Pocket Panzers

Allow me to regale you with a tale of a game past. In particular, the story of my second game of the day for Virtual Lard 7, a long-distance tabletop event put on by the Too Fat Lardies community. I'll be the first to admit that this post is a bit... delayed. VL7 happened at the end of October, nearly four months ago. My post about my first game of the day was far more timely. However, as I said recently, last fall I hit a pretty bad creative slump that I'm only just new getting out of. This Sharp Practice 2 game is set during the American War of Independence — my first foray into the period after exploring the ruleset with our French and Indian War campaign last year (more on that soon). As always with my write-ups of virtual games, please keep in mind that the generous hosts have to juggle moving the forces of both sides and dealing with as many as four different players, all over internet connections that can sometimes be shady. They are very good about positioning webcams ...

  This week, I managed to finish up a number of figures that I started late last year in an effort to get back into the swing of painting models after a substantial break. Some of those figures require a couple finishing touches, but I did complete one squad plus a platoon leader for a Panzer Lehr Division platoon. I started this project late in 2019, when I purchased some of Artizan's Panzer Lehr figures. I'm usually not too hot on Artizan figures. They're easy to paint but are usually not detailed enough for my tastes. The Lehr figures, while still a little on the soft and chunky side, were a bit more of a happy medium. Plus, Lehr is a unit that fought both British and American troops in Normandy, making them flexible. At the time, my main opponent had a sizable Normady-themed British force and I only had a rag-tag bunch of Waffen SS figures that fit that period. I elected to build a panzergrenadier platoon for Chain of Command, as it involved slightly fewer figures and m...