Pafetikbazerkas foray into 15mm Flames of War

So my mates organised a big table game , 4players, 150pts each, Russia v Germany. In the lead up I asked if there was anything in terms of scenery or terrain he might require and he mentioned a lack of objective markers.

As it happened I didnt have any cool objective markers only the bits of an idea I had printed years ago on my now dead FDM printer. By resin standards the finish is pretty rough but with only one night to dig it out and get it together I thought ‘better than nothing’.

Painting was very simple, black with a tan rattlecan zenith. a quick hit of olive drab through the air brush on the truck , liberal use of AK muddy ground to cover unsightly bits, dry brush bricks, and a bit selective wash to hide other sins

FYI I don’t expect readers to get much from this as it is more or less a simple reminder for me of a cracking afternoon. But some may like to take note of our novel approach to introducing new players to FoW.

Essentially it was on of those rare moments when all the old school buddies travel from far and wide and get together for a spot of gaming. Most of us had varying degrees of experience with FoW but there were a couple who had never tried it and wanted a taste. Needless to say I wanted to give every one something to do and learn a bit, while not giving them too much and bogging things down.

I also thought it would be good to give it a grounded theme and with all the talk of D-D anniversaries going on I thought it would be cool to do a Normandy theme.

I then set about creating a manageable force for each player based on the units I had to hand. Though we could have pooled units and terrain it was simply more stream lined for me to pre plan and organize so I could rock up, set up and roll dice.

I decided with 6 players it would be fun to imagine a German occupied town by the coast getting pressured from both a beach landing and paras falling in behind.

Every one received a formation, each scraping the minimum requirements but comparable in weight and then I threw in some support units to balance the sides and address some shortfalls.

In the end the list looked like this. I think by the rules there’s some limitation to how much fortification you can have but it was atmospheric on the table and made it easy for me to divvy up the points.

For the table I opted for a long narrow setup, plenty of perimeter for folks to gather around and the narrow field kept things focused and moving in the right direction

We loosely followed Help is on its way from the American D-Day book but forgot the Over whelming force rule which may have weakened the landing attempt but we only gave the Americans 6 turns to reach the center of town to keep the game length in check.

I didn’t record every blow by blow accounts and to be fair the afternoon gradually turned into a whisky tasting and I wasn’t following every move.

In essence after the Stugs went down the Sherman’s landed on the beach and the tide started turning but we figured the Americans were still 2-3 turns away from decisive victory so we called the Germans victors and cleaned up for dinner.

After dinner we sat down to a good few hours of the Free Leagues latest Twilight 2000, and a few more whiskies. So great to spend a whole day and night gaming with my gamers.

The Higgins boast dowloaded from thingyverse then widened at key points to accomadate tanks

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4766369

Soldiers are resin printed models from 3d breeds March to Hell Europe in Flames series. There was a Higgins in that kickstarter collection but it felt a little too simplistic.

Basicaly I just aranged the unsorprted models as ablock in blender and auto supported in chitubox. I magnetised the gunners for resiliance, means I’m not dealing with breakages if they catch or bump,

Too lazy to start another project for my FoW stuff but truth is I never realy stopped expanding my Flames over the last few years. Only it resembled more and more a bundle of half finished projects which started to get under my skin a bit. One of more interesting piles that had been taking up too much of my desk space the last 6 months was a plastic Tamyia Me262 with Me163 @ 1/100 scale an air control tower printed on my old FDM just before it blue smoked and a collection of resin bits that kind of resembled a pair of  Me262’s also @1/100 scale that were tweaked to work my Vitrix flight stands

I wont go over the how to’s of putting a plastic kits together or detail painting step by step but I did employ a few new tricks to get the resin models to match the Tamyia kit as close as possible.

In hand I had 3 aircraft but only 1 set of scale decals. Answer turned out I had to make my own…kind off. Sourcing decal paper for my ink jet epson was easy enough and I had scale decals in hand as a template but standard printers dont print white.

So I resorted to trying both solid black and a black out line on transparent paper as a basis to then paint over.

Played my third game today, 120 points. Infantry, tanks, aircraft, artillery , the works. Still learning many of the rules and probably still getting some others wrong but my sudden, impulsive ‘foray’ into this game has now definately settled into a long and lovely tussel.

In terms of how the game went, I folded after 5 turns. My mate cleaned up my tanks , using my tanks. (my minis his terrain) but we declared a draw as we figured he wasnt going to reach his objective by teh end of the 6th turn.