Undaunted - Hot and Cold.

Gaming and painting time has been a thin on the ground of late. I really need to pick up the pace with the Cotswold day just 6 weeks away and I still have a bunch of Western Desert stuff to finish.

The gaming room has been captured by the family using it a dumping ground for 'stuff'. I need to wrestle back the space, which is surely a cue for a big game over a few nights. While I mull over the options, I have played a couple of Undaunted games which are surprisingly challenging for a board game/deck builder/war game.

I don't play many board games but this has a very good feel to it and could easily be turned into a tabletop encounter. We mixed it up with an outing in the Western Desert as the LRDG attack an Italian Airfield looking to blow things up while the defenders looked to stop them.

The game was close with the plucky Brits managing to sneak a win destroying the plane, lorry and fuel dump, that will slow the Axis forces.

Meanwhile a second outing and this time the Stalingrad variant, things have definitely come on a bit, with a nice campaign sector where cards are swapped in and out for wounded and experience. The Pic below is the opening scenario with a Soviet push for the main square as the Germans and their LMG teams sweep the main approaches.

The Russians were able to swamp the left hand LMG team were defeated in a foolish rush across the street, damn you Fog of War cards......

Not a bad way to spend a couple of hours,,,,, both games give a good feel for the period, the mechanisms work well the Stalingrad scenario book is particularly nice with an interesting linked scenario format.

Anyhow enough rambling those mini's won't paint themselves.......

Dispatches from the front II

I bloody hate cavalry...… I have been sitting looking at the same cavalry unit for the best part of three weeks, if I can't break the back of them tomorrow they might have to be bounced from the queue for a while.

I am not sure if it's the mass of horse flesh or the fact that I have glued the riders on first, something that I don't normally do in the painting process. Do we all have a touch of OCD when it comes to painting?

Meanwhile we had a crack at Osprey's latest card game, a two player game with a number of missions from D-Day to play through, you use your cards to grab the initiative and use your squads to grab objectives I must admit it was a real blast and felt very realistic, very much a band of brothers feel to it, the early missions contain only rifle squads, but later missions introduce MG's Mortars and snipers.

MG's are great at pinning troops, mortars are flaming nasty and you need to get a move on once the targeting round lands. Stick and move is the name of the game.

Send your scouts out to clear the ground in front of you before you send your rifle sections in to take the ground.

The game tiles have plenty of detail and I am sure I won't be the only one thinking about how I could convert this to a miniatures game. 

Each mission lasts about 45 minutes and makes for a great evenings game. 

I based up the QH Miniatures and have included a couple of comparison shots to the Trent Miniatures, they match up very well in size although the quality of sculpt needs some work when compared to others on the market these days. 

Trent Minatures have a slave pack available which landed this morning along with some casualties which will give me so more line infantry shock markers. 

Whilst finding anything to do other than paint the Haitian horse, I did finally get round to painting up the Warbases Pigeon loft and a couple of the test houses for the Red Phoenix project.

Switching between 28mm and 6mm is not great when you are trying to get you eye in once the cavalry are done I will look to get the rest of the Korean village finished so I can get a couple of Seven Days to the Rhine in.