Desert War 7: A game at last

Finally got to play with my desert toys last Thursday and the weekly meeting of the South East Scotland Wargames Club. Kevan Gunn had been busy over the past couple of weeks putting together some really rather nice Desert terrain, including a small town made up from some rather nice models from Kerr and King.

As usual we were using the Battlegoup Panzer Grenadier by Dave Brown. Each square infantry stand represents a section and there's a command stand of two figures on a circular base for every platoon. Vehicle models represent two or three vehicles.


British Infantry, supported by Matildas attack the town.


Another view of the British attack.

Buildings by Kerr and King.

An Italian Saharina scout car (Kevan Gunn).

Two saharinas and an Autoblinda (Kevan Gunn)

Italian paratroopers (Kevan Gunn)

Italian Paratroop mortar team.


2 pounder Portees (Derek Hodge)

Matilda (Jim Louttit)

Carrier platoon (Jim Louttit)

Desert War 6: Carrier Platoon

The wife's been away for the weekend so I've had the chance to do some painting in between looking after the children. Much of my time was taken up painting Warhammer 40K stuff for my son who had a game organised today, but I also finally managed to put the crews in eight universal carriers and base them up. The Carrier Platoon of my 8th Army infantry battalion is now complete.

Four carriers with three crew in each. The crew are a mixture of Peter Pig Range 8 British drivers and 28 British seated and the figures Battlefront provide with their universal carriers. The carriers themselves are from the Skytrex Command Decision range. I'm going to get some of the Battlefront special order Bren AA machine guns to mount on these carriers.

The platoon dismounted for action. Peter Pig 8th Army Brens and Command figures.

All that I need to do to finish the Battalion is paint up a couple of 2pdr Portees and some carriers for the mortar platoon.

Desert War 5: Rebased Armour

Well I've been rebasing my 8th Army armour this week, but I'm not really very happy with it. I think I can paint better now than I could eight years ago when those models were first done and the Internet postings of one Mike Starmer have convinced me that the sky blue I used on the Caunter pattern camouflage on these vehicles is in fact wrong. So what I'm going to do is rebase a few vehicles so I can play games with my toys right now, but completely repaint them all, this time with a sand colour and two shades of grey, over time. More work.

A Marmon-Herrington armoured car from SDD

A Vickers Mark VI from Peter Pig.

An A13 Mark II, also from Peter Pig

Desert War 4: Afrika Korps

Just finished rebasing my small force of Afrika Korps. That's a Kapfgruppe based round an infantry company for Battlegroup Panzer Grenadier, or a platoon with lots of heavy support for PBI 2. Lots of sand colours painted on models from either Peter Pig or the Skytrex Command Decision range.

The complete force

Commanding Officer - all models from the Skytrex .

Infantry platoon - again Skytrex.

Infantry gun and command stand - gun and gunners from Peter Pig, rest Skytrex.

Engineers, one stand with flamethrower - Flamethrower is Peter Pig, rest Skytrex.

HMG and command stand - Skytrex.

Anti-tank gun - gunners Peter Pig, gun Skytrex.

Desert War 3: British Engineers

Well they may well not fit in terribly well with the Peter Pig figures that make up the majority of my 8th Army forces, but they do look good on their own.

Flames of War BR766 Royal Engineers (Italy) painted up for the desert.

Desert War 2: Rebasing

My WWII Desert War project advanced this week as I manged to rebase all my 8th Army and Afrika Korps infantry, artillery and anti-tank gun stands. That's over one hundred and thirty stands rebased. Why rebase? Well the rules I'm intending to use the toys for, Battlegroup Panzer-Grenadier and Poor Bloody Infantry, can be played using the three infantry on 1 1/4" square bases that we were using for Command Decision all those years ago. But I've decided to use different command stands and my PBI command stands are now all three models on a 1 1/4" circle and my command stands for BPG are 2 figures on a 25mm circle (that's a 2p piece) for platoon commanders, a 1 1/4" (30mm) circle for company commanders and multiple figures on larger irregular bases for higher level commanders. So I had to do some rebasing.

And because my new bases (above) look so much better than my old bases (left) I decided just to rebase everything.

Here's how I do it.
1) I glue the painted figures onto a base made out of 2mm MDF, in this case a 2" square. I buy these bases precut from Tony at East Riding Miniatures. They're available in custom sizes and unlike cardboard they don't warp. The base has been prepainted using Dulux Trade Emulsion, Tawny Crest1. This paint is available from B&Q in 250ml sampler pots for about £2.






2) Then I glue my texturing material onto the base using thinned down wood glue. At the moment I am using Games Workshop's Modelling Sand but they've just put the price up to £4 for a small tub and I'm investigating cheaper alternatives.








3) I then cover the base with a thinned down mix of wood glue.












4) When the gravel mix has set solid it looks like this.












5) Then I drybrush the base white.













6) Finally I glue on some static grass, again using thinned down woodglue. In this case the static grass is Harvest Gold from Woodland Scenics .










7) The finished article

Desert War 1

A chance remark by Kevan Gunn last week, combined with a general increase in my level of enthusiasm for wargaming brought about largely by Cannonade 2006 (see below), has got me all excited about the Desert War of WWII.

Along with other members of the South East Scotland Wargames Club I first got involved in doing this period in 15mm about eight or nine years ago, but our enthusiasm died the death when we couldn't find a set of rules that we really liked. Command Decision proved to be too complicated for our tastes, and we never managed to finish games off in the time available at a club night, while Spearhead was disliked by British players who all felt their troops were badly treated by the combat system.

At the moment there's several WWII rules systems that I enjoy playing, all of which can use troops based identically. Most played at the club at the moment are the Battlegroup Panzergrenadier rules from Caliver Books (review here) and we sometimes still play the PBI II rules from Peter Pig which were very much a craze last year. Personally I am extremely fond ofthe Blitzkrieg Commander rules and I have played and enjoyed Battlefront WWII on occcasion.

Over the past year or two I've been mainly concentrating on the Normandy campaign of 1944, a favourite of mine as I have spent several long summer holidays in the area. I have forces for this period from 11th Armoured Division and 6th Airbourne. These forces are not yet complete of course and I've just placed an order for over £100 of stuff (mainly Para Jeeps and Shermans) with Peter Pig which should be ariving next week. What a sensible time to revive the desert stuff.

I didn't really need to buy anything new for the desert, though I did splash out on a couple of the rather lovely 2pdr Portees from Flames of War at Cannonade and since then I've bought some of their Engineers to add to my force.

I did decide to rebase my entire desert collection of about fifty vehicles and around a hundred infantry/artillery stands. Not that I'm putting them on different sized bases or anything, it's just that the way I'm doing bases nowadays just looks so much better than the way I did back when I started this project.

Anyway here's some pictures of the stuff I finished off this week. The infantry and 2pdr are from Peter Pig, the small staff car from SDD. The terrain board was made by Kevan Gunn.

Currently sitting on my painting table getting rebased is a small force of Afrika Korps and I will put up some pictures of them next week sometime.