Musings about the importance of terrain

Scenery..we always need more.

Despite being a solo gamer for the most part, I find a large part of the appeal of wargaming is the scenery and terrain.  I don't see any reason why, just because you are gaming for yourself, that you shouldn't have great terrain, in fact as you are doing it for yourself it should always be more important.

I've also discovered that I really enjoy painting and building terrain pieces, with that I want to show off one of my fairly recent projects.  I wanted to build an abandoned SciFi settlement kinda inspired by films like Miyazaki's Castles in the Sky.

I used foamcore for the bases and junk from around my desk and wargaming boxes for most of the details, but the basic buildings are from Brigade miniatures Desert domes miniatures

 http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/6mmSF/Desert%20Domes.html

I confess over the last few years, Brigade have been a real go-to company for me, they make some really great minis and I always get tremendous service so I can't recommend them enough

Here is one of the bases with a bit of spray paint, roughly assembled. I wanted a landing pad and the radar thing in the front made from an old aeronef ship tipped up on its side

From the other side while the scatter material and static grass is drying, I've added rust to the landing strip and tried to show staining and overgrowth on the main building

Doorknobs! .. another base with a building and a pair of doorknobs that looked like interesting SciFi machinery of some kind

 The next three pics are groupo shops of the settlement.  I'm glad I put the different pieces on different bases as I think they look good grouped, but also work when they are seperated.

This piece shows an old light fixture that was broken that I've turned into a blown up reactor of some kind (hence the abandonment and destruction)

So that's some of my Sci-Fi scenery, I'm going to have to take this out of the box and try and play a game of solo Future War Commander soon

First new proper post.

I'm going to start this off by posting projects that I've worked on during my looooong blogging hiatus.  While living in the UK I belonged to the Berkeley Vale Wargaming club and we played quite a lot of 6mm Future War Commander so I think I'll start with some pictures of my Space Canadians!  These are Brigade Miniatures South African Confederation miniatures. 

I wanted something that was relatively low tech (hence the wheels vehicles) and decided to be a bit over the top with the colour scheme making them a scifi peacekeeper vibe.

The unpainted miniatures, they look a little crude but the camera is very unforgiving to 6mm if you look to closely

I tend to use cheap paint as my hobby dollars have to go quite a way.  I sprayed white first from a cheap rattle can, then masked with blue-tack and sprayed the red

The biggest chore with these guys is painting all the wheels!.. I don't like painting wheels

I base my 6mm stuff, generally whatever size works, but normally 20x40mm a bit of fine model railroad ballast, washed and fine static grass added for part of the base.  I've always vacillated on basing 6mm vehicles, but it does protect them and it's fun to do little mini-dioramas for command stands.

I wanted to make these guys really stand out on the table, so I added tiny Canadian flags to a bunch of them using fine florists wire and paper flags

The whole crowd in Action at the 2017 Future War Commander boot camp in Slimbridge.

And here's the whole Space Canadian Peacekeeping deployment company

Blog renewal time!

Well after many years I've decided to have  go at blogging again.  This time I'm going to try and be very focused, concentrating on my attempts at solo wargaming and miniature painting, primarily in 6mm.

So people know where I'm coming from, 6mm has been my go-to scale for over 30 years, and while I have gone through phases in and out of wargaming, I always end back with this under-represented and incredible versatile scale.  That said I do have other games in other scales, but 6mm is my primary interest.

I'm a fan of all sorts of periods, my current 6mm projects are from the following periods

Dark Ages (inspired by SAGA in 6mm by Per Broden at the Roll a One blog
Peninsular War
WW2 Operation Barbarossa
WW2 Normandy
Six Day War 1967
The War of Atonement 1973
1960s Cold War Central Front
1980s Cold War Central Front
Future Sci-Fi both Epic Armageddon and Future War Commander.. more factions than I can count

Non 6mm Projects

Space Fleet Combat using Full Thrust Rules
Imperial Skies : Flying Victorian Battleships!
Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator
1/3000 WW2 Naval
1/3000 Cold War Naval
Adeptus Titanicus
Bushido
Infinity
1/600 early cold war Airwar

and so I might get some play with other actual people

Killzone Tau force
X-Wing Scum & Villiany
Star Wars Armada

Well Thats all for this post.  Hopefully there will be quite a few in the next little while while I update the blog with loads of other pictures of the various projects I'm working on, and musings about my attempts to solo play the above systems.