Fred’s 2025 Painting and Gaming Diary

[fred.]

Fistful of T34s

After seeing the post about these rules - - we got in a cheeky mid-week game to give them a run through.

We used the forces in the first scenario in the paper units PDF - this was 2 battalions of Soviet Infantry, 5x T34s and 4x T70s. The Germans where a reduced battalion of Panzer Grenadiers and a company on PvIIIs. We played a simple scenario, with the Soviets defending a village and a river line. With their armour deployed between.



The Germans probed forward - we suspect that the in the proper scenario the Soviet armour was probably expected to to arrive after some turns, as it proved to overwhelm the German armour. Whilst the German infantry had no great trouble clearing the two villages.

The rules worked well. We got the hang of them pretty quickly. There were a couple of bits we got wrong, whilst softskin transport can be left behind out of coherence. If it moves it must move to rejoin its parent formation.

Edit - after tea!

Second mistake was tanks vs softskins - we thought as these didn't have an armour value (even 0) that you needed to use Anti Infantry attacks, rather than Anti Armour ones. But apparently you use Anti Armour - which is pretty deadly vs softsknins (as you'd expect).

My PzIIIs where hopeless vs the T-70s, never have I rolled so many 1s! Which meant they were messing around trying to kill these whilst the T34s advanced. PzIIIs vs T34s was never going to end well, even with the Germans having a quality advantage.

One thing we noticed is that half-tracks and even tanks are quite poor vs infantry - Bolt Acton players will be shocked!

Overall we liked the rules, they flow pretty well - the turn order, with Artillery first takes a bit of getting used to. And we will need to think about table setup with 15" being max range for most AT weapons, and about half that for infantry weapons. 15" represents 1.5km so will have a look at some maps to get the right terrain density.

[Steve J]

Great looking game Fred ! I'll probably simply convert the scenarios for use with BKCII, as the unit representation is the same from what I can see.

[fred.]

Great looking game Fred ! I'll probably simply convert the scenarios for use with BKCII, as the unit representation is the same from what I can see.

Thanks Steve, terrain is mine, figures and tanks are Jon's - and I think mainly Pendraken.


We went with the forces from the scenario listings, just to ensure we had the stats to hand. But there should be plenty of scenarios available as lots of rules use 1 stand = 1 platoon.

[far4ngn]

Fred, where is your battle mat from?

[fred.]

Fred, where is your battle mat from?

It's from Deep Cut Studio, across my gaming group we nearly all have mats from them.  Cloth mat, so hills can go underneath, I think it is the Steppe pattern.

[streetgang]

Great looking game! Beautiful figures, scenery and tabletop.

I'm really intrigued by the Fistful of T-34s and also the original FFoTs.

[fred.]

Thanks Streetgang

Fistful of T-34s is a great intro to FFoTows. The production values are high (as would be expected by Little Wars TV), and they really distill the essence of the game into a few pages. 

We've found the full version of FFoT in our stash of rules - and to be honest I wouldn't have looked at it given how information dense it is, and its modern focus. But having used FFoT34s as an intro to get the core concepts then looking up specific bits to either understand more or add some detail from the full rules works quite well. 

[Last Hussar]

Are they just Eastern Front - all my kit it Normandy and after.

[fred.]

The stats in FFoT34s is just Eastern front and a fairly narrow date range too - it is the free offering after all!

But the WWII adaptation on Wargames vault has a small number of NWE stats.

The full version has all the stats for everything you could think of!

[fred.]

Armoured Clash - Enlightened vs Alliance

A game from last Friday - we stuck with 1300pts but played at the Skirmish level, this mainly means smaller sized units. Skirmish is the official size for this number of points, but we tend to have been using the Battle sized list building rules. 

For me this meant quite a few changes to my list, with the big Mars tripods only available in 2s, and the crab like artillery walkers too. I'd built my list at the start of the week expecting to fight the Crown, who have a lot of armour, due to illness of the Crown player I ended up playing against the Alliance who have far more Aerial troops - which made one of my unit swaps much less good for me!



Early stages, my aircraft went for an alpha strike on the first activation of turn 1, and attacked the block of units at the top middle of the photo. They have a beam attack, and I was able to line up 4 units to attack - this attack can be Overcharged - basically I get to flip a card and add that many attack dice - unfortunately I only got a 3 (out of 1 through 12). So did a fair bit of damage, but nothing fatal to any units. The downside of Overcharge is any blank dice cause a point of damage to my unit, which knocked out 1 of the pair of planes. 

There are 3 lots of Alliance floating aerial units, as well as an aircraft off table. I only have 1 unit that can engage these - my rotocraft just behind the central building. The lone blue tank on top of the far hill is an AA tank - it was very effective all game!



Early turn 2 - I have deployed a unit of heavy constructs on the right flank - unfortunately they weren't quite in charge range of an enemy unit. Lots of units have converged on the objectives in the middle of the table. 



The end of turn 2 - and the end of the game as it was getting late.

The Alliance fighter bomber is making a decisive straffing run which killed 2 of my damaged units that had a chance of capturing the left hand objective. Out of picture on the right the Alliance would land a drop pod near the other objective - whilst I killed the Legionnaires who disembarked, they did enough to stop me claiming the objective. 

Alliance where 20 - 14 up at this point - and holding a unit count advantage too.

Overall it was a brutal game with both sides loosing a lot of troops. I doubt we would have got to 4 turns let alone the 5 the scenario is for. 

It was a bit slow with only 2 turns completed in 3 hours or so - the Alliance player is still learning his army, and it does have a lot of special rules to understand. Also by the nature of the forces nearly every unit is different so there are a lot of stats to get your head around. 

This was probably the first game I have struggled with the Enlightened - I couldn't keep my command units in the radius of my troops to prevent Suppression and Disorder. I'm still not sure about the most effective way to use Vanguard moves at the start of the game - they can just leave units far forward and therefore exposed. 

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Interesting report Firbes

[fred.]

Armoured Clash Enlightened

Got the last of the troops done for this project - enough troops to make 4x basic sized units of all the different troop types



Basing to be finished - but that will be quick once the paint has dried properly.

Then just the big behemoth to finish off - which is half painted.

[fred.]

Got these guys based up this afternoon 

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

Very cool Forbes 

[fred.]

More Armoured Clash

Horsell Super-Heavy Surveyor



This is a big boi, should have taken a photo with a stand of infantry next to it.



Wondering if I add a bit more detailing - perhaps to the leg joints?

Scythe Drone Fighters





Obviously not on their flight stands

[Duke Speedy of Leighton]

That's a big beast! 

[Steve J]

A pretty impressive model for sure, which would rather dominate the table, due to its size?

[fred.]

It is a big model - and needed some thinking about the foam storage for transportation. 

He's not got on a battlefield yet - within the game system each faction has a behemoth - which are powerful, they cost around 3-4x the points of a normal unit, and only can be fielded in higher points value games.