Stosstruppen climax

Recently I have been reading a lot of material about the German assault troops tactics. Two key books on the matter that I would recommend are Stephen Bull's "German Assault Troops of the First World War" and Bruce Gundmundsson's  "Stormtroop Tactics". A couple of very handy Osprey books are also interesting if you want to get a thorough introduction on the matter: "Trench Warfare (2)"  also by Stephen Bull and "German Stormtrooper".

WW I Trench Photos

I have just discovered this article in Der Spiegel (in English!) with a photo gallery in colour showing some very interesting features of the trench daily life during WW I.  I saw them in other blog which I decided to join.

Hope you like them

More VC activity detected!

The Viet Cong forces continue their buildup. A couple of weeks ago I introduced to all of you my first Vietnam period painted figures and today I have finished a support weapons squad, heavily armed with RPGs, Chinese LMGs and some US-captured weapons. All are from The Assault Group "Up Country" range.

Anibal's Wordle

I saw this afternoon this curious application in Big Lee's blog and then in Sidney's Roundwood's blog. It is basically a tool that searches a piece of text or, in this case, their respective blogs history of posts, to create what it's called a "word cloud" (see image below) or the most repeated words in the blog, grouped "artistically" and with different sizes relative to the number of times they're repeated.

I found it really-really curious so decided to give a try to my own blog, et voilà this is what i got:

Not surprisingly GERMAN and BRITISH (slightly unbalanced in favour of the former) are the two most relevant words, considering that my main focus of interest is in WWI on the Western Front.

If you want to give a try, just go to the Wordle website.

Panzer Strike

On Saturday February 5 we played an Eastern Front scenario in the aftermath of the Kursk Battle. The game depicted a German strong armoured counterstrike against a lightly defended Soviet position, aiming to gain some time for the main German forces to pull back. The objective of the German players was to control the area to the East of the table above the second stream  (see map below) with at least two operative AFVs. As usually, the game was played with the TFL rule set Troops, Weapons and Tactics for platoon-sized engagements.

VC activity detected!

I reckon that Vietnam has traditionally being a somewaht alien period for me and have been comnpletley unattracted by it. As many wargamers that I know, we are reluctant to game on periods that we feel are too close in time to us, and I'm no exception. Furthermore the most modern period I have always wanted to play was WW II.

But then, TFL published another excellent ruleset last summer called  Charlie Don't Surf and I could not resist the temptatiom of buying the rules and have a read... a very bad idea.