Italeri French for Vimiero

Another side project I have is to re-fight the peninsular war battles solo when I can using Sam Mustafa's Grande Armee rule set. As I have a large quantity of 1/72 Napoleonic figures floating around I decided to use them for this. So far the Army of Portugal is almost complete so I shall make a series of blog posts showing them off.

These were painted in large groups, not really that detailed or accurate and I also played around with some flowers\shrubs I was given.

Below, are some of Kellerman's cavalry

A brigade of Chasseurs (Italeri). Is this the only Chasseur set on the market ?

  The Dragoon Brigade  (Italeri)

So yet another side project !. The last few months have been taken up with sorting out Romanians for Operation Uranus, however now they are complete I am working on the following at my leisure :

• 1/72 Napoleonic Armies (above)
• 15mm Sci Fi (For solo skirmish)
• 28mm Sci Fi (For solo skirmish)
• 1/72 Fantasy armies. (Orcs, Rats, undead, humans, dwarves, Elves and Conan the Barbarian.
• A 1/72 medieval fortress and town.
• Siege Equipment. 
• 1/72 Modern. 

I shall make posts on these in turn...

WW1 Action

The moons have aligned ! School holidays , working late and cancelled events meant that I was able to visit David's to join his ww1 action.  Cambria 1917 I think with massed tanks attacking german trenches .

 I was the RAF and had the pleasure of simply flying where I pleased bombing and strafing. Biggles and Snoopy menaced the German positions at first but Snoopy was shot down so Biggles lost his nerve. We paused at the event below as the tanks made it through the wire and onto he trenches

I hope to make the next evening to see the end of it.

A very slow month for me due to a busy life, work and other interests that do not leave much motivation or time to partake in  painting or modelling. I did have a spurt of activity that I do need to finish off that I will leave for a subsequent blog post. Ideally in one month after a conference and busy work time I can finally get back into painting again.

Though, I have managed to visit Archduke Piccolo's for a few chinwag sessions and last night we played a few games of Memoir44 to wet my appetite. Archduke picked up the main rules at the swap meet and I picked up the Eastern Front expansion pack last week so it was time to have a game (Archduke has played solo).

The first scenario we tried was Hill 307 I recall. I played the Axis and Archduke the Allies and the game was a bit of a blood bath but my German troops did manage to puncture the US lines and seize the objective.  US Air power was not enough to save the position but did a lot of damage on the Panzers.

The next game was the "Gates of Berlin" with Archduke as the Soviets and myself as the Axis Panzer Army.

It was a hard fought and bloody contest. Soviet artillery poured fire onto tanks and I took heavy losses though finally forcing the central Soviet line to fail. A quick Panzer thrust captured the bridge and ended the game thought the Germans were in no state to hold the position or keep fighting.

Below - Panzer Casualties mount as we get close to the soviet lines.

Very entertaining evening of games, tea and coconut slice. Just the little spark needed to prompt me to get the Romanians sorted.

Cheers

General d' Armee playtest

Hi,

Chassuer was hosting Archduke Piccolo for a test game of the new ruleset and he invited me along. I arrived an hour or so into the game and then took command of the French. The wonderful collection and terrain are all Marks and they were a joy to play with.

Below are some sample pictures from the game:

 The Austrians surge forwards

 Upon the Guard Cavalry arriving on the field I then had my usual rush of blood to the head and sent the entire cavalry straight up the guts.

Commanding Cavalry is rather fun when you have lots of them !

The Austrian attack stalled several times but then surged forwards giving the Polish infantry a hiding. At this time the French suffered a daze and could not seem to do anything so I took the risk of investing my command dice 100% into the Cavalry to try to make a difference.

It was a good long game though I found it tiring (I only arrived back home at 1am from Australia that morning) but I felt it went well. The rules were easy to pick up and luckily lacked half the modifiers that the GdB ruleset had that caused me a nightmare at Waterloo.

Old Crow Drop Ship

I am in Australia on holiday and its all very good, so here is  a pic anyway of my favorite 15mm vehicle as I need to host the photos somewhere.

NQM PLay Testing

Archduke Piccilo and I sat down last night to try out the NQM rules so we could make sense of it all.

Some pics from those tests. Dug-in Romanians take on the Soviet Hordes. In these tests the Romanians were always wiped out but they often took a lot of Russians with them.

Note Quite Mechanized Romanians

I am currently firing out stands for the 3rd Romanian Army I plan to use at some point.

The above are infantry, AT gunners, Engineers, Command, Gun Crew, mortars and MMG's.

Archduke and I had a working bee to get it all started and we shall try the rules out at some stage with a very simple scenario. What better reason to burn through the hours getting these chaps ready.

They consist of:

• HAT Romanians (perfect)
• A HAT\Armourfast motorcycle for recce.
• Esci French (Had nothing else to do with them)
• Italeri Russians in Winter Uniform (Apart from the helmets they look fine)
• An Airfix French Legionnaire - This figure looks like a soldier with a fur hat.
• An Esci Boer war soldier - He is kneeling and the helmet looks Romanian.
• Airfix WW1 guns
• 1st Armoured shall be some Renault's and a PzIII.
• Not pictured are the ACW and Napoleonic Limbers I will use for the guns

So not accurate for the rivet counters but I make do I with what I have.

Its also getting me back into the swing of things. Archduke and I were supposed to have another bee a few nights ago but as its winter  we have the usual colds running around which delay things.