Clock's ticking to the 10th Painting Challenge

Madrid Puerta del Sol Tower Clock

I can hardly believe that 8 months have passed, and the new edition of the Painting Challenge is looming now sooooo close in time (it will start as usual on Dec 21^st and hopefully it will be announced over the next days).

This year I entered into the planning phase at a very early stage (late September) and by now I have most of my core project for this Challenge almost ready (assembling, basing and priming).

As many of you may know, my strategy is to concentrate my efforts in one single project or army (Fallschirmjagers, Napoleonic Austrians or British Red Devils as in 2018/19…) and then complement with some leftovers from other projects.

This year I decided to focus my effort in building an early II World War German Army for the Blitzkrieg period. The reason for this is twofold: on the one hand, TooFatLardies released this year the first major supplement for Chain of Command centred around the France 40 campaign. The follow up videos uploaded to its YouTube official channel with Richard Clarke and Nick Skinner playing a few of the campaign games only light my desire.

On the other hand, several years ago I bought second hand a lot of Warlord’s Early War German Army plastic sprues to one of my club mates, so a major part of the investment was already done.

My plan is building a core infantry force complemented with a strong engineers detachment and several armour supports. I’m looking to do a 7^th Panzer Division unit (the famous “Ghost Division led by Erwin Rommel) which featured some nice Czech Skodas (better protected and armed than the mainstream Pz Is and IIs of that era)

The build-up is looking good and I have already finished assembling the infantry, the engineers and three AFVs (an early Stug version, a Pz II and the Panzer 38t). I still have some additional tanks targeted for the project (Pz I, Pz IV…) but I’m tracking any interesting potential Black Friday offers emerging over the next days by Warlord and Blitzkrieg Miniatures.

A project lately coming into my sights is an Early Imperial  Roman Army related to “Infamy! Infamy!” the wargames rules in the Ancient era  that TooFatLardies is currently testing and would be likely been published… by Easter  XD  

 Can’t say much about the rules now, as my gaming group was invited to the playtesting and I am tied to a sacred oath to the Roman vestals not to reveal any details.

For this project I have bought so far, the Roman Auxilia and the EarlyImperial Roman Cavalry boxes from Victrix. This will complement some WargamesFoundry Roman Legionaires that I collected in the late 90s and were long forgotten deep in a cabinet at my mother’s home.  

I have also undusted my old (very old indeed) Wargames Foundry Celts and Gauls, which were my first painted units to playing with Warhammer Ancient Battles in the late 80s.

The truth is that the painting level is of such low quality that I decided to remove the paint with a fingernail paint removal liquid and start the unit again from scratch. Some of my friends were shocked by this decision, but the sight of the colours used then (bright oranges and greens, purples, etc) hurt my eyes sorely…

This is it for the moment, the clock is ticking and news about the 10^th edition will soon flood your favourite social media  accounts… stay tuned