Enchanted Dice

My Christmas present from the Duchess was this beautiful little wooden chest of dice. Since there are five of them, and Warlords in SAGA roll five attack dice, I plan to intimidate my opponents by only using the dice for that purpose. When the warlord enters the fray, the dice chest is produced. Mwahahhaha!

Happy Yule and Christmas to you all, and thank you for visiting my humble blog.

The Painting Challenge So Far...

Curt's wonderful Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge is off to a roaring start this year, and I've been having a ball getting my entries in and trying to keep pace with Tamsin as we race to 1500 points.

I'm away with the in-laws now until after Christmas and suffering painting withdrawal. I'll take this opportunity for a quick recap of what I've painted for the challenge so far.

I got some runs on the board early with a platoon of 15mm Volkssturm figures for Battle Group Fall of the Reich.



I'm really pleased with how they turned out, especially now that I've given them a second spray of matt varnish. Next up was my entry for the first bonus round, on the theme of 'Cold'. I painted Northstar's figure of Thor confronting Fenrir which was part of the Mini-Duchesses' 8th birthday present.



Speaking of the mini-Duchess, I cheekily entered the birthday cake I made her for the challenge, and Curt was kind enough to give me a few points. You might notice a theme here - my daughter has been getting into Norse mythology in a big way recently, and I couldn't be happier.



Sticking with the Early medieval period, I painted a unit of Breton warriors for SAGA...



...before doing up some Saracen archers, warriors and nobles for SAGA: Crescent and Cross.



That's nearly everything so far, and I'm currently sitting on 292 points while we wait on the scoring from the first bonus round. I've finished a couple of other things as well, but I can't reveal them yet. One is for a future bonus round, and the other is waiting on some decals to arrive from the UK until I can submit the entry to Curt.

As always, it is a real pleasure taking part in the challenge, and seeing the talent of the other painters out there as well as the great spirit that characterises the challenge.

At My Signal, Unleash Paint!

School is done and dusted for the year, and the 5th Annual Painting Competition begins in just over seven hours. I've set myself the insane target of 1500 points, and have side duels going with Curt and Tamsin. This is going to be fun!

Pro Gloria Plastic Landsknechts! You Know You Want To....

Pro Gloria's Indiegogo campaign to fund a box of plastic Landsknechts is ticking along pretty well, with over 12.000 Euros of the 30.000 target raised and 24 more days to go. If you haven't seen these already, check them out - the greens look stunning.



Imagine, if you will, a mass of these guys tramping across your tabletop in their wonderful gaudy costumes. And think of how with the money you save buying them in plastic you can support them with lovely metal figures from the likes of Artizan. Personally, the moment they get funded I will be buying a bunch of gendarmes and archers from Eureka.

I'm pretty keen for this to get funding, so hopefully I've caught some of you in a weak moment. Here are four steps to a wonderful weekend.

1. Play some loud 'Landsknechty' music. In Extremo will put you in the mood, but basically anything that implausibly blends metal and medieval with some growly German vocals will do fine.

http://youtu.be/GXoy_V5quIo

2. Drink some German bier.



3. Find your credit card.

4. Look at all the shiny things! You want them!

Battle Group Barbarossa: Soviet Armour

Having finished morphing my Battle Group Kursk Soviets into a late war force, I've now pretty much done the same for Barbarossa. Adding to the 20 T-26 tanks I finished painting last week, I've just finished 7 BT-5s and a monster T-35.



All the models are 15mm Zvezda kits from their Art of Tactic game. These are great little kits. Very easy to put together and with lovely crisp moulding. The biggest down side is the lack of open hatches and crew figures, and all the tanks look very clean and Spartan, with no stowage items. Of course, I could have just added tarps etc made from Greenstuff, but decided not to on these as Soviet vehicles from 1941 generally do look pretty lacking in clutter from most photos I've seen.



Nice stuff, Zvezda. And what a beast the T-35 is!

Plastic Soldier Company IS-2s

Just in time for the end of Tanktober I finished this platoon of IS-2s for Battle Group Fall of the Reich. With the replacement 85mm turrets I did for my T34s and a few SU 85s and 100s completed, that pretty much finishes off what I needed to do to adapt my Kursk Soviets for 1944-5, although I will add some more infantry.



As always, these PSC IS-2s are ajoy to whack together, and should scare the fascist vipers quite a bit.

Plastic Landsknechts!

Pro Gloria Miniatures have started their Indiegogo campaign to produce a box of plastic Landsknechts. Yes!!

I'm pretty excited by this.... Check out the campaign for some tasty deals.

Tanktober Film Festival: Osvobozhdenie (Liberation 1969-1971)

One great thing about Tanktober has been that it's given me the opportunity to discover some terrific Soviet and Russian movies. Chief among them so far has been Liberation (Osvobozhdenie), a five part, over six hour epic of the war on the Russian front from Kursk in 1943 to the fall of Berlin. The films were shot between 1969 and 1971, and were the most expensive war movies ever made in the USSR. I'm only half way through part 2 so far, but enjoying them immensely.

Compared to the sorts of movies being made in the west around the same time, Liberation really has to be seen to be believed. The sheer scale of the battle scenes of Kursk and the crossing of the Dnieper are extraordinary, with rows of Zis 3 guns and T-34/85s and SU-100s tearing across the fields. There are inevitable inaccuracies, such as the use of T34/85s at Kursk, but they have certainly made a big effort to make the films as realistic as possible, with some pretty convincing Tiger Is and less convincing Panthers based on IS-2s taking the field, although always in panzer grey.

One of the most interesting features is the propaganda in the film, and particularly the portrayal of Stalin. He gets a fairly sympathetic treatment, but is shown as largely deferring to his generals, with some of his decisions like that to treat Soviet POWs as traitors shown to be counterproductive. The Western allies are shown as dragging their heels somewhat with the second front, with some subtle distortions like the landings in Sicily being described as a response to Soviet success at Kursk.

Get hold of a copy if you can - Liberation really is very good.

A Tanktober Miracle

Tanktober is a magical time of year. Today I realised just how special it is. On Monday I went to Hobbyco in Sydney on a whim, strode purposefully into the shop and said 'I would like to get a remote controlled tank, preferably a T34.' The chap behind the counter said 'turn around - that came in half an hour ago'. Sitting on top of a bunch of shipping boxes was this beauty. I handed over $50, and took my pet back on the bus to his new home. He has accompanied me to school, and I'm enjoying taking him for walks.

Today, my friend Sian decided she wanted the Tiger I in the same series so we could have a battle (the tanks have infra-red guns in them). I rang up Hobbyco to see if they had one. The bloke I spoke to claimed the shop had never sold such a tank as the one that was sitting on my lap being patted while I spoke to him. Sian and I went to investigate instead of facing the horror of exam marking. Even in person Hobbyco claimed no knowledge that such a thing ever existed. 'No, we don't have those. We have some for $200 but they're smaller. We're not even sure tanks even exist. What's a tank? Who are you people? What do you want from us? Take some Lego and go, for god's sake, just go!' and so on.

Eventually it turns out that my tank was something a rep from the distributor had added to a shipment because it came from a shop that had closed down, and they don't even make these anymore, and certainly wouldn't for $50 if they did.

Or so they said.

But we know what really happened, don't we? The god of tanks has smiled on Tanktober, and given me this wonderful blessing.

Stal! Stal! Stal!

Many, Many Tanks

Whew! This week in Tanktober I finished my Company + Platoon of T-26s for Battle Group Barbarossa. That's a total of 20 tanks along with a OT-26 flame thrower tank thrown in.



The T-26 (1933)s are from Minairons, the ones with the 1939 turret and the OT-26 are from Zvezda.



Now some BT-7s, I think...

Looking Good in Tanktober

Yeah baby!

Tanktober, Los!

It has been a busy week in Tanktober...

Firstly, I think we can agree that I'm looking pretty stylish.



The Tanktober film festival (aka me on the sofa while the kids are going to sleep)rolls on with a look at Beyyi Tigr (The White Tiger) (2012, dir. Karen Shakhnazarov).



This is a very interesting and odd film. During WWII, a Soviet tank driver is burned in his tank during a battle with a ghostly white German Tiger tank. He survives, miraculously, without a mark on him, but having lost his memory. With no name or past, he instead becomes something of a Tank Whisperer. Tanks speak to him, and he prays to the god of tanks. He is his instrument to bring vengeance against the White Tiger, a tank perhaps even without a crew, that appears in battle to wreak havoc on the Soviet tank men, and which even the Germans speak of in hushed tones. For the tank spotters amongst us, the movie features the (unconvincing below the turret) Tiger, T34-76s and 85s, ISU-152s, SU-100s, BT7s, Pz IVs and even a couple of Lend Lease Matilda IIs and M3 Lees. For the contemplative amongst us the film offers a metaphor for the forces called into being through violence that Thucydides might have appreciated, and which probably resonates more deeply with an appreciation of the Russian fascination with and fetishisation of their tanks of the Great Patriotic War.

But on to cake! The highlight of the week has without a doubt been my wonderful colleague Sian's decision to humour me by making some tank cupcakes. She arrived at school with these yesterday, and I think you'll agree that they are an amazing example of Blitzkrieg baking.

I Hate Google+

Apologies if you have attempted to comment on my blog over the last week and have been unsuccessful. I briefly enabled Google+ Comments until I realised that it meant that only visitors with Google+ would be able to comment. I then attempted to disable Google+ Comments and cocked it up, leaving the Blog in some Kafkaesque limbo where Google+ was disabled but still controlling my Comments. I've just managed to sort it out, but I think it means that if you do have Google+ and have commented on my blog your comment has now been lost. Normal programming should now have resumed. A pox on Google+. I suggest the read the fine print more carefully than I did should you be considering linking your blog to it.

T-26s for Tanktober

Today I finished off my first 12 T-26s for Battle Group Barbarossa. That still leaves me 5 short of a Company, and I have about another 8 in the assembly line. I haven't done much with extra stowage etc. Partly because I'm painting about 20 of the things, but looking at photos from 1941 they don't often seem to have carried much extra gear, so I don't think they look too bad.

Kits are a mix of Zvezda T-26 (1939)s and Minairons T-26 (1936)s.