General update and 6mm Team Yankee

A peaceful day at the Danish countryside...

Hi guys! This post was supposed to have been posted already in early june...and now the summer is almost over! Its hard to balance family life, work and playing minis, so the blog isn't a priority. Anyway, here goes:

A lot has happened since the last post - I became a father in february. This has considerably shortened the already small period of time available for gaming, as some of you who are parents might already know. Still, I've managed to get some minis painted during the last ~6 months. There are some 28mm Napoleonics on the workbench for example (yes, I know, I'm insane), namely some guys from the Vistula Legion. I'll try to post some pics of them when they are done - right know I'm trying not to hate myself for choosing a unit with yellow uniforms... the most dreaded paint of them all. Sure, it looks good, but its impossible to get a good coverage within a normal amount of time.

I'm also making some terrain and putting some paint on more 6mm miniatures to use with the Team Yankee ruleset. I've even managed to play two games with them earlier this year, while my other half and our toddler spent a couple of days on the Swedish countryside.

Punch-buggy, red!

I'll throw some pics of it, just for fun - not the best quality, but at least you get to see some of the terrain I have. Its still not finished, as I need to paint more houses, make more of those large forests and paint the tree-trunks. In case you wondered, its suppose to be somewhere around northern Germany/Denmark, ca. 1986.

The first game was against Krieger, and he used my Danish force. They are supposed to be a part of a Mechanized brigade, and consist of Leopard I's with some

I didn't take any close up pictures of the danish forces opposing my Polish 1st army T-72M1's, since the are not done by a long shot. Still, it was a great game, even though I never managed to cross the road. I blame the dice though; for example, I managed to hit the danish Leo's 5 times, but only rolled a 2+ ONCE on the firepower check. That meant that 3 Leopards, parked out in the open with no cover, only lost 1 tank while keeping the whole flank secure.

The table for the first battle

Polish T72's advance

Spokojnie, spokojnie...

After the battle - no win this time...

The second game fared a lot better for me though. This time I went up against two opponents, each with their own armies. Mr E brought his British mechanized unit (along with some chieftains), and Mr W threw in some West-Germans riding in Marders.

Now I rolled like a god (even though the 3 first rounds were miserable) and managed to get my "mighty" CAS-asset on the table several times. Whats even better is that those Lim-6's (that a Polish ground support version of the... MIG-17 "Fresco") harassed not only the infantry, but also attacked and destroyed a platoon of Gepards! Now that's some good  rolling right there... sure, they lost 2 machines to ground fire at the and, but I lost count of how many 5+ saves I managed to roll - and how few 3+ rolls my opponents managed to get while shooting at them. I bet they wont be that good once I've painted them...

Second battle, slightly changed set up. Polish armour rumbles forward...

No more pics were taken, since it was to hot to think straight and i think a bit of my cell actually melted. Still, I won!

There are almost no pics from that game, since it was damned hot inside our apartment and all of us wargamers were a tad whiney. Still, we had a good time, ate some pizza and, oh, I didn't roll like a skunk. Yey for Lim's!

I really, really like 6mm, especially the way one can easily make the table actually look aesthetically pleasing. Much more so than I excepted at first, and I do recall that I once regarded the scale as "too small".

Besides looking good, it also makes much more sense for a fast paced, modern, half-realistic game with large formations like Team Yankee to be played at smaller scales. It feels a bit like playing Wargame: Airland Battle, a computer game that I suspect inspired Battlefront (manufacturers of Team Yankee) as much as Harold Coyles old novel.