In this special bonus edition of the BattleVault podcast Tom is joined by No Dice No Glory teammates Austin Copeland and Preston Jacob. The boys go all fan-boy and gush incoherently about all the goodness the upcoming D-Day British book and card release for Flames of War. In case you can’t tell….they are very excited about the release.
Since the beginning of FOW’s Version 4 I’ve been patient. Taking the opportunity through the midwar releases to buy, build and paint an entire British armored company, and a motor and infantry company. An entire cornucopia of Churchills, Grants, and tin hatted tommies have graced my painting table all gussied up in the Tobruk Finest camo schemes.
What I have been waiting for, however, is the Airborne. Because I have three full companies already painted in their signature smock. And its’ been a long wait.
Let’s see what the new D-Day British book gives us, shall we?
By Mitch “the Meta” Reed
My first army for was a Canadian infantry list. I swore at the time it would be my only army. My Bronze-Green Canucks were soon joined by Germans and many other lists but my love of playing Commonwealth armies has never abated. As Late War started to go under the V4 treatment I eagerly awaited the first dedicated British book and the new British D-Day book that will be released in March has a lot to be excited about. Airborne, Commandos, Canadians, Cromwells and multiple versions of the Churchill will no longer collect dust and now see a table and based on my first impressions of the book they should be a competitive and fun force to play.
Ed and Tom hit the air-waves again for the second installment of No Dice No Glory’s BattleVault podcast.
by Dennis ‘Matt Varnish’ Campbell,
photos by me and James Smith
On the first weekend of November 2019, we had an event, the first Upper Canada Regionals, in Kingston ON (on the NY State border) for Late War 100pts. It was held at Royal Military College (our version of Westpoint) and put on by Ryan Sullivan and his gang. It was a good time, but more importantly, we were able to guinea-pig a new iteration on the Battle Planner, as below document and matrix:
Playing with a friend at home Blue vs Red is good. Meeting with lots of players at the local club for a tournament or a day-long huge game is even better. Playing a part in a world global campaign is really the next level of our hobby.
Battlefront and OnTableTop (yes, the guys we formerly know as Beasts of War) created the D-Day Global Campaign, a cross-media system to allow any player, any club and any tournament to be part of a six weeks D-Day campaign.
I recently returned to playing in tournaments of one of the first miniatures games I got into,, and I now have a new appreciation for the game. I wanted to share this rejuvenation with you.
Why did I leave the tournament scenes? It wasn’t that I walked away from the game, I still played FOW socially, ran tournaments for both FOW and Team Yankee (TY). As many of you know I still covered the game here on NDNG. I just walked away from competitive play for a while. My hiatus came about because I saw some things I didn’t like about the tournament scene.
A month or so ago, when the D-Days books first came out, I wanted to bring a friend who hadn’t played FOW into the scene, and a tournament at a new Local Game Store (LGS) seemed like a perfect opportunity. But, would the tourney scene be a positive experience for a new to FOW player? Or, would the hardened, competitive attitudes of some of the players prove to give him a negative experience?
The new Late War books sparkled lots of interest here in Italy: old players from V3 dusted their armies buried at home and began to play back, while Mid War veterans found a reason to expand their WW2 legions. on NDNG, the new “balance” with tank costs almost halved creates a more mobile metagame, with lots of armoured vehicles going around on the wargaming table.
As a result, we’re going to have . The first one happened on October 6th and saw almost 20 players coming from all Northern Italy (and one from Switzerland!), while we are already accepting entries for the second one, on December 15th (99 points Late War Tournament).
An army marches on its stomach: Napoleon Bonaparte was right, but speaking of our games, we should misquote to “our armies march on their rectangular bases”. There is nothing more disappointing in seeing a well-painted army on poorly rendered bases – I’ve seen with my eyes tournament armies with their infantry merely stuck to the brown Battefront bases!
Basing your miniatures is not that difficult. First of all, you need a plan. For example, all my Flames of War Mid armies and my Team Yankee lists have two infantry platoons, as I really like to play with massed infantry. For this reason, I try to base the two units with a different “landscape”, so I can tell them apart at a glance, even when they assault the same target and mix up. For example, my US Armoured infantry platoon 1 is mounted on “urban” bases, while Platoon 2 is on “rural” ones.
