Old West Town

For our What a Cowboy campaign I needed an Old West town. I love the MDF Old West buildings from Sarissa and TT Combat, but due to space and budget restrictions I needed to find other options. 

I have found that paper buildings (e.g. from Dave Graffam) work well for me. While Dave has some buildings available that fit in an Old West town, he doesn't have things like a saloon or sherrif's office. Fortunately I found the Rio Draco set from Fat Dragon Games.

Instead of foamboard I use cheap corrugated cardboard as support for the paper. Basically the method is the same as described in my Old town post.

The cardboard house is glued to an MDF base supported by pieces of styrofoam.

Then the paper building walls are glued to the cardboard.

To maximise ease of storage I decided to leave out the boardwalk parts except for the saloon and build separate ones from popsicle sticks.

I remembered covering the side of the cardboard building walls for the bank before attaching the paper wall.

I forgot to do this for other buildings and fixed this by inserting matchsticks.

And covering the top of the front with coffee stirrer sticks.

The finished buildings in a town setting, together with Dave Graffam buildings:

Indiana Jones and the sword of Cortes part 3

Last week of the school holidays. Managed to squeeze in another Fistful of Lead game in my son's busy online gaming schedule 😀. He played the heroes. I got the villains.

The story so far:

Dr. Marcus Brody and British agent Rupert Jenkins have taken the Sword of Cortez from Baron Otto von Drüben and his goons in Iceland (read all about it here) while Indy was recovering from his wounds sustained in part 1. Marcus and Rupert escaped to Canada where they join up with Indy. Accompanied by Lieutenant Goodman RCMP they board a train to the United States.

With help of agent "Elch" of the German embassy Von Drüben has organised an ambush party to intercept the Sword before it reaches the US.

The good guys

The bad guys

Indy is admiring the Sword when suddenly their train violently brakes and stops, just in front of a pile of logs on the tracks.

Indy, Rupert and Lt Goodman get out of the train to investigate. They see villains moving through the woods towards them.

"Granaten" Gertrude appears from behind a tree and throws a grenade towards the heroes. It goes wide and explodes without wounding anyone.

Von Drüben's evil henchmen gun down Lt Goodman RCMP. Rupert fires his Thompson at Gertrude. Dropping her with a wound.

Marcus rushes to Lt Goodman, but fails his medic task roll. Lt Goodman stays wounded and down. 

Indy and Rupert put "Granaten" Gertrude out of action before she can trown another granate. Agent Elch has closed in with his shotgun, but also goes down in the hail of bullets from Rupert's Thompson.

Unable to do any more for Lt Goodman, Marcus retreats back to the train. Lt Goodman's recovery roll succeeds and Indy and Rupert take agent Elch out of action. Things are going great for the good guys!

Then disaster strikes for the heroes! Both Indy and Lt Goodman are shot by Von Drüben's body guard Schultz and are out of the game!

However, the villains are experiencing trouble of their own. A random event causes an angry bear to turn up at the board edge close to the henchmen, who are all out of ammo.

With their rifle butts they beat the bear unconscious without receiving a single scratch themselves.....

Rupert sees his friends fall around him and fires at Von Drüben. Von Drüben cowardly transfers the successive wounds he receives to his bodyguard Schultz.

Meanwhile Marcus has stealthily made his way to the front of the train. He carefully aimes his revolver and kills Schultz.

Rupert charges towards the henchmen, firing his Thompson, but unfortunately not hitting anything.

Marcus has more luck. He inflicts two wounds to Von Drüben, who decides to flee.

Although Von Drüben collapses in the snow (failed his recovery roll), his henchmen put three bullets into Rupert, putting him out of action.

While Marcus hides from the henchmen, they recover the briefcase containing the Sword from the train and take Von Drüben to a friendly doctor. 

Marcus patches up Indy (who was just unconscious from a bullet that grazed his skull) and stabilizes Rupert.

Will the good guys be able to stop Von Drüben taking the sword to Germany? Stay tuned for part 4!

Project WW2 Pacific Part 2

Had a bit of spare time today and built a second Australian section.

Bren Team:

Rifle team:

The section leaders will follow later.

I have the 3 man Vickers team from Warlord. In Chain of Command this support weapon usually has a crew of five, so I built 2 extra crew:

Project WW2 Pacific

While talking about miniatures and gaming with a fellow wargamer, he mentioned something like "WW2 pacific theatre Australians would be nice"......

These words combined with the news (at that time) that Toofatlardies were going to produce the Far East handbook for Chain of Command, led to (yet) a(nother) project forming in my brain. I got some Warlord plastic Japanese, but was not sure how to represent the Australians. Reading about the New Guinea campaign I decided to go for a late war force. At first I thought of modifying the Perry 8th army plastics like John Bond showed on his excellent blog. After buying the Perry box I changed my mind. Mr Bond's green stuff skills are superior to mine, as are his scratchbuiling skills (the man scratch builds his own 28mm Owen guns!).

When I saw pictures of the Warlord Commonwealth infantry sprues I decided to combine the Aussie heads, short sleeved arms and some of the bodies of this set with Warlord US marines bodies and short sleeved arms. I also received 2 complimentary Warlord British & Canadian infantry sprues in an order I placed which provided even more bits. Pictures of Australians in the New Guinea campaign show soldiers in shorts, trousers with anklets, trousers with US gaiters, long sleeves, short sleeves, hats, helmets and berets. I understood that the change in uniform was gradual and that supply problems and extreme wear and tear in the jungle environment were common. So, a "mixed uniform" Australian platoon wouldn't be historically inaccurate and could be used from the Kokoda campaign till the end of the war.

The boxes quitely waited in the pile of shame for the Far East handbook to arrive.

When the Chain of Command Far East handbook was finally released, it unfortunately didn't contain the Pacific war forces. However, the Toofatlardies forum had a thread with an Australian 1943 onwards basic platoon TOE. "Had", indeed, because the entire forum vanished during the recent IT problems of a wargame websites provider!

Fortunately I had copied the TOE into a backup file. While hoping the Pacific war handbook will be released soon, this is enough to start with the basic force and some very likely support options (3 man engineer team, sniper, vickers, medic). Deciding to not wait any longer and start this project, I built the first Australian section.

Rifle section LMG team:

Rifle section rifle team: