Countdown to Vimy – 9 weeks to go!

Seems I’m posting these things on Mondays…

The Plan for last week was to:

#1 Cast, base, prime and goop remaining Germans.

CHECK!

Monday I cast just over 100 Great War Germans to make up the rest of the Germans I’ll need for the project – plus a few extra, in case I hadn’t counted right or I noticed any terribly miscast figures after the fact.

I thought I’d taken pictures of the workbench during the priming/gooping process… but apparently I didn’t. Anyway, I DID get them all primed and enough of the ones I actually need to do gooped.

#2 Cast, base, prime and goop British 5th Brigade

CHECK! Well... sort of...

I made a couple of realizations this week regarding the 5th. First, I don’t need the ENTIRE 5th Brigade, probably only two battalions. Second, I already HAVE enough of my own British/Canadian figures cast to make 3 Battalions. Unfortunately I realized AFTER I’d don’t the casting of the Germans that those three battalions worth of figures lack Lewis Gunners and Officers!? So I will need to do some casting agains at some point in the next week or so. I didn’t get these based, but I’ll have one more batch of basing to do when the rest of the 6th Brigade arrives anyway, so…

#3 Base, prime and goop remaining 6th Canadian Brigade (miniatures should be arriving on Tuesday)

CHECK! Well... sort of...

They didn’t arrive on Tuesday – some mix up with import papers, sender not assigning broker  or UPS being confused about something... Held up in Winnipeg.

Or Wednesday… Still in Winnipeg.

Finally arrived Thursday morning. (These are from Irregular Miniatures)

Unfortunately it was missing a bag of 16 Advancing British, so I am unable to complete the four units of the 6^th Brigade right now as I have to wait for replacements to arrive…

I also ordered a bunch of Machine guns and mortars and artillery from Irregular Miniatures because… well.. they are cheap – like less than half the cost of the any other mortar or MG teams from any other manufacturer – and I’ve gone WAY over budget for games and toys this past year. You get what you pay for though – the German and British MG teams are basically identical – they just have different helmets (and some minor modifications to the guns, I noticed when I actually assembled them).

The Mortar teams were the same – these they didn’t even cast separate crew with different helmets – they just have a generic crew with separate heads! That doesn’t matter so much – they’re in shirtsleeves and puttees and minimal equipment – the crew will probably look alright when they’re done – what was really disappointing (which any of you that know anything about Great War Equipment will have no doubt already noticed…) was these mortars they have come equipped with. The German trench mortars of the Great War ( the Minenwerfer did not look anything like Stokes mortar or any of the tripod mortars used by most nations by the Second World War…. I know, both sides made use of captured equipment, but I don’t think it was done on a large enough scale that it would be reasonable to produce this as the only option for the Germans… I’m not sure if I’m even going to use these. I do have four Mortar teams… I’m not really sure how many I was thinking I needed? One per regiment, is that what I was going for?! They’re not going to be a priority - I have four other much nicer ones, three of which are complete.

Even crazier is the Artillery crews – I ordered a British 18 poinder, a French 75 and two German Krupp 7.7 field guns. The guns are okay-ish, if on the small side. But the “crews” are two sets of machine-gun crews (two kneeling with hand out to fire gun and two prone looking like they want to feed belts of bullets into a machine-gun) and an infantry officer with his pistol out!? I would have much rather had more of the generic MORTAR crews – thwy would have worked much better!? Ah well… I’m probably not going to get to the guns for this project…

And then there’s the Turkish Cavalry I ordered… oh, don’t get me started about them.

I did get them based and primed – but ran out of goop before getting to them the evening I was doing all the base gooping… Though I did manage to get all the Boxers gooped (which I also ordered from Irregular) I think the justification was that I knew I’d have to do some more basing priming and gooping to finish this brigade of Canadians, so I could do these ones at that time – the Boxers ended upbeign higher priority as now that they are gooped I can squirrel them away in their storage box and not have them haunting the painting table… tempting me…

(pay no attention to the jet bikes in the back ground I TOTALLY wasn’t working on those… okay maybe I was… just a bit… I ordered them from North Star Figures as they were blowing out some Warzone stuff and these were 50% off and I’m planning on doing a jet bike racing game for ToonCon  and… well.. it’s a long story… never mind…)

I did get the Machine-gun teams assembled and based yesterday. Hopefully I’ll get to the Mortar teams today.

#4 Finalize Terrain Plans

I did a bit of work here – thinking about things and trying to redraw old sketch plans, but I can’t say they are “finalized” just yet…

#5 Reorganize Germans – repaint collars on old 261 Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.

I did start reorganizing them. This is the first part of that.

On the left we have three regiments of Bavarians – they are not all part of the same Division. In the front is the 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment (part of the 16th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division), which held the north end of the Ridge and “The Pimple” just to the north. The other two Bavarian regiments (Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 1 and No. 3) were part of the 1st Bavarian Reserve Infantry Division which held the area at the south of the ridge.

In the center are Reserve Infantry Regiments No. 261, No. 262, and No. 263, which were all part of the 79th Reserve infantry Division which held the center of the ridge.

On the right are a bunch of extra regiments I cast, primed and (mostly) gooped to field as a few of the reinforcement battalions that appeared on the day – I actually only need four of them.

In front are a few casualty/morale failure markers, in the back are an assortment of achine-gun and mortar teams, field guns and higher command figures all in varying states of completion.

I do have a few more Germans for the Great War – early war cavalry and a Jäger battalion

Distractions!

There were a few…

One thing I’ve been meaning to do for a LONG time once I got the table cleared off was to make a star field battle board for various spaceship battle games. This didn’t take a LOT of time 15 minutes per coat of black (x2) and about 20 minutes to do all the stars. Then board itself was one of the DBA Game Boards I made five years ago. I think I made four of them for use during campaigns, but in all the HOTT and DBA campaigns I ran I don’t think we EVER used all the boards in one campaign turn, so one is beign repurposed for battles among the stars!

Did I overdo it on the stars…? I’m not sure.

My local game store (Dragon’s Den Games) is having a 50% off sale on Reaper Miniatures metal miniatures. So I went and picked up a few weird things – mostly anthropomorphic animals and plants to use as mutant plants and animals in Mutants and Death Ray Guns  (which I have become a bit obsessed with lately…) plus a pack of familiars and halflings and such.

I even started basing and assembling/converting some of them last night (as a “treat” for getting all the German infantry based and primed and machine-guns based…) - there is also a pair of old RAFM REptiliads and an old Citadel Firmir I assembled along with them. 

This Week:

#1 Paint ~45 Great War Germans to add to those painted last week and reorganize into 10 figure battalions to form the 3 regiments of the 79th Infantry Division.

#2 Repaint collars on old 261 Reserve Infantry Regiment to match collars on 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment reorganize those two regiments to form 11th Bavarian Infantry Regiment, Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 1, and Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment No. 3.

#3 Work on (and maybe try to Finalize!?) Terrain Plans

#4 Begin refurbishing rest of 4th Division’s Terrain…?

Rest of February

Finish Germans – 4 more (10-man) battalions of units in reserve plus machine Guns and mortars

Build Terrain for 3rd Division.

March

Finish British and Canadians 2 battalions

Build Terrain for 1st and 2^nd Divison

April (one last week!) 

Make more wire and barrage markers

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

Hopefully some painted Great War Germans!!