Flames of War

By Benny Christiansen

” ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse”

The poem that describes a child’s first meeting with St. Nicholas; how he cannot help himself but laugh out loud, and how he quickly feels that he has nothing to fear from this plump old man. It is a poem, that can give you a sense of Christmas.

It describes very well how I felt when I looked through the Red Banner book. Like a little child seeing Father Christmas for the very first time.. and when I saw the SU-85, I could not help but laugh out loud, feeling certain that I would no longer have any reason to fear the Huns!

I have the honor of taking you through the new MidWar book for the Soviets. I will start out with giving you my thoughts about it all in all, and then I will touch, ever so lightly, on every formation and briefly mention the new tanks and choices available in this book. At the end, I will also reveal a potentially huge surprise in regards to Command Cards.

by Tom Burgess

After playing several city fights with the new Version 4 Mid War East Front lists, and I decided to turn our attention to more open field battles.

We set up an East Front looking table with few woods, wheat fields, a couple of built-up areas, and a rail line. We also increased the points we were playing at from 55 to 81 points as that’s what we’ll be playing at Advance the Colors in October.

By Benny Christiansen

I have always had a weakness for the huge battles. I love seeing the terrain setup – with a “story in mind” so to speak – and then the first few turns in the game, making the first efforts to win the battle.

In this article, I will attempt to describe how I plan the 38,000 points battle and my thoughts in the process, as well as being a tiny battle rep with pictures and video. The primary intention here is to inspire others by sharing the experience. The setting is in LW, but I believe it can be done in any of the games in FOW.  I am well aware there are many other ways to do this, and I encourage anyone who finds large battles interesting, to try it. It is not the same as making a tournament. I think that an event like this is more interesting for the historically focused players than a tournament might be.

After a good start, I was in the top half of the classment. Now we need to fight some serious fight! (If you want to read the first part, just click here!)

Second Game

For the second game I met Alberto De Luca, the owner of  (the Italian  Battlefront official importer) and host of the tournament. After one year of tournaments and events on Team Yankee, I consider Alberto and his wonderful, tireless wife close friends even outside the hobby. Needless to say, Alberto knows the game very well and is one of the top players in Italy. He had a Russian list with two tank Formations, a Grant one and a mixed one with dreadful KV-1, Valentines (“Tovarish Dimitri, they are the tanks I lent to you and now you use them against me!”) and a 10 T60 tanks strong platoon. Also, he had two mortar troops to barrage the enemy line while the tanks march full forward.

In this episode Ed, Austin and Mitch re-cap the Flames of War Charity event they held for TAPS.org at Your Hobby Place in Fredericksburg VA. The guys raised almost $500 for TAPS and you can hear all about the event in this podcast recorded right after the dice were put down.

After one year of intense gaming on with my British BAOR army (of which and ), I decided to try the WW2 side of Battlefront rules. has lots in common with Team Yankee, so I basically had the same ruleset with much more variety in army lists.

I chose the British Mid-War army in the desert: partially because I already had some V1 pieces, but also since I planned to paint the US Army (the other army I’d like to paint) in the Late period for an internal campaign we’re going to have at our local club in early 2019. So I fast-painted the missing pieces and formed a list of Desert Rats. The first tournament at a stone’s throw was Hobby Model Expo on 30th September. Hobby Model is one of the most important shows in northern Italy: everything related to modelling hobbies is there, from miniatures to plastic models, from painting to lots of soldiers of any scale.

For our MW Eastern Front escalation league, the Huntsville Historical Gamers were given the opportunity to review a nice addition to our table terrain.  This Iconic terrain piece is produced in 15mm by the Epsilon Studios from Barcelona, Spain

Introducing the Stalingrad – Barmaley Fountain. This historical fountain is based on a Russian fairy tale, Aybolit and Barmaley, written in 1925 by Korney Chukovsky.  In the poem, Doctor Aybolit cautions the Little children:  Do not go to Africa for there are large evil barmaley there that will bite you!  In the whimsical statue, by sculptor Romuald Lodko, the children are dancing around the barmaley.

There are many people who enjoy our hobby of miniature wargaming in different ways.  Some love a great historical game, tailoring a board to match a particular battle, designing forces to match.  Others like a cooperative aspect to it, playing on teams, or making huge games that bring in lots of players at once.

Some are in it for the modelling and painting, designing elaborate bases, displays, or beautiful scenic pieces.  Others participate to test their competitive meddle against the best competition they can.  At any given point, some of us are in the hobby for all of these reasons.  I enjoy all these things, but I love tournaments. At a tournament, I can get three or more games against diverse opponents, and I get to sharpen my skills at something I enjoy doing. I get to see new techniques for painting armies and meet people with the same passion for this as me. I’ve made some great friends since I got going with

Since I began playing in 2011, I have only managed to finish first in a tournament once. But I felt with practice and opportunity, I might be able to claw my way into the big dance at masters in Indianapolis this year.  Last year I managed to climb as high as 22nd in the rankings. Maybe this year was my best opportunity. And so my travels began.  As our tournament season closes and another one begins this October, I’ll show some pictures of my journey throughout the past year, some big wins, some big losses, and some lessons I learned along the way.

Ed and Austin are back again!  This time they talk about more tactics, answer your questions and talk about upcoming Flames of War and Team Yankee events near you.  You do not want to miss these tips from NDNG’s Masters players.