Keeping a blog up to date is very hard. Hats off to those who have the discipline to put up quality posts on a regular basis. I am not one of those people…
Anyway, I hope 2025 has been good to all of you. A lot has changed since the last time I posted and I thought I’d share a quick update.
The biggest change is that I’ve moved to a new house! We are now empty nesters and built a new home in the southwest Twin Cities metro area suitable for the way we want to live that will also allow us to age in place. From a gaming perspective I have a new, dedicated hobby room that is large enough to hold my painting table, all of my wargaming supplies and host a permanent game table as well. I plan on building a new table or set of tables that will allow me to have at least a 6′ x 8′ gaming space and possibly larger. I have my painting desk set up but everything else is still a jumble of boxes right now. Getting that in order is my fall project once we sell our old place and finish the main floor decorating.
Beyond that, I’ve continued gaming on a regular basis at a friend’s house, focusing on 15mm WWII, 15mm ACW and other games on a rotating basis. We’ve played Chain of Command 2 in 28mm a few times and really enjoyed it. I may look at doing 1940 Germans and/or Brits to go along with another local gamer’s plans for it.
For my personal projects, I continue working on grand plan for big battalion 28mm Napoleonics. I’ve amassed a decent-sized French army now with 13 battalions of painted infantry and a 6-pd foot artillery battery ready to go. I have some light cavalry in the painting queue and plenty more infantry to work on after that. I’m glad I have a backlog to work through as the current US administration’s tariff plans are throwing a wrench in the miniature wargaming business with many UK manufacturers pausing sales to the US until the new customs setup crystalizes. An unfortunate situation that is hopefully temporary.
I plan on experimenting with slap chop and similar techniques to produce more infantry units quickly. I have enough French to run a decent game but need opposing forces. A local gamer has some Austrians he’s working on and I will either augment that or work on some Russians.
I also have a small number of units for the Great Northern War in 28mm. I have two Swedish and two Russian infantry regiments right now and am planning on using “Beneath the Lily Banners” or possibly Simon Miller’s new “Lust for Glory” rules once they are available.
Finally I caved and bought the latest Warhammer 30K starter box and hope to build some troops to play that. The new FLGS in my area is very GW-focused from a miniatures perspective so I would like to find some other locals to play with. 30K is “almost” historical wargaming so maybe I could find some converts along the way. 🙂
Anyways that’s it for now. If you’re in the Twin Cities, MN area and are interested in any of the projects I mentioned, do get in touch.
Posts Tagged 'WWII'
2025 Update
Published August 20, 2025 miniature-wargames , Napoleonics , painting , World War II Leave a CommentTags: 15mm, 28mm Miniatures, fantasy, hobby, miniature wargaming, miniature-wargames, miniatures, Napoleonics, painting, wargames, wargaming, WWII
Happy 2024
Published January 14, 2024 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: 15mm, 28mm Miniatures, miniature-wargames, Napoleonics, wargames, WWII
Here I was trying to keep up with this blog on a more regular cadence and suddenly we have a 7-month gap between posts. The best of intentions and all that… Anyway, I thought I’d write a short post to talk about what’s transpired since the last post and what my gaming plans are for this coming year.
2023 was a good year for me gaming-wise as I started actually playing games again on a regular basis. I started out the year playing with one of the long-established groups that meets at a local game store. They play a wide range of historical periods along with Fantasy and Sci Fi. Regardless, they have a few constraints that dictate the rules used: Games last no more than two hours, and they often have to support a dozen players more more. The games are fun, but tend towards the simpler side due to these limitations.
Mid-year I managed to join up with another local group that plays out of the organizer’s home, focusing mostly on ACW & WWII historicals and Sci-Fi games with the occasional pulp game tossed in for good measure. With a smaller group of players and fewer games in the rotation we use rules that have more complexity to them and I find them more intellectually stimulating. Compared to the previous decade where sometimes I only played a game a year, 2023 led to much dice rolling and camaraderie. I’ve missed it and am looking forward to more.
Painting-wise, I also had a productive (for me) year. Here’s the tally:
– I finished a full reinforced platoon of 28mm Late-War WWII British for games like Bolt Action or Chain of Command.
– I painted three stands (30 models) of Northstar’s Oathmark Human Infantry for the fantasy rules played by the group at the FLGS.
– I completed around 40 28mm Models for the “Back of Beyond” or Russian Civil War. Mostly red sailors with command and a Maxim MG team along with a few other characters of dubious intent.
– I started about 25mm WWI Austro-Hungarian Infantry from Brigade Games also for the Russian Civil War.
– I started painting 28mm French Napoleonic Infantry but ran into painter’s block. The method I chose to follow was very detailed and as I figured out about 2/3 of the way through a battalion, impractical for building armies at scale. I need to continually remind myself that at three feet distance those highlights are practically invisible.
– Finally, I have around 16 of the new plastic battlemechs for Battletech that are in various stages of completion.
All in all, a productive year.
For 2024, I am going to try and tighten focus. With the Back of Beyond stuff more or less finished for now I plan on shifting back to 28mm Napoleonics. In addition to my first contact that is painting Prussians here in the cities (Hi Jason!) I also recently found out that another member of my Wednesday night group is painting Austrians (Hi Chris!). So cranking out Frenchmen will be priority #1. In addition to the Perry, Front Rank and Calpe minis I’ve already purchased, I bought myself a resin 3d printer for Christmas and am going to be purchasing the STL files from Piano Wargames. They look like lovely sculpts and are sized to match well with the Perry models. They should fit decently well with Victrix as well.
As a palate cleanser or change of pace from rank after rank of French Infantry, I have purchased some 15mm WWII minis. My Wednesday Night group likes Fireball Forward for WWII in that scale and I am also looking at O Group and the Battlegroup series of rules for doing larger games with combined arms. The 3d resin printer will come in handy here, too.
Finally I have some old 15mm Sci Fi models that I would like to use. Small figures with simple paint jobs so get some forces going relatively quickly.
Those are the plans. I will endeavor to try and keep the blog updated on a more regular basis as well. Life gets in the way but I will do my best.
I hope 2024 is better for all of us.
April 2023 Update
Published April 1, 2023 Uncategorized Leave a CommentTags: 28mm Miniatures, minatures painting, Napoleonics, WWII
Greetings everyone.
It’s been a while since my last post but I haven’t been idle in the meantime. I don’t have a setup for taking pictures of my models so this will be a short text-only update. I’ll try to remedy that in coming months,
Painting
I’ve finished my 28mm Late-war WWII British army. In my last post I mentioned that I had finished the final sections of infantry. Since then I’ve added the following bits:
- A command section with a senior leader, Sgt, Radioman and medic
- Two snipers in ghillie suits
- Two Vickers MG teams
- Two 3″ Mortar Teams
- 1 6-pdr AT Gun
The only 28mm WWII items I have in my backlog are a troop of three Cromwell tanks, I’ll assemble and a paint them at some point when I get tired of painting black powder troops.
I also assembled and primed a bag of the excellent Victrix 28mm Republican Roman cavalry. One of the local groups plays 28mm scale ancients and I’ve got enough Romans and Carthaginians to paint up small forces for each.
Finally, I have started on the great work – 28mm Napoleonics. I’ve assembled and primed my first box of Perry plastic French infantry. I had a box of the 1807-12 infantry in the pre-Bardin uniform. They are excellent figures. The sculpting is top-notch as you’d expect from the Perry twins. Each figure has at least 5 parts (body, head, two arms and the pack/coattails, which is both a blessing and a curse. The modularity means you can build a unit with individual poses for each model. It also means you have to clip, scrape and assemble more pieces per model. So, assembling the models took a while.
I managed to fully-paint a few skirmishers to test out my painting scheme for these figures. I’m following what I’ll call the “Spanish School” of figure painting promoted by the likes of “El Mercenario” Javier Gomez and Rafa “Archiduque” among others. Basically, black prime and shadow/base/highlight using primarily Vallejo colors. I bought the “Painting War” magazine issue for the French Napoleonic army and have been happy with the results so far. I’ve tended in the past to have very subtle shading and then wash it all out with overall washed of Army Painter Strong Tone/Citadel Agrax Earthhade. This works fine for eras like WWII where people are trying hard to not be seen but it ends up with subdued colors for more flashy periods like the Napoleonic wars. The recipes in “Painting War” gave me a brighter overall color scheme that might not be as realistic but will show up on the tabletop a lot better without using garish color schemes. So, I’m happy with this. Picture soon-ish I hope.
Note: Javer Gomez’s book “Painting Wargaming Figures”. has very similar paint recipes and is readily available in the US and UK. It’s a great starting point for gamers looking to get historically plausible paint schemes for their models.
Right now I’m aiming more at 1812-1814 so I’ll be doing way more of the FN100 boxes in the future, which should cut down on both assembly and painting time (greatcoats FTW).
Gaming
I continue to play games on Monday evenings with one of the local gaming groups in town. I’ve played a variety of games including French & Indian War, fantasy, Napoleonics and ulta-moderns. I get to 1-2 games a month right now which works with both my work and family schedules.
That’s all for now, It’s been a long winter here in MN and I am looking forward to spring. Hope all is well with everyone, and I’ll try to post again soon.
Signs of Life – Part 2
Published September 15, 2022 miniature-wargames Leave a CommentTags: 28mm Miniatures, miniature-wargames, Napoleonics, WWII
Greetings. I’m performing a bit of online necromancy to try and resurrect this blog from it’s long slumber. I had plans to try and jumpstart my hobbying and gaming activities the last time I posted in 2019, and then life happened in some very unexpected ways. New Job, caring for sick family members, dealing with loss and then the pandemic hit. Needless to say it was a lot and for the last few years it was all I could do to simply keep my head above water and keep moving forward. For the last few years I spent most of my free time doing relatively mindless things as I usually expended most of my mental bandwidth on my job and family.
Fast forward to 2022 and things seem to be clearing up. The job is still there with all of its demands, but otherwise things appear to be moving to a ‘new normal’ as it were and I’m finding more energy and desire to do more with my free time than simply trying to keep my favorite chair from floating off into the universe. We bought a lake place last year and I’ve been spending most of my weekends since then learning how to be a better fisherman during open water season (i.e. roughly April – October each year here in the upper Midwest USA). I find it relaxing and challenging at the same time and keep getting slightly better at inconveniencing the largemouth bass that live in my lake. Sadly, we are approaching the end of the open water fishing season and over the next month I need to make plans to get the boat to its winter storage, pull the dock out of the water and get ready for the onset of winter.
I like fishing, but not enough to want to spend winter days out on the ice so I’m looking for other outlets for my creative energy and spare time. As always, thoughts drift back to miniatures gaming, as it’s been part of my life for 40 years now. With that in mind, I’m starting to work on projects, get my hobby desk back in some semblance of order and hopefully get enough of a force to start doing some gaming again.
I’ve got a lot of figures and projects in the proverbial backlog. Overall I am tending towards larger figures again for the most part due to the fact that I have always preferred the larger scales, but also due to the fact that I’m getting older and my eyesight isn’t what it used to be. The challenge for me will be to be OK with a good paintjob on models versus putting on the magnifiers and trying to block, shade & highlight everything. The quality of figures being produced keeps on getting better, and it can be hard to fight the urge to work on every detail you can see up close.
A few projects I’m working on right now:
- Late War British for Bolt Action – I’m working on a force based on the Guards Armored Division for Normandy through Market Garden. The new Warlord plastics are quite good.
- Battletech – I used to play this frequently back in the pre-Clan invasion days and continued to do so until around 2000. I regret selling off my old Ral Partha mechs back in the day but have been collecting the new Catalyst Game Labs models and they are quite good. I have a few lances of Donegal Guards ready for the tabletop and even managed to play a game earlier this year with them. Hoping to do more.
- Warmaster – A friend of mine has access to the new hi-def resin 3d printers and I am slowly working on Orcs and Goblins for Warmaster. The quality of these 3d sculpts can be amazing.
- Napoleonics in 28mm – Ever the dream. More on that later.
- 28mm Republican Romans – I have a few boxes of the Victrix models that I was thinking of using for Saga, SPQR or eventually something like To The Strongest. It’s back-burnered for now,
I’m hoping to use this blog as motivation for me to stick to projects and get them done. If others find it and keep reading, that’s a bonus. Thanks for reading and I am planning on having new posts more often than every three years. 🙂
A Long Overdue Update & Plans for 2013
Published January 5, 2013 Napoleonics , painting , rants , wargames , World War II Leave a CommentTags: 28mm, miniature-wargames, WWII
Happy New Year everyone!
It’s been a long time since I updated this blog. As usual, there are a couple of reasons for this:
- Life has been busy. My work got very busy in the second half of 2012 and I spent a lot of time working out of town. Naturally this had a negative effect on my hobby time. I also had some family health issues to deal with as well.
- What hobby time I have had has mostly been spent working on non-historical projects. I picked up a copy of Warhammer 40K last summer and found a new (to me) local game store that had a healthy GW gaming crowd that had a vibe I liked. As a result, I’ve spent most of my hobby time painting up a Tau army for Warhammer 40K. I’ve started a separate blog covering my GW-related activities. If you’re interested, you can check it out here.
- When I’ve had hobby time, I’ve been spending it on painting versus writing. I joined Twitter last year and spend more time writing short updates there. I find the short-form micro-blogging that Twitter allows for is something I can keep up with much easier. If you’re curious, my Twitter handle is @GreatRedoubt. I talk about both GW & historical gaming there. I haven’t found too man historical miniatures gamers on Twitter so my content & timeline skews towards the GW crowd.
I’ve enjoyed the break from painting Napoleonics figures. While I would still love to build armies and play games with large blocks of 28mm Napoleonics, it’s not a short-term project for me, especially without at least one other committed partner. In the meantime, I’m looking at starting at least one short-term, smaller project to break up the painting production line.
The main project I’m starting is 28mm WWII. I recently bought some figures during some end-of-year closeout sales and am looking at a doing some low-level skirmishing. I know, 28mm probably isn’t the preferred scale for this period, but I like the character and dynamism that figures from companies like Artizan, Crusader & Warlord (among others) bring, and I’m already committed to doing some 28mm terrain to play on, so the thought of having to duplicate a lot of it in 10/15/20mm scale is not appealing to me.
I’m starting with 1939 in Poland. I have a few squads of Polish infantry and early German infantry on order, and eventually I’ll add some smaller tanks and supporting vehicles. While the Polish campaign was over relatively quickly, the Poles put up as much of a fight as they could, and the combat at the tactical level was not as lopsided as some gamers may think. The Germans had yet to perfect their tactics, so at a tactical level the two armies were probably closer in skill level than, say, the Germans and Russians were in 1941. Both armies used the Mauser rifle as their main squad weapon, with the Germans having a distinct advantage in squad MG (the MG34, with it’s high rate of fire) versus the Polish BAR.
I’m looking at games with maybe around a platoon per side. This keeps things small which means I can get game-able forces painted up faster as well as provide both sides without breaking the bank. I think a number of the Warhammer 40K players may be interested in trying something like this, along with some of the historical miniature players in two.
The nice thing about skirmish gaming is that basing & organizations are the same across rules sets, so I will be able to try out and potentially play a number of different rules sets.
Current candidates include:
- Bolt Action – This is the new ‘it-rules’ for WWII put out by Warlord Games & Osprey publishing. I have yet to pick up a set but plan to do so soon. I suspect this rules set may be one of the easier crossover games for GW players to pick up.
- Disposable Heroes – I’ve played this before and it can put out a fun, if sometimes bloody, game.
- Rate of Fire – These rules from Crusader Publishing look relatively simple while still being fairly ‘historical’.
- Force on Force – These rules from Ambush Alley Games would probably put out the most ‘realistic’ game, but it’s a bit complex for novices. I’d love to try it but it might be a harder sell among the local crowd. I have the pre-Osprey edition of FoF that still had the WWII rules included. A new, updated WWII version of FoF will come out eventually, but not until Bolt Action (another Osprey product) will have had a good head start from what I’ve read.
Over time if I keep on enjoying myself, the project will move into later periods of the war. I just don’t want to have games that are wall-to-wall panzers, so early war seems like a smarter place to start.
Beyond WWII I’d be interested in other 28mm projects, whether it’s ancients (WAB or similar), Dark Ages (Saga) or horse & musket. We’ll have to see how things progress as the year goes on, and who I find to game with.
Well, that’s enough blathering for now. I hope that 2013 is a good year for you and your gaming projects, and I hope to keep this blog more up-to-date as well.
An Update: Legacy of Glory, 20mm WWII and Empire
Published February 25, 2010 miniature-wargames , Napoleonics , wargames , World War II Leave a CommentTags: 15mm Napoleonics, 20mm WWII, Empire Napoleonics, Legacy of Glory, miniature-wargames, Napoleonics, Scott Bowden, wargames, WWII
Life has been busy which means the blog has been quiet. Work has been very busy and while the pace has slackened a little bit, it’s still giving me plenty to do on nights and weekends which conflicts with both family time and gaming time.
Other than buying a slew of wargame rules recently the only other purchases I’ve made have been about 20 feet of olive canvas for the start of a terrain mat and recently I’ve bought some 20mm WWII figures for France 1940. I’ve been painting in spurts and recently started working in earnest on the AB Russians again. I’ve gone back to a cleaner version of my original style since the blocking-in look, while nice was very time consuming. Between the Napoleonics and 20mm stuff I’ll be plenty busy over the next few months as time allows.
Gaming-wise it’s been a slow time. Haven’t done any since the fall. I have my Legacy of Glory gaming group coming over Saturday to spend an afternoon pushing troops around to get more familiar with the rules. This will be our third meeting and things are slowly coming together. We would’ve been further along had my schedule not been so messed up over the winter; our plan is to meet at least once every two months if not monthly. We’ll see how that goes. I hope to get a copy of the beta rules for LoG: Thunder of Destiny sometime this spring. The rules authors are starting to distribute early releases of the rules in snippets and so far things look good. I’m hopeful that playtesting will reap benefits for both game play and rules layout. The first edition of the rules suffered from formatting issues that kept a good set of rules from gaining wider acceptance.
In other news, Scott Bowden is re-releasing Empire in several versions (the original Empire, Empire II and EMPIRE (aka Empire V)) in electronic form via The War Event. If anyone’s interested in getting a set, it’s a way to keep interest alive in the rules. I haven’t played Empire in almost two decades but I had fun with the rules when we played and would not turn down a chance to play them again with the right group of people. Another game with a complex learning curve like Legacy of Glory.
Something New: Force on Force
Published September 30, 2009 miniature-wargames , wargames , World War II 7 CommentsTags: 20mm, Ambush Alley, miniature-wargames, wargames, WWII
I ordered a copy of “Force on Force” from Ambush Alley Games yesterday. I had previously downloaded the free version of Ambush Alley and liked the ideas, so I thought I’d spring for a copy of FOF with an eye to some World War II and maybe some modern/near-future gaming. It’s a busy week (when isn’t it?) so I haven’t had a chance to peruse the PDF versions I received, but based on the feedback I’ve seen on the web and the AA rules that they’re based on, I’m looking forward to them.
I’m going to slowly accumulate some 20mm WWII figures for running some small games. It will be a nice diversion from Napoleonics and it may be something I can interest my son in playing a few years from now (he’s 7). I figure when I get bored with painting too many white straps and shako cords I can switch and do some figures in camouflage to mix things up a bit. With winter coming on we’re getting back to what I consider to be prime time painting season. With much less outdoor work to be done, I’ll have a few more hours a month for painting. Mixing in a few platoons of 20mm WWII figs shouldn’t be hard.
I may also pick up PDF copies of Rapid Fire 2nd Edition and some of their supplements as well for a quick & dirty larger games.
Closed circuit to Chris S.: Answer your damn email! 😉
Battlefront’s Empire Grows
Published February 12, 2009 Flames of War , miniature-wargames , Napoleonics , wargames , World War II 5 CommentsTags: battlefront, Flames of War, gale force 9, Napoleonics, wargames, Wargames Illustrated, WWII
As you may have seen on TMP today, the boys at Battlefront have been busy snapping up companies. Just today they announced buying both Gale Force 9 and, somewhat more surprisingly, Wargames Illustrated. As pointed out on the TMP fora, the acquisition of GF9 makes sense with the popularity of the specialty dice, templates, counters etc. That looks to me to be a tactical move to bring some expertise in-house and possibly increase their distribution channels/footprint in the USA. Hopefully it will mean improved customer service for the US, since I gather that in general it’s been fair to horseshit in the past.
Battlefront’s purchase of Wargames Illustrated is a more interesting move IMO. A longtime stalwart of the historical miniatures scene, WI has global reach, a dominant brand name in the (albeit small) wargames press, and decades of expertise. I haven’t bought the magazine much in the past decade mostly due to lack of interest and continually rising prices. A single copy at the Source now runs $9.00, which is too much for me to drop on an issue that may not personally interest me much. It will be interesting to see how the new ownership changes the content. The grognards on TMP are already bitching about dumbing down the content and WI morphing into Battlefront’s version of White Dwarf… i.e. a glossy catalog of new figures and rules for FOW with some other filler. We’ll see if that happens or not.
The Great Redoubt 