Pocket Panzers

  It's been a minute since my last update — April and early May have been very busy, and even when I've had time, I've struggled to focus on and finish a single project. But with our French and Indian War campaign using Sharp Practice 2 set to kick off in about a week, I felt the need to get my act together and finish some more terrain. That's where this second log house comes in. This scratch-build uses largely all the same techniques as I used in my first cabin , but has a few other features, most notably the stacked-log chimney instead of a stone chimney and the bark-sheet roofing instead of shingles. The log chimney was a lot of hassle, but I think it looks relatively convincing, and it has that distinctive early colonial flair. I'm not all that eager to do another one, however. I guess that's the cost of detailed scratch building. The use of bark sheets as roofing is drawn from the excellent YouTube channel Townsends, where their group of living history ent...

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...

In addition to a group of marauding Huron warriors , I recently finished off these stalwart defenders of New France, the milice canadienne. I don't have much in the way of a history lesson on these guys. Based on the reading I've done and the uniforms I see, they seem like a mix of quickly raised militia and experienced woodsmen. They seem better than their British colonial counterparts, especially the later minutemen. At least, in the Sharp Practice ruleset we have been using. With the exception of the leader in the back, these figures are by Brigade Games . They're great sculpts, with a lot of detail and character. They don't paint up quite as fast as some of the Warlord figures, but they're still excellent. They're a little slender compared to Warlord sculpts, but no big issue. My only real complaint is that the musket barrels, though realistically proportioned, are incredibly thin, and give me the impression that they're be very easy to damage. They'...

  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...

  The perceptive among you have probably guessed that my new wargaming project is going to be a force of French and Native American warriors for the French and Indian / Seven Year's War. This will be my first time doing any sort of black powder era wargaming - my first foray out of WWII wargaming, actually. I was drawn to model the French side because of their interesting uniforms and heavy reliance on Huron and other native allies. Plus, everyone loves an underdog, right? We'll be using Sharp Practice by Too Fat Lardies , but I suspect we might end up giving Studio Tomahawk's ruleset Muskets and Tomahawks a try eventually as well. This Christmas, I was gifted a box of Warlord's Woodland Indian War Party , which are actually metal sculpts by Conquest Miniatures. I've always loved these characterful and detailed figures, and painting them has been great. This is just the first batch of them, and I also quickly added to my collection some plastic natives , also from ...

  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...