Lockdown Post 17 - Cruel Seas Royal Navy Fleet

My youngest is a big fan of ships so when i described Cruel Seas to him he was all in straight away, that means I've had a built in gaming buddy for lockdown and it's given us both the opportunity to learn the rules properly. I'm not going to give a run through of the rules as that's been done better elsewhere but I thought I'd share my Royal Navy fleet as I'm quite pleased with how they came out. 

These have been painted over the last year or so,  I still have 2 Fairmile D's to paint so this isn't my full fleet! 

Vosper type 1 MTB's. I quite like the aesthetics  of these, although the masts are way too chunky

An armed trawler,  it's pretty pathetic when facing up against some of the Kreigsmarine ships but when you factor in the gazillion torpedoes from the cheap and cheerful Vospers then it manages to survive quite a while. 

Vosper type 2's. Same problem as the type 1's with the oversize mast. I should really have replaced then with something more appropriate to the scale. 

All the gang together.  It'll look better when I add the Fairmiles.

Lockdown Post 16 – Its the little things!

In these trying times you appreciate the little things, those small things that you normally wouldn’t really appreciate enough. Like many of you I’m exhausting my supply of hobby materials, I’m painting more than normal and Covid-19 timed it just right to turn up just as I’m starting to run out of stuff. I’d normally call in at a bricks and mortar store but that’s not possible here in NZ with our lockdown so I had to make use of online ordering from local hobby store Kapiti Hobbies (a hobby shop that’s also a pharmacy, or is it the other way round?).

I ordered yesterday and boom, my stuff arrived today! Pretty good turnaround from both the store and the courier company!

Good service, good products. I know it’s not much but it brightened my day

Lockdown post 15 - Roman Legionaries

I've been working on some more Warlord Games Roman's too go with my earlier efforts.

Had a minor disaster with the army painter spray varnish which went cloudy but a quick application of some olive oil managed to fix it.

 Next up are some barbarians for them to fight against or ally with! I've had a bunch of Warlord Games plastics floating around for a while so lockdown has provided the perfect impetus to get some of them out of the cupboard!

I should have enough for some games of SPQR now,  hopefully when lockdown finishes and we all emerge from our bunkers there'll still be some people to play against!

Lockdown post 14 - Islands

In one of my recent posts I talked about gaming with my boys,  the game in question was Warlord Games Cruel Seas. Well as we all know every game is improved with some nice looking scenery and that's what I did the day before that game so I thought I should post about making islands. 

Each island is just a chunk of polystyrene stuck on some old board and shaped accordingly. 

Painted and textured with old art acrylics, although I have used some Vallejo sand paste which is something new for me.

Looks all right. I'll post with my Cruel Seas fleets at some point!

Lockdown post 13 - "Badges? We don't need no stinking badges!"

And so continues the painting table clear out, this guy is part of my desperados for Dead Mans Hand.

I was tempted to do a crazy colorful paint scheme but he looks too much like a badass to wear lots of bright colors.

I quite like the Great Escape minis,  at least for DMH anyways

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Lockdown post 12 - Gaming with the boys

Before you start calling the social distancing police the boys in the title refers to my kids, don't worry we're staying within our bubble here at t'club house. Like many of you, trying to keep the social aspect of our hobby going is quite challenging in these dark days,  however I'm lucky in that my kids share my love of gaming (to a degree). At 9 and 10 the gaming is simplified a little more than normal, and when I tell them that it also counts as school work they get even more interested. 

So the other day we cracked out Cruel Seas, the mechanism is simple and clean although moving the ships is fiddly but we muddled through. Here's a few pics:

We invented the scenario,  "Transport the tank on the tanker". This made good use of the boy's home made tank and my scratch built tanker, at some point I'll write a post about building it. 

The game was such fun that it inspired my eldest to invent his own version - Penguin Wars! I'll share more in another post.

So that's how I'm scratching the gaming itch, anyone got any good stories about theirs?

Lockdown post 11 - Some more Romans

A nice quick one this,  3 more Romans, this time legionnaires.

As stated in my last post they're quite small,  I've based them on good old GW 20mm squares to give them some height.  I'm running low so will have to get some more to stay consistent. 

Once I've enough for SPQR I'll probably start multi basing them for bigger games (if I get that far). Here's the gang so far.