3mm Works in Progress (and some targets)

Well some of the pictures are crappy, but here are some painting projects that have been going on lately. Most are 3mm Vietnam, but a couple of bases are targets for 1/600 air gaming - 1/2400 truck convoys. One for the desert, one for Europe. The trucks still need to be painted obviously.

I had another 10 LVTP-5's to get into action, so after basing I painted the bases green for jungle on 3, giving me 8 on that terrain. The other 7 I'm putting on the beach, so after messing around with various colour permutations, I just settled on Americana's "Sand" as the colour. It looks better in real life than this picture shows:
All the rest are US forces. These are just a sample - FAC base (4 guys), half-squad (5 guys), medic station, and MG team. Uniforms, flesh, and guns are done on all. I remembered I wanted to add flak vests on a couple of guys way after the fact, so today I gave a couple of guys on FAC teams and one gunner's assistant their vests. The guy on the far right of the FAC has one. Most references showed the vests as beige, so I went with that. On the MG team you'll see a hint of gold, representing brass cartridges; later Dullcoate should tone down the shininess.

My big "decision" was to go with black (leather) boots on the guys who's boots you can see - just the MG teams and medics and their patients. The beige jungle boot would be more representative, but after trying it, I realized that at this scale it just made them look rather ridicuously barefooted. I think the black contrasts nicely with the rest. This particular medic station has a couple of patients with bleeding wounds, one in the lower leg, one in the gut. I wasn't planning on doing it this soon in the process, but I needed to cover up a mistake while doing the boots, and deep red did the job nicely. Most patients will have bandages with or without blood.







Although painting has been slow, it's been a productive month for me - lots has been cleaned and based, including some new terrain pieces from Irregular and Simply 6. I also have been scoping out SYW and ECW projects in 2mm, and should have the SYW (in India) started by next weekend.

Trenton and Trenton again (1776 version)

Last week the club I've been playing with in Toronto (current name is "The Napoleonic Brigade - Toronto") had its big annual weekend of games in 6mm. This year was the Battle of Trenton, played thrice on Saturday and twice on Sunday (some test games earlier made it 7 games total). The third game Saturday followed a quick end to the second game, after the Hessian commander's boldness didn't pay off).

I was only there Sunday, playing in both games. To make the game fair to the outnumbered and surrounded Hessians, there was a 3 hour time limit on each game. The first game got to a late start, which made my job easier as I was the Hessian commander (Rall). I traded space for time and we slowly got pushed further into the middle, doing more damage than we took, and when the clock struck we were ahead. As we had to wait for lunch to finish cooking, we played a few more turns and the Hessians also got cooked as their perimeter collapsed.

In game 2 I was one of the American commanders (Greene), looking after two forces coming in from the north west (to the right of the American battery on the hill). The Hessian strategy in this game was to try to escape to the east, using their free set up of a half battalion of skirmishers to harass one American unit from the rear, holding the door open while the rest tried to scamper out. The skirmishers did a good job the whole game, and one wing of Hessian infantry ultimately escaped (with guns).

However, once the Hessians in Trenton itself got turned around to mosey on out, my forces got across the river and threatened them from the rear, so they had to turn around yet again, and this allowed additional converging forces from the northeast and south to hit them from all directions, and everything in the centre was destroyed.

All in all, a good time was had by all. Playing the Hessians was challenging, but fun. I seem to have a talent for delaying actions...

Here's the table set-up before the gaming began. The Hessians occupy the centre area, under fire from American guns on the hill, and basically threatened on all four sides.



More pictures from another attendee (Andy) are available here:
Game 1 and here: Game 2