July 2025 – Skinflint Games

You knew this was coming, right? Nothing says “Weird World War 2” more than the infamous Maus tank.. and being as this Apocalypse: Earth is set in an Even Weirder World War 2, it makes sense to have an Even Weirder Maus.. and thematically, as The League Of European Nations is fighting a grim and bloody defensive war against the Holy Soviet hordes, it makes sense to have a big, slow, solid defence tank with a BIG gun.

I did download a Maus papercraft but couldn’t figure the scale so, I sat down with foamboard, card and Google Images and got to business.

For the unintitiated, this is what the Maus would have looked like..

4 foamboard rectangles, dimensions written in

Glue the foamboard slabs together so you’ve got two sets of two, and look what serendipity has provided as a turret and main gun…. yes, that’s a Loctite superglue gel tube and a sawn off pen, stuck together with the the usual mix of quick dry PVA and superglue. I found that if you paint the foamcoare with PVA first, you get the superglue kind of bonding the PVA layers to each other and avoiding the foam melting.

Next up, looking at the Maus picture, it didn’t follow the pattern of separate track units and hull, so I decided to create a frontage that pulled the track units together and gave a solid hull…. the floor was lacking, but GW don’t seem to see that as problem on their (checks GW site) £63.25 Rogal Dorn kit..

Greeblies added with card and PVA dots, and here’s the turret and hull together!

Paint scheme was the same as the Cougars-

Crafter’s Choice tan basecoat (3 – THREE!! – of), then stippled Vallejo Russian Green over the top with a makeup brush

Same trick done with craft brown acrylic

After thin wash of Smokey ink, pin was h around the rivets, sponge chip with black and drybrushed mud with brown craft paint. Paintbrush bristle added for antenna.

I also discovered the turret had an unfortunate tendency to fall over, so I used a bit of sprue to create a frame to balance it on – this got primed silver and washed down, sitting nicely under the turret and stopping the unfortunate “Brewers Droop”…

Energy coils got painted white and then overpainted with cheap translucent craft blue, thinned with water

I should mention the gun – this is the Sonic Cannon that’s in the rulebook but none of the units in the army lists take (sigh) – this is a great big bugger that projects an incredibly powerful focused soundwave downrange, pretty much causing whatever it hits to shake itself to pieces in moments. So it’s great for picking off Soviet monstrosities, but there are a couple of downsides -1) it’s enormously power hungry, hence need for a massive tank which is basically a big rolling lithium ion battery (and we know what happens when those things catch fire) and therefore can’t fire on the move, and 2) ANYTHING in the way of the soundwave gets hit. So not great for a manouevre-orientated assaulting force, but pretty handy if you just need to sit there and carve chunks out of a a vastly more numerous attacking foe, which is most (but not all) of the League Of European Nations mission statement.

And the whole LoEN force as is:

So that’s a platoon of regular infantry (2 rifle squads, 2 Himmelsturm jump pack-equipped assault squads), a platoon of territorial infantry, a platoon of Jagers, a platoon of Ocelot light tanks, the Cougars and the Haunebau – pretty comprehensive!

So there we are, I reckon that is the LoEN done – at least for now… next up, let’s see if we can get the Chinese up to speed!

Stay thrifty out there and Slavia Ukrainia

Summer is fast approaching – Christ knows how as it’s only been 2025 for five minutes – and with it the traditional Skinflint Games Smackdown.. and with version 2.0 now available out in the big wide world, we figured we should push the system to its limits with a beast of a game featuring all four factions..

Now, A:E has been conspicuous by its absence since we entered the current Age Of Strife – but it seems that somehow Putin hasn’t got the message.. and given that we’re donating 25% of profits to Ukraine, we can hopefully raise enough for a few blankets and a generator and maybe do something a bit useful.

So this necessitates filling in a few gaps – the Atlantic Alliance and Holy Soviet Empire are pretty well fleshed out, and the Chinese are still recruiting, so we went for some low hanging fruit, fleshing out the the League Of European Nations with a tank platoon featuring 3 Pzkfw VII “Cougar” medium battle tanks. In game, these clock in below the Alliance M60A3s in capability, but above the T-48s and older Chinese Type 52s – packing decent armour, and a 105mm cannon but without the ATGM systems present on the Atlantic Alliance vehicles.

I started with a papercraft template from … 2017, so I know not where I’m afraid, but it claimed to be a “Simple Leopard Tank”, but was clearly scaled for 28mm, so I resized it in GIMP to 66% and printed the templates out, Pritt Stick’d them (hey, I invented a verb!) to cereal box cardboard and cut them out. An IDE cable got chopped up to provide tracks and a drinking straw with paper wrapped around it provided the barrel. I chopped up a couple of bits of granny grating for the machine guns and sculpted green stuff to make the stowage, dotted PVA blobs on with a cocktail stick for rivets (I’m sure BMW, Merc, Audi & Porsche drivers will recognise the tendency in German engineering to reinforce welding with rivets)… and then off to the shed for priming.

I gave all three vehicles a grey prime and dusted it with white, then a couple of thinned base coats of Crafter’s Choice tan, a thin Vallejo Smokey Ink wash, before drybrushing up with basecoat tan and bone, before stippling on the camo patterns using craft brown and Vallejo Russian Green – I did the drybrushing and stippling with a set of cheap makeup brushes off AliExpress following a tip from Midwinter Minis, cheers Guy!

So, pics:

Primed and basecoated with Crafter’s Choice “Dunkelgelb”

Stippled on craft brown, washed with thinned Smokey Ink and drybrushed

Should mention the funky looking gun on the middle tank – that’s a superglue nozzle, and in game it represents a Gravity Lance, used to pin targets in place for the attention of… well, you’ll see in the next post!

Should mention the antenna – clipped off a dead paintbrush and painted black

Stay thrifty out there and Slavia Ukrainia

Month: July 2025

Maus In The Haus

Goin’ Down To Cougar Town – New MBTs for The League Of European Nations