Hints, Tips & Stuff

• Painting a 15mm Valentine III
• Painting 15mm Infantry
• Painting Microarmour
• Microarmour brands: cost and quality comparisons
• Fixing ¹/₁₀₀th AFV turrets with snap-clips

Background

I've been interested in wargaming since about the last Ice Age, when mighty mammoth roamed the plains and primitive geeks and nerds played games of skill, tactics, and interminable rules-lawyering about the campfire. I began when I was about 7 or 8, playing games without any rules with soft plastic 1/32nd scale Airfix figures and a spring-loaded Britains cannon which shot little plastic shells with potentially lawsuit-invoking force. Later I played games with a friend in his father's garage, in which the table was often so crowded with 1/72nd scale plastic kitset tanks that it was difficult to move them. Not long after, I discovered Heroics & Ros 1/300th scale microarmour, and we played equally unrealistic games with hundreds of them at a time, with mixed forces comprised of vehicles from every conceivable nation — no infantry though; they weren't glamorous enough, besides being too fiddly for our tastes.

I lost interest in wargaming for quite a while. Then, when we moved down to Christchurch I became re-enthused, this time in Medieval 25mm gaming — an offshoot of my penchant for fantasy rolelaying. I painted a lot of figures, but didn't actually do much wargaming; I suppose I've always been more interested in the modelling side of the hobby than the gaming. I ran a reasonably successful multiplayer campaign for a year or so, but in the end I became disillusioned with the constant bickering over minute points of the rules, and gave up wargaming altogether.

I've become interested in the Flames of War WWII rules, which seem to me to be much more concerned with recreating the feel and tactics of the various nations at different times of the war than in trying to represent trivial differences in vehicle speed, armour, etc. Unfortunately, the rules themselves are extremely expensive, and Battlefront (the publishers) appear to be following the Games Workshop model of requiring players to buy a whole new book every time they want to build a new army or play any part of WWII other than 1942-43. The rules themselves do have some glaring faults, but they're fixable as long as you don't mind not ever playing in any kind of official tourney situation.

My main interest right now is MicroArmour (again), using the second edition of WRG's All-Arms Land Warfare 1925-1950 rules. I still like painting the 15mm stuff though, and one day I might have enough stuff finished to be able to play a decent game with them.