Pocket Panzers

Well, games set in the French and Indian War mean specialized terrain for the period, at least if your brain works like mine. After all, you can't have tomahawk-toting Huron fighting in the ruins of Stalingrad , right? Of god forbid, some sort of gothic 40K monstrosity. What I'm trying to say is that this is the first of several period-appropriate buildings I plan on scratch-building for our games in the period. It's built in much the same way as the log building I scratch built for my eastern front terrain, which can be seen most prominently here, where I also showed off my split-rail fencing for the FIW project. However, I tried to take the lessons I learned from making that cabin and apply them here to get a better result. Those lessons were, primarily: 1. the dowel rods I used as logs looked far far too uniform; 2. I notched them by hand with a craft knife, which took forever and murdered my hands; 3. the insulation or chinking between the logs looked unconvincing, and...

  The next step in my French and Indian War project, unsurprisingly, is some French . These gentlemen reek of garlic cutting… wait, my mistake, that was meant to be Gallic cunning . Either way, they're the first group of light infantry skirmishers for Sharp Practice, representing a portion of a Compagnie de la Marine. Now, I don't speak French, and am probably not the best equipped to explain the history of these troops, but they're essentially crown-raised colonial troops under the umbrella of the French navy (hence marine). I don't think referring to them as marines is technically accurate, they aren't typically ship-borne, but I suspect I will in the interests of brevity. These men would have, to the best of my knowledge, been trained to fight in the traditional European style and issued fine uniforms, but frequently ditched or modified both the clothing and tactics to better fit the North American style of warfare. Until French regulars arrived in 1756, these me...

  As some of you may have inferred, my next big project will be set in colonial America. I plan to keep the precise setting under wraps for a little while longer, until I have some figures done to show, but I have already gotten cracking on some terrain. This first batch covers, as you might have guessed, fences, ponds, and a bit of delicious scatter terrain. My Russian cabin is shown here, though some more period-correct buildings will come in time. To me, the split-rail 'snake' fences are a must-have for a project like this, so I set about making some, drawing inspiration from Mark at Tactical Painter and John Bond . Here, an anachronistic German soldier shows the scale of these fence sections. I did 8-inch lengths, largely because I typically have to transport my gaming kit to and from gaming stores and friends' places. It might be better to have one or two 12-inch lengths. If so, I can always make those later. These ponds are cut from the MDF or hardboard I use for bas...

  Over the last couple weeks, I set about revamping my bunkers and entrenchments for WWII wargames. My last attempts were made in the first couple months after I started gaming, in my college apartment bedroom. I have a much better setup now, I'd like to think. So let me show you what I've made. Here are some of my previous entrenchments in use. Up top, some scatter sandbags and below, an earthen rampart of sorts. These aren't bad, but not exactly what I wanted. The rampart, for example, is large enough to give convincing cover, but looks a little out of place on the table. There's some planks on the back side, but what's supposed to be holding all that dirt up in that shape? Anyway, I knew I could do better. Bunkers These designs are pretty shamelessly stolen from TinyHordes' Soviet MG Platoon , which is appropriate because that's the Chain of Command list I'll be using them for. Three machine-gun bunkers and a command post bunker up front. These are ba...