Pocket Panzers

  Met with some people I haven't gotten a chance to game with in a bit and got in two games of Chain of Command set in June or July of 1941, with German motorcycle troops advancing on a Soviet village. No full battle report for this one, but I did take some photos here and there. We played Big CoC rules with two-squad platoons for the purposes of time, and that worked very well, I think. Our Soviet players had not played Soviets before in CoC, as I recall, so there was a bit of a learning curve, but it was good for teaching. I also got to field some of my newly painted models, like the Rubicon Panzer III E shown above, which is always nice. German troops advance on a stream crossing near a Soviet farming hut, wary of Bolsheviks hiding inside. As the firefight kicks off, the German light mortar fires at entrenched Soviets on the other side of the stream to soften them up. The arrival of German armor makes the Soviet position much less tenable. Soviets deploy in force, hoping to bury...

  Over the last week or two, I've been working on sprucing up this 1/72 scale Russian izba by Pegasus to add to my rural Russian terrain. This is a plastic multipart kit with some nice textures on the wood that make for great drybrushing detail. I was very cautious of the scale - sometimes 28mm/1/56 scale buildings can be rather small, let alone 1/72 scale. Here are some Warlord plastic Soviets for scale. If you look too close, it seems a little off, but I think it'll do just fine. I think it's believable that a very rural building might not have large and lavish doors and windows. The walls go together very nicely. The roof is a little more complicated - it's meant to sort of hook into the walls and it's quite snug. I ended up modifying it quite a lot to make it easily removable. The central beam is also not terribly sturdy, in my opinion. I set about tinkering and modifying it to fit my needs, starting by filling the gaps in the side walls left by the assembly. A ...