The Consistent Irregular: Bulging Out All Over The Place.

     Well, here I am back with another irregular blog post, this time looking ahead to winter 1944 (eh?). We, Richie and I have finished with the Hell's Highway scenarios from Campaign Market Garden (though not with the rest of the scenarios; we'll be back...we'll all be back!) and we were pondering what to do next, Bolt Action wise. There's certainly a lot to choose from and the current trend is towards doing something with a winter theme as we are much taken with Pat Smith's Setting The Scene Winter Wargaming book. 

Wargamers porn

     We have a hankering to get some games played from the Fortress Budapest campaign book played. However, we realised we were both approaching the building of armies for this from the same point of view as we were both in the process of putting together winter Germans reinforced platoons. A Eureka moment occurred failry swiftly though. Now that the US Airborne's part in Market Garden is finished I decided to winterize them, This was fairly straight forward and all it involved was painting their hands as if they were wearing gloves then adding a snow effect to their bases.  And before you could say "Brass monkey!" I had a suitable, winter themed force for the Bulge. 

     But as we all know the Battle of the Bugle wasn't just a US Airborne affair, the majority of the US forces were more conventional GIs; infantry, artillery, engineers, military police, tanks, tank destroyers and recce units were all in the mix along with, bless my soul, chaplains. 

     Now I have a lot of US infantry and armour that I have used for Normandy themed games but they have been pretty much sidelined due to other forces catching my eye. Though we plan to play more Normandy games my intention is to play either British/Commonwealth infantry or German Fallschirmjager or Panzer Grenadiers from 21st Panzer Division in that theatre of operations so, as there's no room in Normandy for my GIs I have decided that they are going to get the winter treatment too.  

Gloved hands and snow texture added; first of my winter GIs. I
did some research and found that plenty of GIs were still awaiting
the issue of the new combat uniform and so many of them were still
wearing their Parson jackets

I decided to add a smattering of troops in greatcoats. Artizan
Designs figures 

         I also decided to do some Bulge specific terrain...sort of. First to get done was this set of farm buildings and some rather thick looking walls that Richie had bought on spec .

      He wasn't to enamoured with them though. Despite purportedly being 1/56 scale they were more like 1/43; the doors, windows and roof tiles looked quite cartoony and Rich was on the verge of binning them when I stayed his hand. Being of a hopelessly optimistic nature I said I'll see what I could do with them. Now this was back in December before we started contemplating winter terrain and the buildings have been sitting in a box waiting for the froth to strike. And it did, eventually, and last week I went at it with a will resulting in this... 

     In a nutshell, I used Miliput to trim down a couple of the doors then covered the walls with Das Clay. I then added smaller MDF windows and shutters from Warbases and covered the roofs with Das Clay to replicate snow. I then figured out a decent looking layout for the buildings, stuck them onto a piece of backing board from an old wardrobe (Lets hope the wife doesn't decide to rearrange her clothes in the wardrobe too soon or I'll be rumbled) with hot glue. The low walls and corner posts are balsa wood coated with Das Clay with some MDF railings added. I then made up some snow paste as per Pat Smith's recipe from his book and added a little here, a little there to give it that much trodden look. Really pleased with how this little project has turned out. My only regret is that I didn't leave more room between the external stairs and the surrounding wall but hey ho, there you go.  

      The wall pieces were also winterized as was the scatter terrain below

     I managed to make a bugger's muddle of the fences I had. I didn't leave them to dry long enough and the colour from the terrain seeped through the snow turning it a lurid pink. I scraped off most of it and will revisit it soon to rectify this particular buggers muddle.

     Lastly, for the moment, I have decided to revisit my US armour; it is lacking in stowage so I have made a start on adding more. I use Miliput for this and they are really easy to make, each piece is individual as well as sitting more naturally on the vehicle, following the curves and angles of the vehicles.

     Whilst in the mood I finally got around to building my Deuce And  A Half truck. This is the Rubicon kit and it's really nice. I replaced the the crews heads with Warlord plastic ones as the Rubicon ones have no character.

     So that's some of what I have been up to recent. There's still more Bulge stuff in the pipeline, which is Bulge-tastic. I plan on getting a snow mat from Deep Cut Studio Mats. This will be a double sided one with an aerial view on the reverse with hexes printed over it because...dan dan daaan!!...

pip pip for he mo,

Jimbob