Battle of Fraustadt 1706

Hello There! The New Buckenham Historical Wargamers recently put on the Battle of Fraustadt as a weekend game.

I do not know much about this period of military history so here is a few photos for your delight.

Further pictures can be seen on the New Buckenham Historical Wargames Facebook page here.

Vapnartak 2025

Hello There! I have just returned from Vapnartak and had a lovely weekend out and about in York with my partner.

I was a great weekend and here are some quick posts about the weekend and some of the sites, and buys, there,

First the show. Unlike Partizan the show has some demonstration games and some for display. While the game quality is not up to Partizans standard there were a number of games that had been at The Other Partizan, from last year and looked splendid.

This 'Wings of War' games had a nice base mat for the ground which went well with the game. The players were also very welcoming.

This game was very well attended and had a number of players which did seem to move along quiet well. I liked the castle walls, which appeared to be foam board with block work etched into it.

I have a few large 28mm ships sitting in my store cupboards and this game reminded me I need to get them sorted!

Here is a close up of the castle walls. The cannon was obviously manhandled from the ship!

This 28mm game was certainly a different period of history for me but looked good on the table.

Close up it was possible t see these were 28mm Perrys plastic ACW cavalry, converted.

The Yarkshire Gamer also bought this magnificent set up from The Other Partizan.

This game, set in a snowy waste, looked good and there were some nice snow effects used.

I have been experimenting with different foliage for trees recently and I thought these trees could have benefitted from the seafoam I have been using recently.

Tucked in the corner of one of the sub floors was this 28mm AWI game which while it was good was in a position in the building with poor lighting making it difficult to get some good photos of it.

Another way of making trees for scenery can be seen here.

Lastly this spectacular D Day game in a very small scale.

This view reminded me of a feature in one of the very old wargames magazines from the '90's where 1/300th Normandy bocage scenery had been made for a large table. I must dig up that edition!

The water effect was very well modelled.

Overall a very nice day. We arrived at 10 am and while there was a long queue that went down very quickly indeed and was well stewarded.

I left at 1.30pm and felt like I had been there for hours!

Samurai You Tube Video

 Hello There! Here is a post on You Tube that features Samurai Skirmish here.

This is on the New Buckenham Historical Wargamers You Tube channel.

But what has this all to do with me I hear you say?! Well the blossom trees used in this game were supplied by myself  and this is the first time I think I have seen them in use!

I am pleased how they came out but they were an absolute pain to make nut are very hard wearing and are a number of years old now and standing up  well to the rigours of wargaming.

Scenery: Messing around with Trees

Hello There! Well after moving house, with all the packing and unpacking that entails. The DIY around the house and the building work required to make the place habitable, I have now 'returned'!

With a new log cabin on the was, the base built and the chance of a wargames room, I have started to make some trees for my own scenery.

I have a large number from my business, but wanted to have something more realistic for my needs.

I went to You Tube and glanced through some of the posts there, especially in the model railway hobby. I can across this person, here.

I was aware of the use of seafoam foliage for making trees but not had great results so I felt I needed some better instruction from You Tube and this person had a number of good ideas.

All the following use Woodland Scenics armatures for the start of the model and have Miliputt covering the trunk and a scoring but either dental tools or a craft knife to represent tree bark.

These first ones use seafoam glued to the ends of the armatures after the seafoam has been stripped of the remaining seeds and seed pods which are usually still on the original plant.

The foliage was a little different because my partner mentioned she had a large amount of herbs which were out of date, so I thought I must be able to put them to good use.

Another visit to You Tube and I found a suitable post here, I have followed the Terrain Tutor for a while and used some of the methods he has used in the past. I would highly recommend looking through his channel.

So with the herbs, in this case basil, soaked in glycerine and water mix and then drained through a tea strainer and dried over time and a short while under a warn grill, (don't leave it or forget about it!), you have a new flock and scatter material.

Once the leave have been glued on and dried I high lighted some leaves with a number of bright green shades from the Vallejo VMC range, using a brush.

As you can see they have come out very well indeed and unlike my previous trees you can see through them, much more like the real thing. This item has the basil leaves with a fine covering of fine burnt turf from Woodland Scenics

The next examples are using clump foliage, (far right and far left), and some fine Woodland Scenics scatter on the middle example, again with the seafoam. This picture gives a good comparison of the effects from each method.

Again you can see that it is possible to see through the branches and looks a lot more realistic than my previous efforts.

This item has had a darker fine flock. I visited the local railway model shop here, well not so local now that I have moved, (but I want to make sure I support them), and bought some different shades of flock from a different company, this time 'BUSCH' It was a little too coarse for my needs so I purloined a small blender, (which was no longer needed for food processing!), and blitzed what I had for a while to get a finer flock, which worked very well.

Next up, seafoam again but this time I used various fine and coarse turf from the Woodland Scenics range again. I experimented with the coarse and then fine scatter on each tree, with different variations of colour. 

Here I decided to go far less heavy with the flock, hoping to have a tree at the start of Spring as the foliage is just starting to appear. 

This has the seafoam again but some burnt grass coarse then fine flock.

Lastly some rubberised horse hair which was teased out a lot to provide a less dense canopy. I used hairspray then matt varnish to hold it all together. I tried tacky glue but it was very thick and formed clumps which held far too much flock and made teasing the horse hair apart pointless.

Overall it was very refreshing to do something different and to make some time to use You Tube as a research tool then try to replicate some of the methods on there.

The wargaming hobby has so many facets for the individual to explore and I enjoyed exploring this particular area.

While some may say that these may be too fragile for wargaming, which to a point is true, these will not be travelling anywhere in the back of a car, or to the local club, but I have used multiple sprays of hair spray and varnish to help keep the flock on them.