15mm

By Troy A. Hill
All images courtesy of IronFist Publishing.

When IronFist Publishing and  (PSC) first published their Overlord book in 2013, the tome weighed in at 240-ish pages. The book covered the Western Europe forces in D-Day operations, as well as D-Day+1 up until the defeat in the Falaise Pocket.

IronFist and PSC recently republished a partial re-release of the book:  (BtB) that covers “the battles inland” after D-day. The reprint is slightly over half the pages of the original (at 136 pages).

By Tom Burgess

With Flames of War moving back to its Mid War desert roots, this seemed to make this year a good time to for me to build an 8th Army force to oppose my existing DAK German force. Even better, from my perspective, was that I’d be able to do this new force, even the infantry, in plastic. The announcement of this caught me off-guard as I recalled an earlier WWPD interview with Pete that indicated that Battlefront was steering away from plastic infantry. This was due to the fact a hard plastic infantry sprue took up the same time and effort as three hard plastic tank sprues. So I was caught quite by surprise with these new figures becoming available and I was excited that I’d get to move forward with an all plastic Battlefront 8th Army force.

Assembly of Mk II finished.

Plastic Soldier Company has released their and 20mm scales. They were kind enough to send NDNG a set of 15mm for review.

Out of the box, the 15mm sprues are impressive, yet daunting. Two hull tops are included – one with side skirts, one without. The instructions list the side-skirt hull as the Valentine III and IX model.

These tanks are a welcome addition, with both Flames of War and BattleGroup focussing on Desert War in North Africa right now. Players of any 15mm WWII game with an eye toward North Africa, or even the Eastern Front with Valentines as Lend-Lease can make good use of this set.

By Dennis Campbell AKA Matt Varnish

Photos by the Author

Hey guys, now I go through my step-by-step for painting vehicles. You need a good drybrush, and optionally, these :

 

After getting a good dark tan spray down, get your vehicles up to Vallejo (VJ) 879 Green Brown

By Dennis Campbell AKA Matt Varnish

Photos by the Author

Part II will be vehicles

Hey gang, what’s going on? A few folks have DM’ed me on Facebook asking about my DAK force that have been up on a few Battle Reports, and how I painted them. So here is a how-to step by step (literally) on how I built and painted my force, which looks like:

Infantry and guns, Basing:

If you don’t have the pre-holed bases/and have gun teams, score with a sharp blade diagonally on the base, which makes any spackle filler or even just PVA GLue/Sand stick better.

By Dennis Campbell AKA Matt Varnish

Photos by the Author

Rob and I did a test game with the new Nam rules for Team Yankee (Team Yankee Early War?) but instead of using traditional lists, we decided that since Team Yankee the novel is a what-if scenario, then why not do a what-if of the Oil Crisis of the 1970s!  In our case, we did a Canadian Tank force (Aussie Centurions) vs some T-55s and Motor Rifles out in a desert oil facility.    As usual, video bat-rep at the end.  Thanks to Rob for hosting as usual, this time on his awesome AFG board where I added my 15mm terrain to good effect:View from the industrial center

by NDNG-Dane and Tom Burgess

Welcome Comrades,

PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR BRIEFING

The new ‘NAM  book provides a lot of options for the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN). In fact, the North Vietnam Forces could have easily have been divided and printed solely as a Communist Forces in Vietnam book.  The Politburo has directed that we brief you on our glorious and loyal forces battling the Capitalist foes in the South. We will do so in to four separate briefings so that you may better understand each.

by Troy A. Hill
Photos by the Author

I’ve recently begun a series that looks at the . This piece will look at some basic rules of the game. All page references are from the Battlegroup Rule Book, hardcover revised edition.

Winning the Game: 

The first question a player asks of any game is: “how do I win” (or lose)? In Battlegroup, there are several ways: controlling all objectives at the end of your opponent’s turn, causing the opposing force to be destroyed or pinned so they cannot use any orders on their next turn, or (as

occurs most often) when your opponent’s Battle Counter Chits sum exceed their force’s Battle Rating.

Battlegroup uses a secret countdown of these Battle Counter tokens as a core mechanic. During the course of the game, players will be required to blindly draw morale “chits” from a bag or cup. These chits range up in value from one to five points each. Typically, there are more of the middle numbers (two and three) than there are ones and fives in the pool of chits. There are also special chits, with beneficial effects for the one who draws them. I will cover these more in a later piece.

I had a chance to play a FOW V4 game with one of my regular opponents, Karl this past week.  My purpose was to test the new formations in the new Armies of Late War (AoLW) book. Ed Sales has written a review of the forces in the book which can be .

Scouting Stuarts prepare for the battle of the century

I knew from looking at the book that it was geared more towards newer players.  And in that respect, it accomplishes its goals well. In others, it falls a bit short. But to be fair, the old Forces book had generic lists as well.  This book was never intended as a points fixing cure-all for LW issues. It was meant to give new players a simplified system for list building, to provide force diagrams, and to give a look at the command cards for LW forces BF is working to put out.

By Benny Christiansen

The typical Dane. Happy-go-lucky with a positive look at almost everything. Giving you a glimpse of the way the Danes do it.

In the first article, I focused on the Fog Of War cards in the game. In this article, I try to give you examples of how we play with the Flames of War (FOW) V4 rules. 

The Third Game of the day

Notice the minefields in the middle of the table. I wanted to ignore them

In the final game, I had the privilege to play against two of my dear friends, Helge and Lynge, who some of the ETC community may know. Helge is the Captain of the Danish FOW team and also a person who is involved in the ETC community for FOW. Lynge is a regular on the Danish ETC Team, and I see him as one of the best players in a tournament, as he never knows how to give up or give in.

Our games were to be two vs two players. In order to keep the number of players even and an equal number of Axis vs Allies, I had agreed to run two forces at a time. Against these two, I knew I was in for a challenge. I rarely win in games against Helge, and to play against Lynge and Helge at the same time… well… I decided that I would do my best, at least to give them as good a challenge as possible.