Scramble for Britain - First game

This afternoon we played two games of "Scramble for Britain", the "Wings at War" Battle of Britain game using my new setup.

It worked great. The flight stands worked well with the German forces using the water sea and the British the land ones. We both loved the formation rules, which speeded up play nicely. 

Both games had great swirling dog-fights, bombing runs, exciting failed manoeuvres, etc... Though Ed won both, once as the Germans and once as the Brits!

We'll be coming back for more for sure!

 

Battle of Britain - Ready for play

So, I've managed to do a lot more with my WW2 planes in the last week or so. There's now more of them, they have plenty of stands, counters and a little bit of English coastline to attack. I've also just finished off the convoy ships.

So it was time to get all of it out for a quick photo shoot...

More bits for my Kings of War Salamanders

I just completed the Phoenix for my Kings of War Salamanders ready for trying it out at COGS. I realised that I had not posted photos of my other recent units, so here they are.

First up is of course the Phoenix. This is one hell of a model to paint. All those flames and then the feathers. It's so huge that it really is important to get it right for the army. I didn't want this one to ruin the look of the rest of the army.

I looked around the net and decided to go for red feathers with black highlights like they are burned at the edges. The flames are my usual recipe, but with extra white highlights where they meet the bird itself to make it seem even hotter. The teddy bear filling highlighted again with black, covers up what I think is the weakest part of the model, where it meets the ground and makes it look a bit more like its flying.

The Mage Priest is a wonderful sculpt and a good model in the army. A spell caster with Inspiring built-in is not the usual in Kings of War. It has a good selection of spells and I'd consider more than one of these, but Mantic only do one model! With such a dynamic model I just could not run with two the same! Come on Mantic!

The Lekelidon is another superb model. I loved painting this one... A nice bit of cheap chaff he's going to have to fight with my froggies for a place in the army most of the time though.

I'd always intended to do a horde of Ceremonial Guard, but in the end I only really have space for a regiment. I stuck with my original plan though of having them lined up as if on parade... I selected only the parts that would allow this and left the more dynamic bits for other units.

"Wings at War" - "Scramble for Britain"

 A few years (decades?) ago I had a go at doing a wargame of airplane combat over Burma during WW2. The idea was to represent some of the airborne operations of the 2nd Chindit Expedition. I bought a few 1/600 planes from Tumbling Dice and had a satellite image of the appropriate area of Burma printed out to play on. The rules I chose were "Scramble!" and after one game of that incredibly detailed, but clunky and slow game I shelved the project.

Anyway. a few weeks ago my friend Ed introduced me to the "Wings at War" range of games, designed to use the same 1/600 planes that I had bought those many years ago. We played a few games from the "Mig*Alley" rules for North Korea and downloaded the "Desert Spitfires" set to have a closer look. I loved them! They're quick and fun; with proper scenarios; simple, but realistic rules including proper aerobatics; and allowing many, many planes to be flown without too much niggly detail and no paperwork at all!

I immediately looked for a Burma book, but of course there isn't one. "Perhaps I should write my own?" Well, maybe I will, but first I would need to try something more WW2 than MIGs over North Korea... 

So I bought a copy of "Scramble for Britain" the Battle of Britain set. This is a bargain for £10 and comes with a set of lovely Tumbling Dice planes to start you off... I immediately set to work painting the German planes up... Here they are:

Playing with Ed we used dice on the bases to keep track of the 2 stats for each plane, "Energy" and "Height", but with my planes I will be using the 3D printed bases I've designed with Energy on the dials built into the base,.and height designated by extending the heights of planes. They are each attached to a small wire rod that can be stuck into any base as needed and I'll have some extension pieces as can be seen in the following photo.

These are the Spitfires I painted for my Burma game, so they are in the wrong colours for the Battle of Britain. I'll be painting some extras up for a bit of authenticity... I'm not sure I'll repaint these though.

I did start with the brown 3d printed extension pieces, but I found some brass tube and will probably switch to that.

Of course I also needed some ground targets and so went a bit mad scaling down 1/300 buildings from Voxelhouse to 1/1200 on the resin 3D printer...

The tiny spitfires show the correct colour scheme for the Battle of Britian, but I'm amazed I managed to print out the radar stations in so much detail. A couple have a bit of damage, but one is perfect.

And finally some photos of the rest of the Burma planes I painted those many, many years ago... 

I've still got loads to do... There's a load more planes that just arrived today, convoy ships, sea bases, and the Kent coastline

Kings of War - Salamanders - The Whispering Scales

My new Salamander army continues to grow. The latest part bringing me up to 1950 points of new models for the COGS of War tournament this weekend is the formation for the army, "The Whispering Scales".

For this I have two regiments of Salamander Primes, one with 2-handed weapons and a special Battle Captain. 

For the Battle Captain I designed my own model using Hero Forge and then printed it on my resin printer.

Kings of War - Bullywugs... er... Ghekkotah Warriors

I decided that I needed some chaff for my new Salamander army and at 60 points for a troop the Ghekkotah warriors look ideal. However, Mantic don't (at the time of writing) make any Ghekkotah troops. There's a few heroes, but nothing else. 

I started looking around for 3D printable alternatives, but found nothing that really grabbed me. That is until I found the Warp Miniatures Bullywug Warriors. I loved these happy smiling frogs the moment I saw them and knew I had to use them.

Now you might say, those are frogs, not geckos... and you'd be right. But if Mantic can confuse salamanders as being reptiles, then I can confuse geckos as being amphibians. To be fair to Mantic, it's not their fault, but the fault of the medieval scholars who couldn't work out what a salamander actually was.

Anyway, having decided that I was going to use the Bullywugs, (which could also be Riverguard... hmmm...) I decided they needed appropriate bases. Loads of messing with 3D prints; plaster cast rocks; transparent resin, both two-part and UV; and some of the rather excellent Gamer's Grass lazer-cut plants has produced a couple of little troops I'm very proud to put at the front of my army ready to be killed first... 

... and not an LED on them!

Star Wars Armada

Years ago, before Covid, I used play a bit of Star Wars Armada. Not much, just a bit. 

Anyway, recently we've started playing it at COGS. I've been supplying most of the stuff for it as most of the players are new to it and the game is now harder to find and often expensive.

A little while ago I bought the Corellian campaign pack as it was cheap and realised that if we were to play it then I'd need more ships. This lead me to investigate into 3D printing ships for the game. There's quite a few designs for free online and with both resin and filament printers I printed a few out. 

It soon became obvious that really I needed some original ships as well to copy the base cards from and other components and so I started looking at what was available to buy cheap. This lead to some bargains, which lead to more bargains. 

Then the terrain had to be 3D printed and finally I thought I better get all those squadrons painted.

Anyway, now I have enough I think... though I do have a couple more ships in the post yet... one of those is very. very large.

All the squadrons in the photo are proper ones. The ships on the black bases are the ones I've 3D printed.

Oh and I should have mentioned this before... but we won best overall participation game at Hammerhead again...