Country House bases

You may remember a few weeks ago I finished painting up some Italian style buildings.  It has been my plan to make some of the houses into a modular city/town.  Well that part is on the back burner since I don't have enough row houses to do what I want.

I do however have enough to do some country houses or farm houses.  I use Piquet for our games mostly and they call for a 6" base that counts as building and its area.  While at the local Craft Warehouse they had some 6x6 canvas panels.  They are sturdy, don't warp and very cheap.  They were a $1 a piece, so I picked up 12.

So I picked one of the houses and placed it.

I also placed a few trees and once I was happy with the placement, I sketched in a little path from the farmer and family to walk on.
Then glued the trees and house to the board.

I then painted the path black and painted the base green.  At this point I had decided I would just flock the base as is but decided against it.  I had read on someone's blog about using spackel to contour the base and then paint the spackel.  A quick trip to Home Depot provided me a small vessel of spackel.

Now the path was also filled in with Woodland Scenics ballast.  I watered down some elmers glue and painted it onto the path and put down the ballast.  Once that dried I took some more elmers/water mix and used an eye dropper and squirted it onto the path.  Once that dried it was hard as stone.  No pun intended.

The spackel was then put down with a small putty knife.  I used a thin layer and once that dried, within a few hours, I then thinned down some dark brown paint into a wash and painted it on.

The thin layer of paint dried quickly and allowed the contours to show through.  The picture isn't great but its there trust me.  I then mixed up some more elmers and water and spread it in batches where the grass would go.  I didn't cover the whole base in flocking, just a few areas.  Once that was dry I then put more elmers/water mixture onto the patches of grass.  Again that was allowed to dry.

Once the grass had dried I took some cream colored painted and dry brushed it onto the exposed brown areas.  All in all I think it turned out pretty well.  Now I'm going to do this 4 more times.

A quick game of Check Your 6!

A couple of weeks ago I ran a game of Check Your 6!  It is by far our favorite air game for miniatures. I threw the game together the night before and thats what I love about the system.  It doesn't take much to put a game together.
So for this nights game I put some British P40s up against some BF109s over N. Africa.

A quick look at the combatants

With the sun at the British backs, the BF109s had hard time spotting them.

The fur ball begins.  Lots of shots fired but little to no damage inflicted.

The two British pilots plot their moves

And they are still thinking about it.....

The British close in

Lots of shots fired again and only some airframe damage.

With crippled planes the British pull away to fight another day.

While the game was rather uneventful with no one going down in a big ball of flames we had a rather interesting conversation afterwards.

I brought up the fact that it was difficult to simulate the advantages the aircrafts had in real life.  For example the turning ability of the Zero against the Wildcat.  

We started to put two planes back out on the table to figure out how you would use the planes strengths against its targets. 

So a BF109 uses the A chart and upon further inspection we found that the BF109 at slow speeds 3 or less it does not pay a heavy price for turns.

The P40 on the other hand is not as maneuverable at slow speeds but has the speed to get in and out quickly.

So what we decided was that when the fur ball started the german pilots should have hit the brakes and flown circles around the P40s.  The P40s would have to use their speed to do hit and run attacks and engage the BF109s in a turning battle.

I realize that most of you who will read this will say, "Well duh! Thats what you are suppose to do."  As my friend Garland stated, "we just went from being green pilots to skilled."