Nice Static display in the middle of no where. (EASY-8)

Old Hickory is a Static display out side a defunct VFW post turned into a currently shuttered Bowling Alley in Rogersville, Tn. USA. The only reason the town might be familiar to the ear is the Netflix show "Swap-Shop" Its a trailer park version of "Pawn Stars" with a lower budget and less interesting Junk. 

I cant vouch for the authenticity of the vehicle or it's service record, but the limited restoration makes a nice picture for anyone working on a model.

Most people in town are vaguely aware of it's presence, and it's easy to get a picture free of locals most days. 

Location:

Old Hickory

ANZAC in Vietnam

 Back in Mid-September I had been asked to run a couple of games at a Kansas City game shop called Table-Top-Games. A Fantastic establishment, but the show case of games was called off due to some reason or another. Plans had been established prior to go and Months before, I managed to talk an old friend of mine into running a game he published called F.N.G. (Darby Eckles). He was flying from Dallas so he couldn't put terrain in the overhead. A group of us scrambled to put together a game in 28mm for the Vietnam period. It was a mixed bag of models, terrain, and figures.

The scenario is for our Platoon to patrol a rather quiet area, Capture any pro-communists (or amateurs)  and return them to interrogation at the HQ.   

 

Our Platoon consisted of a piecemeal unit of Kitchen staff, motor pool personnel, and some guys from the PX. Our mission was to search a rubber plantation for evidence of collaboration. A Low intensity encounter.   

 This Quiet peaceful village would soon be ablaze with the fires of democracy.

3 miles of bad road

   

 Not sure why this stuff is called Elephant grass it's full of Tigers. 

The Magic Bus

This is the rubber plantation's processing area. 

    For  religious monk who disregards materialism, what's in the bag of stuff?

For some reason it became imperative to acquire an old truck on the plantation.  

Never get caught in Bamboo. The encounter with the monkey residents was a lesson to the green troops. (Sans Monkey figures, we didn't have any.)

The Game ended with us capturing North Vietnamese Tax collectors in a Taxi.

  Then dusting off in a Chinook, For some reason none of those pictures were taken.

Pretty certain this was a war crime going on. 

 

Game two was a capture and hold scenario  

Seems simple: Cross a river, set up watch on a hill till relief arrives. No we got this!

 

Good rules for Vietnam, you never know what in the hell will be encountered next. Team play is smooth and it adds a little role playing to the game.

 

The final Battle was full of causalities. In conclusion it was nice to play a Vietnam scenarios where there wasn't a PBR or a Huey in the mix, something rarely seen at conversion games as players try to capture the Hollywood aspect of the conflict.    

 

 

This Old House

 

This is the Warlord games kit "Ruined Farm House", a single version of the Building in the "Ruined Village Set". For the most part the kit doesn't get a lot of credit for it's elegance. There are a lot of ruined buildings out there but few, have the robustness that represent the thickness of a stone buildings in ruins. 

I like terrain. More so than actual miniatures. Anybody can buy a box of mini-soldiers and paint them up to specification, some with such detail it's lost at arms length but conscription leads to uniformity and homologous detail. I feel the real reflection of the passion of a hobbyist is in the unique quality, the details of the terrain they place on the board. If your a bit of lichen, one stone, and single rock wall kind of a guy cool! Throw some dice and play. The real flavor comes from terrain.  

 

 

I built this as a piece that I wanted to have a story, not just another scattered rock or bush. So I put details in it much like archeology gives clues to it's former inhabitants both original and transient. 

The Idea was to overlap the time lines, first all of the remaining furniture in the house is weather worn and sun bleached. The former owners abandon this residence long before this war kicked off and possibly it has seen two world wars or more of deterioration. The occupation of this place by transient parties can be seen by the carefully placement of an empty bottle on the outer wall and the abandon German helmet on the window sill. The fire place contains fresh soot and ash from recent use. 

The chair in the archway has seen recent use, and somehow managed to escape both bombardment and the fire place. Somethings all occupants value is a nice place to sit after a long trek. 

An Awkwardly balanced lounge picked clean of cushion, Just put there to let the observer think about how that scenario manifested. 

A living tomato plant, a discarded seed or the remains of a former garden?

Several scattered wooden buckets and tubs, not buried by the rubble suggesting the possibly use recently. I also placed some cut tubes of styrene, I painted to look like empty ration tins but the rubble pile did a good job of hiding those in the pictures. 

So how and where rubble falls I find fascinating. It is really not something that most gamers model. I did spend years in Archeology classes, so that is on me. However, I hear it on forums all the time " I can't put my mini's on the terrain if I put that junk all over the floor. It falls over." Your basing it wrong. If the mini is lighter than the base, it doesn't fall over. 

Every part of this model was washed and dry brushed many times over to mute the colors into a blended pallet that reflected the desired aging and bleaching of the environment. I played with the idea of hiding an animal in the wreckage but preferred the defiant structure to feel more ghostly than alive.