Battleground Blitzkrieg now read

I am very pleased with my purchase. Nice overview of the Polish and French campaigns with lots of great photos. The Germans get army lists for both Poland and France which I thought was a good idea. The new special rules look interesting and seem very simple to add period flavour to games. The best sections for me were the scenarios. I particularly liked the fact they used small forces as I don't have large Blitzkrieg era collection, and no French or Poles. One Polish scenario caught my eye which needed just 3 or so tanks. One of the French scenarios would need just 30 odd figures. I think these small scenarios are great to start off collecting a force so that you can play them. Unlike the other books there wasn't a large scenario which is a shame but then size is subjective.

Now which force to start collecting first...

Wargames Room progress

It's a while since I last gave an update on the progress of the dream wargaming rooms, so I thought I'd post a few pictures. In summary things are moving steadily forward, and the design of the finished rooms is much more advanced.

The all important bathroom. You don't want to be making crucial tactical decisions if you're distracted. The missing tiles are for wall units. Lesson learnt just tile behind wall units. Old houses don't have level walls so our wall units that looked OK when we test positioned them now look like a couple of leaning towers of Pisa. Solved by just moving them slightly away from the wall, except that now that shows the bare plaster. Bother!

Discovered pink painted floor board under the carpet. This will be removed. Not that I'm against pink but I need to replace the floorbaords due to some rot. This room will have figure and terrain storage and a 6x4 board.

The interconnecting doorways have been studded ready for plaster boarding. This room will  be the main figure storage and house a 6x8 board.

The painting area hasn't changed much apart from the old ensuite doorways have been blocked up. The boards on the floor are to hide holes and perhaps more importantly stop people falling through. The holes are tiny compared to the boards I used.  One hole being foot sized. As is the hole in the bathroom ceiling below.

The office/study has a lot less in it since I last shared a photograph. Noticeably the ceiling. I have to take all of the down to straighten and strengthen the ceilings.

The floor in the office/study was painted light blue. A 150 years of sooty deposits released by removing the ceiling sorted that colour out.

I like my new scaffolding...

... As does Jess

Max on the other hand is not bothered and would like to know when I will be coming down to feed him

The Conway Wargames Club website is now live!

Well I finally finished it and sent it round the chief organisers of the club for approval and they liked it!

I settled on Wix as the website builder. I found it easy to use and most importantly it's free with the option to upgrade and pay if necessary.

My brief was to produce something that advertised the club on the web, telling people what we do and where we do it. The next important thing was to advertise what the next months game was to be.

One of the clubs' challenges is that apart from when we are face to face we don't all communicate in the same way and we probably can be grouped by our preferences e.g. some of us are great Facebook users, while others don't have accounts, others are email, and others prefer texts. If just one of these methods is used you would not reach all members, except perhaps for mobile phone texts.

The website is therefore a further addition is our styles of communication, as well as just advertising our presence.

We have a Facebook group to cope with social chatting so I didn't include this type of functionality.

Future developments may be a members page where games each of us want to put on can be scheduled for all to see to gather support and avoid duplication.

I confess that I had a look at other club sites for inspiration and borrowing of ideas and wording. The sites I found the most useful and used the art of 'cut and paste' were:
The Deeside Defenders
South London Warlords

So a big thank you to them for unknowingly providing me with quick way to get the clubs website up. If I have done something wrong by doing this please let me know and I'll change the site.

So if you want to see my very first website build or want to know more about the club go to:

Conway Wargames Club

Enjoy