Club Night 23rd September

I arranged a league game against Laurence and his Dark Elves. We had to leave some forces in reserve and I found myself starting without one of my Shamans, the Minotaurs and the Giant. The rest of my force deployed on my right leaving space for the others to arrive.
I swept my line forward pivoting on the building to close with the Dark Elf line. I came under heavy bow fire and magic as I advanced and my charge rolls seriously let me down. My Bestigors charged forward twice and turned around and charged back after the Shades once, and never moved more than 3" for their failed charges!

However despite my chariots being shot up quite badly they charged into the corsairs and crossbowman and managed to break and chase down both of them. However the Gors got caught up and eventually cut down by the enemy sorcerer, angered by the nearby alter of Khaine and protected from harm by the pendant of Khaleth.

My General had his chariot shot from under him, but at least managed to kill the Shades so he made a slight contribution.On the other flank my reserves arrived and the Giant failed to charge the chariot while my Minotaurs also failed to charge. The Giant was charged by the chariot but survived and managed to crush it before charging in and inflicting heavy casualties on the cold one riders, who then brought him down. The spearmen and their assassin charged the Ungors I had positioned to cover the flank of the Minotaurs, discouraging anyone charging them previously with mind-razor so they where strength 7!

However without the spell to enhance them, they fled and failed to rally, leaving the table. The spearmen redirected into the Minotaurs and fought them to a draw, but with a musician they won, and the Minotaurs failed their break test, fled and also failed to rally, leaving the table very ignobly. Despite bombarding the spearmen with magic I could not break them and the game drew to a close.

I was defeated, and by more victory points than expected, but felt a lot closer and I was pleased with how my tactics worked, even if some key dice rolls let me down too badly to be able to compensate for.

Blood Angels XI - Almost finished

I have the final touches to my last units of Blood Angels. That is the whole company now completed, just need some flat coat to finish them. I will then take and post some pictures of the finished units.

Above: Tactical Squads, Death Company and Honour Guard,
Below: Assault Squads, Dreadnoughts, Land Speeder and Terminators

Above: Command, Veterans, Below: The entire company

Battle of Beda Fomm

Steve, Luke and I gathered for a mid-week game. We decided to try out the Beda Fomm scenario from Wargames Illustrated as with Steve's BEF tanks we could virtually do the exact forces. The British Combe Force deployed across the road while the Bersaglieri deployed at the far end ready to try and make a breach for 10th army to escape through (below).

The Bersaglieri advanced valiantly against a storm of British artillery fire (above), while the British armoured cars attempted to flank them, but were driven off by the Italian tanks, who then swept on as the British armour arrived behind them (below).

However the British opening volley failed to take advantage of this position and the return fire decimated them, as the rest of the Italian armour arrived (above). meanwhile the infantry had continued to push forward, taking heavy casualties, but managing to hang around and even attempted a very unsuccessful assault on the British lines (below), before finally faltering under the massed fire and breaking.

The British MkIVs has also arrived by now (below, cunningly using the mirrored wall to enhance their numbers) and began to attack the Italian artillery. Although this quickly proved fatal for them, they destroyed enough gun crews to seriously hamper the Italian supporting artillery fire for the main attack. The heavy losses to the British armour meant that if the Italians could break one of the defending platoons they could win, but the dug in infantry was going to prove too tough for them, and the Italians eventually broke after many turns of tough fighting, resulting in the destruction of the 10th army.
This is a really tough fight for the Italians and I think we were all surprised how close I actually came. I was even more surprised when I saw the following weeks Wargames Illustrated and found they had changed the scenario after more play-testing and made the Italians just have reserves rather than delayed reserves so they arrived much earlier, which could prove decisive. We will now have to repay it with the revised scenario and see if I can manage to save the Italian 10th army!

Club Night 16th September

Having missed the last game I persuade Phil to run another Check your 6 air combat game as I really wanted to try out these rules. He fortunately obliged and run two scenarios for us based on the start of the Battle of Britain.

The first game saw me commanding flight of Hurricanes, chasing down some unidentified aircraft under Phil(history is unsure what they were but most likely RAF Blenheims), while some of the shiny new Spitfires under Bob attacked me in turn. yes, this was the historical recreation of the first aerial kill by a Spitfire and not a Jerry in sight!

I swept around to try and use my superior speed to run down the more ponderous aircraft and happily ignore the Spits' as why would my own side fire on me! However they did damaging one of my Hurricanes, which eventually crashed after I tried to climb after the 'enemy' bombers and stalled and my green crew were unable to recover. The rest if the Spitfires made attacks, but missed and then broke off as they ran out of ammunition. I managed to make a few passes at the bombers inflicting some damage before I also ran out of ammunition.
We then had time for a second game. This time involving the enemy! Bob and I shared some Messerschmitts while Phil took the British photography mission (I think they were flying Defiants, but I can't recall). Here the German should have had the advantage, but one of the down sides of air (and naval) games became apparent. If you don't play them regularly you don't have a full enough understanding of the limitations and manoeuvrability of your craft and fail to take advantage of it fully or place you self in poor positions. And this is what Bob and I did, not flying to take full advantage of our aircraft, while Phil made full use of his. This combined with our poor shooting and the annoyingly accurate Brits meant we failed to chase them down, took damage ourselves, although mostly ran out of ammo firing from disadvantageous positions.

Despite this I really enjoyed this, and a possible project for next year is the Jet-Age update, flying wither over Korea or Israel.

Colours

10th September saw Colours wargames show at Newbury racecourse. I have said before that I really like this venue. Although the multi levels is not ideal, the glass front to the Grandstand makes it feel really light and airy. While the club put on our FoW game again I joined the Skirmish Wargamers for a 54mm Al-Andalusia game with Hail Caesar rules.

Pete had organised the game, even getting figures from members who could not make it and did a magnificent job. He and Beth had set up some brilliant looking terrain and written out cards for all the units so everyone had everything they needed. Myself and Alan played the Muslims, while Beth and Ted were the Christians and Pete umpired.

The first nice touch is Pete let me and Ted (as C-in-C) pick our units by flipping and coin and then alternately selecting units. This resulted in Ted placing a preference in missile troops, while I found myself with a mass of heavy cavalry and infantry, which I hoped would give us the edge. I took command of our cavalry on our right, while Alan took the infantry on the left with the lights planning to move through the marsh. The enemy deployment almost mirrored ours, with Ted having the cavalry opposite me and Beth the infantry opposite Alan.

Above: Muslim cavalry, below: Muslim infantry

Above: Christian cavalry, below: Muslim cavalry

While the Christian forces dallied (or failed many command rolls), the Muslims hurried forward to attack the infidels. I angled part of my cavalry to either side of the wood, chasing down and catching the unfortunate horse archers on the outer edge and preparing to charge the enemy infantry in the centre (below).

While I fought off the majority of the enemy cavalry, and drew the attention of the rest on the other flank Alan harassed them with his skirmishers, while the Frankish infantry (presumably gold had outweighed their faith to their God) formed a second line behind the cavalry that then took its turn to stand around doing nothing before finally charging in just dribs and drabs (below).

By now my flanking force was truly surrounded (above), but in the centre after some viscous push and shove, we had broken though and were sweeping left and right to open this hole in the enemy lines (below).

The remains of the enemy infantry tried valiantly to hold against the Frankish heavies, but were gradually pushed back (above), and with the cavalry behind them their fate was sealed,while all the Christian cavalry could do was face off against the Muslim cavalry and watch their infantry be cut down behind them, resulting in a famous victory for the Muslims.

This was a great fun game and ran fairly smoothly for a first run through of the rules, mostly thanks to Pete's organisation and I really look forward to playing the rules again in any scale, although the 54mms really do have visual effect nothing else can achieve.

Club Night 9th September

Steve K and I decided to play some Flames of War but to go back to mid war and not campaign enabling us to freely pick from the lists and use some troops we haven't used for a while and for Steve to try out his armoured cavalry regiment.

We played the Dust Up scenario from Hellfire and Back, and I immediately came unstuck. I was using my favoured Squadrone Esplorante, but Steve had reinforced his light armour with 2 Lee-Grant troops which would cause me big problems. And when he got the first turn, it went from bad to worse as he was able to shell my Lancia trucks with their 90mm guns and destroy them with ease. This then left only my 75mm guns with the slightest chance of dealing with the big British tanks ad he astutely avoided them.

Above: The heavily armoured British, Below:The Italian defenders

I managed to push the game to its limits with my reserves, but the outcome was never really in doubt and I lost. Fortunately we had time for another game. This time I was defending in a hold the line scenario which suited my forces slightly better. I remember it was a good game, but I have taken so long to write it up I forgot who won (probably means it wasn't me!), so moral of the story is to try and blog more regularly

Post 200!

So, as I make an attempt to catch up with my blogging, I find I have reached 200 posts. What I achieved in the last couple of years then. Well there are at least 16 people out there following the blog, and I know a lot of the club member read and are amused by my take on events! Most importantly it has given me some focus to my gaming and painting. I have been able to look at what I have painted and see my progress, and reflect on my games and my mistakes, and hopefully learn from them.

Most importantly of all though, is I have enjoyed writing it and sharing my gaming with other gamers. I love my gaming as it is a sociable activity and to be able to share it with a wider audience is fantastic.

So now on with the next 100 posts, with the Blood Angels virtually finished, the next projects are Malifaux and Helldorado as something a bit different,

Thanks for reading

Leigh

Painting Blood Angels Step by Step

I have decide to try and photo the painting of my Sanguinary priests step by step so you can see how I work if your interested.
1. Prime miniatures with Citadel spray gun and Mechanite Red GW foundation paint2. Highlight armour with GW Blood Red applied with airbrush. I spray from level and above only so there begins to get some shading appear.

3. I then washed the armour with GW Baal Red wash to enrich the red and provide some guidance for subsequent painting.
4. For the sanguinary priests I found after the red was painted some of the crosses I had filled on the Death company parts were still visible so I refilled them and touched up those areas using the same colours as 1-3. I then put a base colour of Astronomican Grey GW foundation paint over any areas that were going to be white or gold.5. I then over-painted the areas to be white with Vallejo off-white and black areas with Vallejo black.
6. I then washed these areas with thinned GW Badab Black wash to provide some crisper depth than the army painter will give.7. I then repainted the white areas using off-white again over the washed areas
8. Next I painted metal areas with GW Boltgun metal
9. All bone areas and scrolls and purity seals were base coated with GW Dheneb Stone
10. All the gold areas where painted Vallejo Old Gold, I like this as its a nice deep aged gold. It takes two to three thin coats to build this up but its worth the effort.
11. It was now time to clean up the paint job again. With the amount of detail on these there is more areas that need cleaning up than usual. This is just a repeat of the colours used in steps 1-3. At this step I also pick out the blood drops and purity seals wax seals in Mechanite Red. I painted the eyes lenses Knarloc green at this point too.
12. The eye lenses are painted GW Scorpion green and white dots added. The blood drops are highlighted with GW blazing orange.
13. The next four images are almost the final steps. Highlight the blood drops and the vials with GW Sunburst yellow and off-white dots. It was also at this step any bone areas were highlighted with GW Bleached bone.
14. The final painting step is GW Codex Grey highlights to the black areas and GW Vomit Brown to the red areas. Unfortunately I forgot to photo this step.

15. Army painter. I use the strong tone and apply with a brush. Once I have brushed it all over, I wipe the brush clean and start lifting off any army painter that I don't want to leave shading in the recess and not affect the colour of the raised areas too much.

16. Bases and Transfers. Bases are painted whatever dark brown I have to hand, usually either GW Scorched Brown or System 3 Artists Burnt Umber, then over-brushed with bubonic brown, before a dry-brush of bleached bone, with the edges repainted bubonic brown. The decals are the standard Blood Angel chapter badge with one wing chopped off for my chapter badge. I complete my scrolls with a fine permanent pen

17. Final step is to flatten the shine from the army painter. I use the army painter anti-shine as it is made to go with army painter so as long as I follow the instructions I should be fine.

Club Night 2nd September

We had planned to be joined my some members of South London Warlords to play a 7YW game, but unfortunately they couldn't make it, but we still played a game. Bob and I took the French against Austrians under Scott and Steve K using the Konigskreig rules which are nice and quick and fun.
We also used the 'hidden' movement system for the first time and I think Bob and I got caught with this as our dummy bases were quickly removed, while Scott kept his near the back of the table enabling him to activate them instead of another command and so letting them activate their 'fighting' commands after ours and always take advantage of whatever we did.

This advantage combined with some poor dice rolls on my part meant that my cavalry was quickly routed and our line was in danger of being turned, while in the centre our infantry was driven back leaving a victory to the Austrians.