Sunday 14 November 2021

76 Volks completed & 6mm terrain.

I finished the 76 Volkssturm figures for Alister on Saturday morning with the two machine gun teams. Once again a quick video seems to give better results than my phone camera, please excuse my gruff voice! They will be heading home to Brighton Monday morning.

I'll prep up another 9 figure regiment of 20mm WSS cavalry this evening for Tony and these will be painted this week along with a 28 figure unit of Peter Pig Berdan's Sharpshooters for Graham.



So with a free Saturday afternoon I decided to take the plunge and mark out my folding card table in a 75mm square grid by carefully dotting out just the corners with a yellow paint. The results are pleasing as the grid is quite difficult to see when you stand back a couple of feet or so. The previously made woods sit nicely into 2 squares and it's possible to place a unit base along any edge to represent it being inside rather than placing it on top! The first experimental hill was made from 4 layers of 5mm foam board covered in matching green cloth, superglued on the underside and trimmed round. I'm pleased with it as the one thing I really do not like about the 'Portable Wargame' concept are square hills. The road needs to be narrower and slightly more twisty I think so that's the next job along with field textures to break up the bare green. I'll be basing everything on the same thin plastic sheet as the figures to avoid any hard edges where possible. 

I'm working on pulling the rules together now, I won't go into detail yet but suffice to say they are mostly Commands & Colors based with a simple DBN style activation roll so no cards and squares instead of hexes, and a DBN inspired roll for attacker/defender with defender choosing which of the four table edges to defend while the attacker deploys opposite and get's the first activation throw. 

. I have just one aim with this and that's to have some fun with quick play easy set up, portable style wargames that allows me to indulge myself in painting tiny soldiers and messing around with terrain! 20 units completed now plus command stands, I have another British infantry unit on the go to be followed by a unit of Greek Legion in traditional attire.







7 comments:

  1. Lovely and neat mate. Really like it! Strangely enough I’ve just ordered a small 2ft x2ft hexed C&C style mat for my 2mm boys. Simple is definitely best.

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    1. Cheers JBM, I'm enjoying playing around with this little project. Look forward to seeing your new mat.

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  2. Lovely, woods work well,are the hills just a little hard edged? I only say this as I am looking at doing hills for TtS to fit in grids,I'm planning on building them with the green underfloor insulation and painting and flocking them, that way you can get more of a broken edge, of course that's for 28mm and the more graphic approach might well be more appropriate in your scale,I like the little yellow dot grid,very subtle!
    Best Iain

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    1. That's a good idea there Iain might have to look into that :)

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  3. Lee, that's a really convincingly irregular bunch of Volksturm, I'm sure Aly will love 'em..
    The 6mil Crimea is coming on as well. When it comes to hills, I think it is easier to make the base bigger than a grid-square and the top smaller than a grid-square. That way the slope straddles the boundary and the top of the hill, while still smaller than a square is a bit less cramped. You can probably also afford a slightly shallower slope for a more realistic hill - making the hill not quite so high would also help.
    Got another ECW game arranged for Tuesday, let's see if the rules hold up as well second time around.

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    1. Thanks Rob. I'm still experimenting with hills, just got a new sheet of foam board this morning. I want to keep the hill height in relation to the small houses and woods to try to get a vertical scale perspective. Good luck with the game and please take plenty of pics. Which rules are you using?

      Lee.

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    2. Still using my mash up of Victory Without Quarter and Command & Colours.

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