We played our first game of the .45 Adventure rules at the gaming night earlier this week and I must say it was thoroughly enjoyable!

So that was $7us well spent (ack! three months ago). The system is fast and easy to play and creates a very cinematic feel. I’ll definitely be playing more of it in the future.

In fact the single ‘demo’ game we played generated an extended conversation amoungst the ‘Garage Gamers’ in our forums, so clearly I’ve struck a gaming nerve there somewhere.

Anyway, we needed some more 28mm desert terrain for the game, so the evening before I finished off the ruined Egyptian CD terrain piece that’s been kicking around in my garage for a while. It’s gone through a bit of re-working to add a sand bank and a couple of chunks of ruined block and looks a little better imho.

That scary looking beastie (my apologies to any arachnophobes) is the Heresy Miniatures spider I ordered way back in October ‘04 on a random whim.

Poor thing, she’s been kicking around in the gaming cupboards for so long I’ve actually had to reattach her legs twice after knocking her onto the concrete garage floor. This last patching up involved a lot of superglue and very long metal pins which will hopefully hold the legs on.

It’s only fair that now she’s likely to appear in games she gets a paint job really…

Well I finally succumbed to the dread Games Workshop marketing engine and purchased a Cities of Death Manufactorum box. $45nz locally seems like a reasonable price, particularly since I get a 10% ‘VIP’ discount from my local games store.

The contents of the box aren’t that impressive, consisting of three large sprues: two of the Manufactorum sprues pictured here and one standard COD Floor Panel sprue which is shown in Aaron’s earlier post. My sprues were a little warped too and there’s a noticeable curve on serveral of the large, thick panels which is a little annoying. The pieces you get those seem fairly useful and I can see you could have a lot of fun mixing and matching a couple of boxes.

The real reason I bought this box was to experiment and I think I’ve figured out a way to combine the COD panels and Hirst Arts gothic blocks. So this Manufactorum box will probably be converted into one intact ’substation’ block roughly 3″ x 4″ and 3 1/2″ high and one substation that’s been severly damaged in a corner. The roof will be flat with COD balustrades with a ladder up to it so figures can be placed on top.

Of course I’ve had to pilfer quite a few Hirst Arts blocks from the Cathedral casting piles so it’s back to casting plaster for me. I really *must* cut the base for that Cathedral and start building it!

Previous CoD post: Cities of Death.

I’ve been gaming with Crescent Root Studio’s excellent 15mm North African buildings for a while now. They often get arranged as a couple of little villages on the table and always look a little bare without surrounding walls.

So last week I quickly put together a couple of 3″ wall sections, a 90 degree angle joiner and a little tumbled down end piece and molded them up. The photos show the first two casts painted with a quick drybrushing of interior house acrylics.

In play they’re high enough for a Flames of War infantry base to reasonably claim cover from and they act as a nice bit of extra cover if you’ve got infantry hiding in the village. In the last game of FOW I played they actually helped foil a Russian SU-85 recklessly firing down the village’s main road at my Panzer IIIj on the other side.

I may master and mold a few more pieces: 60 degree concave and 120 degree convex pieces would be handy for making irregularly shaped fields or road junctions and of course you can never have too many 3″ long straight sections.

This is a surprise: Aaron Brown is a professional freelance 28mm figure sculptor living in Auckland (my home city). Quite talented too judging from the work on his site.

However at an ‘average price of a 28mm figurine between $250US and $300US’ I don’t think I’ll be contracting any original sculpts soon. Maybe one for the ‘if I win Lotto’ list though!

Well, I started collecting this Flames of War army (my first) in May 2004 and I just finished painting the main fighting force for the Garage Gamer’s last gaming evening on the 13th of June 2006. All that remains to be painted is five transports (two quad gun tractors, two 15cwt Lorries and a jeep) and a couple of objectives.

It’s hard to believe it has been over two years since I started assembling and painting this force. Particularly considering my second FOW army was purchased and assembled in the space of a month - but then Armored companys are pretty easy to put together.

Anyway, here’s a little roundup of the painted force as it stands now! The HQ platoon has appeared on the blog before and indeed they’re currently in the title bar - thanks to Jonathan for the web design suggestions btw. So they won’t make a repeat appearance here. Instead here’s overhead photos of the two finished Rifle platoons.

Every infantry base in my army was painted using this recipe and both Rifle platoons appear here with a light mortar and Boyes AT rifle team. I’ve also got a single painted PIAT team too. To be honest I find the LM teams are nearly useless, although they can fire smoke, and the Boyes teams totally useless, which is at least historically accurate! Both Rifle platoons typically field without those teams and one platoon is usually given sticky bombs as a stop-gap against any armor assaults.

The only other weapons or combat platoon I field is a Recce carrier group. I initially added this platoon simply because they’re a requirement when you field a NZer Div Cav Light tank platoon. However as Universals are dirt cheap and highly mobile fully-tracked vehicles carrying at least one MG they have turned out to be very useful on the table on more than one occasion.

In the photo you’ll notice the command Universal is flanked by two slightly off colour carriers. That’s because they were amoungst the first vehicles painted in my force and I was experimenting with some cheap art ink at the time. Turns out the ink wasn’t colour fast and bleed down to this odd grape purple colour from a chestnut brown. So at some point in the future these carriers will be stripped and repainted.

That covers the HQ, Rifle and Recce platoons. A following post will cover the Support platoons.

Huzzah! A free wargame from www.grognard.com: The Russians counter-attack the Germans at the gates of Moscow after Operation Typhoon fails in 1941.

Via Miniature Wargaming.

Phil describes the new Flames of War Second Edition Air Support rules in the latest FOW site update and I have to say it sounds a lot better than the way air support currently works!

Currently it’s a fiasco. Limited and Sporadic air support are rarely worth the points because the show up so unpredictably they don’t actually feature in any real tactics. They’re just a random event that can sometimes be devastating (bombing your artillery away for example) but are mostly just an annoyance for both sides.

The new system frankly makes a lot more sense. You purchase a pool of Air Support dice which you can elect to throw or not throw on any given turn. If you choose to throw them, you throw the whole pool and any number of successes results in air support arriving AND you removing ONE die from the pool.

That’s a simple mechanic that will work exactly like air support should imho. The first time you need it you’ve got a fairly good chance of it arriving, and then likelihood of continued air support is reduced in a predictable manner each time they do arrive. Lovely!

If this new Air Support is indicative of the sorts of changes we can expect to see in FOW 2nd Edition then I’m sure it will be a great success.