3D Printing, News, Scratchbuilding, Terrain boards

Carentan

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It’s been awhile since I was able to do anything wargames related due to all the work that needed to be done to our house. That kept me busy for the better part of the year but with the end in sight and the wonderful anniversary gift of a 3D printer (actually 2 printers) by my dear wife I’m back in the game! 🙂

I was lucky to discover a kickstarter for 3D print files of Normandy 1944 buildings by a German gentleman named Jens Najewitz.  He offers an amazing array of buildings at a very low cost and he is very prolific. He has done a North-African, Normandy, Age of Pirates and now a Wild West kickstarter and of course, I backed them all. 🙂 Consequently my next terrain projects will be a desert board (with 3D printed 8th Army and DAK vehicles and armour to game on it), a pirate board and of course a Wild West board.

The one you are looking at now is a “Band of Brothers – Attack on Carentan” type of board, completely printed from Jens’ 3D Normandy files.  It is very loosely based on Carentan as it looked at the time of the assault by the 101st Airborne Division but it is not limited to that; I can use this board also as an early war Belgian or French village, for a Battle of the Bulge setting and much more with a little imagination and the right posters on the walls of the buildings.

I finished the basic layout after I took these pictures. I have a lot of painting to do now but that should go pretty fast with my trusted airbrush. I’ll post some more pictures when there is more to see.

PS. the MP40 hanging on the wall in one of the pics is also a 3D printed model in case you’re wondering. 🙂

 

News

Woohoooo !!

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As some of you know we moved our family to Belgium late summer last year after having lived in the Philippines for 6 years.   There was a lot of renovation work to be done in our Belgian house so there was no time left to even think about wargaming until now. With 95% of the work done I have some time to myself and I made good use of it already. 🙂  I have just finished building my wargames table !!

It’s a modular table, meaning that it has 3 boards for a total size of 2.5m x 1.4m.  If I want a smaller table I can use just 2, or even just 1 board and that will give me 1.4m x 1.4m and 1m x 1.4m respectively. My original plan was to have a 3m x 1.5m table but I just can’t fit that size into my workshop which is already full as you can see.  My carpenter’s workbench doubles as the base for the wargames table. When not in use I can store the boards behind my wood storage rack on the left of the bottom picture and use my workbench for its original purpose which is to build furniture, my other hobby.

As you can see in the pictures I got “screwed” by NOCH, the manufacturer of the grass mats that I used. I bought two rolls with the same name and same bar code and yet there is a color difference between the rolls. The two outer boards were done from one roll, the inner board from the other roll. The difference is obvious.

What I missed most during these many months of forced absence from our hobby was painting so it is no surprise that one of the first things I did was set up my painting table and paint some figures.

I’m exited to have a place to wargame and paint again and I can’t wait to invite my wargaming buddies for a inaugural game! 🙂

News

Excuses excuses…

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I know I know, I haven’t been really good at keeping this blog up to date. Real life always seems to get in the way of painting and gaming and frankly, a lot of times I just don’t feel like slapping paint on figures or get them out of the cupboards and onto the table.

The reasons for that are many but the main one is that I’m still a one man show. I have 3 male kids in the house of an age that is perfectly agreeable with wargaming but neither of them shows any interest in playing wargames with dad.  They rather sit behind their computers most of the time and pretend they have friends online. 🙂 It’s hard to get motivated to paint troops and finish projects when you know you will just end up putting them in the cupboard when they are finished.

Second reason is that things are rapidly changing for us and that is taking up a lot of my time and energy. We have filed our visa applications for my family to permanently move back to Belgium.  Now all we can do is wait and hope they don’t get denied, cause even if it is remote, that is a possibility. We were going to wait to do that until our house here in the Philippines was sold but it just isn’t selling and we can’t wait forever.  The kids need to be in school in Belgium when next school year starts in September so damn the torpedoes and full steam ahead.  Moving an entire family, dogs included from Asia to Europe requires a lot of money, planning and determination and most of all, it isn’t easy. I seems that it is easier to just walk into Belgium and claim asylum nowadays than for a Belgian who has served his country in uniform for 30 years to get his family to Belgium. But that has nothing to do with wargaming so I’ll shut up about that.

So, I’m not going to promise you that I will make a come-back soon with painted figures and games on this blog but I will try. I need to to keep my sanity. 🙂

Eye Candy, Medieval, Pirates, Scratchbuilding

Cardboard Village..

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My oldest son arrived last week from Belgium, he will stay with us for a year or so and that means that I finally have someone to wargame with.  We are going to take advantage of this to lure my two younger stepsons into the wonderful world of wargaming and what is better for that than PIRATES!  They don’t care much about historical gaming but pirates spark their imagination.

So I have built a coastal village entirely made out of paper and cardboard buildings, ships and stuff downloaded as PDF from the Wargames Vault (http://www.wargamevault.com/index.php).

I know these models are actually meant to be a medieval village but they work well enough for an English, French, Dutch or even Spanish settlement during the Golden Age of Piracy. And the good thing is that this entire setup has cost me less than $200 US, cardboard and glue included. Try doing that with resin or wood…

I have 3 pirate crews and 1 Navy/pirate hunter crew and have tasked my oldest son to come up with a bunch of fun scenarios and missions. Will let you know how it went in later posts.

All about Wargaming…