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?

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!

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 !

Paint Table Saturday - Challenge finished... Artillery under construction

Finally I posted all of my entries for Curt's painting challenge. This year really few figures only but at least I managed to achieve my goal of 250 points.

Nevertheless there's no time for idleness with a lead pile like mine to handle:

Paint Table Saturday: Final week of the painting challenge

Well then... It's Saturday again and because we'll spend the afternoon at my parents' on my fathers birthday party I'm rather early with giving a view onto my workbench. As you see the projects are more or less the same as the week before but some of the figures are finished now. Namely my entry for the 'Risc Taker' bonus round of the painting challenge, Oberst Kurt 'Curtgeld' Steiner and his twin as well as two Royal Navy captains from Brigade Games wonderful range. Unfortunately I cannot present those figures now since they haven't been in the challenge until now but next week I'll feature them.

Then after the painting challenge I'll have to tackle some half-finished things. Two of them are on the picture as well: The AWI artillery of course and those more modern chaps near the grips. At least the first sqaud has to be finished and then maybe a sixpounder antitank-gun to keep things going. This actually is most difficult because there are so many ongoing projects on my workbench and upcoming temptations: North-West Frontier, War of the Roses, Late WW1, WW2 Paras, Desert Rats, Napoleonics, AWI... It seems I need a better structure... Or I should isolate myself more to avoid distraction...

Anyway meanwhile I started a new round of photography experiments. Actually most of the time I'm struggling with illuminating my workpieces well to take good pictures. No background looks disturbing, white background darkens the miniatures in front, gradual bluish print went missing weeks ago. Unfortunately I don't have space for a permanent photo box. So I tried a medium light blue sheet of cardboard from my daughter's craft stuff. To illuminate the scene properly I took two lamps with I covered with tracing paper to make the light more diffus.

The results were pretty much alright but you have to be patient for a couple of days since I only photographed the Navy captains yesterday. So this is my prieview for next week. Additionally of course the finished miniatures I mentioned above and maybe a report of my visit of the 'Maritime Museum' during our journey to Hamburg.

For now that's it.
Enjoy your weekend !

Paint Table Saturday - Navy, Artillery and Risk Takers

After a longish absence I told myself to come back to blogging more regularly. last year one of the embosomed habits of mine was the regular contribution to the 'Paint Table Saturday' group. So what could be better than coming back to that again.

Currently there are a couple of different project on my workbench:

The two chaps in the foreground are captains from Brigade Games wonderful range of Napoleonic British seamen. For now they'll top my collection off. There are a couple of seamen and gun crew to be painted but since they aren't bought yet I'll leave it with fourteen figures for now.

Behind them you see my piece for the 'Risk Taker' bonus round of Curt's painting challenge. I don't want to give too many hints but most of you should recognise that smuggler anyway. Actually he's finished already but he needs some varnish now.

Besides those I (finally) decided to paint my AWI British 6pdr gun and crew. I'm not sure whether I'll be able to finish them in time for the challenge but however it's time to get those chaps ready for action since I painted the limbered version nearly a year ago. Remember? Here.

Last but not least a couple of twins:

It's Warlord Games's interpretation of Oberst Kurt Steiner which some of you might know from the classic war film 'The Eagle has landed'. In this movie Sir Michael Caine plays the German Fallschirmjäger colonel who gets the order to kidnap or kill Winston Churchill during a secret mission behind enemy lines. He and his fellow soldiers jump off over Britain and try to get hold of the Prime Minister while he's spending some time in the county.

Since a couple of fellows and me want to play this story as a Bolt Action scenario I wanted to have the figure for my own and since Curt asked to have a 'Risk Taker' miniature as entrance fee (aka. 'Curtgeld') I decided to paint a second one right away.

That's it for now... Back to the desk...

Enjoy your weekend !

Tactica show this weekend !

Unbelievable that not only days but once again weeks have passed since my last post. I'm deeply sorry that I was absent for such a long time again but somehow I haven't been able to turn the corner and get myself back to regular blogging. The first weeks of 2016 were simply too stressful at work and too busy at home...

Hobbywise I had a few games that I took pictures of to write some short AARs but even didn't manage to do that. But promised rather soon here'll come some pictures from Star Wars X-Wing and Armada. On the other hands the chaps from the THS club and me were preparing our presentation game for Tactica wargaming show which will take place this very weekend in Hamburg. This time we'll lead our highly appreciated audience to Egypt and show them a battle between French, British and Arabian troops during Napoleon's Egypt campaign. It's a skirmish level struggle for which we use an excellent variant of the Lion Rampant engine. It'll be featured in one of the upcoming Wargames Illustrated but we were lucky enough to do some advance play testing with them. They went really smoothly and allowed us some exciting and joyful beer and prezel matches. Exactly my cup of tea!

Anyway for this game I promised to contribute at least a unit of British tars. You saw six of them in my very last post and six more left the painting table last week. I'll feature them in a later article because they'll have to participate in the naval bonus round of the AHPC (Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge) but here a quick group shot:

Old and new tars

But now I have to get my stuff sorted because we'll head to Hamburg rather early tomorrow and some family duties have to be fulfilled before.

Enjoy your weekend!

Maybe I'll see some of you in Hamburg...

Reviewing 2015

January means not only a new year but another blog birthday as well. Yours truly posted his first article on January 5th 2012 and thus it's now four years of blogging behind me and I enjoyed each and every post of it. Really there were time when blogging kept my hobby spirits alive and maybe I would have turned my back to wargaming without our virtual community. Meanwhile I've become a core member of a wonderful club but nevertheless I'm still enjoying to present my or our humble projects.

But now back to 2015. During these twelve months I added 84 posts to my blog. That's slightly less than in 2014 but slightly more than 2012 and 2013. Thus I'm satisfied with the creative outcome of my writing.

Meanwhile the number of registered readers 'followers' reached 249 and Monty's Caravan collected more than 240,000 hits. Many thanks for your constant support and usually encouraging feedback!

Here are some impressions of the year:

Goodbye 2015 and a happy new year !

Just a short post to close 2016. The time between the years is on the one hand wonderful because it holds a lot of precious family time but on the other hand there's not much time for painting or blogging. Anyway I wasn't lazy and made my start into the painting challenge with a couple Star Wars figures we needed for our yesterday game of Imperial Assault. Rather quick and simple figures but nice playing pieces and a good start into the challenge anyway. Pictures are taken and soon they'll find there way onto the challenge blog first: Three probe droids, four Imperial Guardsmen and the dark lord of the Sith himself.

By the way lately our older daughter discovered a certain interest in Star Wars. Unfortunately she's still too young to see the films but with a pictures book about the whole saga and a couple of smart questions she developed nearly the whole story. Currently she's sorting my old Lego bricks to create some spaceships fitting to the few kits she already has. Yours truly is really proud to say that she's able to build the smaller kits on her own being five years and some months old. The age recommendation on the boxes says at keast 6+. Good girl!

However this combined with having watched episode VII recently dragged me into the Star Wars and Lego theme again and lead to a rather uncommon modelling project last week:

It's awesome what kits they're producing nowadays and no comparison to the bulky Lego things from my youth! Somehow I'm afraid that this X-Wing will not stay alone for too long. At least e won't in case that Viktoria's enthusiasm lasts. Maybe after Easter we'll have a look at the cartoon series Rebels. It's rated 6+ and that might be an appropriate start. Probably better than the real movies or Clone Wars which are recommended for twelve years and older...

But enough about that now. Let my wish you and your families a happy new year! Enjoy this very last evening of 2015 and have a wonderful, healthy and blessed year 2016!

'Secret Santa' is early this year.

It has been silent on my blog for the last week. Not because yours truly was lazy but because my work had to be kept top secret. *** Please whistle James Bond theme now or listen here *** As some of you fine fellows as well yors truly was reckless or generous enough to enter the 'Santa Clause' venture again. Thus the four tin soldiers I stipulated took my whole attention lately. Meanwhile they are finished and I'm hoping that my 'Santa Clause' counterpart will appreciate them. I'll follow his blog with greatest curiosity now.

On Saturday I received a parcel which rose my spirits: 'Secret Santa' is early this year. His gift arrived unscathed and gives a mildly rattling sound like small metal parts hitting thin plastic blister caverage. Hopefully he or she didn't enclose any bone china. In that case the sound should be very worrying.

The gift itself.

Anyway let me send you a big Thank you very much ! in advance. Of course I handed the unopened parcel to unbribable Mrs Monty who will take care for it until Christmas Eve. Luckily in Germany handing out the presents at Christmas is slightly earlier than in most anglo-american countries...

Imperial Assault: Card Boxes

Last week I put some work into my project for 'Santa Clause'. I found a really nice pack of four figures hopefully according to my counterpart's taste. During the last days I started painting them because they should be finished during the following week end be sent to the United Kingdom the week after. No problem for them to arrive before Christmas.

Besides that I worked on Imperial Assault. The games contains oodles of cards, tokens, board tiles and such stuff and it was time to get them sorted. Thus I made some cardboard boxes for the game:

But those boxes weren't the work of myself alone. Luckily some other geeks seem to have kept struggling with disarray in the Imperial Assault box and one of them prepared a set of templates for the prone tinkerer. He's calling himself 'Sir Willi' and is providing a great number of boxes for Imperial Assault, X-Wing, Armada and other games, most of them at least in German, English and French. Have a look at his blog to get an idea of his work. The templates are free and ready to print at home.

To make the boxes I used 240g cardboard. It proved to be thin enough to work properly with our inkjet printer but thick enough to ensure the needed stiffness for the boxes. Then I cut the templates with a sharp knife and a steel rules and glued them together with usual all-purpose adhesive. Really no big deal but afterwards I had some clean and tidy boxes to sort the different cards in.

Only the active cards of our current campaign are in a zip bag to have them ready for our next session. Altogether a simple and convincing solution in my opinion. Agreeing to this was our little one Anna who helped me to sort all the board tiles and the tokens. But especially the AT-ST caught her attention. Good girl!

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

Enjoy your weekend !

Saturday News: Roofing done.

Last week I finished what I started the week before namely the roofing of my multi-temporal estate. Since the original roofs looked too modern to me and suffered some damage somehow some new roofs were needed. For this purpose I cut a couple of triangles from foam board. In addition I cut suitable rectangles from thick cardboard. Those parts combined I had some rather gables as base for the roofs.

Then the trickiest and most time consuming work came up: Tilling the roofs. Luckily Martin and Diane from Warbases are producing sheets of pre-cut cardboard roof tiles. Those were an incredible help. No idea how long it had taken to cut all those shingles myself...

Momentarily the last row of shingles is missing because I want to fit in the new chimneys I made from Depron foam. Actually that was much easier than I thought.

Thus I'm finally seeing the finish line with this project and I'm looking forward to get it done soon.

Until then please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Still building(s)

As the weeks before I'm still working on the buildings we'll need for our Plancenoit game at Crisis. At present I put the wonderful Stronghold Terrain ruins aside and pottered at another estate. One of my friends from the club gave it to me to modify it for the Napoleonic wars. Actually it was part of Grand Manner's excellent range but I think it's out of production currently. Since it was too modern I had to alter it here and there:

The coloured areas were parts we discussed whether they were appropriate for 1815 or not. Finally I decided to do the following major conversions:

• remove gutters (not on the picture)
• remove remaining parts of the broken fencing (green)
• remove the roller shutter front (green)
• make new roofs
• the plate may stay (blue)
• the decorative-moulding as well (red)

Now I don't want to bother you with too many details. There were a couple of other alteration on the gable end of the estate but I'll cover the whole project in a couple of posts as soon as it's finished. But this is the result I achieved during the last days:

Next will be the new roofs that I'll construct with cardboard and Warbases lasercut roof tiles. Afterwards some finishing touchs to make the scene more vivid. A wonderful inspiration was Pat's last piece of art that he presented on his blog 'Wargaming with Silver Whistle' (here). Don't miss this wonderful estate!

Besides that please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Back from Würzburg and to business

My apologies for being absent lately but we - meaning my three girls and me - spent a a couple of days with friends near Würzburg. It was a wonderful long weekend with wonderful hospitality, excellent weather and two interesting trips. One lead us to Marienberg Fortress and the other to the Bavarian Army Museum again. This time to visit an interesting exhibition about Napoleon and Bavaria. I'll post more about those trips soon but for now a small preview:

Yours truly trying a Bavarian helmet

But most of all let me thank you for the wonderful, helpful and kind feedback on those Desert Rats. As most of you suggested I'll mix a couple of colours for the shirts to break the uniformity subtly.

But during this week there's work to do for our Plancenoit project. Three ruins need some progress and half a dozen of French voltigeurs as well. And lately there have some troopers stormed my workbench which I have to finish... Stay tuned!

Tommies finished !

Finally I found the time to finish the six WW1 Tommies that were lurking around my painting table for a while. Actually they were the counterweight to the terrain piece I'm working on for our presentation game at Crisis 2015 but they're bringing my WW1 collection forward to their completion in 2016 or 2017. We'll see...

But now for the boys:

All six miniatures are from Great War Miniatures wonderful WW1 range. The proportions are really good and the poses are very dynamic. Excellent pieces by the sculptor who is - as far as I know - Aly Morrison. The paint them I used Vallejo Model Colours and some advice of helpful Mark Hargreaves of 'Over open sights' frame. His painting guides proves extremely helpful and Mark proved to by a kind and patient fellow. Many thanks to him!

However with those boys my collection rose to 16 painted models and sooner or later I could aim for a platoon sized game. We'll probably use Bolt Action since the system is very popular in our gaming group but with a couple of special rules for WW1 I presume.

Besides that the interior of my ruins are taking shape. The plank floor for the smaller one is nearly finished and the storeys for the larger one are in progress as well:

But for now please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Enjoy your weekend!

Paint Table Sunday - Slow but steady progress

During the week I painted a modern trooper for my Mordern Warfare side project but actually I'm still busy with terrain pieces namely ruins.

Since last week I worked on the outer walls and more or less finished them. Thus I started with the stones themselves and after painting them with dark red I drybrushed them with different brownish red colours. Finally a slight wisp of 'Pale Sand' to outline the edges of the stones and to connect them to the plastered parts of the walls which I drybrushed with different beige colours as well.

Although I've got window frames for the ruins as well I decided to turn my attention to some interior fitting first. For both ruins there are pieces of plank flooring to be painted and some storey floors as well. So I started with those pieces today and drybrushed the planks with different brown and beige colours to enhance the wonderfully carved out wood grain.

Since we'll need my two ruins for another game of Bolt Action next week I'll try to complete the next step until then. We'll see...

Until then please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Enjoy your weekend!

Paint Table Sunday - Ruins and Tommies nearly finished

As usual I'm a bit late for the Paint Table Saturday. Actually signs were good yesterday to get the post online in time. The pictures were taken and cut to the right size and when unmatched Mrs Monty asked me to watch our currently admired TV show 'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' after the girls went to bed I thought afterwards should be enough time for a nighthawk like me to do my blogging duty. But life wasn't fair. After no more than 15 minutes sleepy Mrs Monty was carried away by sleep. Thus I decided to give 'No Country for old men' a chance instead of turning my attention immediately to my humble writing. This proved to be a fatal mistake since the drama drained my wakefulness deeply. Finally I had to postpone my PTS (Paint Table Saturday) to Sunday again... Sorry.

But nevertheless some tiny steps were taken last week and things are going well with the ruin and the Tommies:

Actually I realised once more what a lousily slow painter I am. Only six Tommies to paint and a single ruined building. But anyway I'm satisfied with the result. For the ruin I'm using the same colours as I used for its predecessor since both will serve on the same tables most of the time. For the Tommies I use a painting scheme based to the wonderful work of helpful Mr Mark Hargreaves of famous 'Over open sights' blog. He's kind enought to present some of his painting guides on request and I found his detailed remarks unatterably worthy. I only simplified some lesser details to accelerate mass painting.

Sooner or later I expect about 100 Tommies for my WW1 collection. Mostly infantry by Great War Miniatures but some vehicles and artillery pieces from other companies as well. We'll see.

For now that's it. As soon as the ruin or the Tommies are finished I'll present a longer review on the

Please don't forget to have a look at the Google+ community dedicated to 'Paint Table Saturday'.

Enjoy your weekend!

Paint Table Sunday - Another Ruin and some Tommies

Actually I was busy enough with sorting about 500 pictures from our recent trip to Celle but besides I started some new workpieces yesterday:

Namely it's another ruin from the wonderful range of Stronghold Terrain. Mirco and Elmar presented it on Tactica this February and I was lucky enough to grap one of the pre-release kits they brought. Once again a wonderful kit of a severely battered building. Architecturally it's rather versatile. My piece will serve as part of our Plancenoit game on Crisis this November and afterwards I'll add it to my WW1 / WW2 collection after I finished the interior details with kitchen and water closet.

But besides the large area paintjob I wanted to have some detail work as well. Fittingly a friend of mine revived my efforts for the WW1 range of Great War Miniatures. We're planning to setup some game with altered Bolt Action rules but for that I'll need some more painted Tommies. Thus I put six of those brave sons of the Empire onto my painting table to see them coloured as soon as possible.

That's enough for now. Dear Mrs Monty and me have the unique chance to go to the cinema this midday and thus I have to hurry now, since we have to bring the girls to my parents previously. Unfortunately they show nothing else than the Minion at the cinema that early but never mind.

Enjoy your Sunday as well !

Painting Table Saturday - The Dark Knight WIP

During the last months a friend of mine has been working working on his first figures for the Batman miniatures game. No need to say that his wonderful work inspired me. It lead me to the literary place Gotham City. A place I left about twenty-five years ago. Not that I lost sympathy for Bob Kane's sinister avenger but somehow I lost touch to comic books. Anyway during the ht weeks I plunged into Christopher Nolan's excellent movie triology once more, played the Arkham Origins video game and read a couple of the newer Batman graphic novel. They're rather different from my older 80s comic books: Darker, more serious, somehow adult. But without any doubt worth a try in case that you like superheroe stories. Many thanks to the well-known Michael Awdry esq.

Finally I wasn't able to withstand Knight Models's interesting range of 35mm miniatures and bought one of Batman's incarnations:

It's a very nice miniature that entertained me during the last week. A wonderful piece of lead but I added another base because I don't like those rather thick slotta bases. Of course the colour palette for the Dark Knight is very limited but I decided to paint the cape, boots, gloves etc. blueish. To my mind more interesting than black and grey only. Hopefully I'll finish him next week.

Anyway I'm not sure whether this will grow to a larger project but besides there price there's nothing bad to say about those miniatures. Honestly in my mind's view there are the dark allies of Gotham appearing and Penguin, Joker and other villains lurking...

Enjoy the weekend !

Paint Table Saturay - Ruins, hussars and documentary

It's weekend again... The best part of the week. Today we have a couple of friends visiting us for an old-school pen and paper RPG session but nevertheless there's some work on my painting table.

First and foremost the walls of the two ruins I'm still working on are finished and I'll colour them with my airbrush tomorrow.

Additionally i digged six hussars from the bottom of my lead pile. I painted their horses nearly two years ago but somehow I took a break after six riders. Thus it's time to finish the unit finally.

And last but not least I worked on my documentary book with my colour recipes. Last week I prepared some material from other authors. Some Artizan painting guides, WW1 painting guides by expert painter Mark Hargreaves and the Vallejo triads by Andrew 'Loki' Saunders. My plan is to collect these excellent material and add my own humble recipes. By now it seems to work rather well to support my week memory this way...