By Robert Kelly

I’m sure that everyone has seen those red and white poles either mounted on the trails of a gun or howitzer or on the side of an armoured vehicle. I wrote about the red and white posts a number of years ago on the old WWPD site and decided to dust it off and update after reading a recent Facebook post asking “what are those red and white poles for”? So many people were trying to be helpful to the person asking the question but at the same time being so completely wrong that I felt I had to do something about it. I served 18 years in the Royal Canadian Artillery, so I feel qualified to answer that question. I’ll be describing how the Commonwealth artillery would use them, but the procedures are almost the same for most other armies.

The short answer is that they are “aiming posts”.  The longer answer is that they are cleaning staves painted up to look like aiming posts. So, what exactly are aiming posts and what are they used for?  First of all aiming posts are only used for indirect fire weapons such as artillery guns and howitzers or mortars.

March 14th, 2021

By Howard West

Hard Knox Games located in Elizabethtown, KY hosted a Team Yankee Tournament on March 14th, 2021 as part of WOLFKRIEG 2021. This year due to the state of Kentucky’s COVID-19 event size restrictions WOLFKRIEG 2021 was been broken into two consecutive weekends. Weekend #1 for Wolfkrieg 2021 took place, March 13th, 2021 was Flames of War and March 14th was Team Yankee. This report covers the Team Yankee for weekend #1.

Hard Knox Games has been hosting small gaming tournaments during COVID based on the state of Kentucky’s COVID-19 guidelines that are in place at the time of the event. Chad and the team at Hard Knox have a great store and is like walking into the vendor area at a gaming convention. This is the 12th year that WOLFKRIEG has taken place.

By Kreighton Long

I don’t remember where my interest in playing Germans in World War Two games came from but I do know that the first miniatures I painted after joining this hobby were Germans from Bolt Action Miniatures, before Warlord Games bought them. That five-man infantry squad still sits in my display case to this day. After painting and gaming Germans for over a decade it’s safe to say that the German army is my first-round-draft-pick when throwing dice with friends.

The German Wehrmacht, rebuilt after being disemboweled by The Treaty of Versailles following World War One, reentered the world stage in dramatic fashion with it’s blitzkrieg against Poland in 1939. What followed were six years of brutal campaigns across Europe, Africa, and Russia ending with the final defeat of the Third Reich in the streets of Berlin itself.

By Mitch Reed

One of the best aspects’ gamers love about Blood & Plunder is its historical setting in the days of the early colonial Americas. Once a gamer has painted their miniatures, they immediately look to create a beautiful table to show off their amazing models. Firelock Games has some great solutions for those who wish to pick up some great terrain that will create that world in which the game is played.

By Tom Burgess

Editor’s note: This is the second of our two part look at 3D resin printing for wargamers.

I know what you are thinking “wouldn’t it be great if I could print the high quality wargame miniatures I want on demand?” The true wargamer response to that has to be “of course!” That’s what I was thinking when I ordered my own 3D resin printer.  But it has been an interesting journey for me with some pleasant and some not so pleasant surprises.  This endeavor has made me think about the future of wargaming and how I will fit in with it now that I can make my own models.

Quality resin 3D printers are coming down in price and there are so many people offering free and for-a-fee 3D print files, it just may be that we are entering a new age for miniature wargaming. So where might this road be taking us, and is 3D printing for everyone? These are questions that I will attempt to look at in this article. There may be some misconceptions.

So the first thing you are thinking about when considering to buy a 3D resin printer is probably that you’ll save a lot of money on your wargame miniatures.

By Paolo Paglianti

Editor’s note: this is the first in a two part series looking at 3D resin printing. The second part, where Iron Tom takes a look at many of the cons of

Also: click on any of Paolo’s images to see a higher res image

Back in the 70s and 80s, Star Trek forecast a lot of things that we later saw in real life – touch screens, smartphones, TV screens as  walls, personal computers in every house, and AI answering with a human voice. Also the replicator: the Enterprise crew uses it to create any kind of food, while our “replicators” – the 3D Printers – allow creating resin models. For a wargamer, this is even better than the food!

Join The Talesmen, Glenn, Tyler and Tom as they talk Blood and Plunder, Painting Projects and upcoming goals for the month of March. They cover strategy and tactics for two new missions: Escort and Rescue. They announce new challenges for Glenn and Tom’s painting Cues. Finally, the episode closes with our announcing of the first ever Trivia Winner, and the posting of our 2nd question (which Tom made overly difficult) about an obscure fort during the French and Indian War.

By Glenn Van Meter

I was recently asked to try out Strategy Wave Studios’ Combat Storm system. I was excited to hear that a gaming company had decided to put rules to the plastic toy soldiers I grew up playing with. My friend Brad came over to help me give them a go. We quickly reviewed the rules together. In this system, each individual pose represents a different type of soldier such as a rifleman, grenadier, or sergeant, and they’re grouped in units of 3-12. Special weapons troopers like AT specialists and grenadiers still carry the standard infantry armament of their faction besides their limited ammo special weapon. We were pretty impressed with the depth of the rules. It wasn’t the beer and pretzels type system either of us had been expecting.

The army lists currently published have the green force playing the US Army and the tan force playing the WARPAC weapon-armed “People’s Coalition Front”. My plastic toy soldiers are actually a mix of green,  tan, and grey minis. Brad picked US Green and I decided to organize my PCF force in color-coded squads.

The rules also come with a wealth of printable paper scenery with a modern desert city theme and it all looks really good. Unfortunately I lacked access to cardstock and a printer. Brad and I decided that a more Vietnam jungle village table would work well as long as we had enough terrain on it. So we had a dirt road going diagonal from corner to corner, through a village with a bunch of plastic toy soldier sandbag emplacements, and a lot of jungle patches around that. The mission would be an encounter, with both forces starting on opposite short sides of a 6’x4’ table with the objective of slaughtering the opposing force.

By Tom Burgess

My good friend Ed and I have been playing the campaign for the last few months and we have been having a great time with it.  When it came time for our sixth game, the campaign called for the River Crossing special mission that was covered in the Bagration: Soviet book.

Previously we had to use standard mission instead of a special mission because we did not have the still yet to be published Bagration: German book. So this was to be our first special mission played from the Bagration expansion for Flames of War.  This would require some special terrain pieces and assault boats.

Fortunately Ed had bought We knew this terrain pack would have a river mat and card punch-out assault boats we needed, but I did not realize how much this pack actually had in it.  Yes, this pack had the river mat and special pieces but it had so much more.