Ayton Event - in pictures

Recent ebay aquisition

Very pleased to get this rare item from ebay for only about £4.00. Can't decide if I should get them out the box and painted. Will certainly have a look for more Airfix AWI figures.

Plastic Soldier Company Late War Germans (1/72)

Got these through the post from Drum and Flag this weekend. The first batch are based and undercoated and waiting for my next day off. The poses are almost identical to the Russians, it doesn't matter since they are well thought out. There are no 'waste' poses like you tend to get in other boxes of plastic figures so you end up using everything in the box, which makes it good value.

You also get an instruction sheet for making the figures up, though it's not really needed. This weekend the company launched their Soviet Heavy Weapons set, which I'm very keen to get hold of now and they also do a box of Late War British. They had those in the model shop but by the time I went back with some money they had gone. I'll get them soon though, already have some Ram Kangaroos made up as transport for a Canadian motorized battalion.

Plastic Soldier Company Russians (1/72)

There has been a White Elephant in the room of Db-Variants. A period that never before dared rear its head. Maybe it's the lemsip going to my head this week but I've thought, why not!? Being ill this week and needing a pick me up I had to buy some Plastic Soldier Company Russians in Summer Dress (1/72) without any real plan as to what to do with them. I began thinking of how to base them and knew I didnt really want to base them individually, once I looked at the basing options it occured to me that I could base three on a 40mm x 30mm base very easily and this suggested a look of a DbA/M/C/N/ACW base. At that point the plan for a DbWWII game started to form.

In the box of Plastic Soldier Company Russians you get three sprues, each sprue can make three rifle companies, an SMG company and a command stand if you base three figures to a base. So the box can make a battalion of infantry. In theory.

I've yet to work out any DbWWII rules but I can see that (plus) value points can be given in combat for such units as the SMG company when used as shock troops. The 'push back' rule could be very useful with these elements and when tanks are used the usual artillery mechanisms from other Db variants can be adapted and applied.

I can see dedicated WWII wargamers reeling in horror at the limitations that these rules would have on a WWII game but the advantages outweigh them when you are trying to make a fast to play very easy game to get into. There is a lot of scope to turn this into a join in demo game for shows or at times when there may be people wishing to get involved who haven't wargamed before.

Update!

Managed to get my first Soviet batch finished today. So here we have 1 command stand, 3 rifle companies and an SMG 'shock' company. This is basically what you get from 1 sprue, you also get a prone light machine gunner and loader but I didn't have much use for these, not a fan of prone poses as they seem to take up too much base space. (T34's are quick builds from Pegasus and the BA-64B is a resin model from Under the Bed Enterprises)