Once Again Great Service from The Last Square

Playing Victory At Sea two weeks ago at Will's gaming store got the naval warfare juices pumping. Me being me, I have been slowing accumulating 1/6000 ships mostly Figurehead with a few Shapeways models thrown in. In the US, the place to order Figurehead ships is from The Last Square in the great state of Wisconsin. Their server is rather slow, but they have always provided prompt service and quickly respond to any emails sent.  A while ago, I had ordered some naval rules from them, and for some reason it never got to me. Even thought they stated that they had sent it, they sent me a new copy. 

This time, I put in an order for a bunch of ships. One of the packs was supposed to have four WWII South Dakota class battleship in it. When I looked at them, two were South Dakotas but the other two were North Carolina class battleships. There is separate pack for the North Carolinas. It wasn't a big deal and I didn't want a replacement, but I thought I'd let The Last Square know for quality control purposes.  Sure enough, even though I stated that they didn't need to send me a replacement, I got two South Dakotas in the mail!

In this day and age, its nice that at least with our hobby, companies are willing to go the extra mile for their customers.

Homemade Game Tokens

Being burned out on the fantasy stuff, I turned my attention back to my imagiNation campaigns and started to take stock in where I'm at for those. I really need some sort of markers or tokens to denote the status of vehicles and units. I know a lot of people use different color beads, but for some things, I think the marker needs to have either something written on it or a clear symbol of what it represents. A long time ago, I had bought some blank wooden dice to use as markers, but they are too big. So, I turned to these 3/8" steel circular discs I got off of Amazon.com for basing really small 1/600 miniatures like jeeps or small MANPAD or ATGM teams. I really have not used that many, so I thought they'd look like a good size for both 1/300 and 1/600 miniatures. I have a whole mess of small washers, they they seem a bit too large. Here's my test run of them.

I glued them onto a piece of paper. They look like those old dot candies that were stuck on paper! Once dried on one side, I cut them out and glued the other side down on paper.

I then painted both sides and lettered them. For my first batch, I made targeting markers. The green with black number is the unit firing. The corresponding red with white number is the firing unit's intended target. I tried making it fancy with the cross hair design around the number. 

On the back of every target marker, I painted yellow and wrote "hit" on it to indicated if it is hit (I'll bet you didn't see that explanation coming). I'm still deciding if I should write down the firing unit's number below hit. It might be useful if I have different weapons shooting at the same time. 

For all the tokens, I hit them with a clear spray to seal them. I can't decide what put on the back of the firing unit. I also plan to make some that indicate being pinned or suppressed.

Victory At Sea

I got to play a test Warlord Games' Victory at Sea naval rules at Will's gaming shop. It was SO nice to have a game and interact with others. It was a quickie set up. I had a Japanese heavy cruiser and two destroyers. My opponent, a friend of Will's, had the USS Northampton heavy cruiser and three Fletcher class DDs. Will acted as umpire. 

It was a pretty crazy battle. Ships were constantly circling each other, particularly the destroyers to get a torpedo launch in. Torpedoes have a very short effective range. Only my cruiser had the Japanese long lance torpedoes. Bottom line, the Americans sunk all my destroyers and heavily damaged my cruiser. I badly damaged his destroyers and sunk the Northampton with my cruiser's torpedoes. It  was decided that it was a minor victory for the Japanese in terms of points. I suppose the American destroyers could have pursued, but all of them had already launched their torpedoes. I had a reload of torpedoes ready to go, and probably would have taken down at least two of the destroyers before their guns got close enough.

The rules seem ok. I would need to play a few more games. It seemed like torpedoes are not at all effective particularly in terms of ranges. I'd have to compare it to other rules. I'm not sure if I want to buy the models. They aren't bad, but frankly, at 1/1800 scale, they could have better detail. I think GHQ's 1/2400 figures have a lot more detail to them. 

Fantasy Painting Challenge VI: Orcs, Part 1

 This is the only post of the latest fantasy painting challenge. Its not a work in progress post because they are done. 

It was a last minute challenge. Even though my friend proposed another challenge, neither of us seemed overly enthusiastic about it and it almost seemed like it didn't matter what we painted. I was still in the armored warrior mood after painting those fighters, so I picked orcs. A whole bunch presented themselves on the Reaper website, but a set of two stood out (those are the two in the middle of the pictures). I then fell in love with a rather fetching female half orc, so she had to be included. In my order, Reaper threw in a freebie plastic orc archer. So, my buddy is getting four orcs. Here they are:

The creative juices really got flowing once I got them from Reaper. It took me about a week to get them done even with my usual limited amount of free time. 

My challenge was to try to make the armor and weapons rusty. I was somewhat timid and didn't heap on the rust colors, but between using a brown wash on top of the usual one I use for iron-based metals and sparingly adding tiny dots of various shades of red-brown did the trick. 

The part 2 of this challenge will be my friend's interpretation of the orcs. 

Another Game of Scifi Carnage

 My wife went for a few weeks in February to visit family in China, so the boy and I had time to ourselves. This meant lots of eating out a restaurants and watching cartoons and Disney+. 

We managed to get a game. As usual, it was a scifi battle. I really wanted to use all the fantasy and medieval figures I've been individually basing for Dragon Rampant rules. But it was scifi or no game at all. 

The battle consisted of opposing sides rushing each other. There was a loose objective where I had to protect the president of the Galactic Union from the bad guys. Here are a few pictures I took.

Machine gun armed recon vehicle makes an appearance.

The president of the Galactic Union and his
bodyguard await the impending doom

As usual, the cyborgs and their xenomorph "pets" managed to overwhelm the combined efforts of the Galactic Union alliance. Even the mysterious alien Rocky with is powerful laser beam eye could not make ad difference. He went down fighting with all the rest. Perhaps a mecha on the good guys side rather than a small scout vehicle might have turned the tide. 

As a change of pace, I used the felt game mat that I bought years ago. It added a little touch to the battlefield and removed the need for measurement. 

Checking out 3D printed 15mm from Etsy

 There are a lot of interesting miniatures out there that can be printed, but until I take the plunge and buy my own 3D printer, I need to buy them pre-printed. I have already bought a lot of mostly aircraft, but lately I've been looking at fantasy figurines. Etsy seems to have a lot of shops that will print off figures, but most are in the 28mm to 32mm scale for TTRPG or in 10mm that is the latest craze. I came across one shop that had the license to print off various files and was willing to print off those pesky 10mm at 15mm. Unfortunately, I lost the packing slip and I can't seem to find the shop on the website. All I remember is that they are out of Poland.

I ordered these various foot troops.

They seem a little on the small side, but I will make a comparison once I've removed them from their stilts and base them. My big worry with all these printed miniatures is the possibility that things like thin weapons will get easily broken. Maybe some day they will make a printer resin that is like what Reaper Miniatures uses for their plastic figures that is reasonably hard but more flexible. 

As I recall, they weren't all that expensive compared to some of the other Etsy shops that sold comparable minis. The delivery time from Poland wasn't that bad either. Lately, some of the orders I've made from the UK seem to take forever. 

I will paint some of them up and see how they match up to existing 15s.

Four Swords for Hire

 I got these a few months ago from Alternative Armies. They looked interesting and I thought my paint challenge buddy might like them for a Christmas gift. Well, I still have not mailed them to him. 

Interesting is that they are metal, but look like that maybe the masters were 3D printed as they have very fine lines on their bodies. The last guy, the one with the axe and dagger, reminded me of Cillian Murphy of Oppenheimer fame.  Mr. Murphy is not blonde, but it seemed to work for me.