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.
March 2021 review
March was an eventful month - but less on the wargaming side, more personally. Our second child was born two weeks ago, a healthy boy, bringing a new daily routine with him.
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:
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.
Twelve months, 20,- Euros – Part 1
There is hardly a hobbyist who doesn't have a certain stock of leftover minis at home. In my case, this used to be for a growing bitzbox, but since then, a whole series of unfinished projects have also come along. Since my "Pile of Shame" is already quite large, I thought of a strategy at the beginning of the year to reduce it and at the same time prevent it from growing again. The idea was simple:
Every month I have a budget of 20,- € for my hobby.
With this limit I' d like to achieve that I dedicate myself to my old projects, and at best increase them instead of starting any new ones. Long story short - fight the unpainted minis! In my annual review I already mentioned that the first thing I want to do is to finish my Mortal Gods Hades army. For this I need two squads of zombies that I've already startedn and one base with skeletons.
Star Wars – A long time ago on a gaming table far, far away
I wrote a couple of times about how well Mandalorian was produced and how much I enjoyed it. It picked up the satisfaction I had with Rogue One, and brushed away the lower excitement I had with the final trilogy. The skirmish battles, the rag-tag crew of individuals, with bounty hunters, scum and rebels, all set in the western and eastern inspired space opera. So I looked into Star Wars on the tabletop.
So far I only had Imperial Assault and X-Wing on my plate, and for that the IP works quite well. A dungeon crawler with two clear sides, good and bad, have your heroes fight squads of Imperial goons and hired guns. And for X-Wing, picking up the Wings of War engine and used it for the sci-fi setting and breaks with one of the major disadvantages of the Star Wars IP for a tabletop wargame, the limited amount of factions.
Warlords on the March – Warmasters sighted
Last weekend, Games Workshop did another online preview, covering a few teasers and sneak peaks into the novelties of the upcoming year. I am pretty sure that if you were on social media the last few days, you got bombed with repeated, repeated and repeated again posts of from that stream.
When I ordered the Wargames Illustrated with the ACW sprue from Drachental, I took a look on their webshop and sales, and noted a Warlord Titan in there. So I ordered that one with the magazine. And wouldn't that be a great task, to assemble my third Warlord Titan while watching the stream?
Necromunda – Underhive Stock
I started with the hobby in the mid to late 90s in Germany, so a lot of that late Oldhammer to early Middlehammer coined my image of the hobby. Miniatures sculped by the Perry twins, Jes Goodwin and Gary Morley, artwork by Mark Gibbons and Wayne England. So it is no big surprise, that 2nd Edition 40k, Blood Bowl and of course Necromunda really appeal to me.
What is Necromunda about? It is a 28mm skirmish between the street gangs of the bigger Houses on the planet Necromunda, fighting over supply contracts, mines and facilities. And all that in the underground of a megacity (so very 2000 AD) in the Warhammer 40.000 universe. With the character / gang development it even included a narrative part, to tell the story of your own gang, with all the ups and downs that belong to it. And that narrative part is simply the cherry on top of that old school goodness.
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