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.

By Steve Murga

I am fascinated by 17th Century European History. I grew up in Spain reading the Alatriste Novels by Spanish novelist Arturo Perez-Reverte, the adventures of a Spanish sword for hire in the backdrop of a decadent and crumbling Spanish Empire. Is the fast-evolving nature of the 17th Century that captivates me the most, a period between the medieval world and the modern era, a time where the last vestiges of feudalism gave away to the modern state.

by Patrick S. Baker

“Take command of men who act like real soldiers” was the tag line on the Close Combat box.

When first released in 1996 Close Combat took the war game world by storm. It was not just one of the first real-time tactics/real-time strategy (RTT/RTS) war games, but also boldly claimed to be an accurate simulation of modern war. The game was developed by Atomic Games and published by Microsoft, and was one of the few games published by the software giant at that time.

It was originally announced as Beyond Squad Leader and was to be a digital sequel of Avalon Hill’s million-selling Advanced Squad Leader (ASL) board war game franchise.  However, the companies’ affiliation was fraught and, eventually, Atomic and Avalon Hill parted ways. Atomic renamed the project Close Combat, and continued the development, with Microsoft coming in as publisher.

By Howard West, Photos by Dane Van Norden

Creative Pursuit Games (CPG) located in Leesburg; VA hosted a Team Yankee tournament on January 30^th, 2021. CPG has been hosting small gaming tournaments during COVID based on the state of Virginia’s COVID-19 guidelines that are in place at the time of the event. Dane and his wife Kaitlin are great hosts and have a very nice and welcoming store.

In my previous article on I mentioned how some tournament organizers (TO) will provide the missions for the tournament, who the Attacker or Defender might be and that the points may vary per round. This tournament was a perfect example of this.

Dane also likes to provide a background narrative for the tournament, this one was called RED BLIZZARD. When Dane created the title for this the event, I doubt that he was giving the attendees a long-range weather forecast, but yes it did snow late Saturday evening thru Monday but it is January and it is winter in VA.

By Mitch Reed

Well before I ever rolled a die, painted a miniature, or put a map under plexiglass I played with little green army men. As my son was growing up, he also gravitated to those green men and played with them for hours. I always wondered what use I would have for the bucket of army men as I grew up. My question has been answered with the game from .

NDNG BattleVault Episode 15 – Hero Shock Rifles, best Late War List ever?

By Tom Gall

The Wargaming Company makers of Et Sans Résultat (perhaps better known as ESR) have started to update and release their line of campaign books. The first in the refreshed line is To Assure My Dynasty, . These new campaign books are collectively called Series 3 to set them apart from past volumes.

With the book in your hands, the very first thing you’ll notice is, it’s a hardback. The prior series were spiral-bound volumes. Definitely a noticeable increase in quality but what about the content?

The campaign guide is 184 pages, all in full color. The book is broken up into several sections, first giving you a bit of background about the peninsular war, the countries, armies, and personalities involved in the conflict.

The next section covers how to use the book, with guidance on the size of the table, players, how to set up the maps, working with rosters, and how to handle scenarios that last for an extended period of time. After that is the campaign, 13 historical battles broken up into two logical parts. Last but not least is an extensive guide to the army uniforms each unit wore.