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.