Historicon 2017 – 3mm madness

This year’s theme for Historicon is “100 Years of the Tank”.  That seemed like a perfect excuse to getting really cracking on a project I’ve been kicking around on for a couple of years now – the tanks battles in North Africa using the really nice 3mm armor from Picoarmor.  I had picked up some of these in the past to use as targets in Check Your 6! games and was really, really impressed by the detail and intrigued by the possibility of doing a unit based game where the stands really look like units and not individual tanks.  A while back I bought a bunch of German tanks and experimented with painting and basing, but the project got sidetracked by various other games.

However, that is all at an end now because I have punched the button and submitted two sessions of a 3mm Operation Battleaxe game for Historicon 2017.  For this project I am using the Piquet Field of Battle World War II rules.  These rules are designed for doing division scale games with each stand representing a company and the battalion as a basic maneuver element.  They feature a card based sequence of play combined with variable numbers of move bounds to give a real ebb and flow that I think will suit the desert well.  The game also is set up to offer the ability to do multi-day battles.

I have decided that for this game I’m going to set the companies up at ~1:2 scale (for vehicles at least – infantry will be less) with 7 or so vehicles on each base.  That gives a nice “unit” look without turning each base into a miniature tank parking lot.

1. Kompanie I/8. Panzer Regiment

So far I’ve finished the first battalion of German armor (I Battalion / 8. Panzer Regiment).  You can also see in the pictures some prototypes of a couple of the markers for use in the game,  Smoke columns to show lost strength points and the ambulance to show Supressed units.  I still need to come up with a marker for marking units that have fired (and are thus not eligible to fire again until the next Firepower card is drawn).  I’m thinking of a supply truck, but I have to make sure that can be modeled easily and be sufficiently recognizable from the basic units (as the ambulance is).

I’m planning to post updates on the project as I go.