Terrain-athon

It's been a pleasant summer over the past few weeks, and I've realised I haven't put brush to miniature for over a month. While my painting hole is a cooler room in the house, the paint still dries too quickly to suit me. 

Instead, I've hit the terrain. I had a therapeutic week building up 15mm 4Ground WWII buildings. They are really fine pieces, and ready for the tabletop, but still need the edges touching up and some details adding. 

I've also churned out a bunch of small pieces that I've picked up over the months, ready for a game of 15mm CoC at Wyvern last weekend. First up 12 entrenchments for small and medium FoW bases. Well priced and I appreciated that they are all different sculpts. Thanks to Mike Whitaker of troubleatthemill for the tip on these, sourced from Daemonscape on eBay for the princely sum of £4.99.

For scale, with apologies for the lighting

More defensive works - barbed wire at 2"x6" for Flames of War. Mdf bases from Warbases, toothpicks and some hobby barbed wire. 

Next up a small copse of trees. These were from a bag of cheap Noch railway modelling trees, which means they aren't that durable and the flock is starting to bald already. Don't think they'll last that long, but I've loads of better woodland scenics armatures to build up at some point.

Last up for the 15s, some Landmark high walls that were on discount at Timecast, giving me 6' of walls. 

A nifty sidestep to 28mms, I saw these nice cypress trees in the local (usually pretty mediocre) model railway shop. They were only £1.50 each too. Based for my 28mm terrain, they'll go nicely in Spain.  

Last up, harking back to some of the first terrain I ever bought, I finally, finally painted the rest of my 28mm roads and junctions. I never loved these: while keenly priced and well detailed, they are a bit too chunky for what I was after and needed a lot of work to tidy them up. The originals feature in one of my first ever blog posts - so these have been sat awaiting the brush for at least 4 years! Once painted, they  make a decent large rural roadway though. I took an opportunity to refresh the original ones, re-touching the rocks and flock to match my terrain from the last few years. 

Last Sunday I got in a good game of Chain of Command with Ian up at the club. I took a small but powerful US Para platoon while Ian defended a farmhouse with Panzergrenadiers.

With precious few support points, I settled for a .50 cal.

And immediately emplaced it on a dominating hilltop overlooking Alan's jump-off points. 

I'd be outnumbers and outgunned, so wanted to hit the PG's hard at the outset, but my first section was stalled facing two. We mad an error here and interpreted the walling as hard cover - soft would have made a more sensible game. The .50Cal was valued support, but didn't do the damage that I'd been hoping and a static grinding firefight ensued. 

My second section moved to encircle the farmhouse, but Ian dropped his third into the farm itself, where it would be difficult to shift. This section took a battering as they tried to work their way out of the line of fire. 

Eventually, the Para's brutal firepower and more consistent activations meant they could grind the Germans' morale down. A well timed assault by one of my sections, followed by a sub-optimally timed one by Ian (assaulting a section that just unpinned on the turn end...) closed the game with a narrow US victory. 

I really should play more Chain of Command - it's been a few months!