Monday Round up

Do you like tanks? You do? Well do we have an update for you. Especially if you like your tanks BIG. We have lots of new tanks, reappearing tanks and range extensions. On mission “Complete the range” we have extended many of our 1:35 scale ranges. We have so many tanks in this round  up that they are by country…

Russians

There’s the Zvedva T 34/85  and T34/76 and T90

 

Germans

The VK4502 Vorne from HobbyBoss, the Tamiya PzrKpfWgn IV, the HobbyBoss Land Wasser Schlepper with a rather awesome grin (who doesn’t want a smiling tank?) and MRAV Boxer. Then from Armourfast, tanks that are so good even the pernickety folk in Military Models seem to like them, we have the StuIG 33B and Panzer IV D; not only are they great kits, you get two tanks in each kit. And to complete your tank there is the Tamiya Tank Crew. If you prefer your vehicles a bit smaller there is the BMW motorbike.

 

Britishers

From Tamiya there is the Crusader Mark I/II and Universal Carrier. And from Miniart, a new but already very popular company, we have the Dingo Mark III Scout Car.

Chinese

The ZLC2000 Airborne IFV (does that mean they fly this thing?!) from HobbyBoss

Uncle Sam

The Tamiya M36 , HobbyBoss M4A3E8 with its terrifying mouth, and Armourfast M36

 

But if tanks aren’t your thing, don’t despair, we have plenty of new items for you too.

From Trent Miniatures we have some new ‘battalion’ packs. Its on quotes, because whilst some are actual battalions, it is hard to say the revolting slaves are a battalion. More of a large group of rather angry people, but that’s a bit lengthy to stick on the box. The revolting slaves and the consular garde are our favourites from the new packs, and are ideal for extending your Haitian revolutions or late eighteenth century forces.

If your tastes are a little more Wild West than West Indies then the new bank from the range of wooden buildings  may suit you perfectly. As would the Crusader Woodland Indians.

For Saga fans, and we know there are many of you, we have a new range of counters, with designs for each of the different armies, so you can keep track of where you are in the game easily. Also for keeping track we have measuring sticks for the armies, so that you can easily identify possible attacks without having to carry a geometry set around with you.

From Strelets, who are great for those really unusual armies, we have some new Swedes, French and Romans. Its worth a browse through the Strelets category just to see the diversity!

 

Till next time, happy modelling!

 

Just a note…

Hi folks,

We’re having a little blog rearrangement. The Friday round up will now be the Monday round up, and mostly the posts that were on Mondays will now be on Fridays…mostly.

We thought we should let you know just in case you thought you were going mad.

🙂

Monday gaming post

By Mick Rood

Hello and welcome to the Sturm Uber……………. Blog, a periodical visit to the Flames of War tournaments held at Maelstrom games in Mansfield and strongly supported by Arcane scenary through providing prizes such as the MDF buildings in our range and particularly the popular Zvesda 1/100 vehicles from the ‘Art of Tactic’ game. Not specifically intended for Flames of War but the scale of the vehicles and aircraft is perfect for the game. Sadly, the infantry being at 1/72nd scale aren’t appropriate, unless of course you play FOW at that scale. Just in case you didn’t know Flames of War covers WWII battles mainly intended for 15mm scale but playable in most scales although probably a bit unsuitable for 28mm where more skirmish/squad level rules would be appropriate. The Flames of War ruleset is supported by the vast Battlefront range of figures and army books covering a large part of the 1939-1945 conflict, the book and figure releases come hard and fast.

Sturm Uber………….was originally set up by the lads at Maelstrom when they supported the Battlefront range but some trade differences meant that stopped temporarily. Whilst Maelstrom had a business difference they knew FOW was very popular amongst its club members and wished the players should continue. They invited Myself and Tommy Brown, regular ‘Flames’ players, to maintain their FOW competitions on their calendar. So the ‘ReluctantConscripts’ were born and our first venture was Sturm Uber Europa set in the Mid War (1942-1943) period covering the War in Russia, Western Desert, Tunisia and Early Italy/Sicily.

Considering the theatres and terrain is a considerable part of the pleasure of Flames of War. It has simple but comprehensive and effective terrain rules that allows players to enjoy good detailed terrain without loss of playabilty. Potentially a competitor can find themselves on the open desert or in the claustrophobic horror of Stalingrad. The ideal, of course, is to have the right mix of opponent in the right theatre but competitions tend to spread history somewhat so that isn’t guaranteed.

Sturm Uber Europa in June 2011 was Mine and Tommy’s first joint effort and our aims were to maintain the quality of the Maelstrom events and appeal to the wide competition circuit. Saturday morning saw 30+ players landed at Maelstrom for the weekend and 5 full games. The day always starts with briefing and doughnuts as the draw is concluded. It is always the intention not to have, so called, ‘Blue on Blue’ games where you play the same nationality as yourself. The quirks of army choice don’t always mean a perfect balance but the lads feel that the best enjoyment comes out of historical faceoffs where the uniqueness of each nation/force is brought to the fore. Flames of War cleverly brings out the traits of each nations fighting style, this is further enhanced with particular unit traits.

Maelstrom sorted out the food for us with their expanding kitchen facilities and looked after the drinks side with the very busy bar. I would like to add in a thank you to Maelstrom at this point, not only is the venue excellent for this type of event, the staff on food, at the bar and in the shop are always there to help with Gary Moore and all of them working their b**ts off to look after us.

The event includes awards for best sportsman and best painted army, the competition for these prizes was very close and shows the ethos of most players to make the experience enjoyable for BOTH players. The painting standards were excellent and the skills of all the entrants to be admired. We don’t allow unpainted/unrepresentative figures except in the most exceptional circumstances. Take some time to check the pics of the various forces.

Fierce fighting ensued and here are pictures of some of the excellent armies showcased at Sturm Uber Europa.

Strum Uber Deutschland.

November saw the second outing and Sturm Uber Deutschland continued the WWII story covering the Late War (Late 1943, 1944) with terrain for Normandy, Italy, Russia and Poland. Although this period of the war saw vast distances quickly covered, the hardest fighting had bogged down into city ruins, Normandy bocage and Italian hills and vineyards. The big breakthroughs often came after weeks of gruelling fighting. This can produce some fantastic terrain where the detail is increased as the terrain closed down for these bitter fights.

Sturm Uber Deutschland saw an increased turnout and once again the sponsors had been very generous allowing us to give prizes and a free raffle so that everyone left with something.

Once again, Gary and the Maelstrom crew excelled themselves.

So that was the Sturm Uber series in 2011. We will repeat the June and November events as Mid War and Late War but will start the series in March with Sturm Uber Dunkirchen. The first Early War competition to be run by the Reluctant Conscripts and at Maelstrom

STURM UBER DUNKIRCHEN MARCH 2012

36 Players from all over the UK journeyed to Mansfield to take part in our latest Early War event. It was a great weekend, great players, great atmosphere and great food. This was our swansong to version 2 of the Flames of War rules and it saw us out in great style. We had Polish cavalry demolishing artillery parks, trains chugging up and down tracks, hordes of Italian & British tanks and the surgical strike force of the German Heer.
Steve Charlton won not only Best General but also Best Painted Axis army with his lovely grey panzers. Kevin Brewin won Best Axis General and Jez Evans won Best Allied General. Ian Mann ran away with Most Sporting while Mark Mainwaring won Best Painted Allied and Richard Heath deservedly won Best Play Provided Table with his Warsaw board including poster booths and cars.

 

Shown above and below are road sets provided for us by Arcane Scenery and they also stock the river shown and the buildings below, manufactured by Sarissa Precision…

The Panzers batter the Allied defence lines

Richard Heath’s fantastic Warsaw city scape

NEXT EVENT JUNE 9/10 2012

Monday Models

So we have a couple of projects we’d like to mention. That aren’t Arcane projects.

Firstly Kevin Hill from Texas again, with his Western town layout.

Kevin apparently feels he shouldn’t have painted this in that Cola red, because it looks a bit too barn like, but I rather like it. He made the hay bales using a paper cup and glue.

We’d also like to direct you toward something that we found on the internet, not one of our customers, heck we don’t even know the chap. Though we’d quite like to, because we are incredibly impressed. Curos is a modeller based in southern Spain, in Badajos, who has some AMAZING dioramas of Trafalgar and the Peninsula War. We love those ships. They are beautiful. You should take a look at both sites. Be amazed people.

Friday round up

This week’s entry is brought to you to the sound of trashy FM, so if lyrics from what my mother still insists on calling ‘The Hit Parade’ creep in, my apologies.

After a bit of a delay we now have Conflix, Pegasus and Emhar stocks coming in. HOWEVER, the supplier themselves are awaiting imports and these are due in May.

On a similar vein, but we actually have these. Tauro. Yes Tauro AV7s and Fiats. We have them. After two years. No I really did say 2 years. I think they made the poor little tanks come by their own power frankly. But we have them, at last. I’d grab one while you can frankly.

Another back in stock is the Tamiya…*deep breath* …Schwerer Zugkraftwagen 18t und Tielfladeanhänger für PzKpFw Sd Ah 116…which is a bit of a mouthful even by German standards. For those not familiar with lengthy Germanic words it is a half track with transporter. It doesn’t come with the tank though. It makes a very large model which even if not used in game will certainly intimidate any visitors to the house. It is one of several LARGE kits we sell all of whom are fit to intimidate any window sales dude who might foolishly decide to enter your abode.

Finally we have increased our Vallejo range to include new textures, colours and accessories.

Woo, managed the whole post with no Jessie J lyrics creeping in

Mondays Rule

Continuing the Friday round up we have more new and shiny things…

For Saga we have the Northern Fury supplement with four new battleboards-Scots, Anglo-Saxons, Bretons and the rather bemusingly named Jomsvikings. If the Viking sorts take your fancy you might like to consider our special offer of Vikings and ship…

Firefight is a new skirmish rules set, primarily designed for larger scale (1/32, 1/35) which uses only a few figures, and thus is ideal if you are just dipping your toes into World War 2 or bigger models. And and and…if you are just trying out we have the ideal set for you. The Firefight rules plus Airfix US and German figures, and the dice all together, an Arcane Scenery exclusive. All set to go in mere minutes.

And finally in the new rules theme something a tad more modern Day of the Rangers: Somalia 1993.

We’d love to know how you get along with these rule sets and it would be great to have some of your battle reports here on the blog!

Friday Round Up

First of all apologies for the sparse nature of this round up. I am typing one handed (no, no) which is rather tedious…

We have lots of North Star including, for those with luggage needs, porters, Ila warriors, Matabele warriors. They go well with the Wazunga hunters, and are great for dioramas as well as gaming!

The Ila (or BaIla) are a tribe based in South Central Africa, what is now Zambia. They were fierce warrior herdsmen in the 19th Century, powerful enough to fight off Matabele cattle raids and Arab slave raids. Their distinct tall hair-style was fashioned so that tribal members could see each other moving through the tall grass of the Kafue Flats.

Get them fast though! They’re going fast!

New in our MDF building range we have Adobe Church and Canteena. Ideal for Western and Texian scenarios and the Old West range figures.

In our Future History range we have more Mantic Corporation figures. Great for all science fiction genre games, including something beginning with G and W…

So that your figures need not get separated in the heat of battle we now have resin regiment bases and objective markers…do check out the 104 bases we have.

And finally (ish) for WWII fans we have 15mm Plastic Soldier’s Russian heavy weapons tank, from Valiant some 1/72 paratroopers and from Airfix the Chi Ha.

We are going to bring you more new things on Monday! Yes a second round up…you are lucky lucky beings!

 

 

 

 

Hussar Part 3 [Now with Words!]

This is the painting hussars part three and its just to bring you up to date with the finished models. When we left them the model was completely base coated, and block coated and I had mounted the figure on his horse, which I had previously painted.

We will go over painting horses at some future date, as it is still a mystery to me though I am improving.

So we have a nicely finished block painted Hussar ready to go on his horse and the first thing we need to do is use some quickshade on him. I used the dark tone, which is the black quick shade, and I don’t dip the figure as the instructions say instead I paint it. Painting the dip over the figure allows me a certain amount of control, and it means that you make sure that everything get covered nicely and don’t end up flicking quickshade down my garden, as the instructions suggest. It does make me feel in control; like I am painting it rather than just dipping it in a tin and forgetting it.

Once the figure has been painted with dip and let to dry I check it. Though I do look to check the quickshade is going in the right place, the one thing is that you don’t really know until its dry, where it will go. So you have to let it settle and go in all the creases.

Once they were dry (I let the it dry at least overnight and there is an argument to let it dry longer), and then it is time to matt the figure down. The initial appearance after quickshade is “oh no I have ruined my model”, you haven’t! Carry on with the process and the next stage of the process is to use the army painter matt spray to matt the figure again. Matt varnish can be very temperamental so do make sure to shake it very very well; a good five minutes or so. I have never had a problem over shaking, but I have ruined by under shaking, and then do a quick test spray on a piece of card. This is because if you are like me and have a number of spray cans on your shelf then its so easy to pick up the wrong can, and I have heard of so many people who have sprayed their beautiful models silver…

I spray from around 20cm away in pulses, not a blast, I’d rather go back and respray rather than have it fog and mist.

 

The one other thing I will do is take the matt white and go back over any white that had been too dirtied down such as the fur on pelise and tuft on front of the bearskins. Also on the sword paint the edges in a nice bright silver, which gives the sword a nice shiny edge.

 

He is then mounted on his horse, and based.

 

The basing technique I use is to first of all paint base in chocolate brown or Vallejo black brown, then cover in PVA and use Arcane Scenery Forest Scatter. This gives you earth colour to start with. Then I use Army Painter tufts, and I have a thing for the meadow tufts, and on some of the bases I have used some Highland ones too. And finally some static grass, and for this I used Expo

flowered field which is a nice bright green. The basing doesn’t take too long and gives a nice effect.

 

On a couple of the figures I decided to go back and paint the eyes. One of the beauties of quickshade is that it can bring our the features of the faces, unfortunately sometimes this makes them look rather zombie like, so I went back and painted the eyes. Which even at this scale is an art in itself, and you may notice on if my men has rather staring eyes…

 

They were taken to the table last week in Sharp practice, where they managed to flank very nicely. Unfortunately a French counter charge left them under the charge of the cannon that they were attempting to charge. So not the most glorious start to their career but I hope it will improve!

Good Friday Egg Up

What are you doing here? Those chocolate eggs aren’t going to eat themselves you know.

Any orders placed over the weekend will be sorted out as soon as everyone gets back into the office. Which should be Tuesday, baring any Easter egg overdoses. However, the postal services of both the UK and the bits of the world that celebrate Easter are not always up straight, so do keep this in mind when awaiting your goodies.

So back to the food people. And in the mean time here’s some hot cross guns

 

And for some awesome future history reading over your weekend may I recommend this from io9. Go forth eat chocolate, ruin the diet and come back next week soldier ready to work that army. Dismissed!

 

Friday Round Up

Hello hello hello

First this week we have Tamiya range extensions. Which is many many items, tanks galore and many of them post WWII, which is good news for those of you who like a bit of modern warfare…here are some of the new delights, but to get a better idea of how much the range has extended pop over to the Tamiya section on our eBay site.

For WW2 fans we have the new Operation Squad Reinforcements rules set in. This covers artillery, mortars and new squads. Steve has already tried a brief skirmish with the rules and really enjoyed them. He also thinks they’d work really nicely for 1/35 and 1/48 as well if you fancy something a little grander.

We have restocks on Airfix Liberators and Sabres, which have been reboxed and reissued. The Sabre saw action in North Korea, whilst the Liberator is a B24 bomber from the second world war. The sabre comes with the rather cute little dragon decal shown on the front. Yes yes I know he’s meant to be a scary Korean terrifying Dragon, but he’s sweet  and called ‘The Huff’, which makes him one step away from Puff the Magic Dragon. Only hopefully less stoned.

From Revell we have ummm well its another Leopard tank. They like their Leopards it has to be said.

From Warlord we have some Greeks, some Romans, some casualty markers, and a pike sturgeon…sorry I mean a pike and shot surgeon.

From Wargames Factory, yes those with the ummm boxes, we have some Germans. Really really nice Germans. Some very impressive and well made kits which have good mouldings. Just ignore the box art.

And finally the new issue of Wargames Illustrated is out, and it includes an article by one of Arcane’s friends the innovative Andy Callan and his microships for refighting Trafalgar, which we thoroughly recommend.

Till next week chaps. TTFN

 

The king is helpless

You chaps should know about this, and so I thoroughly expect some corrections. I will be disappointed if not.

War is an expensive business. All those guns, bombs and people don’t come cheap. Well unless you happen to have coerced and stolen, and even then you have a whole new bunch of people to kidnap and people don’t leave AK47s lying around everyday. Ideally you want to plan what you are doing in advance.
You might want to pop a few notes down :
“Monday-march a bit,
Tuesday-circle encampment,
Wednesday-storm encampment,
Thursday-shoot a bit more, probably bury Smith, always was slow,
Friday-win!
Saturday-celebrate,  get Smith to order beer and girls before death”

Of course this all relies on you knowing how to wage a war, and your enemy. If you’ve never gone to war before how do you know what to do? [This is where you chaps answer]

Luckily since ancient times there have been ways of training your officers that don’t require leaving the comfort of the mess hall.

Chess, Draughts… Go

Though the history of all three of these games has been disputed and confused over the years, they certainly have played some role in the strategy training even if unofficially. Chess and Weiqi (Go) both focus on defence and offence tactics, to protect your pieces and diminish the opposition.

When they weren’t off persuading Muslims into Christianity the Knights templar were stealing their games.

The Indian part of Chess’ history (for it has two parents) names it chaturanga, which in one translation means the four parts of the military. The four parts being cavalry, infantry, chariots and elephantry. The elephants disappointingly got replaced by castles in the modern version. The Persian parent side shatranj was used by the military to train noblemen before they took on command roles.

How your chess game might pan out today (photo by Alan Light)

German soldiers watch a game of chess (photo by Bundesarchiv)

 

Roman Sand Pits to German War Games

Something more familiar to many of you is the Roman approach to strategy and tactic with a sand box, and stones to represent your soldiers. Used to play out the possibilities that might face your legions as they advance on the yet to be Caesar-ed towns. Still used by some cadet training programmes in America (apparently) to introduce new recruits to the tactics they might need. You should be grateful to the Romans chaps, not only for their amazing roads, but they essentially are to thank for that thing that you dedicate so much to. The Germans in the 19th century of course expanded on these and chess to create military training games that mixed the two forms and are far closer to the sort of games you probably play. Though HG Wells characterised the German games that he based his rules on as dull, they were not designed to be a fun game, but a very definite training tool.

Helmuth Karl Bernhard von Moltke the man behind Kreigspiel

 

Graph Paper and Simulations

We’re going to skim over the 1950s games which were used by both the military and sold commercially. Not least because a good portion of you probably own one of these games. At a similar time a less game based strategic technique was also emerging. The start of the twentieth century was a great time for science, technology was moving on sufficiently to start making discoveries in the chemical, biological and physical science. And not to be left behind the maths dudes were finding proofs all over the place. The potential of  equations to plan war was not lost on the military, and they began developing wargames that resembled more a log table than a game table. This use of mathematics has largely led to the way that the military now trains soldiers, and how many of you might occupy yourself when not near the game table. Computers. Starting as an almost direct translation of the board games, computer simulations have become increasingly more sophisticated making use of AI and modelling.  No not that kind of modelling, I mean more like   m frac{d^2}{dt^2} x(t) = - nabla V x(t)   or P(t) = frac{1}{1 + e^{-t}}   kind of modelling.

The military’s interest in computers has naturally distilled down to increases in consumer technology, it is after all the military we can at least partly thank for the internet. However, more surprisingly it works in reverse too. Reputedly the US Navy make use of Flight Simulator.

This kind of war room drove the second world war (photo by Kaihsu Tai)

This kind the Cold war…(photo by Niels Elgaard Larsen)

And if we have a space war (lets hope not) this will presumably be the kind of planning room. Though I imagine the astronauts will look less jolly. 

 

The question is would you trust yourself to run a military operation? Or if you’ve done both does the game reflect real life?

If you’d like to read more on this here and here are quite useful sources.

 

 

Friday Round Up

Okay. Confession times folks. You may have noticed no post on Monday for which we apologise profusely. Bluntly technology has not been our friend this week. But we’re fighting it and hopefully winning.

Confession two. No new release. None. Nada. Lots of restocks. Lots and lots. but nothing new. So today we thought we would spotlight on a few of our favourite manufacturers.

Wargames Factory

Their box art can be a bit ummm unusual, but the quality of their products and the expanse of their range cannot be disputed. You want ancient Japan…they’ve got them, you want Amazons…they’ve got them. Modern wars, ancient wars and all kinds of relatively under-done areas. AND if you have a really specific army that you are looking for, that nobody makes, you can even vote for them to make them here. They American and Chinese in origin with a rather colourful history, but we really like their models.

 

Hobby Boss

Also from China come HobbyBoss. Unless you read Han their website can be a bit perplexing. Even in English. What isn’t perplexing is how much of a bargain they are. Really. Seriously. They are as cheap as the proverbial chips, but they are, and I risk sounding like Del Boy here, top quality. They really are beautiful things. Lovely moulding, lots of detail. We love them.

 

Zvedza

From the other East this time comes Zvedza. The moral of today’s post seems to be communism and post communism leads to great model making. They’ve been around since 1989 and make both model kits and board games. They make the moulds, cast and essentially follow the whole production process through from scratch to ensure that they can control the whole process through from the beginning to the end. For fans of Russian tanks Zvedza, or star as their buddies like to call them, are absolutely fabulous with their precision and detail. They also do some beautiful little scenery pieces for World War II scenes.

Hopefully next week we will have some new items to tell you about, but until then have a good weekend.