A Sarissa building for Vietnam

At Salute I bought a number of MDF and grey board models from Sarissa Precision.
One of them was the N109 Small House from the North Africa/Colonial series.

The kit comes securely shrink wrapped with a line drawing on the front (that sheet has the instructions) and a standard sheet on the back.

There is one sheet of grey board, laser etched with doors, windows and shutters. The doors and windows are on interior wall sheets, you do not need to remove the windows and doors, the whole sheet is added to the interior.

The floor and roof panels.

Walls and roof detail.

Other walls. If you are paying attention, you can see there will be an issue later.

I sprayed the inside of the interior walls with Halfords white acrylic. I then masked all but the windows, doors and shutters and sprayed them with Humbrol  Dark Green.

The outside of the interior walls was masked so there was some cardboard to MDF contact for glueing. This was then sprayed with Army Painter Army Green paint.

The body of the building and the roof were assembled using PVA glue. The roof was left separate.

Milliput was use to fill any gaps.

Once it was dry, I masked the doors and windows (door frames on the outside as well). I also put masking tape in the gaps between the locating pegs on the body of the building. This was to ensure that the roof and building could be separated later.

The building was sprayed with Rustoleum Rust effect textured paint to give the MDF some texture. This was then sprayed with Halfords grey acrylic paint followed by Halfords white acrylic spray paint.

The texture does not fill in the laser etched  detail on the walls.

I had masked areas on the inner side of the outer walls so that the PVA glue would have a suitable surface to glue the interior walls.

It was at this point I spotted a problem. The door and single window interior wall is horizontally flipped.

I had painted the interior wall to represent the door set into the wall.

This is how it was supposed to go, if the interior walls were correct.

With the interior wall panel flipped, they line up but there is no louvre detail on the door, and due to my masking, there is rather a lot of white edge.

I remasked the panel and masked and painted again so the "exterior" wall side was white with green doors and windows and the "interior" wall sprayed green.

The exterior walls were washed with Citadel Nuln Oil to bring out the surface detail. The exposed top surface of the base plate was washed with Citadel Agrax Earthshade.

This shows the revised door and window detail. As you can see, the door lacks detail.

Empress Miniatures and Gringo's 40 are in the process of releasing figures for Vietnam. Though this building os intended for North Africa, it is of a French Colonial flavour. Do not just take my word for it, there is a post on the Lard Island blog where Big Rich is using a larger version of the building for a a rubber plantation.

I have two packs of Empress Vietnam US Marines. I do not have them painted yet, but I do have five French paratroopers from the Empress French Indochina, so here they are  taking cover around the building.

The light machine gun provides support from the roof top.

A rifleman shoots from cover.

Advancing past a building.

Two SMG armed troops prepare to assault the building while the rest of the squad protect them.

The squad observe the surrounding area from an elevated position.

Salute 2019 - part three

Sarissa precision had their range of laser cut MDF and greyboard buildings. I did not quite run amok (I had to trim my list a bit), but I did buy a number of buildings for a range of periods.

As I mentioned earlier, I bought the WWX starter set last year.

The figures are taller than normal "28mm" so when Sarissa announced they had a new 40mm Wild West range, I thought that was a sign.

I bought the Adobe Jail and one of the small shops as a start.

I bought the Survivor Shack at SELWG, and thought the "Ghost town" barn and the picket fence would be good additions.

The burned out cabin I thought would make an additional feature for post-apocalyptic games.

Empress and Gringo's 40 are starting ranges of 28mm Vietnam figures, and I thought that some of the Colonial/North Africa ranges might work until there is a specific Vietnam buildings range.

There were also two buildings for World War 2 that interested me.

Salute 2019 - part two

Last year I bought the Gunfight at Red Oak starter set for Wild West Exodus.

Each player is supposed to have an action deck of 48 cards, which have a set amount of Action Points on each card. Disappointingly, the starter set contains only one pack of those cards, so you either share the pack, or split the pack and remove the single five Action Point card. This is unlike the Malifaux starter set, which comes with a set of Fate cards for both players (and two tape measures). Red Oak does have a printed rules book though.

As there are very few places to buy Wild West Exodus, I had to wait until Salute to buy another pack of the cards direct from the publisher Wayland Games.

Now I have the second pack, I might get round to playing the game.

In addition, I bought two sets of plastic figures, one of Gunslingers and Sharpshooters to back up the Earps, the other some bandits to back up the James gang.

7TV Apocalypse

One of the highlights of Salute this year was the release of 7TV Apocalypse.

The game is presented in a large and sturdy box, of similar dimensions to the second edition box reviewed in January 2016. The figure on the front reminds me of something...

Inside are three landscape orientated books.

Director's Guide (containing the core rules).

Producer's Guide (containing cast creation and scenario rules)

The Stuntman's Guide (containing the vehicle rules).

 Character cards, vehicle cards, gear and mutation cards and countdown cards.

 Plot point tokens, dice (including special dice), vehicle upgrade cards, tokens, template and the MacGuffin.

The MacGuffin in detail.

"Carta Armatura" Carro Armato P43 bis tank

In September 1943 Fiat and Ansaldo began development of a new "Heavy" tank design which could be comparable or better protected than the German Panther.

The result was the P 43 bis (an "improvement" on the existing but unproduced P43). The tank design featured heavily sloped armour (80-100mm), a 450 HP engine (possibly derived from the engine in the T34) and various main gun options ranging from the 90/42, the longer 90/53 and the larger calibre 105/23 guns. These designs never passed the wooden mock-up stage.

Last year Rubicon Models in cooperation with Heer46 brought out a model based on the plans.

Like the Krupp Steyr Waffenträger I bought last year, this is resin kit. The hatch for the turret is safely in the zip lock bag (and not shown).

The casting is smooth and required no work (I washed it with some scouring cream just in case).

Like the Waffenträger the parts go together easily. This has not been glued together (I will undercoat it before assembly).

The flat piece is the bottom of the vehicle.

The tank does not seem to have either a coaxial or hull machine gun. I might add an AA machine gun to the cupola.

For Weird War and Post 45 games, the plan is to assume that Fiat Ansaldo managed to actually build them in quantity and supplied them to German forces.

Salute 2019 Part one

Salute 2019 was on Saturday the 6th of April.

It was very busy, and I hope the traders and customers were as happy as I was (even if I forgot a number of items that I had wanted to buy, but then my arms would have ached more ^__^).

First up was Crooked Dice's new 7TV Apocalypse, fresh from their recent Kickstarter.

This is a self contained addition to the second edition rules with added vehicle rules and apocalypse orientated casts.

Another recent Kickstarter from Mantic Games, the Hellboy board game is a co-operative game for 1-4 players. This edition contains miniatures of BPRD heroes Hellboy, Liz Sherman, Johann Strauss, and Abe Sapien facing off against Rasputin, the Giant Frog Monster, and the Tentaces of Sadu-Hem, plus eighteen minions.

I added a number of plastic kits from Rubicon.

Plus a resin kit of a "Carta Armatura" Carro Armato P43 bis tank.

I often wonder why I take my camera to Salute, I am always too fascinated by everything to take any photographs. I did photograph one of the Carnevale boards on the TTCombat stand.  I thought it would be some inspiration for using the TTCombat Streets of Venice buildings for Malifaux.