Finished German Units

I finished the German Navy last night. Here are the pictures. I'm going to pick up some decals for the markings on planes and tanks sometime this week. I'm not very good at painting them as you can see on the Aircraft Carrier.

The guy in the front of the infantry is the Red Skull from Marvel Comics. I'm a bit of a comic book geek so I like to paint at least one "hero" for each nation. Although I have completed all of the nations now I need to do a Russian, Aussie, Japanese, and Italian Hero. Not all are from comics, France's is Napoleon, UK has James Bond as well as Captain Britain, and USA has of course, Captain America.

Now on iTunes!

We're on iTunes now and that is the good news. The bad news is that this podcasting noob screwed up somehow and erased the last 6.5 hours of our game session. Fear not dear listeners! We will be playing again the first Sunday in February and recording that game. Since I think I know how the recording was lost, it shouldn't happen again. My apologies to those of you who for some reason listened to the first two and won't get closure or better, more drunken humour. We will get this thing going better in the future, I promise.

Thank you all for your support and as always if you have anything to add, suggestions, criticisms or anything at all, please leave comments below.

Podcast Episode 1 is up!

After much frustration our first episode is up on Podbean! You can click the Episode 001 link at the side or click here which will lead you to the Podbean site. This is the first round of our game listed below we played on 22-January-2012. Future episodes will go up as soon as I have edited them and put them up to the host and will consist of the rest of this game. We played and recorded for eight and a half hours and had a great time. Hopefully you will laugh along with us or at us but either way please leave comments below.

Classic and Beer

Sunday we played Classic.
Ray and I were the Allies
Mugsy was the Axis

Due to laziness we set up from memory. I think we got it right. USSR's first move was to take Finland and although they executed it well I think E. Europe would have been better as it set Germany up with a ton of tanks to hit Karelia with.

So the Soviets hit first:

Then the Germans countered:

This is what was left:

Meanwhile UK abandoned India and sent everything they could to Egypt which took the African money away from Germany the entire game but set Japan up very well.
Japan opened with an all out attack on Hawaii and destroyed the navy there which didn't even record a hit. The next round however US built a few Subs and it was Japan that couldn't hit and the US sunk 2 Battleships, an Aircraft Carrier, a Sub and I think 2 fighters. This made The Axis a complete land force as Germany was down to 1 Bomber and no Navy while Japan had the same.
Japan did make it into Moscow and was holding 80 IPC at one point which restored their navy a little but the crushing cost of this might have made Mugsy think twice about it and build another IC. He didn't however and this allowed the UK to defend Moscow with 2 fighters with Jet power and Russia was allowed to get back in the game.

At one point we looked at the board and it looked very similar to the original set up. This depressed the Axis so much that they surrendered shortly afterwards.

We had a good time and will most likely go with AA42 or Anniversary in two weeks.

On a side not we recorded the game in audio and I'm going to try my hand at editing and posting it up as a podcast. I've never done audio editing before and the file is 8h40m so it's going to be a monster that will have to be broken up into probably 4 episodes. Wish me luck.

Filthy Nazisupdate

Finished the Infantry. Now I have to re-paint the rest of the units as they were the first thing I ever tried to paint this small I think I can make them much better.

Filthy Nazis

Painting the Germans today. I originally did some of the vehicles way back in '09 when I first got my AA42 game but I wasn't very good at it at the time. Not to say I'm VERY good now but I'm quite a bit better. I also have a shit tonne more units now as this picture shows. (And these aren't even all of them)

I wish I thought out the bases a little better though as if I did I'd have painted them white first and then gone around the edges with the red. What I did was paint the base red then attempt to paint the big white cross. This did not turn out well as the white just bled the red and the crosses were a pain to do as every mistake I made caused me to make the cross bigger. so after doing two crosses I decided to just make big white circles instead, kind of like a negative of the Japanese flag. After they dry I'll go around the edges with the red paint and form a cross. When that is dry I'll make the black cross and the infantry will be finished.

Here's what they look like so far:

My original German planes and tanks look kind of junky so I'll be re-doing them as I have time during the week like I did with the ANZAC's. Two days at two hours per day should be enough but I hope to have them done by Sunday at least for the game. Here are the completed ANZAC's:

Hope to get in a good game of Classic this Sunday and have to inform Ray that we need to play at his place a a heavy rainfall and melting snow have soaked the garage floor here.

Painting & Accessories

Sitting down to paint my ANZAC infantry. I have them attached to nails with blue fun-tac so I can hold the nail and not the unit while I paint them.

Hopefully I can get them done today.

I was recently asked about my accessories that I use for my games. We don't like the cardboard counters that were supplied with the game as they are a pain to pick up and contrast poorly with the 3-D plastic pieces in the game so I went on eBay to see if I could find something better for the Minor IC's, Airbases, and Naval bases. This is what I found.

The anchors I found here. If you check the seller you can find a good variety of color. I did not and got the red ones. Ray took a bunch home and cut the bases off some extra infantry he had, glued them under the anchors and painted them.
The Airbases were made by taking the clothes peg above and cutting lengths from them, painting them grey, and adding a door and drawing lines on top to (poorly) resemble corrugated steel. Ray is much better at this stuff than I am and I should have gotten him to do these but they are pretty small and don't look too bad on the board.
The black house I took from my son's Batman Monopoly game and are used in our game to represent laboratories, a house rule I picked up from EaterofWorlds on BoardGameGeek.com.
The red bleacher is a "house" piece from a Monopoly variant as well it can be found here. I have some small dowels I plan to cut and glue to the backs for smoke stacks and I will paint them in the future, probably when I get to the German's
The tops of the clothes pegs were saved and I used them as marshaling markers for the territories that tend to get overcrowded. I cut up some cardboard artists canvases from the dollar store about the same thickness of the map and painted squares different colors and the peg tops corresponding colors. When we need to fill a territory or sea zone that is too small we place the peg into it and the units in the square with the same color.
Here's a link to a picture of the marshaling squares and pegs.
I hope this is helpful to anyone who likes to augment their games with more realistic pieces. One day I hope to purchase better looking units from Field Marshal Games as they are slowly releasing country specific units that more closely resemble actual units instead of many units being the same such as France having T-34's.

1942

This week we went with 1942
Ray: Axis
Me: Allies

Istarted off as USSR taking Ukraine and W. Russia and felt really strong, but as usual when the dice come up strong early they come up weak later on.

I withdrew from Africa and fortified India then Japan bought 2 IC's round one that fell into my hands putting 3 mainland IC's into the Allies hands.

wish I knew how to fix this

This however may have been my downfall as I spent perhaps too much money at them and not enough in Europe.
Germany had Africa all game and they let the Russians have it taking the Caucasus, then Moscow and then London.

Strange game for us as we rarely see Germany strong and Japan weak. But it's n ice to see something different from time to time.