Pocket Panzers

  2023 has been an interesting year for my hobbying. For starters, for most of the year I've had practically no other gamers to play historical wargames with, which contributed greatly to my decision to make the leap into Warhammer 40K. That's been a bit of an adjustment on all fronts, and something I'll touch on more later. This year has also brought a lot of distractions in the form of work and other life events, and I've struggled a lot with burnout, particularly when it comes to getting models off the painting table. The above photo, by the way, was taken during a recent game in which Jesse's Chinese faced off against my Soviet horde in a game set in 1937 in Xinjiang. Speaking of the painting table, why don't we take a look at the numbers this year? I always intend to paint more models than I buy, but so far that's only happened in 2021, when the ongoing pandemic and my lack of a job for part of the year gave me plenty of time to paint. On the bright sid...

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...

Well, the year has come and gone, so here's a look back at my year in wargaming. This year, I made the jump to a new game system - Sharp Practice 2 - set in a new time period - the French and Indian War - which made for a lot of fun games and really entertaining miniatures to paint. I thoroughly enjoyed my dive into the black powder period. In the last month of the year, I also made the fateful jump into collecting Warhammer 40K. I've played two games so far and have enjoyed it, but it's an interesting adjustment. Expect some posts about my 40K ventures in 2023, but I plan to keep the blog's focus on historical wargaming. Now, some numbers: 2022 Models Acquired: - Figures: 251 95x FIW 84x WWII 67x 40K 5x fantasy - Support Weapons*: 1 - Vehicles: 3 - Buildings: 0 - Scatter Terrain**: 0 - Markers/Tokens: 19 2022 Models Painted: - Figures: 110 33x FIW Native Americans 30x FIW French line infantry 22x FIW French compagnie franches de la marine 9x FIW Rangers 8x FIW Canadian...

Well it's nearly Halloween, so seems fitting that I return from the dead with a new post, this time about the completion of the last major unit for my French and Indian War force. These figures were painted in late August, right before we finished playing out our FIW campaign and I took an abrupt and unplanned hiatus from wargaming and mini painting. My main wargaming partner in the area has left the country for two years on a Peace Corps assignment, and work has limited the time and energy I've had. Nevertheless, I do intend to make more posts here this fall, including battle reports from the FIW campaign. But, back to the miniatures. In Sharp Practice terms, this is three groups of regular French line infantry. I've got them painted as the Regiment Languedoc that served in North America, but I believe they could also stand in as campagnie franches de la marine troops in line formation. To that end, I've modeled flags for both units, since I shouldn't need two stan...

  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...