Pocket Panzers

After putting together two cabins and some fences for wargames set in colonial North America, it seemed only right to paint up some settlers, in this case colonists who have armed themselves to defend their livelihood from marauding French and natives. These models are Brigade Games' frontier family , and like the other Brigade models I have, they're quite nice. Definitely on the slimmer side, but detailed. My biggest gripe with Brigade figures is that the weapons are thin and bendy and the faces are all oddly similar. The set includes two figures who fit the bill for a father and mother. I personally think the man is clearly modelled off of Mel Gibson's character in the Patriot. Then two sons, both springing to action to defend the farm. If the dad is Gibson, I suppose that makes green trousers there Heath Ledger. Finally, there is a younger son and daughter carrying muskets and powder. I think the set has some nice variety, fitting a specific niche between unarmed settler...

  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...

I had a bit of a break this last weekend for a camping trip (and my birthday), and when I returned to what passes for civilization these days I finished off this second batch of French marine infantry. This forms another skirmish group of six men plus a leader for Sharp Practice. These are from Warlord's boxed set of French marine infantry , sculpted by Conquest. I'm still enjoying this set, and although there are some duplicate poses, they have been altered slightly so that they don't stick out too badly. I tried to coax out the blue hues on their clothing here, compared to the last batch where I was a little more reserved, and I like the effect. It's bright and distinctive while still keeping some deep shadows. I threw in a red-head in this unit, just for variety mostly. Maybe he's an Irish Huguenot. As I've mentioned before, these Conquest figures, both Europeans and Native Americans, have a lot of great detail and are pretty easy to paint and come up with a ...

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'...