Bolt Action Campaign Mariana & Palau Islands
A bit of catching up to do. While Bolt Action returns to D-Day with the current and next campaign supplement, we have to catch up and revisit the pacific with Bolt Action Campaign Mariana & Palau Islands.
For those of you, not familiar with the pacific campaign, a brief intro on the campaign might come in handy. We have had releases covering the (South) East Asian conflict for Bolt Action with Empires in Flames and New Guinea. And with Mariana & Palau, the US Forces, especially the Marines are moved into focus, in their battles against the Japanese. At 160 pages it doesn't set a new record in thickness, but is still broad and covering a lot of ground for the campaign. Pricing stays with the usual price band of 20 GBP or 30 USD (about 25 EUR). And as often with the Bolt Action / Osprey books, we had an early cover (left) and a changed final cover of the supplement (right), replacing the US Marine with an IJA soldier.
Valentine for Operation Lightfoot
One of the final pieces to add to my 8th army motor pool is a Valentine infantry tank. As the army is themed around Operation Lightfoot, a mid-war tank and mark would a great fit. As I've stocked the british themed army mostly with Rubicon vehicles, I wanted to keep on doing so. It is just ridiculously difficult to receive stock. The Valentine is part of the second wave 2020 novelties and it took until this week to get my hands on a boxed set.
I kept looking for it on my usual suppliers, like Fantasy-In, got in touch with them, but due to Brexit and the incredibly bad preparations by Rubicon UK, there was just no info on when it would be deliverable. Earlier this week Tabletopper.nl posted an update on their stock, covering the Valentine as well, and I gave it a go. As they "only" charged 7,90 EUR for shipping from the Netherlands to Germany, and even had some other items on stock that I was looking for for a while now (for example Empress' WW2 range, which I ordered through a german store in November and Empress didn't manage to supply them with stock pre-brexit nor afterwards), so I had an order with a total beyond 100 EUR it was free of shipping costs. But what amazed me the most, I ordered it on Wednesday morning and within an hour my order was picked and packed, and I received my tracking number just 75 minutes later. DPD did a great job as well, bringing the package within 48 hours to me. So chapeau to Tabletopper.nl, will keep an eye on you from now on.
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 3
March is always a great month because it gives me the most opportunities for excuses (yes, I know how that sounds). At the beginning of the month I turned 40 - all the more reason to throw a little money out the window. Or is it?
Last month I was thinking about what I wanted to spend my monthly budget on, and that it would probably be a play mat. I've hesitated between four mats from PWorks:
Guess who’s back! HANS again!
It arrived! In July 2020 HANS was here the last time and it was glorious. Now he's back for his sixth tour and I was eager to see what was in there this time.
A not so happy post man brought him up to my door step, and his happyness to get rid off him vanished once I told him, don't worry, you're picking him up again in a few days. Yay ...
Renedra – Middle Eastern Two-Storey Houses
We've talked about the Mud-Brick house by Renedra earlier this month, and they added multiple two-storey houses to that design. Those are available in three different sizes and come either as single kits or a boxed set with all three of them. I went with the large set of middle eastern buildings, so let's get started.
These come either in a large bag for the single houses or in a cardboard box as a set. The packaging is full coloured and covers scenes of them in use, on the backside the individual sets as well as the Mud-brick house is named. Pricing is reasonable, 8 to 10 GBP (depending on the size) for the single houses and 22 GBP for the set of three. You already save 5 GBP with the boxed set.
Renedra – Mudbrick House
This review about the Mud-Brick House by Renedra, that I thought I already published (you could see it in my review on the sandbags), got lost somewhere in the past. I wanted to refer it in the upcoming review on the two-storey houses, but after not finding the review I realized, that I took the pictures, edited them and so on, but never wrote the actual article. Anyhow, I think it still generates value to talk about this kit, especially with a further terrain sets by Renedra, picking up the middle eastern theme.
February 2021 review
February is over and I'm still waiting for the arrival of my UK packages ... because it is still post-brexit chaos.
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 2
February is known to be a bit shorter than the other months, so you would think that mentally there would be a bit of pressure to finish painting planned minis. Well, maybe it was like that at the beginning, because I finished the last group of skeletons for my Mortal Gods Army of Hades pretty quickly. This surprised myself so much that I just tried to finish the remaining group of zombies and managed to do so, which completed the army.
With 300 points for the Hades faction, I was satisfied. Now it was time to completely assemble another faction so that I would no longer have to play games with ugly proxies for Mortal Gods.
Modern Combat – Humvees, Tanks and Marines
The chassis are ready, a convoy of 3 to 4 almost identical looking vehicles would be okay, but as these will be put to use in smaller games and skirmishes, I didn't want to use clones, so I bought some Black Dog resin upgrades a while back.
Casting quality is pretty wild, some parts are just broken or not fully casted. Black Dog threw some of them in there multiple times, probably to make up for that lack of quaulity. The instructions are only available for the IDF kit and even there a bit vague.
Modern Combat – Assembling the HUMVEE Convoy
Some things take up less space once they are assembled, so while sorting out items I came across the Humvee kits by Tamiya in 1/48th scale, and those would be a lot smaller when built. And it was a welcome diversion from sorting, taking pictures and dropping off parcels at the post office.
Tamiya doesn't call them HUMVEE but a more generic name, simply an 4x4 utility vehicle. I have a total of four boxes of these, three of the regular US Modern 4x4 Utility Vehicle and a fourth one as the Cargo Variant.
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