By Mitch Reed

One of most interesting box sets for Oak & Iron is the Blackbeard’s Revenge pack which features some unique historical ships for your collection. The box comes with two ships, the frigate Queen Anne’s Revenge and the sloop Revenge which were the ships of Blackbeard and Stede Bonnet respectively. Both of these ships are a must for a player who wants to play the pirate faction in the game since they are only available for that faction.

By Kreighton Long

When playing Bolt Action I’ve run into the headache of trying to find an NCO who fell to a successful sniper or find an officer to see if he’s close enough to a unit to buff their order check. Taking an extra ten seconds or so to find the right model is a minor inconvenience at worst but there are means of expediting this step while adding fun historically accurate details to your painted toy soldiers.

The American GIs in World War Two painted a white stripe or bar on the back of their helmets so that soldiers they were leading, presumably from the front, could identify their leader and follow them into battle. American Officers donned a vertical bar while Noncommissioned Officers sported a horizontal stripe.

Below are the steps I took to hand-paint my platoon and squad leaders for my Bolt Action 29th Infantry Division army.

By Tom “Chairborne” Mullane

As the summer days begin to grow shorter, and a brisk fall wind starts to pull me back to my job in the classroom, I have also been forced to reckon with the end of the Campaign. Many battle reports have been submitted from around the world, much plunder has been taken, and best of all, a lot of games have been played.  Which in the end is of course the point. You still have until September 10th to submit reports to BandPcampaign@gmail.com if you want to throw your lot in with the rest of us pirates and scalawags.

For those who submitted reports for Spain, (Particularly those who managed to snag objectives) I apologize for not getting back to you sooner, but I was on vacation. But now I’m back and it’s time to give away some free stuff.

By Richard Steer

One of the features of the 4th Edition of Flames of War is that many of the missions require both the attacker and defender to take and hold Objectives. This is a challenge for infantry-based forces, as having your lead infantry platoons pinned down can easily cause your attack to stall. Fortunately for Late-War British Forces, the Canadians solved this problem in 1944 with the development of the Priest Kangaroo: the conversion of surplus self-propelled guns into armored personnel carriers. I won’t go into the history here, but a good summary can be found at MilArt.

By Mitch Reed

The gaming community is full of games that re-fight the American Civil War and new games are hitting the market all the time, American Civil War is just the latest game to enter the fray and I think it is worth a look for many reasons. Based out of Holland, Peter Van Dop, the man behind BelloLudi’s games has a fresh outlook on what gaming can do and how to grow the hobby which is meshed into the DNA of his games.

NDNG BattleVault Episode 20 – Battlefront Production Shutdown
00:00:00 – Intro
00:00:42 – Recent Ops – Ed and Tom cover recent FoW and TY event results and winning lists
00:33:56 – Special guest John Mathews, Battlefront Miniatures Global Sale Manager, joins Tom and Ed explain the impacts of the current production shutdown
01:11:38 – Rules Ed Forgot and Tom Butchered
01:23:03 – Upcoming US Flames of War and Team Yankee Events

By Tyler Stone

In , we walked through the basics of assembling your force for games of Blood & Plunder. In this article, I’ll go over what changes when building a force for a Sea or Amphibious game. We’ll look at including and outfitting ships, as well as how some of the Structure rules affect our list choices.

Remember, ships are just structures that move, after all. Like part 1, this writeup isn’t a guide to building the most powerful warship to ever cruise the seven seas, although I will still offer the occasional Tactical Tip. Also like part 1, this article will assume use of the , so click the link if you’d like to follow along.

By Howard West

On January 22nd, 2021  was published on No Dice No Glory the premise behind the article was the question: can a person who plays a miniatures war game use some basic data collection to keep track of your performance in tournament play and over a time period improve your tournament results based on previous tournament games?

The original article had data from 50 tournament games from the summer of 2018 thru August 2020, V2 adds 34 more tournament games thru August 2021.

So what is new in V2?

When was published on in January 2021, I received quite a few comments and e-mails asking me did I have data on the types of Tank Teams encountered and what types of Air Units where players using. I have added charts for both Tank and Air Units that players used. I also added the new missions from the Team Yankee Extended Missions Matrix that I have played.

By Patrick S. Baker

X-COM: Interceptor

MicroProse and Mythos stopped working together, but MicroProse ended up with the X-COM license. Dave Ellis was assigned as chief game developer for MicroProse’s X-COM games. Ellis was the company’s in-house guru on the franchise, having worked in quality assurance and also, he had written strategy guides for the first two games. Inspired to expand the X-COM Universe by LucasArts’ Star Wars games, Ellis determined to create a game using a flight simulator engine and set the new sequel during one of the previous X-COM games. The idea was to let the player experience the events of an earlier game from a different viewpoint. This concept would become X-COM: Interceptor.

Throughout the development process Ellis and his team received fan input from what they referred to (perhaps not so politely) as the “Cult of X-COM” through an open online form and public e-mail. When fans learned that the game was going to be a flight simulator and not a turn-based squad-level combat game, accusations flew that MircoProse was just slapping the X-COM name on something as a marketing gimmick. MicroProse strongly denied this.

Join the Talesmen; Glenn Van Meter, Tyler Stone and Tom Mullane for their latest podcast as they discuss the global campaign and give advice on running one of your own. The winner of a brand new Core Box of Oak and Iron is announced and we try to stump our listenership with another Trivia Question. Glenn, Tom and Tyler discuss plans for upcoming events as things start to reopen. Join us for news of the Global Campaign and some general chatting about the game we all love