Prepping For Normandy

   With less than a week and a bit before our proposed first games of Bolt Action in the desert, my brother sent me a text to say his armies wouldn't be finished in time, could we play something set in Normandy this month and come back to the desert for our next games. This gave me time to tidy some bits up I'd been putting off. . .

   The more games of Bolt Action my brother and me played in 2022, the more pleased I became with the boards we were putting out. The various door mats and teddy bear fur (that my club mercilessly mock me for) break up the continuous green mat and the hedges really help add cover, but the board is still lacking in a few key areas.

   The French buildings in my collection are not quite good enough anymore - there are a few key things I need to do to upgrade them (roofs mostly) are on my list of jobs and will get sorted once I have a bit more inspiration after a holiday to Normandy later this year. It would be really good to plonk a village that feels right onto the board.

   The other thing is a lack of walls. While hedges are a big way of making fields borders in north western Europe and feature in a lot of my games, stone walls are a prominent feature f the countryside and I wanted to add another type of cover to the board. With this in mind I picked up a box of Warlord's Stone Walls and got to work.

   While the photo doesn't show them properly and the one below is dark and terrible looking, I've built a single 2 sided field of about a foot by 2 foot (so hedges will do the rest of the field boundaries), plus a stone wall for a house which used the whole contents of a box. I've kept the painting as simple as possible, sprayed a beige, picked our bricks in a few other shades then washed.

   While doing the walls, we were also talking about the new gaming club my brother has joined and how it's exposing him to other games. So being the good older brother (?) I've promised to teach him one new game after every session of Bolt Action (time allowing) so that he had more of an idea of what he likes and what he doesn't so he can join in more easily. Having planned to pack a board of Normandy themed terrain, I had a thought about what to play using the same scenery and 100 years war made the most sense.

   The last game played with these collections showed the French were too light on foot sergeants, so I focussed on getting a unit painted ready for the game.

   All I have left to paint in my 100 years war project is a Joan of Arc figure that is lost somewhere in my backlog and a pair of early 100 years war French knights that I bought as an experiment. I am tempted to buy one more pack of metal French men at arms/knights on foot to add a few more banners and allow myself to field another unit of foot sgts but we'll see how this year goes.

Now if only I could find Joan . . .

   Annoyingly this delay in getting the desert games onto the board will end up affecting my targets for the year but as long as I can do a block of it in the springtime we should be alright.

Thanks for reading