Flames of War German Adventure

I've been a bit of a hobby ostrich recently, burying my head in the sand pretending I don't have a stack load of miniatures to paint! I blame Games Workshop entirely!

In order to ease me out of my 6-month slump I thought I'd take a look at some Flames of War models. World War II has always fascinated me from a historical standpoint, so merging two of my main hobbies (miniature painting and military history) seems a fairly natural thing to do.

Where to start?

There are an enormous amount of options for the budding painter/gamer. I chose Flames of War as the base gameset to use, simply because it uses 15mm miniatures (very common) and is an easily accessible and popular game. There are a number of other rulesets out there that use 15mm miniatures as well, however, so its all good!



Once I had chosen the ruleset it was time to choose the forces. FoW has an excellent starter set, called Open Fire!, which has two very good 800 point starter armies. One is a British Armoured company backed up by an American Parachute Rifle Platoon (think Operation Market Garden!) whilst the other is a German Grenadier Company backed up by some anti-tank guns and 3 StuG G self-propelled assault guns. this seemed like a good place to start!

I also picked up a box of Late War German Heavy Weapons made by the Plastic Soldier Company.

The box contains four identical sprues, with each sprue having enough bits to make an MG42 heavy machine gun team, 8cm and 12 cm mortar teams and several panzerfaust and panzerschreck armed soldiers. That's about 16 heavy weapons teams, for a total cost of £16.50! Pretty good, I thought!

The sprues are of high quality with minimum cleaning up required before assembling

I very quickly built one of the MG42 teams (note that bases are not provided in the box), finding the instructions basic but easy to follow

and within an hour had successfully completed assembling an example of each mortar team in addition to the MG42 team.

I added some of Games Workshop's textured basing 'paint', the imaginatively titled 'Astrogranite', allowed it to dry and sprayed it white, using Halfords own-brand spray primer (which at £7.50 per 500ml can is a much better deal than anything you can get from GW or Army Painter etc and goes on just as well!).

The next stage will be to paint the bases and them move on to the models themselves...