All Wargamers should sign this petition!!

I just stumbled across this on the bleaseworld blog:

"It's not often that wargamers get a bit hot under the collar and organise a petition but with the Royal Mail have introduced some rather ludicrous restrictions on the posting of water-based paint that are not only going to be a pain in the butt for gamers who have little option but to order paint online (even living in a city like Bristol I don't have a decent source for the paint I use) but also adversely impact the livelihoods of small online traders who supply wargamers.

Please read about what the Royal Mail have done, sign the petition and encourage others to do so..."

The original post on Bleaseworld is linked above

The petition itself is here - I encourage all who this will effect to sign it - I have already!

Warfare 13

As promised in the last post, I went to the Warfare convention at the Rivermead Leisure Centre in Reading (for those unfamiliar with it, the town name is pronounced "Redding" not "Reeding"). As ususal, I'd placed a number of pre-orders and fell victim (unsurprisingly!) to 'ooh-shiny!' on the day ...

This pic shows what I arrived with when I got home. You can see I got a copy of "Bolt Action" - something I hadn't intended to get, but I'd been to my brother's recently and he had recommended the game, so I thought I'd give it a try. The figures in the bottom centre are a British unit for the Indian Mutiny from Mutineer Miniatures who had a '5 packs for the price of 4' show offer.

The bag on the left with the blue boxes contains stuff for 2 new projects ... oops!

Last Friday's game

Last Friday evening I went to my local club - Farnborough Wargames Society - and played another game of Platoon, the club's WW2 skirmish rules derived from Peter Pig's PBI2 rules.

I took more pictures this time (as you can see)! The one to the right shows my Germans in a piece of club terrain (in the centre) and one of my Dave Graffam Models' Low Ruins builds in the corner (more about that excellent model is in this post: dave-graffam-models-5-low-ruins).

 To the left you can see Graham's British Para's (with my medic) at the start of the game. The game works on activating (by a d6 roll) the figures in a particular 6" square, the result giving the number of action points available. Casualties and being under fire give penalties, which is why there's a dead para and a rifle -1 marker in the square. The casualty markers do give a good look to the game - IMNSHO of course!

This pic gives a larger view of the centre of the table and as well as 2 of my low ruins, the roofless building is one I 'bashed' from Dave Graffam Models' Village Pub (more on that in this post: dave-graffam-models-1-pub).  The 2 buildings closest to the camera are held by my German section, the 2 by the centre crossroad hold Graham's British Para's and the one at the top has Alec's German section. This is where things started to go very badly indeed for the Brits

Graham's hand is in the pic to the left as well as my section in the centre bottom. In the wood to the right side is part of Neil's section, the rest in the building at the bottom right corner ... despite Neil's section in those 2 places and Graham's in the low ruin to the centre left, as well as the Brit Vickers MMG in the ruin by Graham's arm, the Brits were unable to force my section out of their ruin ...

Here we have a closer view of my section's position; having both buildings allowed them to support each other, as well as leading the Brits to split their fire. I tried to concentrate mine on Graham's section, only putting the occasional suppressing burst into Neil's. The 'pinned marker' (helmet on a rifle) in the left side ruin with Graham's section indicates that their last activation gave a 'Panicked!' result, which is the worst you can get and gives a penalty for their next activation ...

And here we see the buildings that had been occupied by Graham's section after the combined fire of Alec's and my section finally drove them out just before I occupied the ruin ... victory was close!

Victory achieved!! The remnants of the British Paratrooper platoon huddle in the ruin to the right. Strictly speaking I should have shown Neil's section who didn't have a casualty IIRC, but this pic went through the propaganda machine ...

A really fun, enjoyable game and it was great to get some of my figures (I provided the German force - an infantry platoon of 3 eight man sections, plus command and 80mm mortar) as well as some of my buildings on the table.

No game this week as I have my daughter, but I will be at Warfare tomorrow wearing my t-shirt with my blog address on the back - if you see me, say hello!

Finally for this post, last Friday at the club David and Gordon played a game of Too Fat Lardies' Sharp Practice. It was a Napoleonic British Naval landing party trying to destroy a French semaphore station. The table looked splendid:

But the thing that really caught my eye was Gordon's launch:

It looked great! He said he'd had it '30 years' and that it's still available!!  I'm tempted to get one myself, but I couldn't finish it as well as Gordon has ...

Last Friday

I've been meaning to post all week, but haven't got around to it :(

Anyway, last friday at my local club, I was going to play a game of Formula De against my good friend Andy. However, when we arrived (coincidentally at the same time) Graham and Alec invited us to join their game of Platoon, which is a club-written set of 28mm WW2 skirmish rules derived from the Peter Pig company rule set 'PBI2'.

So Andy and I took them up on the offer and thoroughly enjoyed it (well I did and I think Andy did!). I didn't take many photos, but those that I did follow:

In the pic above you can see 2 of the main elements of the game - the square based movement system and the buckets-o-dice combat RASH (Roll A Six to Hit) system.

 An action shot featuring Andy's and Graham's chest ...

Unfortunately the pic above is blurry, but it's trying to show some of Graham's figures.

We had so much fun that we're going to play again tonight! This time I'm taking my own figures and Hexon terrain along, so I'll (hopefully!) have more and better pics to post next time

I've just noticed that my "My Lead Men" page didn't have my WW2 28mm stuff on it, so I've just added it

Onwards, ever onwards ...

Just an update to prove I'm still here ...

I've decided to take the new job at my current place, so at least that's resolved and there's no unemployment to endure.  There is, however, a foru month trial period in the new role, so the story hasn't really ended just yet.

I have managed to arange a game at the local club tomorrow night and will be playing Formula De, a fun game. I have a number of plans for this (as I seem to have for everything!) so it'll be good to get another game of it under my belt and maybe try a few new things for it, time permitting!

Hopefully now that the job situation is on a much more even keel, I'll be able to make some proper posts here again - thanks to all the followers for persevering with the blog through these unsettled times!

Bad news ...

Apologies for yet another long gap between posts ...

However, for once I have a decent reason (at least I think  it is!). The day after making my last post, I was called into a meeting by my boss at work, and told that due to the reorganisation within my department (which I'd known about for quite a while) my post was no longer required and therefore if I did not take the new position, I would be made redundant ...  bit of a shock ...

So instead of making things and doing hobby stuff over the last couple of weeks, I've been feeling sorry for myself and trying to decide if I want to take the new role - which is VERY different from my current role - or redundancy and the attendant risk of finding a new job. I've been made redundant before (twice actually) and it's not much fun at all.

So apologies for the lack of updates and especially to Simon for not replying to his facebook contact (I rejoined facebook just before getting this news)

Willpower?? What's that?

It's been quite a week since my last post ... during which my willpower to resist new "shinies" seems to have evaporated completely :(

Having read a post ( planning-winter-war ) on Steve Blease's blog, I caved in and have backed the Baker Company Winter War Kickstarter.  This conflict is one that I've long wanted to game, so although slightly guilty about the expense (I've gone for the £120 'Border Assault' pledge) I'm happy to have done it.

(This pledge level will give me Finnish and Soviet Platoons and includes access to all stretch-goals - currently upto 19! - and free limited figures.)

Also, on Saturday just gone, I went to Newcastle to attend my younger sister's 40th birthday do (gawd do I feel old ... my little sister is 40!).  Anyway, I decided to visit Wargames Emporium in Sheffield on my way, so browsed their website to see what they had ...

After discovering their Hydra Miniatures' War Rocket pages, and then reading this detailed review of the game, I decided to shell out for the game and some miniatures. Needless to say, I got carried away and bought too much :(

Apart from increasing my lead & resin mountains, I'm still working on the rebasing of my 6mm zombie game figures. Despite what I said in my last post - 6mm-zombies - I've gone for 5 military or police on a base, 6 civilians and 8 zombies. I'll take some pics soon and post them here ...