Aaaaand - I'm back. June was rather hectic, what with weddings, birthdays and studying, so the little spare time I had was spent painting, rather than blogging. However, things should be a bit calmer now, at least for a while.
I was dogsitting for my sister and brother-in-law last Friday, so I stayed over, and on Saturday we played what will probably turn out to be our annual wargame.
We had been going to try out the Saga rules, but didn't have enough singly based figures, so decided instead to try out the Normandy Firefight 54mm skirmish rules from Artorus Games I had picked up a few weeks earlier.
We're both long-time WW2 fans, and for me it was pretty much the first period I ever collected (old Airfix OO/HO plastic, a lot of which are still lying about in my loft). The problem, however, is that we only have 20mm figures painted. The solution nearly led to me marking this post as NSFW, and it probably still isn't advised for those with a low pain threshold.
Backstory
Over thirty years ago, when I was barely a teenager (may not actually quite have been), my brother-in-law (then just my sister's boyfriend) commissioned me to paint some 54mm figures he'd "converted". Neither of us can remember the reason behind the project, but the figures were all Airfix, and were a mix of British WW2 (infantry, commandos, paratroopers, Gurkhas), British modern (SLR, GPMG), Australian infantry (there were a lot of figures with bush hats) and German Africa Korps. There may even have been one or two American figures in there, as there was definitely a Browning Automatic Rifle on one of the figures. The conversions had been done using Plasticine (no green stuff back then, at least not that we'd ever heard of) and I'd "painted" them up as a 70s mercenary force - i.e. no real uniforms. I didn't undercoat figures in those days, so it was a simple case or twelve or thirteen year old me applying Airfix enamels as neatly as he could to the figures. There were no eyes or mouths painted, no shading or highlighting, weapons were a single colour, and camouflage was large streaks of colour (sadly, my ability to paint camouflage hasn't changed much in the intervening 30+ years). The figures were then liberally hand varnished with gloss varnish, the bases were left a bare black and the figures were put in a box and stored in the back of a cupboard.
The figures we selected are shown below (those of a nervous disposition should look away now)
British Forces
German Forces
Setup
So, having decided to use these figures, the next stage was to set up the scenery. We had two 54mm buildings (both from the first time Airfix released them) and two vehicles. One of the buildings - the desert outpost - was completely unpainted, and the other, the upscaled Forward Command Post, was partly painted. One vehicle was the LRDG Chevrolet Truck and the other was a plastic Bedford truck (I think), and neither was what you could call "painted", unless you were being very loose with the term.
That, however, was the extent of our 54mm scenery - all trees, walls, bushes, etc.., were 28mm, and 54mm figures against 28mm trees would not have worked. As this was bocage country, however, we needed something. Enter the plastic aquarium flowers and mats of various sorts, along with some roads that Citadel produced a few years back. They are vinyl (I think), and came rolled up. Trying to get them to lie flat was entertaining, to say the least.
Anyway, figures and scenery sorted, we chose figures for the game (and did quite well, historically speaking. The only fudge was a Bren gun pretending to be a German MG34). We rolled up characters, calculated the amount of ammunition each figure had, and were finally ready to start the game.
Next post will cover the actual games.
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