Pocket Panzers

After an extended sojourn in the grim darkness of the far future, I got back to basics by finally painting up my PaK 36 model. I haven't painted any WWII figures since a couple of Soviet casualty figures in late December, and haven't featured any new figures on the blog in almost a year . This is the exceptional plastic model from Rubicon, spruced up with a crew made from Warlord's plastic Germans. I didn't much care for the Rubicon crew, I don't think they match the style of the rest of my Germans very well. It took me forever to get around to painting this model, partially because the very specific spare ammo canisters went missing in my bits box for several months after I finished kitbashing the figures. The PaK 36 is greatly maligned among history buffs and wargamers, considered weak to the point of ineffectiveness against French and Soviet tanks. While that reputation is not totally unearned, the guns still made up the backbone of the panzerjager forces for a g...

Last weekend, I headed to the local game store intending to try out What a Cowboy , the recently released Old West shootout ruleset written by John Savage and published through Too Fat Lardies, makers of Chain of Command and Sharp Practice. There will be more on that front soon, but that plan fell through. Fortunately, an old wargaming friend of mine, Curtis, was in town. He's a pretty avid Bolt Action player but isn't as big on Chain of Command, while I feel pretty much the opposite way. We decided to roll off, and Bolt Action won.

Gebirgsjäger — German mountain troops — are a project I've wanted to tackle for some time, although I couldn't say exactly where the idea first came from. At this scale, the mountain infantry are not that different in appearance from regular German soldiers, aside from the inclusion of some specialized winter clothing. And at least in the game systems I've played, their special rules are nothing to write home about. Still, there's something about the depictions of them in historical photographs, art and reenacting circles that has always appealed to me. Maybe it's the status they carried as elite troops, or the way they seem to appear scruffier and hardier than the average German soldier, or even the Third Reich's tendency to throw away the lives of their specialized troops as leg infantry to stave off an inevitable defeat. What I'm getting at is that I've made some Gebirgsjäger. I started with a squad at first, but I've got every intention to expand...

After taking a bit of a self-enforced break from wargaming at the end of August, I was fortunate enough to snag two games at Virtual Lard 7, hosted by the Too Fat Lardies (makers of Chain of Command, Sharp Practice, etc) community. This is the first of those, a Chain of Command game set on the eastern front during the late summer of 1941. As I've discussed previously on this blog, these games, hosted virtually through various video-conferencing apps, were the community's answer to the pandemic. For me, though, they've given me a great chance to play games with members of the Lardy community in the UK and elsewhere that I never would have gotten otherwise. In this scenario, the Germans are tasked with advancing quickly across the steppe (shown above on right) and reducing a pocket of Soviet stragglers held up in the factory complex. To accomplish this, they'll have a three-squad infantry platoon with its light mortar team, plus a tripod-mounted MG-34 medium machine gun, ...

  This week, my regular opponent Jesse and I were joined by two friends that we haven't gotten to game with in months, so we took a break from the French and Indian War campaign using Sharp Practice to return to Chain of Command, which is my favorite, at least, WWII ruleset. Some people in our group feel differently. We really enjoy games set during the Battle of France in 1940, but don't get to do them very often because only one person in our group has enough French built and painted to play. In this game, Jesse and I will be taking command of a mixed German tank force and a German Kradschützen motorcycle recon platoon, respectively, in a game of Big CoC. Our opponents will have a French tank platoon and a platoon of Chasseur light infantry. The scenario is Hasty Defense from the France 1940 book. The Germans are tasked with moving a unit off the enemy table edge while keeping two thirds of the table clear of enemy forces. The French must repel them and stop a breakthrough. T...