Wednesday, November 22, 2023

Gaming Update, Game at my place Saturday 25NOV23 7pm

          Game will be at my place this Saturday 25NOV23 at 1900hrs.

           Be there or we will insult your ancestors.

Monday, November 13, 2023

Wargames Atlantic 28mm Great War British; Ready for paint at last!

 

the whole crew; ready to do battle with my painting skills

        Sorry about the long delay between posts but things have been a tad hectic around these parts of late. I have been slowly building these lads over the last ten days or so, striving to ensure that each figure is as different and unique as possible. This is made more difficult due to the smaller selection of weapons available to the the British P.B.I. as compared to the Germans that I did a while ago. 

       I decided to depict the troops as they would be organized for trench raiding or attacking. By the later half of the war the British had given up on the traditional "riflemen are the army" approach and greatly diversified their training and equipment. The whole "walking slowly into machine-gun fire" approach was also recognized as simply mass-murder and tactics, while still evolving, had been vastly revised. While still not up to the German Stosstruppen  level of integration the British had recognized that decision-making and on-call firepower needed to be available to the Squad leader, or at least platoon levels.

        To this end they began organizing troops into attack files of a leader, a couple of soldiers equipped for trench clearing, followed by riflemen to hold positions and backed up by soldiers equipped with rifle-grenades and, last but far from least, a Lewis LMG team. The Wargames Atlantic set provides for all of these except for the rifle-grenadiers (a matter easily fixed with some simple modifications).

Friday, November 3, 2023

The Armée de l'Air arrives (at least some of it) at last

        During a part of my reorganization process (which is pretty much a continuous effort to squeeze more and more toys into a finite amount of space) I was confronted with the realization that I had more model aircraft in my "Spats and Such" collection that there was room available in the Heap of Embarassment*. A sober-minded inventory revealed that there were a dozen of so that could reasonably be passed along to Ebay but that still left me with several kits that had no home. I impose few rules on my hobby but one that I do try to honor is that everything must fit into the assigned space.

        While considering the unhappy thought that I might have to add these rare and wonderful aircraft to the Ebay pile I had an epiphany; I could build them and shift them from the guilt-laden "projects" section of The Vault to the "completed" section as minis that were ready to be used in a game. It also occurred to me that if I built the kits that were in the largest boxes it would free up more space. I didn't quite get that accomplished, but I did get four models in large(ish) boxes assembled and painted. Three of these belonged to the Armée de l'Air, an air force that I had rather badly neglected in my building program.