Models and Painting

By Kreighton Long

For the last year I’ve had a squad of Vietnam War USMC Recon primed and sitting in my queue.  Every time a new project would join them and pass them up I could feel their crayon-craving stares boring into my soul.  Eventually I could take no more of their non-verbal harassment and promoted them from my queue to my painting desk.

After some brief investigating I decided to paint them in the ERDL lowland camouflage that was commonly worn by USMC Recon during the Vietnam War.  While replicating the complex pattern shown below in detail is beyond my skill level and patience I endeavored to replicate the colors well enough to represent the camouflage patter.

The paints I used are Vallejo’s Black (950), USA Uniform (922), German Cam. Medium Brown (826), Golden Olive (857), and Pale Sand (837).

By Kreighton Long

On 21 September, twenty-six players gathered at Titan Games and Hobbies in Timonium, Maryland for another Bolt Action tournament (2nd Edition) organized by Michael Kehs.  Mike was pleased to see his tournament crowd grow since the last tournament back in April to include recurring players from as far away as Ohio and a new player who ventured down from Connecticut.  Mike credits a level of his growing popularity to his success in reaching out to vendors for prize support.  In addition to healthy rewards for the top finishers, Best Painted Army, and FUBAR, players also can look forward to raffle drawings between rounds.  Well-earned credit needs to go to the Assistant TOs, Rob and Chris, for providing invaluable support with setup, break-down, raffles, and pictures.

The three scenarios chosen for this tournament were Meeting Engagement, Key Positions, and Sectors.  This tournament included a new gimmick from the previous one.  While last time players could find their turn ending prematurely if two odd colored Order Dice were pulled from the bag, this time players needed to keep an eye on Secret Objectives distributed prior to each game.  The Secret Objectives forced players to adjust strategies and to think more tactically to score up to an extra ten points, five per objective, each round.  From what I was able to overhear, the feedback from the Secret Objectives was mostly positive, and Mike confirmed that he will look into incorporating them at future events.  One improvement he plans on making is to specifically assign certain objectives to pair with certain scenarios and to balance them with each player receiving one hard and one easy objective.  In my three games, the Secret Objectives did present opportunities for me to play the game differently than I normally would, and added an extra level of intrigue to the game.  For example, in my final game, I had an opportunity to finish off one of my opponents units but instead moved my unit into my opponents half of the table to accomplish my Secret Objective of finishing the game with all my surviving units on my opponents half of the table.  While that choice had no true impact on the outcome of the game, the choice I faced did make it a little more interesting for me and bagged me an additional five points to my overall score.

MIA – PACT Airborne Forces

When Battlefront published RED DAWN and the Airborne Assault Missions Pack 18 months ago, I found one casual comment disturbing.  Page 46 says “WARSAW PACT armies (Czechoslovakian, East German, and Polish) lacked dedicated airborne infantry (as opposed to airborne raiding troops) …”

This is a distinction without a difference, and a dismissal.  I intend to correct the record and give some ideas how these MIA units can be incorporated into the game in casual play.

I’m going to follow the sequence in WARSAW PACT in this discussion but start with a unit found in all PACT armies.

By Kreighton Long

Within the next few weeks the 3rd Edition rulebook of Warlord Games’ WWII platoon skirmish game will hit store shelves and mailboxes around the world.  We here at No Dice No Glory were given the opportunity to peruse the upcoming rulebook and I personally scrolled straight to the Armies of Germany section to see what notable changes Warlord Games has in store for the Wehrmacht.

By Kreighton Long

At this past April’s Operation Roundup Tournament I eagerly competed in the Best Painted Force finishing towards the top but not high enough to place.  The category that hurt my score the most was my lack of a display board.  Historically, I’ve avoided building a display board as I would rather invest the time, energy, and resources into painting miniatures and terrain.

Humbled, I decided that I can’t win unless I play the game and this game requires a display board.  Driven by spite I committed myself to investing some of my summer break into building my first display board. As this is my first attempt at a display board the unofficial motto from the start was “good enough”.

By Kreighton Long

My summer of terrain projects continues with a set of homemade rivers.  I set out to echo the method by which I created a set of ponds several years ago.  The materials I used were chipboard for the base, plastic table covers for the river, Vallejo’s Silver Grey paint, Apple Barrel’s Black and Melted Chocolate paint, Delta Creative’s Trail Tan paint, Craft Smart’s Olive Green and Espresso paints, PVA glue, sand, and various basing flock and tufts.

For the plastic table covers I used LovePads 1.5mm thick clear desk pads.  I prepped the table covers by cutting them to size, ironing them under a t-shirt to smooth out the material, and cleaning them with glass cleaner.

By Morten

In this article I will talk about markings used on Danish Vehicles in the 80s and 90s.
Most of these have been in use since the 60/70s and are still in use to this day, although with some variations and updates.

For some markings there are Army standards that needs to be obeyed, and are generally placed on the same location on all vehicles, although slight variation in placement could occur, because they were put on the vehicle by either the crew themselves or the mechanic echelons on base.

Let’s start with the “easy” parts that are present on all vehicles: License plates, Vehicle numbers and weight classification (for heavier vehicles).

By Kreighton Long

Feeling adventurous, I set out to build a pigsty for my rural Bolt Action terrain.  Most of the materials were easy enough to order online.  The wattle fences came from Renedra Ltd; the mother pig from Warlord Games; and the balsa wood, match sticks, coffee stirrers, and green stuff from my hobby cache.

By Kreighton Long

Slowly but surely I’ve been working on improving my terrain options with the focus on Bolt Action.  My primary army project for this year is overhauling my Soviet forces.  Accordingly, my terrain optics have been focused on the terrain pieces that will best fit the Eastern Front.

By Kreighton Long

Bring on the pain!  I bravely (read foolishly) decided to break out my X-Acto knife and green stuff to try to build a Case Yellow Fallschirmjager force using the Warlord Games sprues.  As I started planning there were a few things I needed to keep in mind.

First was to have as many troopers as possible in the early war step-in smocks.  This was in keeping with the fact that the second version jump smock had not become readily available to the Fallschirmjager corps during Case Yellow.  Second was to use heads with uncovered helmets.

Nearly all the photographs I found online from this period show the Fallschirmjager with neither camo covers or netting over their head protection.  Third was to identify where weapon substitutions or additions would need to take place.  The primary light machine gun for the Case Yellow Fallschirmjager was the MG34 and the flamethrower of choice in 1940 would have been the Flammenwerfer 35 as the Flammenwerfer 41 was not introduced until 1941.  With these three things in mind I got to work.