by Keith Gilmour
On October 3rd, I was super happy to get my second ever invite to . The invite started all sorts of list noodling and planning on what I was going to bring. The Masters tournaments all have some sort of twist to make them interesting. This year, it was an escalation theme where you had to bring three lists of 62, 88 and 104 points that need to be built on different formations and each would be played twice.
For our MW Eastern Front escalation league, the Huntsville Historical Gamers were given the opportunity to review a nice addition to our table terrain. This Iconic terrain piece is produced in 15mm by the Epsilon Studios from Barcelona, Spain
Introducing the Stalingrad – Barmaley Fountain. This historical fountain is based on a Russian fairy tale, Aybolit and Barmaley, written in 1925 by Korney Chukovsky. In the poem, Doctor Aybolit cautions the Little children: Do not go to Africa for there are large evil barmaley there that will bite you! In the whimsical statue, by sculptor Romuald Lodko, the children are dancing around the barmaley.
By Robert Kelly
follow up to : and .
As I am all about Canadian subjects in gaming and modelling I could hardly wait for my Canadian infantry to arrive in the mail. In fact, I ordered three platoons.
I opened the blisters up with Matt Varnish looking on. We were both quite impressed with the inserted guide that showed the painted troops and how to base them. The moulding was for the most part quite good and the sculpts were of Battlefront’s usual high quality.
by Tom Burgess
Models provided by the
I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to build and review a box of the Plastic Soldier Company’s 15mm Sextons. I have an all plastic Irish Guards Tank Battalion but had no fire support to go with this force. So this project would be a perfect fit.
This would be the third set of 15mm armoured vehicle models made by the that I have built.
Before these, I had built Soviet T-70s and German PzKw-IVHs. Both sets were very good and I was very excited to get started on these.
By NDNG_Dane
Lieutenant Dan here,
This past weekend, I was able to get in my third ‘Nam game. This game had a completely different feel from our first two games. Again I faced off against Comrade Paul, Fearless leader of the Local Forces. We played the “Fire Base Assault” mission at 60+ points each.
We both changed up the standard force list a little bit. Comrade Paul took a Special Tasks Battalion with the support options for a PAVN Infantry Battalion. I took the TO&E authorized, New Zealand 105mm Battery, that fought as part of the US 173rd Airborne Brigade in Vietnam.
By Robert Kelly
follow up to this article:
The Canadian M113s had a unique and distinctive camouflage pattern. I might not be the best painter out there, but I always have the correct paint colours, cam patterns, and markings. I will now share my recipe so that you can make your Canadian M113s as accurate as possible using my simple air-brushing method (whether you have a quality airbrush or not and I don’t).
If you don’t have an airbrush, you can do the hand painted version using Vallejo paints (887 Brown Violet – also for uniforms, 830 Field Grey, and Matt Black with a bit of grey mixed in). These colours are a close match and we only started to airbrush our vehicles in the mid-80s anyway.
Syria has been in the news quite a bit in the last few years, an area known for conflict and unrest continues to cover the front pages of newspapers. This isn’t about all the modern issues plaguing that area, today we look at Syrian forces from almost 50 years ago. In 1967, three Syrian divisions moved into an area known as the Purple Line. This line on a map served as the ceasefire line after the nations of Syria, Egypt and Jordan were defeated in 1967. Israel captured the entire region of the Golan Heights, a place where my dad actually deployed to on two separate occasions in the 1990’s. This ‘border’ is the official divisional line between Syria and Israel and is still monitored by the UN to ensure stability in the region.
You would have seen many wrecks like this one after this coordinated attack in 1973
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.
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.
