Gaming with my 10 year old

Introducing my son to gaming

I've been trying to encourage the next generation of wargamers (i.e. my son, Tom) to get involved before he gets too old and discovers beer and girls. I reckon I have a few years before he becomes too much like 'Kevin the teenager'.  We played a game of Iron Cross from Great Escape Games this weekend on my winter table.  Iron Cross is a fast play set of WWII skirmish rules.

I meant to take more photos and do a proper AAR, but got side-tracked teaching him the rules and also trying to explain the reasoning behind some of the tactical decisions that I was making, so that he could learn a little about tactics.

We started on opposing tables edges and played a simple "Meeting Engagement" scenario. The table was set up with a small hamlet set off to one side, a few other randomly positioned buildings, a railway track running across the centre of the table, complete with an armoured train parked up in the sidings, and lots of trees and hedges to break up line-of-sight.

Tom played as the British with 3 Shermans, 3 units of infantry and an HQ unit. I played as the Germans using the same number of infantry, but only 2 Panthers, which balances out in terms of points value.

Despite my tactical advice, Tom pushed his Shermans forward quickly with limited infantry support. It turned out to be good decision and (maybe aided by some good dice rolls) quickly picked off one of my Panthers, which was lurking behind one of the ruined buildings.

Spurred on by his early success (only the second turn!), he continued to press forward. My dice rolling didn't help, though I did manage to destroy one of his Shermans fairly quickly, which caused him to slow his advance. By this time, both of us had brought our infantry further to the front line and started pouring fire onto each other.

The infantry battle, supported by the tanks, for the centre ground lasted for a few turns before my infantry started to accumulate too many morale points, which forced me to start spending command tokens on some Company Morale Tests. Here is my remaining Panther with the HQ squad just to the right. Tom's forces are just out of shot at the top of the photo using the cover of several buildings.

The game lasted just over an hour, but was still fun. It is nice to be able to do something that we both enjoy, even though I did end up losing!  After losing the Panther very early on, and then losing an infantry squad, the number of command tokens I had reduced to the point where it was difficult to get much of an attack going whilst maintaining morale.  Now that he has got the hang of it, we will be able to play a game with more points, more toys on the table and a decent number of command tokens each.

The final shot above is one of my infantry units advancing to the railway line about halfway through the game. To help Tom focus on learning the rules, we only played with three models per unit to keep the movement simple.

Painting the remnants of my Fallschirmjager

Finishing off the FJs

I painted a platoon of FJ from Great Escape Games, which are a mixture of Artizan Designs models and Wargames Foundry, last Christmas (2018), but for some reason left 5 models on the lead mountain. I picked them up a couple of days ago and thought that I would finish them off.

Here are a couple of pics of some of the finished models.

Here are the work-in-progress models with just some of the base colours blocked in so far.

One thing that I have really noticed in the intervening 12 months is that my eyesight and my memory have both deteriorated significantly! For the life of me, I cannot remember the original colours that I used for the completed models; and secondly, I'm really struggling to see the detail when painting.  I borrowed my son's magnifying glass yesterday evening and looked at the 5 guys I am trying to paint. ;-(  It looks like a trip to Specsavers is in order to get some reading glasses.

Winter table - part 4

Applying the Detailing

Once all the paint had dried, which took a lot longer than planned, I started to apply some additional detailing. The table was being worked on in a cold shed in the middle of winter!  I ended up getting a couple of small electric heaters and a fan to blow warm air across the table to dry it out.

I wanted to replicate the standing water in the muddy track from my inspiration photos, but during the painting phase I decided that I also wanted to add some ice and a little bit of snow to make it look truly wintry.  To simulate that, I bought some wet-look varnish from B&Q (no, I'm not sponsored by them, they have a store just down the road from where I live and nothing that I pick up there really costs very much) and painted it onto the areas where I was going to leave visible water e.g. in the ditches and depressions in the ground, in the tyre tracks and some random puddles.

When first painted on, it goes down white, which is helpful to see where you have applied it to, but it dries with a glossy finish. The marshy area got lots of the wood varnish.

The poor lighting in the photos actually show up where the varnish was applied.

You can see the variations in the colours starting to create the effect that I was going for now. Keep reading to the end of this blog to see some better photos of the finished gaming table. ;-)

Again, after a significant amount of drying time in the freezing shed, I started to apply some more detailing.  Using weathering powders, I changed the colour of the earth in some the areas that I was intending to show through the grass flock. On reflection, I should have done this before applying the wet-look varnish because it obscured the wet earth effect too much.

So, back to the varnish to re-apply the areas where I wanted to model water/ice.

Whilst all this might seem that it took a lot of time, the only real time to get to this point was due to having to wait for the various things to dry properly. If I recall correctly, I think to get to this point only took about several hours of actual work.  Lots of standing around drinking tea looking at and reminding myself to start the next project in the spring!

One of the things that I did do whilst waiting for paint and varnish to dry was to make some conifers. These are made from a type of wire brush that you lay into guttering to stop moss and leaves building up. I'll write up another blog about how I created those.

I forgot to take as many photos during the next stage, which was to apply flock and scatter material.  I used three different colours of flock, and a couple of packets of scatter material, from Javis and randomly sprinkled these from height over different parts of the table.  The idea, again, was to ensure that nothing looked too uniform, so a bit of dark green sprinkled into a larger patch of light green just breaks up the evenness and texture.

After using a dry paint brush to remove any flock from areas that I wanted to leave the wet earth exposed (bottom of craters, tyre tracks, ditches etc), I used some watered down PVA glue in a spray bottle to affix the flock to where it had settled then left it to dry.

Another little job that I accomplished whilst waiting for things to dry was to make some hedges. This was really simple: I bought a sheet of rubberised horse hair, cut it up into hedge shapes with a pair of scissors and then applied some extra colour (mostly green) using spray paints.  Because my terrain table is winter-themed, the basic brown colour of the horse hair didn't need much doing to it to ensure that it looked like a wintry hedge to break up line-of-sight. I'll perhaps write a short blog post describing the hedge building in more detail too.

The only thing left to do to finish it off is to apply some snow coloured flock and then get gaming!

Winter Table - Part 3

Painting the Table

I wanted to try to replicate the colour of the wet and muddy fields that I had walked across, so started off with a dark base coat.  All the paint came from B&Q.  It looks quite light in this photo (bad lighting in my photos!), but it is actually a dark, chocolately type of colour.  The paint is still wet at this point, which gives it a bit more shine too.

Here are a few shots of the detailing carved into the foamboard. I mixed some ground cork into the paint to create a bit more texture and also randomly stabbed the end of a paint brush into the foam just to break up the flatness of foam.

The "tank tracks" were created by dragging the corner of a large metal file across the foam. As it was dragged, with a bit of force applied, it sort of "juddered" and created what looked like IMHO quite realistic track or wheel marks in the mud. Here's a closer shot of that particular effect.

Once the base coat had dried, I started adding some more colours.  It perhaps cannot be called dry-brushing due to the volume of paint that went on, but I used the same sort of technique to apply a lighter colour on the areas of higher ground, which emphasised the difference in some of the terrain features.  You can see that the darker colour is actually dark in these two photos.

Once the lighter colour had dried, I used a dark green spray paint to highlight some areas. The idea being that some of this would show through the flock and other scatter materials that were going to be applied later on...again, all with the intention of stopping the flat areas of the table from looking too uniform.

In the photo at the bottom you can see an area that I "roughed up" more than other parts of the table; I was planning to make this bit into a marshy area.

Winter Table - Part 2

Preparing the Foam

Where the foam sheets joined, there were some ugly, straight joins, so I used a large tub of cheap wall filler from B&Q and liberally pasted it over and into the cracks.

The foam is quite a high density, so using a craft knife I gouged out some craters (for infantry to take cover in) and also gouged out some other bumps and dips in the terrain to make it a bit more interesting on the eye.

I used one of the spare sheets of foamboard and carved off some thin chunks and glued these in place using PVA to create some higher points on the table.

Once I had filled in all the cracks and created some variations to make the whole table less flat, it was time to start painting. To make the whole table look a bit neater, I slapped on some black gloss paint (again, liberated from the stuff left in the garage!).

Next job...start putting on a base coat of paint.