All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.
Historicals, Inspiration, Terrain

The Next Building Project

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I don’t usually like to talk about plans and ideas before there’s at least some progress to show off, but while I was away over the New Year I had time to do some quick sketching and thinking about a building that would be at the centre of any Russian village or hamlet during the Russian Civil War, and which really is iconic when you want to remind players the game is, in fact, set in Russia.

notebook_jan2011
Some pages from my notebook – possible plans for a feature building for my RCW table!

Google Image Search is really indispensable when looking for prototypes and inspiration, although it’s very easy to get a building that’s just too big for the table. The church at top left would have been over 8″ long and 4 wide, far too big for a scenery piece that is basically just a Line of Sight blocker. The design shrank from there (top right page) then grew slightly on the bottom page and I’m fairly confident the finished result will be something like the two-part double-dome design on those pages, with a footprint roughly 5″x3″ and an overall height somewhere around 6″.

I saved this image from the web but forgot to write down where I found it or any details of the actual building, but it’s become my main reference. I also can’t currently find this picture again via GIS…anyway, it’s a perfect-sized building for my purposes and should help me get a lot of details right.

rus_church
Russian Church found via Google Image Search, except I didn’t save any info on where I found the image… sorry.
Misc

A 2011 Review

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Happy New Year! Just back from a week away from my computer and my workbench, spent visiting the folks inland, and counting down the hours until it’s back to work and such.

Although this website has been around on various hosts and under other names since 1998, 2011 was our first full year in this relaunched blog format, powered by the awesome WordPress and a renewed and expanding interest in wargaming! So how did that first year go, anyway?

Random Stats of Possible Interest

We started rebuilding the site back in September 2010, officially relaunched in January 2011, and we’ve been going steadily since then! According to the web statistics package we run, there were just under 17,000 visits to the site, with just over 20,000 pageviews (just over 1 page per visit, in other words). Most of our visitors are from (top 5, in order) the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Germany.

April 2011 was the busiest month we’ve had so far, with just under 2,000 visits.

In terms of posting, this post is the 149th posted to Warbard, with the vast majority — roughly 130 — being from 2011, giving us a rough average time between posts of under 3 days. Not bad!

The most popular single article was the review of .45 Adventure 2nd Edition, with various terrain articles and gallery posts filling most of the rest of the top ten. We talked about Inkscape quite a bit, lots of pulp adventure, and more recently the Russian Civil War.

Going into 2012, expect more RCW, more pulp, more terrain & buildings, and of course the two main gaming conventions locally are rapidly approaching in February and March/April 2012! 2011 was a great year, and I expect 2012 to be even better!

Historicals, Terrain

Second Russian House WiP

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Started another Russian farmhouse on Boxing Day evening, this one slightly bigger than the first at 4″x2″.

I mentioned in the previous article that I used coffee stir sticks for the wood siding. The workbench photo below should explain some of how I’ve been doing these buildings.

rushut2
Two WiP photos of Russian huts. See text for details, click for full size.

Basically, I split stir sticks lengthwise, then glue them along mattboard walls I’ve already cut the doors and windows out of. It’s easier to go back afterward and cut the stir sticks out of the openings than it is to premeasure! You can see one long side already trimmed above, and the other three sides waiting for trimming.

Incidentally, for this kind of trimming, I highly recommend an X-Acto #17 chisel blade instead of the classic scalpel blade (the #11 blade). Being able to cut straight down makes clean cuts in the windows easier, and it’s an easy way to trim thin wood and other strip materials.

The second photo of the pair above shows the new house with the walls assembled but no trim addded yet, and the first hut finished, except for the roof which is drying off-camera.

I’ve already assembled the thatch roof for the new building, and didn’t get any WiP photos of that, but I”ll try to get some progress photos of the next thatch roof I make, I promise. It is kind of difficult to smear glue everywhere and handle a camera, though…

Off for a week tomorrow, so see you all next year!

Historicals, Terrain

Night Before the Night Before…

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… and over at my place, I was hiding out, enjoying the last evening of solitary, productive peace and quiet I”ll have for a while, as the holiday season proper lands on us tomorrow.

In between beer, sending out festive email, and a little bit of painting on some White Russian troops, I cranked out this:

rcw_hut
A very small hut is investigated by a pair of Brigade Games 28mm Russian officers.

It’s tiny, only 2″ x 3″ – but I’ve always liked the philosophy of making your buildings a bit smaller but having more of them. A hamlet of four or six buildings looks more convincing as a hamlet than a pair of buildings taking up the same space on the wargaming table.

Construction is almost all mattboard, with the siding created from thin wooden coffee stir sticks split lengthwise. The roof is towel over a mattboard framework, and removable. There’s a door to glue into place as well.

The roof needs a lot more painting, which it might get on Boxing Day or else in the New Year, but I’m fairly happy with the greyish tone of the walls at this point. I might wind up rebuilding the roof, as I got a bit too enthusiastic with the scissors and haven’t left much in the way of eves over the walls. The simplest fix for that might just be to slap another layer of towel down over the existing one.

This little building was mostly a test of the wood siding idea, and of building the hipped roofs so typical of rural buildings in early 20th C Russia (and elsewhere, of course). They’re fussier, but this one works and so does the woodwork, so the new year should see a nice little Russian hamlet taking shape here.

Hope everyone has an excellent holiday season, however you celebrate it, Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, and such!

Historicals, Inspiration, Links, Pulp

Templates for Cards

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Because I happen to have a stockpile of them around the place, several years ago I started using pre-punched Avery business card sheets as gaming cards – Encounter Cards and vehicle cards in .45 Adventure, stats sheets for minor characters, more recently the Russian Civil War initiative cards for Mud & Blood. Even if you haven’t got pre-punched sheets around, the 2×3.5″ size is easy to use and handle printed onto ordinary cardstock and cut out.

There is of course a Microsoft Word template available right off Avery’s own website but I created my own templates from scratch in Inkscape, first because Word is a lousy program for actual graphical work, and secondly because the Avery templates are set up with vertical (portrait) orientation of the sheets, while for most gaming cards having a landscape setup makes more sense.

Accordingly, I kicked Inkscape to life, took some measurements from the Avery sheets and from their template and created a new template with the cards set up on a landscape (horizontal) sheet, which makes laying the cards out like small playing cards much easier.

I’ve uploaded three versions for people to use: a PDF version, a PNG version (probably the most generally useful) and finally, for those of you who have taken up Inkscape, an SVG version, which is in a ZIP file as WordPress doesn’t like SVG,

If you’re not sure which version to use, grab the PNG version, any modern graphics program should read PNG. Most should also be able to import PDF, which might get you a more accurate template.

CC0 To the extent possible under law, Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Card Template Blanks (various file formats). This work is published from: Canada.

The little grey block basically means that whoever downloads these can do whatever they like with them, including use them in commercial products. Go nuts. And if you’re from that rather large part of the word that doesn’t use Letter-size paper, sorry, but you’re going to have to come up with your own templates!

Historicals

RCW: Blundering Into Each Other

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rcw_encounter
Early in the game, with most forces still on Blinds. Whites in the top corner, Reds in the foreground. Click through to Flickr for larger version.

We had another round of Mud & Blood powered Russian Civil War action this afternoon, with a White composite platoon under a very dynamic officer meeting a spread-out Red platoon on the outskirts of a South Russian village and defeating them fairly soundly.

Once again Stout Hearts & Iron Troopers was our starting point, this time Scenario Seven, A Baptism At Bleid, which is a German-vs-French encounter battle, with the French unit resting in a farmyard, more French off-table down the road, and the Germans coming on cautiously as everyone advances into Belgium in 1914. The scenario also has the whole table covered in thick mist, so spotting is considerably more difficult.

We swapped in White Russians for Germans and a Red Guard platoon for the French and went at it. Due to lack of painted figures we had about half the troop density the scenario calls for, but it was still a fun game and really showed the power of a high-Status Big Man in M&B. The Whites had the energetic Capt. Rumelski, Status IV, leading their composite platoon, plus Dynamic Leader (bonus Big Man moves) and Heroic Leader (one heroic act per game by a Big Man) cards in the deck. While the Whites had some initial trouble getting their platoon moving, once they got going they never stopped, and comprehensively shattered the Reds before the Red reinforcements could get onto the table to help out.

Reds scout down the road. Photo by Corey
Reds scout down the road. Photo by Corey

I was commanding the Reds, and really being too aggressive for the quality and quantity of troops I had available. I also launched one unsupported and unwise assault just because we hadn’t yet seen the M&B close combat rules in action yet. Now that we have, I won’t be doing that again… I badly damaged one White section, but utterly destroyed my largest rifle section doing so. Close combat in M&B is indeed decisive and bloody!

White Russian Cossacks. Photo by Corey
White Russian Cossacks. Photo by Corey

There’s still more Russians on my painting table, both Reds & Whites, and I’m looking forward to getting them into the game!

Historicals, Inspiration

RCW Cards & Blinds In The Flesh

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Finally got around to printing and cutting out a full set of the Russian Civil War Mud & Blood cards I created a few weeks ago, as well as the earlier Blinds.

Here’s the full set spread over my painting desk.

rcw_cards
They actually exist! Printed versions of the cards and blinds I’ve created for playing Russian Civil War games with Through The Mud & The Blood.

You can, of course, find the PDFs for the cards and the blinds in earlier posts here at The Warbard, so you can print your own.

Corey and I will be doing our second session of RCW M&B today (Sunday) at our regular games club meeting up at the local university. Game reports and possibly photos here, as usual.

Inspiration, Links, Misc

Links of Interest, 9th Dec 2011

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If you haven’t already read Sidney Roundwood’s excellent 29 Ways to (try to) Stay Creative: A Wargamer’s List yet, you really do need to. The accompanying short video is not wargaming specific, but still has good advice. Do you know where your notebook is?

Incidentally, there’s a great collection of links to blogs, podcasts and other inspiration in that post of Sidney’s. Among other things, it’s introduced me to Porky’s Expanse, an entertainingly wide-ranging blog nominally centred on gaming, and suggested a bunch of podcasts I’m going to have to try out. I prefer music while painting, usually, but podcasts are perfect for figure prepping and basing sessions, I’ve found, and with more RCW Russians in the pipeline I’ve have a couple of long prep sessions coming up!

The always-excellent Make Magazine website now as a Tabletop Wargaming section. Not a lot there now, but this could become a very interesting repository for the hobby and also a source of some publicity, as Make has a very broad readership.

Seen anything interesting lately?

Historicals, Misc

Pearl Harbor, 70 Years Ago Today

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Today is, of course, Pearl Harbor Day, and this year marks the 70th anniversary of that attack.

I was on Maui for a vacation about 18 months ago, in the spring of 2010, and my brother and I spent a day at the Pearl Harbor memorial sites, the USS Arizona Memorial, USS Missouri, and the Pacific Aviation Museum Pearl Harbour. I highly recommend the visit if you find yourself on Maui.

The Aviation Museum was recently opened when we were there, and it will be exciting to see it expand and develop over the years. They don’t have a huge collection of aircraft, but the quality of the displays is very high and the collection is tightly focused on the attack on Pearl Harbor and the early war in the Pacific so far.

Arizona & Missouri

Guarding Arizona

The rest of my Maui 2010 photos are over on Flickr.