1944 - Battle of the Bulge from Worthington Publishing went onto the table last night for a face-to-face game.

It is a very playable system and last night's game moved along swimmingly.

At the start of play, rather than simply playing the campaign game (10 turns), the German player can choose one of four objective cards, each dealing with 'a plan' with different objectives.

As the German player I went with 'von Rundstedt Case Martin' plan, which was a bit less ambitious than the actual 'Watch on the Rhine' plan and so you are under tighter time scales (6 turns) to get those objectives captured.

Anyway, I got to around halfway to my objective goals, primarily failing to also take Bastogne, Verviers and Marche.

I did have a chance on turn 2 of a major breakout and exiting the board with a supplied unit for a 'sudden death' win, but my die rolling deserted me and the small window of chance was quickly closed down ..... forever!

The game uses special dice, with infantry and armour symbols, plus blanks and you are looking at rolling the symbols to score hits, resulting in step losses to the enemy.

Some units, particularly the armour have 4 steps (represented by two counters) and they can be hard to shift.

Anyway, the system has not failed yet to give a good clean competative game and last night was no exception.

I have opened a new yellow tab (halfway down the left of the screen) that will start to highlight some map sections / artwork from boardgame maps.

Over time it will build to 20 images (my maximum allowance per page) and then slowly start to rotate out as new things come into the collection.

As with all images on this site, clicking on one should give you a slide presentation of all images on that page.

On the cover of last month's Wargames Illustrated magazine, Warlord Games had donated a plastic frame of their new WWII Soviet infantry.  It is a well-designed sprue with many options including snipers and men holding a panzerfaust.

To make the sums work for the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge, I need to find an extra painting 10 points from somewhere, so - two 28mm infantrymen would do the trick quite nicely, so here we are.

The figures do not come with their own integrated puddle base, so I used a Kallistra plastic base, to get a strong connection between the soldier's boots and the base using a plastic weld glue.

The base is 40mm x 30mm, deliberately chosen to see what it would look like and whether it would work for something like the Rapid Fire Reloaded rules on my table and to see what the figures would look like when set amongst terrain that I already own.

Anyway, they are quite easy to put together. I used Vallejo Khaki for the uniform, which needs two coats for full coverage.

Whether or not this becomes a future project is uncertain at this stage, but it has the advantage that two small forces can be built up relatively quickly. 

As I start to jack up the Schoengrabern scenario from the boardgame 'Napoleon's Wheel' by the Operational Support Group, which has a range of 1805 battle scenarios, including Austerlitz ..... I was reminded that I also have the excellent figures scenario book by Michael Hopper, covering the same subject.

I say reminded - I pulled a game box from the shelf and heard a thud as 'something' got knocked and fell down the back of the shelves. It was then a hands and knees job to drag everything off the bottom shelf to reveal all .... and it was worth it, because I had forgotten about this scenario booklet.

Schoengrabern is a French Vs Russian scenario. I don't have Russian figures, but I do have Austrians in growing numbers and don't mind doing a bit of proxying. So in the first instance, I will be doing Schoengrabern in both boardgame and figures battles and then move on to some of the other pairings, I quite fancy Elchingen and in fact think that I have two boardgames on this subject and the scenario in the figures booklet looks quite do-able.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel on the painting for the Analogue challenge. I have been putting 2½ hours a day into it and have the aggravated shoulder to prove it!

The challenge ends on the 21st, but we have a holiday between now and then, so the race is on to get my last Austrian infantry unit done and for it to cross the 400 point line that I set myself at the start of the challenge.

Last night I put the wash down. This morning I highlighted the figures back up and I have just brushed on a matt varnish. If I can get them off the painting corks tonight and glued down onto bases, then tomorrow I can lay the basing paste.

By the time everything is done and photographed to submit to the Challenge, I reckon I will have just come within a day failing to hit the deadline - so the extra hours painting have paid off.

Once I get back from the hols, those time-consuming jobs of proofing my boardgame, playing the Henry Hyde campaign right through in compressed time and painting for the Analogue Hobby Challenge, will all be behind me and I can just return to a bit of self-indulgent play!

Our face-to-face game last night was ‘65: Squad-Level Combat in the Jungle of Vietnam' by Flying Pig.

As an introduction to the system, we played a small scenario that was just 7 turns long. The game is lovely to look at, those are super-sized counters and hexes. The boards are very nicely done as very practical geomorphic mounted board sections (our scenario used two boards) which lay very flat and butt up precisely with each other - I do wish Old School Tactical had gone down this route instead of having the huge single board.

But it is there, sadly, that any admiration I had for the game ended! This is not the fault of the game, but it is a card-driven system and I just don’t like card-driven games and cannot warm to them …. no matter how pretty!

Additionally, a Rotator Cuff injury makes sustained card drawing an uncomfortable affair.

For much of the time, I felt there was no real rhyme or reason to what was going on. The system, courtesy of the cards, was pretty much in control and I was an onlooker to the luck of card play.

I know there is a huge audience that enjoys these sort of games, you only need to look at the success of GMT’s Combat Commander series to see that, which has just gone to another reprint, but it’s just not for me.

I am trying to meet my pledge of 400 painting points for the winter Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge, which will end on 21st March ...... I am falling behind and now trying to play catch-up!

At the weekend I submitted this Austrian Napoleonic gun battery, which is worth 60 points and takes me up to 290 points painted so far ..... another 110 points are needed before the deadline and I have a holiday coming up that will put an extra squeeze on hitting the goal, but I am still painting daily to try and get it done.

Even if I miss the target by a few days, the whole thing will have been a success because it will have made me bring another four units to the Austrian 'pocket army' and that will certainly increase its utility (plus I paid for a further infantry unit to be commission painted (see below) and that has arrived).

My Austrian force now has two gun batteries (4 gun models with crew), which matches what my French force has.

It is now 3 PM and the French are about to launch an assault on the Farm.

This is the last defensible position that the Austrian rearguard can rely upon. Will they be able to hold it long enough for their reinforcement to come to their assisance?

LINK

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/03/attacking-kis-megyer-farm-3-pm-1809.html

Just released, part of the continuing range of A5 booklets in the Rapid Fire Reloaded series. This one covers four actions on the east front 22nd - 26 June 1941, so we are talking about the opening stages of Barbarossa.

This is a full colour 40 page booklet, with all four actions designed to work on a 6x4 table. The front / back cover of this booklet seems to be of a lighter material than earlier booklets, which used something nearer to cardstock and that’s a shame, I like the heavier cover, though I do like their move to using cover artwork that has been taken directly from the table.

Rapid Fire is designed to play at a higher level with 1 tank model equating to a 5 tank platoon and 8 infantry models equating to a company - so a battalion of infantry, with typically 3 companies would be represented with 24 men plus supports, though in truth, the game can feel and look more tactical than that, so it is a very flexible system.

The battles covered here are tank heavy engagements, so scales for this particular booklet have been adjusted accordingly, for example in the Liuboml scenario, an infantry figure represents 45 men, rather than the usual 15, in what they call their divisional scaling and villages are represented by 1 building.

Its really just bathtubbing and theming to make it work without the 'feel' changing - good!

The four battles covered are;

Alytus - Battle for the bridges

Liuboml - The Town of Death

Raseiniai - The dreadnoughts

Leshniv - Flank Attack

One would need fairly solid collections for some of the scenarios, for example the first scenario uses eight BT-7 models, though in my gaming using other vehicles / units as proxy has never offended my eye.

I have got a couple of solid tactical level boardgames covering East Front ‘41, so I might consider converting some of these scenarios for the boardgame, or indeed, do a terrain’d table, but use counters from the game to get a better proximation of forces.

Either way, I add 'Barbarossa - Border Battles' to my collection of these small booklets and just that ownership brings its own pleasures.

This is an inportant campaign turn. For the Austrian rearguard to now be able to block the French advance, they desperately need to concentrate their forces at the Kis-Megyer Farm and to give the time for that to happen, Austrian troops at the church must hold their positions for as long as possible ..... but the French are about to resume their assault.

Can the Austrian depleted regiments hold out?

Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/02/fighting-at-church-pursuit-of-vi-corps.html

Last year, I sent a commission to the Painting Den painting service for 8 Austrian mounted dragoons to be painted.

In early January, Mark from Painting Den sent out a customer offer of 25% sale on painting prices.... and so here we are!

Arriving today are 20 x 28mm Perry Austrians, painted up in the colours of the 60th Austrian Hungarian Regiment.

Between these and what I have been doing in the Analogue Hobby Painting Challenge, my Austrian forces have at last caught up with the number of units that are in my Napoleonic French army.

These chaps are off to the flagging and basing department now.

Right, I have caught up with everything and have picked up the various nuances influencing the various formations, so I am ready to go again. It is now the 1200 noon turn.

We seem to have hit a bit of a lull, so no new actions on the table, which has allowed me to run the next hour from the map alone, including artillery bombardment. 

As has become standard, there is a post on the Battlefields  & Commanders Blog, that outlines the hour and gives the perspective from each headquarters.

Link

https://battlefieldswarriors.blogspot.com/2026/02/pursuit-of-vi-corps-12-noon.html