Status of My Barbarrossa Campaign

My Operation Barbarossa campaign has become the big project of the year with preparations nearing completion and the start of the campaign lurking around the end of the month (maybe).  For now, I'm focussing on the 6mm side of things (rather than 15mm), as I expect that all of the early battles in the campaign will be played in the smaller scale.

Despite all of the work I've accomplished, I still have some stuff to do on my checklist:

Biuldings - Primarily, I need to paint most of the buildings that I've purchased for the campign.  Additionally, I'd like to acquire more buildings, but am finding either scale or sculpting style issues stopping my purchase of some buildings on the market.  I may have to fall back on mastering and casting some stuff, which i'd like to avoid, if possible.

Brest-Litvosk - I haven't figured out how to represent this on the table yet.  Right now, I'm leaning towards making a simplified fortress approximatly 1200-1800 meters across (roughly one third to half actual size in terrain scale with a combination of foam and plastic.  

Terrain - I need to make a wider river.  Right now, the widest 6mm river that I have is around 200m wide in scale.  The new one will be 450 meters wide, which I think will be wide enough to provide a problematic water obstacle.  This is a fairly simple build that should only take 2-3 week nights to complete.  

Additionally, I need a couple village/town terrain tiles, and a few city tiles.  These are also simple builds, with the village/town tiles probably being built as needed for battles, much in the way, I've done for my WWIII 1958 games.

Aircraft - The miniatures have been acquired; now, it is just a matter of several still needing paint.  They are on the painting table, in various stages of completion.

Defenses - Both field fortifications and the fixed defenses of the Molotov and Stalin lines still need to be built.  I've done a ton of research on this, but not reading Russian has probably lead to me my missing some of the best material.  Despite all of my time on this, I have only a stack of notes and sketches to show for it at this point.  The plan is to build earth and wood field fortifications over the coming week, and the masonry bunkers of the "Lines" during the next.

I feel pretty good about everything, maybe with the exception of the extra buildings and the Brest fortress.  Well, even if those two things drag my start back into October, I'm still months ahead of where I expected to be on this, when I outlined my future plans back in September of last year.

Guess I should get moving on the remaining work; I'm off to the basement now.

Catching Up on Painting

I've really slacked in the painting department over the last few months, while continueing to pick up miniatures, mostly 6mm for Barbarossa, a few for France 1940, and a few odds and ends for the Cold War.

The other day, I realized that I've accumulated four boxes of unopened packs of vehicles and buildings, and  decided that it was time to clear the shelf a little.  So the production line is open.  I'm just going to grind through these, basic, mostly monotone with a little dust, mostly with an eye on starting Barbarossa by the end of September.

                    A large number of minaitures and awaiting transfer to the painting table.

And with some additional miniatures on the paint table.

I got at least some paint on 166 models yesterday, so making progress.  Hoping to have these done by the weekend.  And, trying to finish up an after action report on the World War III game that I played last week.

I Miss the Age of DIY Gamers

The last couple of weeks have been really busy and just plain wearing me out, so I've not accomplished much progress on gaming projects, but I have been enjoying the hobby in a little bit different way than usual.

When I got into the miniatures gaming hobby in the late 1970s/early 1980s, pretty much everyone involved was a do-it-yourself (DIY) gamer to some extent.  Even though the 1980s were very much a transitional period for the hobby, with many new types of products coming onto the market, it was still really quite hard to find many of the products, and a huge proportion of gamers simply filled in the blanks, making whatever was missing for their games.

At that time, I happened into a great group of like-minded gamers, so the early 1980s was a fantastic time for me in the hobby.  We had several members constantly contributing ideas, as well as everything from writing rules to scratch-building terrain or buildings, to experiments in casting some of our own miniatures.

For me, the most enjoyable element in the hobby was the creative part; the opportunity to design and build drove me deeper into the hobby.

As the 1980s progressed, the range of products rapidly grew, and the marketing approach evolved from largely cottage industry to the beginnings of the corporate marketing of instantaneous gratification by Games Workshop.  Though I didn't see it at the time, my DIY hobby was already fading into the background.

Recently, I came into a large number of "Miniature Warfare" magazines.  I had completely missed out on them previously in my hobby journey, not seeing my first miniatures magazine until 1988, and not even really being aware of Miniature Warfare until about a year and a half ago.     

My first miniature wargaming magazine 

Miniature Wargames #65 

(the article about the boxer Rebellion grabbed my attention).

As I've been reading through these old magazines, dating back to 1969, I've entered into a stage of miniatures gaming that I missed completely, a world where the majority of the names are familiar to me now, but unfortunately were unknown to me in my first decade of gaming, and in many cases for far longer. 

Some of the recently acquired issues of Miniature Warfare

 circa 1969 to 1972.  

I received one of Featherstone's books in 1987, though as it was unrelated to my immediate gaming interests, I skimmed through it and didn't give it a much thought.  I didn't really read any of his books until Covid was casting its shadow on us.  Since them, I have become heavily interested in what many of those "forefathers" of gaming were doing back in the day, discovering that my contemporaries and I were largely reinventing what these gamers had already done years or even decades before.

A couple of my more recent Featherstone acquisitions, 

I particularly enjoyed his book about Solo Wargaming.

   

Now, a big fan many of these "forefathers" and particularly of Lionel Tarr and Bish Iwaszco, I find myself exploring Miniature Warfare like I've found a portal to an ancient empire, totally captivated by this "early" world of DIY gamers that is so familiar and yet so distant.

History of Wargaming  editions, recently made available

 by John Curry include volumes addressing the efforts of 

Lionel Tarr and IW Iwaszco, whose gaming style feels 

both familiar and inspiring to me.

Despite predating me, it is like going home again, reminding me of both a warmth from my early days in the hobby and instilling a longing for a time that I was never a part of.  I contrast the time spanning that of the magazines through my first years in the hobby with more recent experiences, such as when a young gamer at a local shop, who on finding that I scratch-built almost all of my own terrain and even cast many of my own miniatures, seemed  distraught or even irritated while asking me why I"...don't just buy everything I need and game right?"

The hobby has surely changed through the years, and I guess that I should appreciate that I have opportunity to embrace the best from both worlds.  The internet fills a part of the void left by this evolution, allowing me to find and share the hobby with others who still embrace the DIY, but I do miss the immediate interaction of gaming with and working on projects with such gamers.

In any event, this nostalgic adventure has been tremendously enjoyable, and maybe has made me more aware of appreciating the most favorable aspects of the present; though, despite all that is available in the today, I still question whether I've maybe lost more than I've gained.  In any event, I do miss the age of the DIY gamer.

Some Barbed Wire

My daughter's project is still occupying my game table, so this weekend, I resigned myself to making some barbed wire sections for 15mm games.  Something I've long been meaning to do.

Pretty generic, but here's a couple of pics for lack of anything better to share:

With old Quality Castings 15mm WWII Soviets.

In all, there is about seven and a half feet of total length.  Not sure if this will be enough, but at least it is a good start.

I was going to weather it a bit, but it occured to me that in the first few games in which I will use it, it will likely be representing wire that was layed only days to hours prior to the battles.  For now, it will reamin pretty shiny.

Some Stone Walls

No game this weekend, as my table was occupied with a non-hobby project.  But, I did confiscate the dining room table to work on a little project that has been on the list for some time.

Every now and then, I come across pictures of fields separated by stone walls consisiting of loose filed stone thrown into a sort of continuous pile.  I've been meaning to make some to give a little contrast in the types of dressing for the table top and finally got around to it.

Method of construction was pretty simple; I started with .06" plastic bases, primed, glued aquarium stone in two applications to build the sort of parmid shaped walls using craft glue, then painted and flocked.

Not a complex process, but a little time consuming given the overall scope of the work.  At least I can check it off the list. Here are a few pics: 

There are 30 pieces, with the long sections being 4" 

in length.

With 15mm Quality Castings WWII Infantry.

A little closer view.

That's all for now.

Finally Completed My Terrain Work

After almost three weeks, I've completed the re-flocking of all of my "green terrain' 1' square foam tiles, an utterly unrewarding project from the motivational side of things.  The process would have moved along a bit faster if weather hadn't kept the humidity up through much of that time, severely slowing the drying process.

Anyway, here's a pic of the the tiles stacked by type on the table:

I happily discovered that I had previously done many of the 2'x2' tiles when I was making the West German terrain,  and do have a small number of 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles to do yet, but will do them over a weekend, when the weather is more agreeable, rather than rather than kill another couple of eeks watching glue dry right now.

Now to get World War III back on the table top.

Doing Some Terrain Work

Last week, in addition to exploring early period Star trek games, I decided to take care of another task in preperation for my Barbarossa campaign later this year.  I still have a bunch (maybe 150 square feet) of moduler terrain that needed to be re-flocked to match all of the newer stuff I made over the last couple of years.

I discussed the color change over the yars in the Woodland Scenics flock sometime back, and figured that now was as good as ever to do the mass re-flocking.

While looking at the foam, I noticed that many of the edges could use some touch up paint, and there were still some bare blue foam edges here and there from my hurry to get terrain on the table in decades past.  It isn't important with respect to usng the terrain, but just looks sloppy, and in some cases makes it hard to see the labeling system that I use on the edges of the foam to assist in finding the right terrain tiles for set up.

The process consisted of patching any missing bits of foam with light weight spackle, painting most of the edges, and then re-applying flock to the terrain tiles.

Here are a couple of pics of the process:

Shortly after starting, the tiles with the white on them have

 lite weight spackle drying, filling finger tip "craters" left 

by a couple of the guys leaning on the terrain back in the 

late 1980s.

A comparison of the WS Green Blend flock 

old and new,  The hill slope tile in front has 

been newly flocked; with older stream tiles 

behind dating to 1990 and 1998.

Not the most fun or interesting thing to do, but necessary, and I can check it off the list if I ever get done.  Thus far, I've re-flocked 54 of the approximately 120 1'x1' terrain tiles.  

We have had several storms in recent days, dropping huge amounts a rainfall.  I don't know the official amount, but we have a little wading pool on the patio for my granddaughter, and it is now filled to the lip with about 10 inches of rain water.  It was empty last Monday.

In any event, this has resulted in a very humid basement, despite the dehumidifier filling up several times, and I started with the most tedious pieces to re-do, the stream and river tiles.  Progress has been slower than hoped, but should get faster as the tiles get easier to finish.

I'm still probably stuck with this ont he table for another ten days or so.  The bigger 1'x2' and 2'x2' tiles are going to wait for awhile yet.