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 Paolo Paglianti

Based in Lancaster, near Philadelphia, Historicon is one of the most important events for enthusiasts of modeling, painting, wargaming, miniatures, and, as the show’s name suggests, military history. It might be a bit smaller than Adepticon, since it involves visitors, players, and professionals focused on historical games rather than fantasy or sci-fi, but it is a concentration of everything our hobby represents.

At Historicon, you can try dozens of games, from chariot racing scenarios to a 10-meter table recreating the D-Day landings in 28mm, or simply participate in one of the demos – this year we tried the excellent “Achtung Panzer” by Warlords presented in person by the author Roger Gerrish, but there was also “Wings of Glory,” demos of “Triumph” (Ancient in 15mm a-la DBA), and a splendid scenario of a clash in Indochina between French colonial and Chinese troops recreated with FOW V3.

I also managed to spend some time with my friend Mitch Reed, for the second time in 2024 and in a true American Sport Bar with baseball games on TV and huge hamburgers!

By Michael Rafferty

D-Day Upon Us – D-Day +10 Battle Report Part 2: The Revenge of Zombie Whitman

It was Saturday morning and time to start the battle. I divvied up the sides as people arrived, those getting here early were able to pick the forces and the last arriving got assigned the remainders. We had 11 people for the event, making it one of the largest for our local group this decade! Ok, this decade is only four years old, and we haven’t run many events, but I was happy with the turnout.

The Allies had the first turn, since they were the ones on the offensive. Against Caen, the 101^st’s first company came on and started moving on the Fallschirmjager. In retrospect, I probably gave everyone too much artillery, but I definitely gave the Fallschirmjager too much. They were also entrenched in the city and surrounding area, so they were hard to kill. This brings us to a house rule we used for this event and will use going forward.

In order to speed up play and allow things to die quicker, we changed bulletproof cover. Instead of forcing a firepower roll, creating a separate roll for every failed save, we had it give the team a +1 to their save. This made play smoother, which letting weapons like machine guns do more damage. There were a lot of Fallschirmjager and not many died to the initial Allied shooting in Carentan, but more died than would normally happen. By the end of the game, the paras were pushing the Germans out of Carentan but had taken heavy loses.

— Create a civilization to stand the test of time!

By Patrick S. Baker

(Read Part one here)

Moves: Legal and Business

In 1996, MicroProse released Sid Meier’s Civilization II (Civ II) for the personal computer (PC) and Avalon Hill then sued MicroProse over the use of the name, Civilization, asserting they had reclaimed the previously licensed copyright. As this lawsuit worked through the legal system, Activision released Civilization: Call to Power, also for the PC, in 1998. This set off a three-sided legal battle over the use of the name.  At the same time “the video game industry … was like the Wild West, with companies starting up, closing, buying and selling other companies, and also trading, assigning and purchasing Intellectual Properties (IPs) at a furious rate.”

By Paolo Paglianti

Although I have been organizing tournaments in Milan for various Wargames for over twenty years, this year’s Flames of War tournament was very special. First of all, I organized it again with the support of Battlefront and the Austrian store S-Games.at, both of them generously provided us with prizes. Moreover, it is the first time I have organized the Italian Nationals, a true honor for me. And finally, we had some foreign guests – and what guests!

By Patrick S. Barker

Civilization: The Board Game (1980)

– The Game of the Heroic Age

The first Civilization board game was created by Francis Tresham, a former British Royal Air Force radio instructor. Tresham first thought of the idea for the game while browsing a historical atlas at his base library. The idea was further sparked by Tresham’s experience playing strategy games like Risk and Diplomacy. Tresham found playing Diplomacy to be rather averse and thought to design a game that stressed winning through cultural and technological progress rather than military force.

Tresham’s game begins with the appearance of early farmers circa 8,000 BCE (approximately 4000 years before the start of recorded history) and ended with the rise of Rome in 250 BCE. Players controlled various real civilizations from around the Eastern Mediterranean Sea.  As the turns and time passed, the players’ starting settlements grew and expanded into neighboring areas and generated additional resources. Designed for between two to seven players, the game could take up to eight hours to complete.

We are back and today we have Mike Denson the designer of GMT Games Last Hundred Yards.

Opinion Piece By Jim Naughton

DYNAMIC POINTS: IF ENOUGH CUSTOMERS WHINE, THEY’RE RIGHT

A recent FACEBOOK post called attention to a BF plan to introduce DYNAMIC POINTS into Team Yankee.  It referred the reader to the Team Yankee website.  Since then, there has been a lot discussion in the various TY Groups on social medium.  

Couple years back, dynamic points were invented for Flames of War. The ostensible ‘reason’ for this was FOW tournament players had reacted to the Army Point (AP) values of the bread-and-butter tanks of MIDWAR by choosing Lend-Lease Tanks for the Soviets and spamming armored cars. Armored cars worked because they had enough armor and lots of machine guns to tank-assault many infantry units. Lend-Lease tanks like the M3 medium had an extra shot compared to T34s.

By Mitch Reed

Another Connections Wargaming Conference is in the books and this last event was yet another benchmark performance. Held in Carlisle PA, the host Army War College Conflict Studies Laboratory exceeded what they did when they last hosted the event in 2019. We have covered this event over the last few years, and it is the premier event where wargamers from defense, industry, academia and the hobby community gather to talk about how to make wargaming better and what the next generation of wargaming looks like.

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).