114th Pennsylvania "Collis Zouaves" FINISHED!

My 114th Pennsylvania "Collis Zouaves" unit has been completed by the talented artist at Leuthen Studios and will shortly be on its way to California. He has done an excellent job of working with my instructions (as advised by many of my readers!). I'm very happy with the result.

The 114th uses metal figures from Perry, "Zouaves in fezzes and chasseur trousers". Flags are by GMB.

The Red Baron (2008) "Der rote Baron"

For a great WWI movie about the war in the air, I recommend The Red Baron "der rote Baron" (2008) starring Matthias Schweighofer as a perfect Rittmeister Manfred Freiherr von Richthofen.

The movie was criticized for some historical inaccuracies, but overall I think it is a very good movie with interesting characterizations, a plot and great aerial combat scenes. His red Albatros of Jasta 11 is nicely portrayed.

Wings of Glory: First Battles

Will, Jeff and I had out first taste of Wings of Glory this weekend, played on the excellent game-mats produced by Ares along with their delightful 1/144 scale model aircraft.  The game looks brilliant and is great fun to play. We were playing the basic game within minutes and quickly graduated to the most advanced rules.

I converted 4 flight stands to hold the gimbals sold aftermarket on the "Aerodrome" support site for this game:

http://www.aerodromeaccessories.com/index.php/game-aides/wings-of-glory/gimbal-mounts-32.html

Several different conversion methods are suggested at this site . I opted for a method which requires no alteration of the model aircraft. This article was very helpful:

http://www.wingsofwar.org/forums/showthread.php?2477-My-Gimbal-Installation-Method-(Detail)&p=31848#post31848

My Board Game Collection

One of the many nice features of Boardgamegeek is the ability to track your own collection. Here are some screens depicting my own collection. I have done a lot of weeding out over the years and sold many a game on eBay. This is my current collection, most of which I really like. Click on the images to get a readable view.

Austrian Napoleonic Ordnance

I recently painted one of the very nice 28mm artillery models from Leopold Diez. These are very hard to find outside of Germany. This is my attempt to produce the yellow-ochre colour used by Austria. It is washed in Seraphim Sepia from Citadel to both shade and darken the ochre.

I was trying to match the Caisson painted for me by Leuthen Studios who also painted the 6-horse team and the Perry 6 pounder and crew.

Dr Stephen Summerfield has just posted on TMP that the ochre is correct but the barrels should be unpolished bronze metal.

"Diez" model 3 Pfünder mit Protze-Österreich 

"Diez" model 3 Pfünder mit Protze-Österreich

"Diez" model 3 Pfünder-Österreich

"Diez" model 3Pfünder-Österreich

"Diez" model 3 Pfünder-Österreich

"Dietz" model Protze-Österreich

 "Diez" model Caisson-Österreich

 "Diez" model Caisson-Österreich

"Diez" model Caisson-Österreich

"Perry" model 6 Pfünder-Österreich

Sails of Glory

Today I took the plunge into uncharted waters. Inspired by my very recent forays into Wings of Glory/War I decided to pre-order the about to be released follow-on game from Ares Games: Sails of Glory.

Like Wings, Sails uses a card system and a "dash board" to run the game with little reference to rules and no dice. It looks good. Let's see how it plays.

Good bad or ugly, Ares does a great job marketing its product. Simple miniatures manufactured in China and packaged and marketed by a company in Italy never looked so compelling! I have a feeling this is going to be the way of the future for many mainstream board games and miniatures.

A far cry from the brown cardboard boxes and sawdust packing material of my youth. However the core of this game as with Wings is a very clever card-based playing system that allows quick but fairly realistic play without the usual assembling, painting and rules-studying that was the prerequisite for most miniature based wargames in the past.

Gotha G. V (Von Korff)

Last month I started collecting Wings of Glory WWI. I have added a few fighter aircraft and I played a trial game with John and Jack last weekend. I just located a hard to find German heavy bomber from the same series, the Gotha G. V. This looks like a really beautiful model.

Von Korff's Gotha G.V

The Rules and Accessory pack adds a lot of nice features to the game and is well worth buying. It doesn't take long playing the basic game to feel the need to graduate to the most advanced rules. This system is very playable.

The earlier incarnation of Wings of Glory, Wings of War WWI also has some nice models which are fully compatible with Wings of Glory. You don't need the earlier rules but a few of the aircraft look good...if you can find them. This is a very collectible series as reflected in the prices. Even the Gotha G. V from the current range was sold for twice the listed price. Scarcity and collectibility matter.