The Painted Thumb

I participated in the FOWSA Mid-War tournament on July 22. This tournament has grown in to a tri-annual event. There is a separate tournament for Mid-War, Late-War and Early-War. Team Yankee tournaments have been added as well. Who would've thought that 15mm WWII gaming would be so popular? I attended this same tournament last year and got completely clobbered, see that post here . This year, I did much better with essentially the same list. My 1600 point list for US Rifle Company from the North Africa book. COMMAND TEAMS Rifle Company HQ    2 Cmd Carbine team        20 pts COMBAT PLATOONS Rifle Platoon       1 Cmd Rifle team        150 pts                     1 Bazooka team                     9 Rifle team Rifle Platoon  ...

I am back on my 'Family Battle Game' (FBG) project which I started to describe in this old post . To recap, I hope to setup a very nice tablescape with some nicely painted fantasy miniatures for use as an introduction to miniature wargames for my local family. If I am lucky, I will have it ready in time for Thanksgiving. I asked some of the prospective players to pick a miniature as their avatar in this game. One of the nieces hand-picked this girl warrior from my Reaper Bones collection. This figure has lots of armor and a big shield with a wolf motif. The professional from Reaper who painted the promotional figure used a shiny gold and silver armor scheme which I really liked. So, over the Independence Day vacation, I brought my paint and brushes with me. I has some time to paint and I finished this fig using the same paint scheme. The niece had requested purple hair and it worked well with the metallic color so I kept that.

Played a quick game of Test of Honour by Warlord Games hosted by my friend Blake. Blake was running a demo at our new local store, Knight Watch Games. A great store! Be sure to visit if you are every in South Texas. Me and friends at Knight's Watch Test of Honour is a skirmish game set in feudal Japan. Each player takes a small force of 5-10 miniatures. Each force has a Samurai hero, some archers, and some Ashigaru (conscripts with spears) on a large, 3-man base. I will assume that most people reading this post are already familiar with the game and I'll won't go too deep in the game details. While there are several scenarios of different types, the basic concept of each is to kill the enemy's Samurai. Initiative and activations are done in the same way as most games by Warlord. You roll a 6-sided die to determine initiative. One token for representing each unit is placed in a bag. Then you draw from the bag and activate one unit. There are three fate tokens p...

Recently, I've backed a few Kickstarters for 3D printed terrain. One of those was the Rampage Castle from Printable Scenery. The Rampage Castle is a system of parts that can be interchanged and connected like Legos to create very detailed and custom castle walls, towers and battlements. Each part is connected to other parts by a licensed technology called OpenLock clips. Each clip is compatible with models from other manufacturers/designers. Thus, you are not tied down to models from one specific manufacturer. I am very impressed by the foresight of this idea. For my first construction, I decided to do the relatively simple square tower with 4 levels. Each level required a floor piece, 4x walls, and 4x corner support columns. The first few pieces Getting taller... The result came out very nicely. The parts printed out cleanly and were very dense. I was hoping to reduce the amount of filament used in each piece. However, no matter how I adjusted my slicing software, the...