Soviet Armoured Steamroller of DOOM!

Met a chap on Facebook last week. He wanted to swap for some terrain. So in exchange for 3 resin buildings I wasn't using much I got this:

Green are Zvezda, grey are Plastic Soldier Company.
So 2x BT7s and a T26 for early war (yay! Finally!)
4x 45mm AT guns.
An always useful Gaz truck.
17x T34s. 8 of which can have either the late war 85mm gun turret or the 76mm gun turret.
They'll be easy to paint.

Pimping My 4Ground

My new Crescent Root Studio buildings with their lovely bases have made my 4Ground terrace houses jealous. I've quite often deployed my set of sidewalks and improvised some walled back gardens for them (for example here). But it's always been "not quite."

So this week I decided to set things right and make them bases. The first step was to decide on the size with some thin card that would be the bottom layer. This involved a lot of manipulating buildings and bits of sidewalk, and trying to measure very odd dimensions while things kept shifting.

The sidewalks I'm using are 15S-TAO-105 12mm wide pavements. The set comes with enough lengths and corner pieces to go around 2x two door terraces and 2x three door terraces. I used some of the spare pieces and cut them to make the depth of the gardens.

The next hurdle was to find a piece of card stock the same thickness as the walkways and cut pieces out to infill the garden areas. More measuring of odd, irregular dimensions while everything shifts.
Once everything was cut out it was time to glue it down and leave under a board with a heavy jug on top to make sure they dried flat.
I then used scrap MDF board from the left over frames and cut out garden walls, gluing them in place with the quick setting Aileen's Tacky Glue.

Then paint and flock.

Because these are back gardens, I used an unmixed light green flocking instead of my usual mix of shades and textures, tea leaves and bits of lichen.
While I was at it, I added a German propaganda poster to one end wall, tearing it and scrawling graffiti from an angry local.

For the ruined terrace I decided to make a rubble pile and have it fallen into the street. A pet peeve of mine is not enough rubble blocking the streets in our blasted urban battlefields. It was reading an article about using the leftover MDF frames to make rubble that got me to start saving them.
So I started building up some layers to give a shape, gradually using smaller pieces to give the basic form.

I then started chopping up MDF into bricks.

After gluing the substrate in place (first putting a MG team in the building to ensure the pile didn't intrude too much), I sprayed it with aerosol glue and then dumped the bricks on top. I then gave it another top coat of aerosol glue to stick everything down and added some beams on top. I also added some fine sand around the edges, using the sticky aerosol glue to grab much of it, but adding blobs of PVA and sand to hide the the straight edges of the sublayers.

Demonstrating blocking a street.

Now I'm just letting the aerosol glue fully dry and then it's dabs of PVA and fine sand to fill things in a bit, but not soo much that it looks like a cat turd.

Barbecue and Dwarves

It was supposed to be 8 of us last night. So instead of WW2, which can get complex and move slowly, I decided a big game of Dragon Rampant would be fun, easy to GM and bash along even with all the side chatter and socialising. 1944 France got switched around to 14th century France/Middle Earth.

Dan brought his 80s vintage Warhammer Dwarves.  He also brought the "5 Meat Platter" from the infamous Lancaster Smoke House for pregame nibbles (or in my case dinner; I'd saved my appetite being forewarned).

Ribs, brisket, chicken, pulled pork

Grits, slaw, bacon macaroni, beans, jambalaya and corn bread

So after stuffing our faces and then washing the barbecue sauce off we trooped downstairs. With some bad weather it turned out to be only five us.

Dan decided he didn't need any of my troops and did a list up using his Warhammer figures. Slayers were bellicose foot, gyrocopters were greater Warbeast with flying and artillery were heavy missiles. He gave all his infantry the invisible upgrade, negating my goblin archery but after the barbecue I gave him a pass on that.

I tried something different last night and interspersed the goblin light foot with missiles to support the evil men heavy foot and also spread the trolls out more to give each group some offensive thump.

Each side ran to 90 points. Even with the invisible upgrade negating my archery, I was able to use my 3:1 advantage to destroy Dick's dwarves on my left. I lost some scouts, a pair of trolls and my wizardling lost a fight with a gyrocopter.

Some snaps of Dan's retro Dwarves.

I think my trolls had some grilled dwarf that night for dinner.

Some Late Roman cavalry

Some more work on my slow going painting commission for a friend's 28mm Late Imperial Romans army. I've been working on this off and on for a few years. Fortunately my friend is patient and figures that even with my slow progress they are getting done faster than if he were painting them.

This installment is three units of cavalry and another cohort of Auxilia Palatina.

The sudden announcement that he is coming from Ottawa to visit friends in the area this weekend prompted me to get a shift on and decal the shields. Otherwise they've been done for a couple of months. But I wasn't expecting to see him for another month at Hotlead.

While I was busy with water and tweezers to apply decals I put some more crosses and numbers on my German armour.

I'm thinking I need to do some scenarios in Normandy or Market Garden to put the Tigers and King Tigers on the table. I also need some Polish or French opposition for my Early War German armour.