Major Ballsup's Hobby Shed

A new year and the first monthly hobby update.  After some family dramas to start the year, thankfully things have settled down and January has proved to be a very productive month.  Completed I'm continuing on where I left off from last year in getting stuff done: First of all I polished off a baker's dozen of 20mm Second World War Red Army infantry.  These are now sold by Battlezone Miniatures but they are Sgt. Major Miniatures sculpts.  Bread and butter work for me and a nice early success for the year. You can see more of them here .  While I was working on the above, I was also painting my last four 28mm Victrix Vikings with heads swapped  with ones from other Victrix sets.  There's more of these here . With some figures off the table, I went on to a bit of terrain work.  One of my aims for 2025 is to produce or improve at least one piece of terrain per month: I made some multiple tree bases out of a miniature Christmas tree.  You  ...

Something I've been meaning to do for ages is to add some winter trees to my terrain collection.  Very much motivated by reading about the combat in Hungary in the last winter of the Second World War I got on and did it. Two things enabled this.  The first was picking up a dirt cheap Christmas tree ornament for only £1.49, the second was being sent a free pack of suitable bases from the lovely people at Warbases as part of their marvellous Helping Hands initiative.  The bases were the real catalyst.  They were waiting for me when getting home from work on Monday afternoon and I did steps 1 and 2 that evening.  I did nothing on the Tuesday and worked on them for 15 minutes here and there during the day to finish them on the Wednesday doing steps 3 to 7.  Here's the steps: 1. Prepare the trees.  Using a pair of snippers I cut each branch as low as possible from the ornament.  This gave me 20 trees.  I also gave each tree a good hard brushing to...

My second batch of completed figures this year was a quartet of Norse warriors. These sturdy fellows are 28mm Victrix from their Viking set.  These were the last four left from this set and were the oldest outstanding plastics in the pile. I did minimum tinkering with them, just replacing the heads with ones from different sets.  The unarmoured axe wielding warrior's leonine head is from the Ancient Germans set, the other three are from the Rus set. I can only paint four or five of these Victrix figures at the same time.  Otherwise I notice the quality drops and I don't do them justice.  I've not got many to do, 12 Rus and three Ancient Germans which will be finished as Norse.  That should give me enough for a game of Ravenfeast with Rus versus Norse. 

My first finished miniatures of 2025 are a baker's dozen of 20mm Second World War Red Army infantry.   I picked these three packs up along with two others from Battlezone Miniatures stand at Salute last year.  The sculpts are Sgt. Major Miniatures. They're all dressed in winter clothing.  There's a good mix of greatcoats and the padded jackets and helmets and padded hats.  Two of the figures were in all-in-one suits, so I chose to leave these until I work on the pack of similarly dressed assault engineers I've got. I like these figures.  They're what I'd term "classic" wargames figures.  Maybe the proportions aren't great, maybe they're a bit cartoony and maybe the weapon are quite crudely done, but they've got bags of character which comes out as you paint them.  They're pretty robust too so should take handling during a game without any trouble.  They also fit in very well with my existing Red Army figures from Battlefield, New Line a...

I didn’t play a game until May last year, and I was determined not to let 2025 start in the same way.  With a few hours on my hands a game of Sword Weirdos was in order, so I dug out my small collection of small pirates (15mm Peter Pig) and set up a 1ft square jungle board.  Introduction Parts of two rival ships' crews, The Hot Pearl led by Captain Lux and The Meteor led by Captain Pretty  Paul*, encounter each other while looking for lost treasure.  The scenario is based on the Treasure Surprise scenario in the Sword Weirdos rules.  Instead of the Mimic I've opted for deadly spiders that will make one attack and then disperse.  All the other rules are per the scenario with 5 treasure tokens placed on the board.   Each crew works out to 101 points with the full details here . Round 1 Starting positions The Hot Pearl crew to the right Pretty Paul from The Meteor wins the Initiative and uses 2 actions to claim a treasure token.  He doesn't...