This week in wargaming at WSS

Life can get in the way, but if at all possible, the people who put together WS&S try to do something on their own hobby as well. Here’s what we did this week.

Guy: This week has been very busy for me. With the deadline for WS&S 78 closing rapidly and with the final draft of Black Ops due shortly, any spare time I had has been pretty much consumed with other things. However, I did take a little time off to convert some more miniatures for our Ligny game in June. This time, I took some Victrix heads (from their Middle Imperial Guard boxed set) and placed them onto Warlord and Perry bodies. I glued spare heads to the Warlord models, then cut them down to the collar before adding the Victrix heads (Victrix have their collars as part of their main body while Warlord have them as part of the head). The Victrix heads have a lot of character so they’ll further break up the look of my lines with different faces. I then set upon some HäT 28mm and did some head swaps. I like the HäT 28mms as they add variety to my lines of troops and allow me to add additional firing and loading poses to my lines. These are destined to be Voltigeurs to screen my advancing French attack columns from my Prussian 19th infantry Regiment (complete with rose pink collars!). After WS&S 78, I’ll have some spare time to give these a lick of paint.

Christy: This week, I was mostly focused on painting figures for my weekly videos. I first completed a tutorial on painting a World War II German sailor, which was a fun challenge for me since I’d never tried painting that much Navy blue before! I was however quite happy with the results and I think that a lot of my viewers were excited too. Later in the week, Javier Gomez Valero tagged me for a Facebook challenge where I post three photos of my minis for five days in a row on Facebook! So far, I’m just using old photos of my work, but at some point, I’ll probably have to take some more. Right now, I’m preparing for another painting tutorial. This one should be fairly simple but interesting to many people: I’m going to show how to paint a basic American GI from the Vietnam-era. Lots more dull green coming up!

Mark: This week has been very busy at work so not a great deal of time for gaming. Last weekend I managed to put the finishing touches on an article about a French raid on the South Coast of England in the 100 Years War. Guy is still cracking the whip though, and there is another article to get completed over the weekend! On the gaming front I managed to sneak in a quick trip to my local club. I had planned to play Crescent and Cross, but arrived to find bumper numbers of attendees and barely any space. Instead I joined in a Chain of Command game based on British and German patrols meeting somewhere in France. Two players were on each side, and I played as the British. We managed to get some reasonable drop off points but the Germans had strong defensive positions that they moved forward to seize. They quickly deployed their entire platoon, while we played a much more cagey refused flank gambit and holding plenty of sections in reserve. We managed to pull off a great ambush using our CoC dice and a HMG at close range to shoot up some Germans in the open. The Germans took quite a pasting but managed to get revenge when their flamethrower team decided to toast one of our sections. Honours were shared evenly in the end, although their force morale was considerably weakened. Lots of lessons learnt and next time I’ll try to be more aggressive!

Jasper: Though I’ve been painting and working on a lot of World War II in 28mm lately, this week brought a change in the program. This weekend we had our semi-regular ‘Wargame Beer & Game’, an informal get-together of members of the Dutch Miniature Wargaming Facebook group. It’s usually in Zutphen, tends to draw about a dozen people who play at our office or, when the group’s smaller, at our house and usually is capped with a wonderful dinner cooked by Christy. We had a small group this time, several of whom are interested in the AWI and the small-unit suggestions for Black Powder as expressed in Rebellion. So my modest AWI collection got to the table, combined with some figures the others brought, and we had a great time playing the Hanging Rock scenario. Suffice to say that resulted in an order with the Perry’s, and a complete rekindling (as if necessary) of the love for AWI…