Long time no see

It's been awfully quiet here on my blog for quite a while with nearly a month long pause between the posts. Real life is really interfering badly with blogging as practically all weekends are spent hunting, which cuts out most of my hobby time.

I haven't really picked up the brushes for nearly a month with only a bit of paint applied on some 15mm minis at home and my only really active painting being done during a club day where we painted a 1000pt German starter set for Bolt Action to be used freely by members.

It hasn't been completely quiet on the wargames front though as I've managed to get in about a game per week though and I've been trying to follow other peoples blogs and forums. Still about a month to go on the busiest hunting season so maybe I'll get my painting mojo back on after that. In the mean time finding energy for concentrating on painting seems to be nigh impossible with most evenings spent lying on the couch watching ice hockey or then playing some game. I have some projects set up though that I'm hoping to get started on when I can gather the motivation.

  Chuck will really be needed to kick me back into business.

Games wise I've played a few games of Bolt Action with varying degrees of success. I'm really growing to like this system more and more. There are of course some issues with it, but all in all in my opinion it does give quite a nice "realistic" outcome most of the time. Real life tactics work quite well and it's simple enough to allow for a fast game.

We also played a demo game of Longstreet a week ago. Seems like a great game and I really like the way the cards are used to influence both your and your enemies play. For small games with a handful of Regiments per side it seems like a great system, but I guess it won't scale that well upwards. I'll definately be trying to play more of this so that my 6mm ACW guys see some action too.

Project wise my Bolt Action collections will be expanded a bit as I bought roughly a 1000pt force of Germans to have an axis army to play with too as most of the players at my club only have Allies. These have been put together whenever I've had the energy. 30 plastic Pioneers and their vehicles etc was surprisingly tedious to do with all the fiddly bits. However no they are all put together and based and are just waiting for a basecoat. Maybe finding motivation for painting these will be a bit easier as I can at least see them being used in the near future quite often unlike some of the other projects. Then there's still most of the Baker Company Winter War stuff. I've only received the basic units until now so still loads to come. I did decide to sell the Russians though as I'm totally fed up with the quality. The Finns I'll finnish as I've already started on them.

Waterloo 2015 is drawing ever closer and I need to paint up 6 French battalions and 6 British and Hannoverian battalions and roughly 3-4 squadrons for both sides. This should keep me quite busy for a while, though I did decide to make my life a bit easier by deciding to revert to 4 models per base instead of the 6 I'd been using. Cutting down 50% of the paint load on the Frenchies and Hannoverians really should speed up the process. 16 guys instead of 24 per battalion is quite merciful.

15mm will also be featured quite heavily during the rest of the year as Early War is going to be the thing in Flames of War for a while. I took advantage of the Battlefront EW sale and bought up units for a Early War german Panzerschützen army. I've always found the early war germans most interesting and now that ETC will be an EW event and a lot of club members focusing on that I decided to jump in the bandwagon. Hopefully a rather quick project as I have quite a bit of armor and all of the vehicles and equipment are quite simple to paint as well.

Some more long term projects are expanding my 15mm US troops with a couple of platoons to allow me to run my collection as Tank destroyer or armored rifle companies. Not too much to add, but I'm not in too much of a hurry with these if everybody will be concentrating on Early War anyways.

Another longer project will be to finally build up my 15mm Prussian army. Most of the Napoleonic games at my club are played with 15mm so getting these guys ready for battle would allow me to take part without having to borrow other peoples minis. The horrendous Warrior minis ones I've had have really kept me from going forward with this too fast as they are all one pose and really bad castings. Now I bought a few test packs from Campaign Game Miniatures and Fantassin and these are from a wholly different planet quality wise. I've yet to test paint them, but hopefully I'll get these done a lot quicker as they seem like something that would actually be nice to paint rather than the tedious task that it is with the Warrior ones.