So where were we?

I'm about ready to resume gaming now as I am able to lift and carry playing boards and banqueting tables again.  Which means I can set up a game and restart the Dark Ages and World War Three campaigns.  I might even be able to try out the Altar of Freedom Random bid spreadsheet once I have created enough terrain (my collection needs to be extended to include more roads, rivers and a lot of woods).  As it's been a while since I was able to move any of the campaigns forward I thought that a short catch up post might be in order.

Dark Ages Campaign
It's still 799AD in dark age Great Britain.  The last entry for that campaign was way back in February and can be found here Small but Perfectly Formed: The Dark Ages Campaign (elenderilsblog.blogspot.com) and details the forces about to clash in the South West of modern Scotland where Strathclyde and Northumbria are about to fight.  The Northumbrians have the advantage of numbers and are intending a straightforward line 'em up and let 'em go approach to the battle.  The Strathclyde Welsh are hoping to use the terrain to narrow the battle lines to off set the Northumbrian numbers.

Cold War Gone Hot 1982
The second encounter between BAOR forward elements and the Soviet assault formations is going to be a tad unbalanced.  You may recall that a BAOR recon formation is facing probing Russian Motor Rifle and Tank battalions in sector D8 of my campaign map.  Details of the run up to this game are at Small but Perfectly Formed: Cold War 82 - further information (elenderilsblog.blogspot.com)  The big question is should NATO funnel armoured formations into the table from adjacent map sectors or hold the line until all Soviet lines of attack have been identified.

Altar of Freedom
The most recent thing I was working on was the semi-random bidding spreadsheet.  I think this does what I want but I need to trial run it in a game.  My big issues is that the PC with the spreadsheet software is not in the same room as the gaming table.  So I came up with the idea of generating several turns' bids (actually more than the game will need) before the game and recording them on cards.  Each turn I shuffle the cards and draw one at random so that I have no solid idea what that turn's enemy bid is going to be.  It means that I'm not running from room to room every turn which will let me get on with the game with minimum interruptions.

So that's where we are.  Normal (or at least what passes for normal around here) service will be resumed in the next day of two.

Supreme Littleness Design's 3mm scale buildings

The hunt for small scale buildings to use with my 3mm O8 Cold War armies and my Altar of Freedom home made troops has continued. Brigade Models stuff is lovely but slightly too small as is the Irregular Miniatures range. Both are more 2mm so are around a third too small for what I have in mind. I continued to search Google and recently came across Supreme Littleness Designs' offerings. The 3mm range is aimed at European Napoleonic gamers but a fair amount of it is generic enough to work in an ACW setting or a modern European one.

The range is inexpensive for the number of buildings in each set at around £1.50 - £2.50 with there being 2 - 4 buildings per set.  They are made in laser cut MDF which comes as a kit to be assembled (As an aside; am I weird in quite liking the smell of freshly lasered MDF?).  Now the idea of a kit for a 3mm building may seem to be a stretch but trust me it works and has some advantages.  For a start the method used to create the buildings creates great texture for the roofs, which as we look down from a playing vantage point is the main thing we see.  Secondly it allows some customisation of buildings.  Chimneys can be moved around and lean to sheds added or not as the whim takes the modeller.  This is possible due to the design of the models.  Think of the design as a sliced loaf of bread approach.  Each building consists of  vertical slices, mostly shaped like squat arrows.  The arrow point forms the peak of the roof, and the laser cutting creates lines along the edges of the vee of the arrow head that create lines of tiles when the slices are put together.

This how they arrive.  

The two gable ends have some detail laser etched in, windows. brickwork and similar things.  Each building has a number of these vertical slices and two side walls that go along the length of the 'sliced loaf' creating the long walls of the building.  Again these have etched details and they also hide the layers of the core of the building and tie the whole thing together.  It's really rather ingenious.

Examples of two of the completed kits. 

The downsides are that troops cannot be physically placed inside buildings, but that isn't really a thing at this scale anyway and that the fit of the parts does have some natural variation in thickness of the MDF sheet the parts are cut from.  This means that the slices of the building core and the sides may not be a 100% match.  This is easily rectified by either using paper of thin card shims between the slices to lengthen the core or filling the corners with a bit of modelling putty or Milliput.  Don't let this slight issue put you off the buildings are very, very nice indeed.  My only real criticism is that the building instructions are not always as helpful as I might have liked, but I have been able to work out what I was doing by dry fitting the parts and looking at the images of the completed buildings on the website.  The order is accompanied by an email with PDF instructions but these are often just an image and a description of the finished building.

The manufacturer also does buildings in other scales and covers some areas I haven't seen else where in the larger scales like the city walls and buildings of Troy!  Their website is here >>Supreme Littleness Designs Home