Chain of Command practice game

With GothCon less than a month away, I needed some trigger time with CoC. My good friend Koen was spending the evening in town anyway, waiting for a night-time service window at work and agreed to play.

I set up the game in the office with what little terrain I had available and set up a platoon of US Airborne (played by 1940 Frenchmen as the actual Airborne figures are at Laffes house) vs a German infantry platoon. I took the US and Koen the Germans and away we went.

The table set up. US entered left, Germans right. The scenario was Patrol so we diced for entry points with US on the nearest third and Germans in the middle.

All US Patrol markers locked down.

 Bottle caps had to do for Jump Off points. Red for US, black for Germany.

 US gets the first turn. As time was short (long train ride home) I decided to go for broke straight away as is good and proper for airborne troops. From the left: 1st Squad, 2nd Squad, HQ bazooka team and Plt Sgt. Only the Lt remained off table after the first phase.

 Koen followed my example and deployed all his troops. This was going to get very bloody very quickly!

Some good old Fire and Manoeuvre! We shot the German squad in the ruin to bits and 1st squad moved across the road. One of them can be seen on the left. 

1st squad advanced...

...and took the ruin in hand to hand combat.

Or more correctly, they took the ruin and the remaining Germans ran for it.

 I rolled four sixes, leading to a roll on the Random Events table. We spent two phases shooting at each other while jabos of unknown origin made movement impossible.

 We ended the game in this position, with the fire-fight undecided but the US Lt wounded and 1st squad's leader dead. US Force morale was down to 3 and German to 5. A single lucky roll would have finished one side so instead we called it a draw and a great game.

In summary: if you have not tried Chain of Command, you owe it to yourself to give it a go. It is fast, it is tactical, it rewards proper tactics ( fire and manoeuvre) and it punishes bad tactics (do NOT get caught in the open in front of an MG34!) and above all it does this while being fun!

Major Tatham-Warter, DSO

Another figure from an old TQD Group Build, now available from CP Models. This is Major Allison Digby Tatham-Warter, immortalised in the movie A Bridge Too Far by Christopher Good as Major Carlyle, though in the movie Major Carlyle dies while in reality Major Tatham-Warter survived the battle.

A chance for free stuff!

Free stuff is not to be sneezed at. Especially not if it is really cool free stuff.

Model Dads have their hands on a new house from Renedra. So new, in fact, that it will be released at Salute, and now they are giving away their house. Go over there and join in for a chance for a bit of real estate.
http://www.modeldads.co.uk/Life-at-the-Front/wordpress/renedras-brand-spanking-new-156th-or-28mm-scale-mud-brick-house-give-away/

And to show that I have actually done something hobby-wise since last time:

 More Gondor Militia.

 The guy in the middle above, now with a suitably terrifying banner.

A Normandy farm being painted for GothCon.

Especially for The Mad Padre: Gondor Militiaman

This guy is from the Gripping Beast Dark Age Warriors set. I intend to make a bunch more like him to use as Militia-style troops in my Dox Gondorum campaign. The idea is to take unarmoured troops from Gripping Beast and Warlord and mix in pieces of kit from the bits box to create conscript troops for Gondor and probably Rohan later on.

SSU Drakoni squad finished

I just finished my second SSU squad. These are Drakoni, commissars that can be fielded as a squad or divided up among other units. They are lovely sculpts and a joy to paint. I especially like the fact that the heads are loose meaning you can remove them during painting and then glue them in place at the end. It makes painting the dude with the rocket launcher a lot easier, I can tell you.

Crap lighting as usual. I'll bring them for playtime at the beach this summer and take some nicer pics of them fighting the Germans and Allies.

My commission work, at work!

I delivered my very first commission work, the Regimental Light Guns for Fredric's FoG:R army last week and they went straight into action in Fredric's Swedish army. Here is one of them in front of a mixed block of pike and muskets.

Both Fredric and Fredrik liked my work and I will probably be doing some cavalry for them next.

Some finished things

I have actually finished two of the things from my last post!

The shelter now has a fully functioning removable roof. It will be a perfect objective for our LRDG games.

The golden tank is finished. This is the Pz38(t) that Turtle Team uses at the start of the series. I have bought decals to allow me to make the Hetzer they use later on, but I don't have a model for it yet.

The PzIV...is still to come.