Last post was in June, I’m getting really lousy at keeping this poor blog from getting dusty and neglected. It’s been a busy summer for things like bike holidays and being out in the real world, not so much on the gaming front although our Blood Bowl league season is drawing to a close (my poor Rodents of Unusual Size got blown out of the playoffs in the first round) and some good games of Infinity.
On the modelling front, about all I’ve gotten done is a some progress on the various Infinity buildings I’ve started this year. We’ve got an Infinity tournament coming up on October 24th weekend, so I’m pushing to get the current group of buildings done and finished before then, as well as having my entire Haqqislam force painted and finished to field that weekend!
Recently I’ve been pushing on the mosque (shrine?) seen previously here. I’ve put a few of the recent pictures of that building up below! Click on any of them for full size, and enjoy.
Apparently I’ve basically taken most of the summer off from blogging and doing wargame-related things I felt the need to blog about… last post was June 10th!
I’ve been playing a lot of Infinity and Blood Bowl, but doing basically no painting or terrain building at all until this weekend, when I’ve finally cleaned up my workbench and gotten a tiny bit of progress on the mosque roof for my Infinity terrain.
Drum dome on mosque roof. Click for larger, as usual.
I’ve run with the “bright hexagonal future” jokes about Infinity with the one, and tried to incorporate some Islamic themes as well because I run Haqqislam forces in Infinity. The main footprint is a hexagon, there’s a hexagonal tower as part of the cupola/minaret on the roof, and I’ll probably use some hex-patterned origami paper I bought recently as part of the decoration scheme as it looks a lot like some Islamic tile patterns.
What else have I been up to this summer, anyway? Riding my bike over mountains, for one, and lots of other bike riding and other good warm weather activities!
A number of the stock scenarios in Infinity need some sort of antenna or console for the troops to interact with/hack/seize/blow up/etc. You can use basic tokens on the tabletop, but real scenery looks better!
Antenna and consoles in Inf are supposed to be on a 40mm base, so I had a go at cutting 40mm circles with my circle cutter. The stubby blade won’t go all the way through the mattboard I build with, though, so I wound up basically scoring circles and then finishing them as carefully as possible with a new Xacto blade. It’s not an ideal way to cut circles, and for larger and more visible ones like a round roof I’ve started since building these antennas I’ve gone with multiple layers of light card, which the circle cutter handles very nicely, and glued them together in layers.
Six antennas for Infinity on 40mm bases. Each is roughly 4″ high. Click for larger.
The antenna themselves are more mattboard, generally offcuts from other recent projects. No particular design ethic to these, beyond “angular and futuristic”, which is easy to achieve.
Even for scenarios that don’t require antenna on the table these are likely to put in an appearance as general futuristic clutter, which is always in high demand on an Infinity tabletop!
After building the first building to use on Infinity tables, which turned out to be a complex shape and two storeys plus roof, I decided the next building needed to be simpler and quicker to build, but still interesting.
Going through my building supplies I found a sheet of corrugated craft paper that became a feature of the new warehouse, both for the two large rolling doors and on part of the roof. The rest of the building is mattboard/picture framing card, which is cheap, easy to work with, and makes good durable buildings.
The whole warehouse is 9″ long, 5″ wide, and about 6″ to the highest point of the “sail” that divides the roof up.
More details on the picture captions below. There’s still some structural work to do on the back wall and on the roof, and a lot of detailing still to do. Paint will happen eventually, as well.
The Eureka tachanka itself (the wagon, that is) comes together fairly easily with a bit of patience and some test fitting. The main body is a single piece, which I had to bend very slightly to straighten as the back end had been pushed very slightly downward during shipping. The rear springs and axle are three simple pieces; the front piece has the bar the horses are harnessed to, then two springs, then a front axle.
The tachanka itself upside down on the right; the horses mounted and puttied into place on the base to the left. Crew figures int he foreground, along with the Maxim MG. Click for larger, as always.
I glued the whole thing together in one shot, wheels and all, and now that I’m painting it I find myself wishing I’d left the wheels off to make the undercarriage slightly easier to paint. On the other hand, getting the fenders on either side into place and symmetrical is easier when you have the wheels already solidly in place for reference, so it’s one of those “on the one hand/other hand” sorts of things. I can always slop mud around on the underside to hide any minor painting glitches, after all…
The base the whole thing will sit on is a strip of .040″ styrene plastic card, reinforced with Milliput epoxy putty, especially around the horses’ integral bases. I also ran a ridge of putty down the centre of the card base to stiffen it, with some slivers of scrap card under that just to give the putty something to hang on to. The base is just barely big enough to hold the wheels of the tachanka and the horses, but similar minimal “shadow” bases have worked to protect the relatively delicate wheels of other pewter/resin vehicles in my collection for several years now.
The tachanka is getting a dark green basecoat, similar to the paint scheme on the earlier armoured car. I’ve gone with blue trim, either a remnant of civilian finery (a lot of tachankas were lightly converted civilian carriages) or a bit of regimental pride coming through. I’ll leave all three crew in generic Russian khaki so they can be used by either side in my RCW games; I might eventually rig a flag holder somewhere on the thing for it to show off which side it’s fighting for today!
Such basecoating! Horses, tachanka and crew all basecoated, as well as heroic Russian officer dude on his horse behind – also a Eureka figure. Click for larger, as always.
I’m trying to get the tachanka ready for Trumpeter Salute in Vancouver which starts this Friday, so time is pressing and I’m speedpainting like crazy, and feeling rusty because I really haven’t painted much at all in the last eight months or so! At some point I also need to come up with some basic rules for running the silly thing in Chain of Command, but that might be left for the ferry ride over to Vancouver Friday afternoon…
What the heck, you ask, is a tachanka (also found spelled “tchanka”)? It’s a Russian vehicle developed during the Great War and used, in various forms, right through the Second World War. A lightweight, sprung carriage with two, three, or sometimes four horses out front, a Maxim machinegun mounted to fire out the rear, and a few crew holding on for dear life. It was designed to give machinegun support to cavalry units. Wikipedia has a bit more, if you’re interested.
The Eureka tachanka has been around for ages, but it has a bit of a mixed reputation among RCW/BoB gamers. The crew figures are undersized, is the usual complaint, and I’ve also heard comments about the beastie being fussy to build.
That said, it’s the only easily-available tachanka, and the presence of such an eccentric and unique unit in an RCW/BoB force is a powerful lure!
So to start off, here’s what you get.
The Eureka tachanka all laid out. 25 parts including crew and horses.
Three horses, three crew (driver, gunner, assistant gunner), a Maxim on the usual Russian wheeled cart (4 pieces) and 15 parts for the tachanka carriage itself, most of which are suspension. The whole thing is cleanly cast and there was a minimum of mold lines and flash to remove, most of it between the horses’ legs.
The small piece of paper with the exploded view is useful as a reference, although I think I’ll wind up printing the photo of the assembled tachanka off the Eureka website as well for additional reference. The front wheels/suspension/horse-attachment bit is the only really complex subassembly, although the fenders on the sides are going to require some gentle, careful bending to fit them into place and keep them symmetrical. I’ll put it on a “shadow” base like I did the armoured car I did a couple of years ago to help strengthen the whole thing, and probably use a small amount of putty out of sight on the underside to reinforce things here and there.
As I assemble the beast I’ll get some photos of it along side Copplestone & Brigade RCW infantry and cavalry, to attempt to answer that whole question about the scale of it. Onward!
Last Sunday (15 March) got us another bash at using Chain of Command/Mud & Blood (I’ve taken to calling it “Chain of Mud”) for Russian Civil War adventures. I umpired the game for Mike, who has played RCW previously a number of times and once with the current Chain of Mud rules, and his brother Stewart, who was visiting from Vancouver and had heard interesting things about my RCW games and wanted to try it out.
We had a scratch White force of a short platoon of White Rifles (three sections), supported by two small troops (Teams) of Cossack cavalry and an armoured car attacking a hamlet around a small walled monastery defended by two sections of Red militia backed up by a single section of Red Guard and a single Team of especially enthusiastic local Reds lead by one of the Red Guard leaders.
It was a good game that saw the White rifles driven off by Red rifle fire before the Cossacks and the armoured car finally rout the Reds in a really, really tight game that saw both players convinced it was all over for them several times.
Late in the game, the White armoured car (lower left) brings its machineguns to bear on the walled monastery compound defended by Red Guard.
I realized afterward that I’d gotten the Force Morale tests wrong in the heat of the moment, so the Whites missed two tests that would almost certainly have damaged their Force Morale and could have cost them the game.
I’m really starting to enjoy the Patrol Phase of the game and the use of Jump-Off Points. The tactics of the Patrol Phase, once new players catch on, can be almost as fascinating as the main game itself, with the limits on movement imposed on the Patrol Markers and the conflicting desires to set up good JoPs for yourself and also deny the enemy good JoP positions. This was the first game we’ve played where one Jump-off Point marker wound up right on the table edge, nearly halfway up one long side of the table, which gave the Whites a flanking position on the whole hamlet that gave the Reds quite a lot of trouble in the first half of the game.
I’ll be running an expanded and tweaked version of this scenario at Trumpeter Salute in Vancouver in a couple of weeks; I might swap the ordinary Red Guard out for a section or two of Red Sailors, just because they’re such a colourful set of figures to put on the table! With a bit of postal luck I might also have a tchanka from Eureka Minis to add to the fun!
I’ve previously shown my urban scatter terrain for Infinity, and after getting that assembled I decided to tackle something more challenging and larger.
Quite a bit larger, actually. It’s a two-storey building that wound up being about 10″ long, 6″ wide and almost 7″ tall!
The building is entirely made of mat board, usually used as picture framing board. It’s good quality cardboard, easy to work with and it takes paint and glue well. Our local art supply place, Island Blue, sells the offcuts from their framing business off cheap! The roof and second storey come off to allow full access to the entire building during games, and I think I’ve managed to make the building tactically interesting for games of Infinity.
Check out the gallery below; the captions have a lot more detail.
If you’re interested in doing similar buildings for Infinity or any other skirmish game, I really like the ongoing “Cardbuilding” series of articles over on the Infinity news site Data Sphere: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, Part 4. Errhile is much more organized than I am, designing a whole system so that his buildings nest and stack for storage and reconfiguration, and he’s got lots of great techniques and ideas in his lavishly illustrated articles. I might well do some similar modular buildings, but for now it’s fun to just bust out a big, complex building — I haven’t done much terrain building recently!
So I’ve been persuaded (OK, it didn’t take much…) to get into Infinity, the fast and lethal science fiction skirmish game from Corvus Belli. I’ve been vaguely interested in Infinity for years, both by the high quality sculpting and because of the background and basic look of the game with it’s obvious influence from awesome sources like Ghost in the Shell, Bladerunner, cyberpunk, and a generally “hard science fiction” future – no skullz, no rusty Gothic goofiness, etc!
I’ve picked up a small Haqqislam force and started painting them up; they’re really neat figures that I’ll show progress pictures of later.
Being the sort of gamer I am, though, I also immediately started producing bits of terrain for the game. Infinity is a fast lethal game that demands a fairly high density of terrain on the table. Most of our terrain is fairly urban, lots of shiny new lasercut MDF buildings owned by the other players, so I decided to do some mixed scatter terrain to go along with that.
Planters seemed like a good choice – straightforward to build, plausible in an urban environment, a good chance to introduce some greenery and colour to an urban board, and a chance to use up some of my stockpile of scrap and offcut mounting board leftover from older, larger projects.
28mm planters from scrap card for Infinity SF skirmish gaming. Figure is a 28mm Janissary heavy infantry.
The largest piece is 6″ wide and 3.5″ across, mostly because that’s the size of a scrap of foamcore in my leftovers bin. The four smaller planters are 4″ long and 1″ across at the wide end. The small piece at the end is based on a 3″ circle of mounting board I cut as an experiment — yes, my circle cutter will cut mounting board. But not happily…
I’ll probably do another two or three of the long narrow planters, and then start exploring other shapes.
I did have to get into my uncut stockpile of large mounting board sheets for the end plates on the large raised piece, but basically everything else is from offcuts – total material cost so far about as close to zero as you can get!
I’ll get these painted this weekend, then break out the greenery to fill them in.
This sculpted bas-relief is by Bob Murch of Pulp Figures fame, and is included in his Mad Guru set of Thugee. I own most (possibly all, I’ve lost track) of the PF Thugee packs; they’re among my favourite figures from Mr. Murch and regularly appear in our Pulp Alley games. (Thugee previously on the Warbard here and here!)
A bronze bas-relief of Kali, Hindu goddess of death, change and rebirth. Click for larger, as usual.
The bronze relief, though, has sat around unpainted and ignored for at least a year until it fell into the current round of “clear off the painting bench” mania! The main colour is GW Dwarf Bronze over a grey primer, then a coat of GW Gryphonne Sepia wash/ink. A very, very thinned green ink over that for a bit of verdigris here and there, and finally a few highlights back with straight Dwarf Bronze. (Note that all my GW paints & washes are from the previous range, not the current GW paint/wash range, and I’m afraid I have no idea what the current equivalents of these colours are!)
The base is just a scrap of plastic sheet and a bit of Milliput with some flagstones scratched into the putty to tie it in with the flagstones already on the pewter. The whole thing has come out very nicely, and really shows off the incredible details of the piece, with the six-armed Kali with her necklace of skulls, skirt of human hands and forearms, and one foot on the body of her consort Shiva. (Good stuff on this Wikipedia article about Kali, btw.) Mr. Murch did his homework!
