Busy Times....

Well the last month's been a bit of a car crash where my blogging activities have been concerned. What with a UK heat-wave leading to a general lack of get-up-and-go, and travel for work, I don't seem to have had time to take any pictures or write anything up.

I haven't, however, been totally idle.....

Great Escape Games 1914

Firstly I've been experimenting with Great Escape Games 1914 Rules, using my rebased 10/12mm Pendraken WW1 figures and terrain.

One day I will get around to writing a proper review for these, but for now suffice to say these show promise.

Apparently they use a very similar mechanic to the GEG  Iron Cross Rules in that each side gets a number of command tokens each turn to spend on activating their troops. The active player then takes the first turn and the inactive player has the option to spend a token and gamble on (by rolling +3 on a D6) being able to interupt their action before they take it. This leads to a very fast and fluid game, with both players fully involved throughout.

To match this mechanic the actual move/shoot/morale mechanics are very simplistic, but I think adequate.

Initially I've found the book, whilst very nicely produced and illustrated, to be difficult to interpret. Whilst there are examples given, these don't cover everything and as a confirmed dyslexic I have struggled to take the rules on board.

That said the couple of solo games I've tried have been great fun even though I'm not certain I'm following the rules to the letter.

The picture above is of a scenario I've been developing (1914 Scenario) for the Battle of Landrecies 25th August 1914 - part of the retreat from Mons. Its a great introductory action using one British Brigade versus a much larger German force in what is a delaying action, protecting a river crossing.

A Black Tree Wermacht figure armed with a Russian SMG together with a 50mm Mortar team & MG34 SF Team  of unknown origin

Recently I was lucky enough to attend a gaming sale at our local community centre, where there was a late gamer's complete collection being sold off by his family.

Whilst much of what was for sale was either fantasy or sci-fi related, there were a number of things to excite the historical gamer! One was an old style GW Army case containing around 90-100 unpainted 28mm WW2 figures. Most were Black Tree Designs figures (Germans, Russians and a few US Infantry) plus a small number of Foundry Fallschirmjager.

I couln't resist, so I'm now contemplating finally giving Chain of Command a go. Firstly I will have to paint them all up.

I already have a motley mixture of Artisan Designs Miniatures German & British Infantry + a few support elements from unknown origins, so I treated myself to a can or PSC Field Grey and got started.

I've found the ideal number for me is to paint six figures at a time so this will be a long project....

3D Printed Pzkfw IVs

Finally, I was dismayed to find that following the printing of a second run of my home-designed dug-in markers for 1914 (see previous post), the PLA filament had become stuck in the printer.

To make matters worse, rather than do the sensible thing and look on Youtube, I decided I could fix this myself! I proceeded to dismantle the printer head and found the PTFE tubing that feeds the filament had become damaged. Removing this I succeeded in destroying the pneumatic coupling used to hold this in place. Doh!

Now I found the tubing easily enough on ebay (£3 delivered) but the pneumatic couplings less so. They were 4mm diameter with a M10 thread where all I could find were those with M6 thread. Finally the engineers at work came to my rescue and I got things re-assembled after two weeks down.

To prove my repair worked I set the printer producing two 1/150th scale Pzkfw IVs for use with WAT Rules. As you can see things are looking good and all went to plan after nearly 5 hours of printing!

So I'd better get them finished off. You can see from the turret and hull in the foreground that there's quite a bit of support material to be removed before the model looks like the one at the back.....