Tuesday, April 21, 2009

A New Direction

After several years of waffling, excuses and whining I have decided to jump into Flames of War. You might be wondering why this is such a big deal for me (then again you might not). Well, it is mostly a big deal because for some reason I have made it that way. I have spent a great deal of energy coming up with reasons for NOT playing this game all the while I have spend hours pouring over the FOW web site.

You see, I really like what Battlefront has done with this game. They have a really well designed product with excellent support. Their models and books are top notch. From all I have been able to see the game is very popular and plays well. In addition there are lots of options for models in 15mm...

15mm...this is where the trouble starts. You see, I hate 15mm. When I first started miniature gaming 15mm was a very tempting direction and I even invested in 15mm ACW for Johnny Reb III. There was a time when I was thinking about build a DBM army...the mind boggles. During this time I was also playing several GW games and was getting into Warhammer Ancient Battles, which are all 25/28mm games. To make matter even more complicated I had a large collection of World War II in 20mm for Battleground World War II. I also had a collection of micro armor which was 6mm. Things were getting out of control. I made a decision that I was only going to play games in one 'scale' and that was going to be 28mm.

After much thought I finally realized that 15mm was the only bad thing I could think of about Flames of War and it wasn't important enough to keep me from playing. So, now I am building an 8th Army British Infantry force for North Africa. Several other friends are also either working on armies for this game and period.

In the picture above you can see the start of my collection. Most of the infantry is from Old Glory's Command Decision line. I think that most of the vehicles will end up being Battlefront as they are very nice models. This should be a very fun project to collect and paint and I am planning a series of posts as the project moves ahead. Stay tuned.

3 comments:

sovietspace said...

Ah Flames of War, I'm struggling to resist it too. I'm an horrific history buff and your right, the game and models all looks really well done.

The main reason I'm resisting is that I know I'd have to commit completely, and my 40k wouldn't see the light of day for a while!

Please keep us all updated on your thoughts on the game etc.

The Inner Geek said...

I tinkered with Flames of War a couple years ago. It did seem like a good system, the few games I played. And, the models were top notch. It just didn't how my attention and I believe it was the scale that kept me from going further. I love both the GW epic scale (6mm?) and regular scale (28mm), but FoW just seemed odd to me because it was neither of what I was used to.

Charles Feduke said...

An excellent decision. I own a game store and paint and play most (all?) of the popular game systems but our Friday night gatherings for Flames of War is what I look forward to the most. The game plays fast, its fun, and offers a lot of unique modeling opportunities. I have nothing but good words for Battlefront; working with their sales reps has always been very smooth. They are very committed to their customers and are constantly offering up new Intelligence Briefings weekly for free (you could consider 2-3 of these a full codex GW normally sells for $20).

I just completed a North Africa British tank army myself. Going to work on the infantry later this summer when the new hardcover North Africa book is released.