Hobby Update 26 Mar 23

I am still making slow but steady progress through the lead hillock although again there has been a lot less actual gaming than I might have liked.  The old conconction of being busy with work (and just as importantly, feeling pretty lethargic when I have finished work), busy with family things and not really having easily accessible gaming spaces and gaming stuff have continued to defy my efforts.  But I have made a little progress in sorting that I hope, so I have a small stable of 'doable' games near my work space whilst everything else gets stored out of the way.

Anyway, first up is more WW2 Polish stuff: an infantry company (more-or-less), a couple of tank, tankette and armoured car platoons, and one anti-tank, artillery and anti-aircraft artillery battery.  These are a mixture of Heroics & Ros (most of the vehicles and guns) and Scotia (all the figures, plus one of the armoured car platoons and one of the tankette platoons).  Annoyingly H&R don't do any Polish gun crews for their Polish guns. Grrr.  In retrospect, I might have been better off using French WW2 gun crews than some spare Scotia Polish heavy weapons crews, they look a bit big. Oh well.

Two platoons of Polish tanks, in their rather nifty camouflage scheme.

The armoured cars and tankettes and tracked artillery tractors.

The Scotia infantry aren't as shapely as the GHQ stuff or as dynamic as Baccus or Adler or as 'correctly silhouetted' as H&R, but they are sort of okay - they are like an old-fashioned Minifig if you like, simple and easy to paint and not quite as reliant on nifty brushwork as some of the Irregular stuff.

H&R anti-tank guns (front), guns (middle) and Bofors AAA (rear)

Next up is a bit more British and German WW2 stuff: the British for early war, the Germans are a mixture.

H&R A13s (left) and A10s (right)

Ok, Panzerjaeger Is at the front, 21 Pz vehicles back-right(a 75mm anti-tank gun on a Somua chassis, a 150mm on a Lorraine and a converted French half-track carrier, I think); A StuG42 and two Hanomags with heavy weapons top-left - these are Scotia, IIRC...

The British have a few Morris armoured cars (centre) and some Beaverettes (right), the latter a common feature of 'what-if' Sealion 1940 scenarios, I am finding.

Next-up is a group of figures that I completed a little while ago, but don't think I have posted: 15mm Cold War Dutch from Battlefront:

The figures were nice enough.  I have done a couple of female head-swaps, using the Peter Pig female head pack.  They are a tiny bit small really but I think that they basically worked okay.  Finding the right colours wasn't as easy as it might have been, but blogger Jemima Fawr did some really brilliant posts on doing a Cold War Dutch Army in 15mm, highly highly recommended!

I have managed to get a figure game to the table but more of that later; otherwise I have been mainly plaing the Thirty Years' War board game Europe in Agony:

Previous experience has told me that you can't get enough 'practice runs' with a boardgame you intend on using as a campaign engine!  Also, actually playing solo and using it as a campaign engine will always require a few small changes to be made, but only familiarity with the game can help you judge the secondary effects of any changes.  But in any case, the game itself is full of interest and I have been learning a lot thinking about the challenges facing Wallenstein, Mansfeld, Tilly, Spinola et al.  Compared to the previous campaign board games I have used, it feels closest to the Gallic War in terms of how the game plays out.  Where this one is a little tricky is that the first couple of turns seem incredibly important in determining the likely flow of the game, since neither side has many troops and they start in pretty close proximity.