I say so myself.

The building on the background is one of the Saxon hovels that 4Ground makes. Absolutely fantastic looking stuff! I've got the three now and I think I'll be buying the Anglo-Danish buildings also to make a small village.

Next up some 105mm Artillery for FoW that has finally arrived after being ordered in early February! Though there is a stag party and a wedding coming soon so there are some distractions that keep me from reducing the lead pile. I also finally managed to clean up the rest of the Oldhammer pile so I guess I'll start painting through them too. There's also the last two Red Devils sets waiting for paint. A 6 pounder and a 75mm howitzer. Especially the 6 pounder will be needing paint soon as panzers have been sighted at the club lately.

 

Ropecon 2014

Well Ropecon is over finally and I've had a little time to gather my strength again and go through the few photos that I remembered to take during the event. 3 days full of miniature gaming, tabletop games and tons of roleplaying and cosplay stuff was more than enough for quite a while especially when we were running our demo games for two full days.

There are tons of pictures on the Mika's blog Femoral Head Ostectomy so visit there for pics of pretty much everything was going on :) Mazikainen of On Wargames and Such also has a post about the ACW 6mm game that he was running with a guy from my club and about our Winter War game too.

The Winter War table and minis gathered quite a bit of action and we ended up running 7 or 8 demo games through the event when we had originally planned to play three all together. Bolt Action is really a wonderful ruleset for conventions as most people managed to learn the basic rules in about a turn of gaming and things started to roll forward very fast after that. Bolt Action miniatures seemed to sell quite well at the stores in the convention and quite a few players came to thank us about the demo and to tell that they'd bought a few boxes to start the game themselves.

Our scenario focused on the first battles around Raate road where the Finnish 9th Division historically encircled and destroyed the Soviet 44th Division. Our scenario dealt with closing the narrow Raate road around the village of Haukila. Facing each other were two Inexperienced Soviet platoons with light tanks and a Regular Finnish Platoon with added anti-tank capabilities and a machine-gun. The scenario was adapted from the Flames of War Surrounded scenario with the Finns seeking to take one of two objectives along the road. Worked out quite nicely, even though the Russians were maybe a bit too powerful and managed to win nearly all games.

Our Zen Saga game also gathered quite a crowd. The scenario is the same as seen in Hamburger Tactica by Kurpfalz Feldherren. All the minis and terrain came from one of the players in our club who also ran most of the demo games.

Another group from our club was running a Force on Force Vietnam demo focusing on a group of special forces soldiers trying to escape the board by reaching American reinforcements and their extraction boat.

There were plenty of other demos running too including the 6mm ACW game, All quiet on the martian front, Infinity and plenty of more. One of the more impressive ones was the Warmachine demo station run by Jason Soles who is the lead developer for Privateer Press and their Warmachine game. He ran demos where he gave a Q&A session about the game and it's design followed by a challenge game against some willing victim.

Naturally there was also a painting competition with some pretty brilliant entries all around.

This zombie hunter diorama won the diorama category. Nice composition and especially the lighting effects were brilliant.

This dwarf unit ended up winning the people's choice award. The base was really nicely built and the use of non-metallic-metallic technique was pretty much spot on. 

The inquisitor diorama won the open category and the theme competition ("Power"). There seemed to be more and more to see when you started looking at it closer. Especially the flames reflecting from the windows are a nice touch and add a lot of background story to the diorama.

Warhead didn't have their own stand this year, but instead they had put together a table showing different Space Marine chapters from both the loyalists and chaos side. Impressive paint jobs all around and some very nice conversions especially on the Centurions which are normally horrendous models.

Finally there were the shops with all the usual stuff on sale. Not that many miniature sellers, which is quite understandable as Ropecon is still mainly a roleplaying and LARP event. I tried to limit my shopping to only a few minis that I had preordered, but I ended up buying my own copy of Zombicide as well.

This Girls and Corpses magazine was one of the most random things on sale at the whole place. Apparently somebody has been publishing this for over 5 years already. Maybe there is room for Playboy mixed with zombies after all :)

Finally there was a large library of tabletop games that you could borrow and play during the convention. This has always been one of my favorite stands at Ropecon as trying out new games is super easy and you end up playing games that you probably would never have spent money on beforehand.

Tigers in the Mud manga by Miyazaki Hayao

With the Bridge at Remagen book for Flames of War just out and Otto Carius making a comeback this time in a Jagdtiger, this oldish manga by Miyazaki Hayao was an interesting find. Tigers in the Mud deals with Carius' time in Estonia during 1944. And what's even better it seems to be available translated and totally free. You could get quite a few nice scenarios out of them and even if you don't it's still a pretty nice read with nice illustration and a slightly more animalistic side of the conflict!

The volumes are available through Mangatank: http://www.mangatank.com/manga/otto-carius-tigers-in-the-mud

Hellcat platoons

Well I finished up my Hellcat platoons finally. Didn't get them done in the timespan that I had in mind, but then again the game was cancelled too so not too much of a loss. Final details and decals took a lot longer than anticipated with far too much time going to painting tracks and trying to avoid previous paintjobs in the meantime. And putting in about 70 decals was annoying to say the least. Maybe doing 14 vehicles in a batch wasn't the greatest of the ideas after all :) Anyway fun minis to paint as the Hellcat is one of my favorite tanks of all time. You can't go wrong when you have about 18 tons of steel rolling around at up to 60km/h running with a radial aircraft engine.

I decided to use the decals to make recognition on the tabletop a bit easier to if for example the platoons are situated very close to each other. Half of the Hellcats are named and the M20's have different styled names to mark them for one platoon or the other. Painting wise these Allied vehicles for WW2 aren't too interesting with a the monotone green colour scheme so I tried putting in colour where I could by painting the tracks in a rust colour etc. Not much of it is visible beneath the mud anymore, but at least I tried :)

After these I'll concentrate on finalizing our Winter War demo game for Ropecon that is held next weekend here in Finland. It's the biggest roleplaying and wargaming convention in Finland and my club has a few demo games running including my Winter War table, a Samurai version of SAGA (with rules graciously borrowed from Kurpfalz Feldherren), Force on Force Vietnam and Warmachine all there. Still small touches to add to the table and we're set to go. And after the convention I have a small holiday at our summer cottage so that will probably mean a pause in painting again unless I decide to drag a small painting box with me hidden from the better half.

The four nameless tanks are guided by Suzy and Jane. I only ended up putting the Tank Destroyer badge on one of the tanks as it's actually too large for the Hellcat. I figured trying to fix it for 8 tanks was too much and only left it on one.

Weenie One, Battling Bitch, Blood N Guts and Destruction rolling forward with Speedy and Daring showing the way.