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.

Team Yankee 6mm Polish Tank Battalion

Who's got small hands now, huh!?

I can't believe it – it's actually been almost two (2) years since my last update! Crazy. And a bit sad, since I had big plans for this blog once! But live and learn, right?

Too many hobbies, to little time (and money). Anyway, it doesn't mean that I haven't been busy. I've done some nerdy stuff and even had the opportunity to do some gaming. I won't bore you with every one of my projects during the last two years (well, not yet – hopefully I'll make more posts in the future!), but here are some pics of a project that I started and actually finished earlier this year.

Team Yankee in 6mm

I've been playing a bit of Team Yankee, and decided that 15mm is way to big for any games larger than a reinforced platoon. Sorry Battlefront, but it just looks horrible with hordes of modern armoured vehicles going fender-to-fender on regular 6x4 tabletops. Besides the aesthetics of it, the table gets filled with minis and manoeuvring looks more like chess rather than a miniature wargame. I think that 15mm works on 30-40 points though, so I won't stop playing it (unless the coming Battlegroup rules change that...).

However, in 6mm it works just great! It looks and feels better, even with (almost) no rule changes. Oh, and I've halved down the size of the bases for infantry – I use small FoW-bases instead of medium ones for the infantry, and half sized small ones for weapon teams like the RPG-teams. Any large size teams (I don't have any yet) would be placed on medium sized bases.

The distances makes more sense too, even though they are still a bit off (3mm would be more correct), especially regarding artillery. Still, it feels way better.

Batalion Pancerny, marsz!

So, being into Polish military history I decided to build a Polish T-72 battalion (so far using the East German rules). Since it's 6mm I also liked the possibility to make all of the fighting elements in a chosen unit. Well, at least the ones that would be on table using the TY-ruleset.

In order to keep costs down, but still have decent miniatures I bought everything from Heroics&Ross. Sure, it's not GHQ – but it didn't break my bank either. It still looks good if one paints it right.

I went quite generic with my army - this could be any of the updated Polish tank battalions, with the most up-to-date gear available around 1986 (I really don't buy that this is 1985 anymore...). It should be one the units in 1^st army though, poised towards northern Germany and Denmark (the Jutland army group). Doing some research, I finally opted for the following list:

1 HQ-tank:

 

3 Armoured Companies; 10 tanks each (1 command tank and 3 platoons with 3 T-72's in them). One of the companies got the T-72M, while the rest got the T-72M1 variant (the one depicted in TY):

T-72M, the first export version built in Poland

The T-72M1, not built in Poland until 1986

1 Recon company (with 7 BRDM-2's – 1 command vehicle and 3 small platoons with 2 cars each):

1 Self-propelled AA-company, with 4 ZSU-23-4 in 2 platoons:

1 Infantry company, made up of 10 BWP-1's (3 platoons and one command vehicle) and infantry. BWP is by the way the polish name of the the BMP:

As far as I've seen there were no separate PKM-platoons in the Polish army. Instead the PKM was used as a squad support weapon! I've yet to have to change the spec's in TY to reflect this...

By the way - I like most of the H&R-models, but the BMP-1 just doesn't look right. Here's a comparison with the Battlefront one in 15mm:

 

Since I'm comparing scales - the difference between 15mm and 6mm is really big:

 Anyway - thats a Polish armoured battalion around 1986. I haven't made the sappers though, since they don't have any rules in TY.

This battalion has some divisional support too, in the shape of two 3-gun batteries of the self-propelled 2s1 "Goździk":

...and two platoons of the 9m31 Strzała-1 AA-system:

All vehicles were painted with Vallejo Air US Dark Green as a base, pin-washed with Army painters Strong tone, drybrushed with Vallejo Grey green and with some high-contrast highligts with Vallejo Deck Tan. The bases were painted Vallejo Flat earth, drybrushed with sand and grey paints. The infantry was painted Vallejo Grey green, over a Field Grey base.

In a hopefully not too distant future, I plan to buy and build a battalion of T-55AM "Meridas", to swap with the T-72's, and some TOPAS transports (a BTR50pk variant) for the Polish marines and a company of PT-76 tanks. Oh, and some Danish resistance...

 And lastly - an epic photobomb by my fiancée: