Dawn on the eastern front!

      John Paul and I get together for another WWII miniatures battle using the NUTS! rules from THW. This time on the eastern front as I bring out my glorious defenders of Mother Russia to face John Paul's dreaded Germans!

     It is dawn on the eastern front. The German has been advancing rapidly all along the front leaving encircled pockets of Russian resistance in their wake. My platoon has been decimated leaving just a hand full of men who have sought cover in a small farm. Stuka dive bombers took out our T-34 and pounded the farm buildings. We can hear the revving of a half tack as the Germans close in to finish us off.

Getting Back into Social Gaming

     It has been way too long since I have played a tabletop miniatures game with another person. Almost 15 years! I recently rediscovered my love of miniature gaming when I was going through boxes of stuff from my younger years that my parents had stashed in the back of their basement. There were old toys, baseball cards, my collection of ridiculously heavy war history books, and in one box I found all my old miniatures. Now many years later and 400 miles away I was a long way from my old gaming group. My first step back into the hobby was to search the internet to see if I could find anything in the way of solo war gaming rules. That was how I found THW and all of their great gaming goodness.

     I love how THW games handles solo gaming and I was having a great time doing it but I was still missing how much fun I remember having playing with other people. A couple of weeks ago I recieved a message from a fellow THW gamer on the THW forums who had noticed that we both had the same location of Portland ME in our profiles. This gamer, named John Paul and paulnutsplayer on the forum, asked if I would be interested in meeting up for some THW gaming. As you can tell from his forum name he is a fan of the THW WWII rules NUTS!. NUTS has been near the top of my 'to buy' list of THW rules since I first found them so I jumped at the chance to be able to try out the system.

     Last night we were able to get our schedules to line up so that we could meet up for the first time to play. We met up at a local gaming lounge called R Choice 2 Gaming where John Paul hosts Fantasy Chess gaming the 2nd saturday of every month. Since neither of us had had dinner we first went across the parking lot to the Burger King to grab a bite to eat and talk gaming. It was great to be talking miniature gaming with someone sitting in front of me again and not just through a computer screen. After we had finished eating we stayed for a little longer and John Paul and I went through the NUTS! rule book from cover to cover. With our bellies full we headed back across the parking lot to throw some dice!

Building a new world to adventure in

     I recently got married and as a result my usual hobby space has been taken over by wedding gifts. My wife and I went a little crazy with the gift registry scanning gun not thinking about what would happen if we were actually to receive everything when registered for. I love to cook but having 8 different fry pans of various shapes and sizes might have been over doing it. So as a result my hobby space is the temporary storage space for all our cool new stuff and I've taken a little break from my painting and gaming. To help scratch my hobby itch I have started to work on my custom world for my BSS campaign to take place in. So now I would like to present to you all the great nation of Marstonia!

With a little savvy and hopefully some steel

Of all the projects I am working on currently, my workbench is literately covered with miniatures right now, the one project I really want to focus on is my solo campaign using the By Savvy and Steel rules set by Two Hour Wargames. By Savvy and Steel is a fantastic rules set that takes the player back to 17th century Europe and the very same time period of the Three Musketeers! I have been a big Musketeers fan since I was a kid and I can still vividly remember seeing the 1993 Walt Disney movie staring Charlie Sheen and Kiefer Sutherland when I was 12. So when I saw that THW had released a rules set having to do with musketeers I jumped at the chance to get into a more historical side of the wargaming hobby. All of my previous experiences in wargaming were with futuristic scifi miniatures games.

By Savvy and Steel takes place in a fictitious country in the middle of real life 17th century central Europe but you are free to have your games take place in any real of imagined country you would like. This got me thinking about not just having my own fictitious country to adventure in but to create a whole world of own. Well a whole world might be a bit ambitious so instead I think I will start with a fictitious version of Europe. I've started scribbling down notes and ideas for my world, even made a rough sketch of a map, but it is all still a long way from being a world ready for adventuring so more on this in the future.

After buying the rules I now needed some appropriate minis since my genetically engineered super humans in power armor and blue skinned aliens with pulse rifles weren't going to work very well in this setting. I used a mix of minis from the Royalist Infantry plastic box set from Warlord Games, the Empire Free Company box set and the Empire Huntsmen box set from Games Workshop to make a few soldiers, gentlemen, and thugs.