Reviewing 2016

2016 is coming to an end and a lot of people will say it wasn't a good year since so much mischief happened on earth. But nevertheless I'm lucky enough to be able to focus on hobby issues and see the wargaming world in a nutshell. So let me ponder about the last twelve months on Monty's Caravan and review some of my hobby highlights 2016.

To begin with I have to admit that I didn't produce too many articles this year. My apologies for that but somehow real life and family issues consumed more of my leisure time this year and I didn't find enough time to bring my humble ideas to words. Thus my productivity dropped to an average of slightly more than one post per week after more then 1.5 last year and even more in 2014...

Anyway I'm glad that you're interest didn't cease. To my surprise at least the same number of visitors dropped by in 2016 maybe even more. Many thanks for your kind and encouraging support! Frankly I'm really pleased how the virtual wargaming community keeps developing and I'm glad to be part of it! Especially when I see that mostly American, Russian, German and British fellows seem to visit my humble blog. What a splendid international bunch of enthusiasts we are...

Besides those numbers what did 2016 bring on the workbench?

Merry Christmas!

A merry, joyful and blessed Christmas to you and your dears !

Last chance to get a Paul Hicks sculpt for £5 !

A while ago Paul Hicks started a lottery to help raising funds for his local rugby club. Luckily I met Paul at Crisis in Antwerp and had the chance to make his pleasant acquaintance. He's a hobby rugby player and loyal supporter of his club so I decided to spread his project via my humble blog.

The Chesham Stags plan to build a new club house and Paul's helping them to collect the needed money. On Youtube there is a short video clip featuring the Stags:

For £5 you can buy a ticket for his lottery and for the lucky winner Paul will sculpt a bespoke 28mm figure. Pretty simple, isn't it?

So if you ever wanted a special figure or maybe yourself in 28mm or even if you just need a Christmas present for one of your wargaming fellows then don't hesitate to join Paul's lottery. He'll close it tomorrow and draw the winner between 12pm and 1pm.

Some more details on Facebook: Here (public, no FB account needed to read).

In case that you want one or more tickets please contact Paul:

p h i c k s 1 [at] m a c [dot] c o m

A couple of days ago the fund raiser was at £1,305 so about 261 tickets sold. So you might want to raise your chances and take more than just one ticket...

Anyway keep in mind that you have only 24 hours to join the lottery !

New header

My friend Holger is a professional and very gifted graphic engineer and during his lunchbreak he seemed to have been rather bored. Luckily he used his free time to experiment with some pictures and somehow a new header for my humble blog came into being:

As you see he took a historical picture of Field Marshal Montgomery, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Field Marshal Alan Brooke in front of Monty's famous caravan. On the right hand side he included a couple of my Perry plastics for NWF. I'm especially delighted because those are some of my favourite results from last year.

Many thanks to Holger!

I hope you like the new header as well.

A bunch of conversions - 28th Rgt. of Foot for Aboukir and Peninsular

The annual Painting Challenge is coming nearer and actually I should take time to prepare figures for it. Luckily my lead mountain is filled with primed miniatures so I can use my little time at the workbench to proceed with my contribution to our club's next show project: The British landing at Aboukir 1801.

Besides a couple of boats my largest task is a 24 figure unit of British redcoats that shall respresent the 28th Regiment of Foot. Comparing the different ranges available - mostly of course those perfect 1801 British by Alan Perry - none gave me satisfaction. Excellent figures all around but I wanted to have something more characterful. So I decided to create a unit of conversions:

The whole unit with an additional command for Peninsular

Germany's Armoured Fist - Leopard 2 for 'Team Yankee'

To complete my initial force for 'Team Yankee' I acquired Battlefront's German starter set 'Kampfgruppe Müller'. Although I decided to postpone the BO-105 anti-tank helicopters I was in need of a couple of Leopard 2 main battle tanks to withstand the Red Horde. Thus I painted them actually a few weeks ago but didn't find the time to take pictures earlier than today:

Those five Leopard 2 from Kampfgruppe Müller

Lest we forget !

Remembrance Day in Britain and Volkstrauertag here in Germany. Remember those who gave their lives that we can live in peace and freedom.

Santa's little helper

Year after year not only the festive season approaches but two wargamer community ventures as well 'Secret Santa' run by Ian Willey and his helpful wife and 'Santa Clause' run by Chris Stoesen. As the two years before I decided to participate in both projects and bought the gifts for my targets at Crisis last weekend.

Anyway this brought back into my mind that I haven't posted some ideas for my personal Santa until now. I apologies the delay but somehow the question of what to get for my targets displaced writing my own wishlist.

It's difficult this year since I'm more or less contended with my lead pile. I've got spare figures for nearly all the periods I'm in but nevertheless there are a couple of gaps:

Crisis 2016 - Some impressions...

So last weekend Crisis 2016 took place in Antwerp and I had the great pleasure to visit the show with a couple of friends from our THS wargaming club. A tremendous weekend again from which I collected a couple of impressions.

Finally I'm off to Antwerp for CRISIS 2016.

This year our club will bring a fantasy game covering a battle losely based on Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. There our club fellow Robert will present his extraordinary collection of 15mm fantasy figures and his lovely terrain to bring a skirmish battle between orcs and Riders of Rohan to life.

We'll use the 'Dragon Rampant' ruleset for a quick and entertaining game. There are some preview pictures on the LAF forum: Here.

Please drop by and take the chance to leave the anonymity of the Internet. I'd be glad to meet some of you in Antwerp and have a chat about the hobby.

Here's were you find us. Pretty much in the centre of hall 1:

See you there !

Mechanized Infantry (Panzergrenadiers) for 'Team Yankee'

Last year Battlefront released ist WW3 ruleset 'Team Yankee'. Actually a very interesting background for me since it's a scenario I grew up with. Being a child of the 80s I remember the last years of the Cold War rather well. Partly from my own experience and memory and partly from my history and politic lessons in school. But I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon too early since my greatest doubt was how large T.Y. would grow. Not too surprisingly I was waiting for German troops rather then US or Sowjets.

The whole PzGrenZg (Mechanized Infantry Platoon)

Reviewing 'The Men who would be Kings' - A NWF game

Having finished my twelve men of the 66th Regiment of Foot I was eagerly waiting to give them their first appearance on the battlefield. Finally last Friday their time came when my wargaming fellow Michael and me gathered for a test match of 'The Men who would be Kings' the new colonial ruleset by Daniel Mersey who is well known for his '[...] Rampant' series. To get into the rules we decided to play a simple scenario with two of the recommended field forces from the appendix of the rulebook. Thus we fieled the following 24 pts.:

The battlefield showing Michael's wonderful terrain pieces.

British attackers (yours truly):

3x 12 Men regular infantry @ 6 pts. each

8 Men refular cavalry @ 6pts.

Afghan defenders (Michael):

2x 16 Men tribal infantry @ 3 pts. each

1x 12 Men irregular infantry @ 4 pts. each

1x 12 Men irregular infantry upgraded as sharpshooters @ 6 pts.

1x 10 Men irregular cavalry @  3 pts.

1x Poorly trained gun @ 4 pts.

66th Rgt. of Foot finished... For now.

A while ago I presented a review of the British infantry plastics for 1877-1885 by Perry Miniatures and my first painted figures from the set (here). As some of you might remember I wanted to have a unit of those splendid figures painted as members of the 66th Regiment of Foot that fought a heroic battle near Maiwand on 27th July 1880. So here we go:

Sharp Practise AWI - Our first introduction game...

As you know the musket era is one of the main hobby theme on my humble workbench. Starting from the Seven Years War the conflicts of British Redcoats during the 18th and 19th century have been keeping my interest since I started wargaming about three decades ago. My very first figures during those happy days at primary school were a couple of boxes of Italeri plastics for the battle of Waterloo and the idea of highly disciplined scarlet coated soldiers never fell off of me.

Unfortunately as you know I'm a lousily slow painter and there's no chance for me to gather larger armies for all those interesting theatres of war. Nevertheless those marvellous shiny figures from those well known companies are a constant seduction.

Thus I had been looking for a blackpowder skirmish system for a while when I stumpled over 'Sharp Practice 2' when I was published earlier this year. There was a very interesting review in Wargames Illustrated #XXX and the TooFatLardies aired a couple of interesting introduction videos on the Youtube channel.

So I gathered a few club fellows of mine and we decided to give the rules a go. A couple of weeks ago our first AWI battle took place in which we decided to use the most basic rules only to find an easy way into the unusual command mechanics of the game.

We took the rather simple first scenario of the rulebook: A kind of meating engagement. 

Really a simple game with two more or less equally rated forces to try out the basic rules. So we fielded two basic lists from the rulebook.

Back again...

My honest apologies for such a long time of absence. Unfortunately during the last couple of weeks hobby time was rare and precious. Some 'real life distractions' caught my attention. Our elder one, Viktoria, had her first weeks at school and developed a new sporting passion:

Actually really good thing but they needed pretty much organizational work. Besides Anna started autumn season with a couple of days of flu and fever. Rather unpleasant...

Due to this I tried to keep things on the workbench running but didn't find or take the time to prepare things for the blog. Please excuse leaving you alone for these weeks. Most probably the lack of contributions is bearable but I'm sorry to have missed the excellent content you provided.

Anyway during the last days I wrote some lines about two games of Sharp Practice 2 and a SAGA match I had lately and finally my preparations for the 300K raffle are coming to a close. Besides I'm working on a Napoleonic vignette for a dear friend of mine, some NWF figures for The Men who would be Kings, stuff for our Aboukir game and a top secret 15mm distraction... So actually enough stuff to fill a lot of posts. I hope to be able to fulfill my and especially your expectations...

Gunboat for Aboukir - Preparing our 2017 Tactica game...

Since our bloggosphere fellow Miles presented some lasercut kits from Laserdreamworks during the last painting challenge, I've been strolling around the 28mm ships Matthew Green and his team are offering. Lately my friend Bernhard and me were pondering about our Tactica 2017 game and I got roped into preparing some more boats too easily. Our game will address the British landing at Aboukir in 1801 and of course we'd like to have more than the two rowing boats we brought to Hamburg last year. However that brought me back to Laserdreamworks and made their kits even more seducing. Well... 'Landing at Aboukir' implies that we'll not likely present whole Neptun's ocean but a piece of the shallow Aboukir bay and a piece of its sandy coastline of course. So the larger ships dropped out and I went for one of those rather small gunboats.

The kit is based on an improved design by Commisioner Hamilton from 1806 or 1808 but it's well reported that the British employed larger ships than rowing boats at Aboukir before. Unfortunately I'm not au fait enough with naval history to explain the different types of tenders Royal Navy ships carried along during the Age of Sail but as far as I know from different pictures a launch of this gunboats size seems plausible.

Conversion pieces - Press moulding with 'Instant Mold'

About five and a half months until Tactica 2017 in Hamburg. This time our club is preparing a Napoleonic game featuring the British landing operation at Aboukir in 1801. Although my friend Bernhard has overall control over the project I'm glad to take part in it and to contribute some humble pieces. After all there'll be one or two rowing boats, a larger gunboat and about 50 foot figures from yours truly meaning that I really have to start preparing and painting the stuff.

With the gunboat I'm on a good way as you'll see in a later post but with the infantry units I'm more or less in the starting blocks. As revealed earlier this week there'll be a highly converted unit of British Redcoats from my workbench. For that I'm using different plastics sets by Perry Miniatures to create rather early Napoleonic uniform variations. Namely some chaps with trumplines, overalls and stovepipe shakos. Since I didn't want to use all the trumplines from the AWI sets I needed to find a way to reproduce some of pieces. Unfortunately my sculpting skills are very limited so I turned my efforts to Instant Mold:

Instant Mold is a clear material which looks slightly like hot glue. At room temperature it's rather solid with only little flexibility. But exposed to higher temperatures it becomes very soft and flexibel. This way it is useful to create simple moulds to reproduce roughly two dimensional pieces like shields, structured surfaces and such. Anyway I wanted to have trumplines so I tried some more complex one piece moulds...

Converted Napoleonics WIP

Yesterday evening I had another very pleasant video chat with Dave and Martin during which I kept working on my conversion unit for our Egypt 1801 game at Tactica 2017:

Work in progress

Basically I'm using the Perry Napoleonic British plastics as well as their AWI sets for British and Continental infantry. Those combined give the figures themselves in somehow unusual poses. For our presentation game I wanted to create something special so those and some additional chaps will form a unit which takes a small rest after the exhausting landing at Aboukir. Alan Perry himself inspired me to this conversion project with a Facebook post he published lately.

But a view conversions have to be made to make them credible:

Since the Napoleonic figures have the post-1805 trotter backpack I decided to remove its straps and add a trumpline instead. From my personal point of view that gives them a kind of early war look. Pretty useful for 1801.

Anyway since the cartridge boxes and the water bottles are part of the trotter piece I needed to cut them from the backpack and glue them directly onto the figure.

Luckily the remaining parts of the 1808-1815 figures work rather well because the stovepipie shakos was worn in Egypt as were such trousers or overalls.

On the other hand I didn't want to use 24 trumplines and leave all the AWI troopers without baggage. Thus I decided to make some of the parts I needed by myself. To accomplish this I used an incredible stuff called 'Instant Mold'. Very useful but more on that in another post.

The figures above are pretty much finished but I need to add the shoulder tufts for center companies. Currently I'm not sure how to add flank company soldiers. Most probably I'm not able to sculpt the shoulder wings myself so I'll need to work around that somehow...

Shrubbery from Rubberised Horsehair

A while ago our fellow Dave presented an excellent tutorial about making hedgerows out of rubberised horshair. Actually it's a stuff from upholstery business but in the days of disposable low-budget furniture and synthetic padding it's pretty unusual. Due to this I foundered on acquiring this stuff until Dave kindly and generously sent me some of his clippings. Actually a pretty large amount of horsehair so I'll be able to tart my NWF collection up with enough shrubbery for a medium sized battlefield. Many thanks again, Dave!

Finally during those holiday weeks I managed to try working with the stuff and prepared a couple of test pieces myself. 

1.) Bases:

As most of us I have a pretty large amount of those green plastic bases which are supplied with the Perry plastics. Now I found a proper use for them and employed a couple of them as bases for my shubbery test pieces. For this I simply unsprued a couple of them and rounded the edges. Not perfect but sufficient for test pieces. For the real terrain pieces of course the shape should be much more irregular.

Back from holiday - Workbench snapshot

Ten days by the sea went by in a flash!

The family and me were in East Frisia since 11th August and spent a wonderful time of temporal deceleration there. The weather was rather fine and we enjoyed a couple of excellent day trips with the kids: Bicycle rides, a short cruise trip and a trip to the German shipping museum in Bremerhaven for example. About the last one I'll spread a couple of words here.

But now back to the workbench!

While we were on holiday my kit of a Hamilton gunboat by Laser Dreamworks arrived and I was very happy to find it on our doorstep just. So this MDF beauty will be one of the next pieces on my workbench. Nevertheless there is the next batch of NWF British to be finished before the ship:

As you see they are nearly finished but they need some highlights here and there and some finishing touches. Most probably I'll be able to present them later this week.

Until then enjoy your weekend !

66th for NWF - Perry British Infantry 1877 - 1885

Ten days gone since my last post. Holidays are really a hustle... Currently I'm having my yearly summer holiday and we spend part of it at home but part of it in East Frisia by the sea as well. Although I enjoy any time out and especially having time for the family things tend to go somehow stressful to hang around together all the time. Particularly when the girls are missing their common playfellows. However there'll be a couple of day trips to mention here...

During the last days my blog crawled over the 300,000 hits step nearly unnoticedly. Many thanks for your recurring interest in my humble pieces of work!

Be sure that I'll cover this step in a seperate post and I'll create a appropriate raffle for that. But I have to postpone this in the aftermath of our holiday.

But now in medias res. Actually this day's post was meant to introduce and review the rather new plastic set by Perry Miniatures. The spring after Salute the twin published a set I'd been waiting for since it was announced last year: British Infantry 1877 - 1885.

As you know the Great Game and the 2nd Anglo-Afghan War have been keeping my attention for a while. So I didn't wait too long until I assembled and prepare a couple of those figures. Finally the first five are finished and I wanted to take the chance to show you the set as a whole.

As most of you might know the plastics come as a box of 36 multi-part 28mm figures. Once again they come in a handy box with a tremendous artwork by Peter Dennis:

Zombicide: Black Plague - Lady Faye

The forth and for now last survivor for Zombicide: Black Plague (Z:BP) I painted recently is Lady Faye:

Zombicide: Black Plague - Xuxa

Let's proceed with the parade of survivors. After Brother James and Lucas here comes the third figure for Zombicide: Black Plague I painted recently:

Xuxa

Zombicide: Black Plague - Lucas

After a week of sweltering heat I braced myself up to write at least some humble line about one of the figures I painted while I was offline:

Lucas...

... one of the survivors for Black Plague

Birthday passed and online again

Luckily the issue with my laptop wasn't insolvable. After some careful treatment I was able too restore power supply. Thus I can gladly fill this blog with posts again...

However yesterday I had the doubtful pleasure to accomplish another year of age. We spend a wonderful day at with the family at Schloss Burg near Wuppertal and visited the castle museum. Not too profound for enthusiasts like us but nevertheless a very interesting place for curious children like our two girls.

Afterwards we had some friends for dinner and a exiting game of Zombicide: Black Plague. The game gave us some great hours again although we finally perished in the surge of zombies. Really a splendid day which sweetened the pill of aging!

On top of this some generous souls felt obliged to enrich my birthday with interesting presents. Some of those game more or less hobby related:

Many thanks to all who passed their wished the modern, digital way on Facebook or via email. I appreciate each and every of your messages and honestly they really made my day!

Zombicide: Black Plague - Brother James

In hindsight my last entry was pretty lame. The pictures were taken on my mobile phone and the entry itself was arranged on that tiny device as well. Seen on a usual screen the pictures and overall appearance of the post was far from optimal. Hence I understand why the commentaries were as scattered as restrained. Anyway I got cracking a bit to present you something better quickly:

Brother James with his character card

Short Update - Black Plague survivors

Last weekend was packed with family business. It was Anna's second birthday and our whole family fell in on Sunday so Saturday was overshadowed by the preparations. After all it was a merry day with cake, tea and football. Luckily team Germany performed better than my appreciated Three Lions and threw out Hungary 3-0.

Anyway on the workbench there are still a couple of Zombicide and Black Plague miniatures. Especially those character figures from Black Plague are excellent stuff to work with. The plastic is the same softish stuff well known from board game pieces but nevertheless the miniatures are well detailed and well cast.

The figures I'm currently painting are from the Kickstarter exclusive survivors. You might notice that they recall some central characters from established TV series and films. I'll explain that further when I present the finished pieces. May the first of them rather soon...

Besides those four chaps there are still some season 1 walkers waiting for the final touches and of course the NWF infantry in need of colours. So actually my workbench is once again fully stretched.

How time flies!

Currently unpleasantly long days at work as well as the UEFA football championship are taking too much time from my troubled account for hobby time. Thus my presentable progress is not too much but at least my Zombicide painting project goes on:

Massive Kickstarter experience - Massive Darkness

As you know hunting 32mm zombies took a certain ammount of my leisure time lately. So it should not surprise my appreciated readers that the current Kickstarter campaign from the authors of Zombicide caught my attention. Cmon (Cool Mini or not) and Guillotine Games refined the well known Zombicide engine to a co-operative dungeon crawl for one to six players called 'Massive Darkness':

The artwork of the box and the rulebook

72nd Highlanders - Unit completed. Finally!

My apologies for being absent lately but besides some more zombies I tackled a trio of figures that took a bunch of time. Finally I managed to finish the last three daring scotsmen for my NWF highlanders:

The last trio...

Once again it took a while but you know how lousily slow I'm painting from time to time.

... and from another angle.

So now we have the second unit for NWF finished after those more or less generic Brits I painted more than a year ago (here). In addition there'll follow those wonderful new Perry plastics, some mounted troops, artillery and whatever seduces me to complete the collection:

The whole unit of twelve figures.

A brew that is true...

It's always difficult to start a post with 'now for something completely different'. For that reason I'll avoid this phrase although I'm about to tackle a topic that is not stricly wargaming related. Whereas... Who would argue that beer is something wargaming related? Isn't it all about a great time with friends, beer and brezels? Maybe not all but at least a major part of it so let me share how Monty's Manour turned into a brewery a couple of weeks ago...

Well... It was during those days after Pentecost when precious Mrs Monty took our girl to a North Sea trip and left yours truly behind. The three girls were about to spend a couple of days with my parents in law and I found it unnecessary to spoil their and my holidays likewise. Anyway that left poor old Monty behind and loneliness planted the idea into my mind to invite one of my oldest friends to try some do-it-yourself brewing.

A word, a blow. On Pentecost sunday Auld Nick joined me and first we inspected the ingredients for our brewing day. We decided to make an India Pale Ale (IPA). A kind of beer we both appreciate and which is available in prepared packages with weighted out ingredients:

The ingredients weighted out for about 4 litres of beer.

Guess what... Even more zombies

Although I scored some progress on my last three highlanders I didn't find the time for too many intensive painting sessions. Thus I turned my attention to a much easier bunch of figures: 

Since I don't want to bother you with repeating the facts about the Zombicide game so let me just mention the two posts about it to our newer reader:

Part 1

Part 2

With those eight chaps done I've finished after all three fifth of the walkers. Currently there are eight of the sixteen females on my painting table. Maybe something for next week...

Anyway although I enjoy it very much to do some quickly painted miniatures without caring for details too much I'm looking forward to having all zombies done. After them I'll address myself to the survivors. Some much more challenging miniatures again.

More 72nd Highlanders

After a lot of zombies here is a post about a historical theatre of war again. Finally my unit of 72nd Highlanders fills the ranks having nine brave Scotsmen ready for action now. This meaning that yours truly managed to finish six new figures by now:

Zombicide - More zombies...

The last two weeks were pretty quiet here. My apologies for that but the Pentecost weekend and its preparation took too much time. Wonderful time indeed because it was family time but on the other hand your's truly didn't find the time to presents his last outcome.

So here we go: Another eight Zombies for Zombicide:

Painting Zombicide - First bunch of zombies.

Everything's better with zombies some say. Well at least our games' closet is!

As early as summer 2016 the Kickstarter campaign about Zombicide - Black Plague caught my attention. A friend from our club was about to back it and I got slightly tempted to follow his example. Especially because I read from some of my blogging fellows who seemed to develop a certain addiction to killing zombies. Anyway I wasn't able to convince peaceful Mrs Monty that zombie hunting is a good activity for our regular board gaming sessions so I refrained from backing Black Plague and banned the whole thing to the back of my mind...

But it came to pass in these days that I had this splendid hobby weekend near Stuttgart. As I mentioned earlier Saturday evening was tainted with the medieval incarnation of the zombie apocalypse. Namely we played the earlier mentioned Black Plague there and all my desires for this series of board games came up again. All geared up with personal experience rather than internet rumors I returned home and explained the game to attentive Mrs Monty and painted a most glowing picture of it. Anyway I was successful and thus Zombicide - Season 1 found its way into our small but exquisite collection of board games. After the first game changeable Mrs Monty fell under the its spell and turned to be the mainspring for organising the following sessions and the future growth of our Zombicide collection. Believe me I love it when a plan comes together...

Finally I decided that a miniature game in my possession must not stay unpainted. Thus after Imperial Assault I took the challenge to paint playing pieces again. First for the zombies to get a feeling for the style and the quality of the figures:

Imperial Assault - Rebel Scum

Finally after the simpler gaming pieces for the game master I turned my attention to the figures representing the player characters. At least to those for needed in our local group:

Imperial Assault - Nexu or Guess who's coming for dinner...

Besides the AT-ST and the E-web guns there are two fierce predators as larges figures in the Imperial Assault basic game. Nexu are feline predatory species native to the planet Cholganna located in a galaxy far far away...

Paint Table Saturday - Highlanders and Zombies

Last week was more or less dedicated to Imperial Assault. Besides two Nexu predators I paintes the four model for the players also known as rebel scum. Those are to be presented during the next days but with the two posts about Imperial Assault and of course the Queen's birthday the blog seemed rather well-filled.

Anyway this weekend I'll try to spend some time with Zombicide figures and the remainig highlanders for my twelve figure unit 72nd Highlanders for NWF.

On Sunday then we'll have another Imperial Assault session with our local group and I'm pretty curious how they'll perform with painted miniatures. Until now the Empire performed better than the rebel scum...

That's it for now, Please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Enjoy the weekend !

Bounty hunters for Imperial Assault

Besides the imperial troops and the rebel scum the Imperial Assault basic game came with a couple of bounty hunters and monsters - namely four Trandoshan bounty hunters and two Nexu. After having finished the imperials I started with the bounty hunters:

A health onto Her Majesty !

Today her majesty Queen Elizabeth II. is celebrating her 90th birthday. Although I'm not a subject of hers I'm admiring her deeply. For my whole life she has been a political and societal anchor showing greatest sense of duty and commitment. She lead the United Kingdom and the Commenwealth during the tides of more than 60 years and kept her subjects together. Kudos!

Happy Birthday, Ma'am!
and
God save the Queen!

Imperial Reinforcements for Imperial Assault - Guns and AT-ST walker

Last weekend we had a longish Imperial Assault session and yours truly also known as 'The Emperor' needed painted reinforcements. Thus I took some E-Web engineers and an AT-ST walker to the workbench.

First for the guns:

Paint Table Saturday - Game pieces week

Probably most of you are in London enjoying Salute 2016 now. Green with envy I take the time to present an overview of the figures I was busy with last week:

AWI British - 6pdr gun finished

Lately I finished a set of Perry AWI figures: AW105 - British Royal Artillery aiming 6pdr