ReaperCon - Thursday Day One

Day two arrives, everything is ready to go and I'm ready to run games.
The RPG area, gamers are gathering for the first games

 Derek from Denver made it down, despite his car breaking down 50 miles outside of Denton. He is one of my CMPA folks

 Despite it being the morning of the con, my dungeoncrawl area has to come to a stop sometimes so they can ship stuff out.

 Open painting in the middle, freelanced sculptors and painters around the outside.

 The painting competition room waiting for the first entries to arrive

 Dungeoncrawl style games getting started up. In the back is the Dungeon of Dread, followed by the Sunken City game, then the Cowboy game and then Kraken's Revenge, the game I'm running.

 One of my first vict...players of the day. Yes, there is a pirate theme.

 Sonic setting up. They have a grill on the loading dock so the food is fresh

 And Sonic in full swing

 Kraken's Revenge ready to go

 The VCR parts challenge. Someone donates something with cool parts on the inside and, for this year, a box of dinosaurs. Using the parts from the machine (in this case an old printer) build the object of your choice and the winner (most creative) will be announced on Saturday.

 One of the Warlord tournament tables. This one will support three games during the course of play. The section was built by Ed Eckelkamp and you can find the WIP thread at http://www.terragenesis.co.uk look in the WIP forum for ableman33's thread: Mediterranean Island Pirate Mega Map

 Warlord tournament squeezed into the miniature storage area

 Another angle of the Pirate Island

 Learning the new software for the painting competition

ReaperCon - Wednesday - Day 0

Wednesday is a semi-official day at Reapercon. They are busy changing over the manufacturing area over to convention space. We also discovered some more permanent changes at the building as well. They feed everyone BBQ from one of the local places.
The new employee breakroom, this will be registration

 A current Reaper Miniatures employee

 The game store in the front of the building. Apparently they sell miniatures here.

 The front of the warehouse, blister miniatures are stored here ready to ship.

 The paint production and storage area. Actually Sonic will be here for the weekend.

 The Reaper Miniatures Cat Supervising - Mama San

 More Reaper Employees

 Getting ready for the show

Review - Armored Attack 1944 Steven Zaloga

Armored Attack 1944 Steven Zaloga

US Army Tank Combat in the European Theater from D-Day to the Battle of the Bulge

Stackpole Books, copyright 2011

The first volume of the two book series “Armored Victory 1944” was waiting for me when I got home from work yesterday. Another massive tome filled with pictures.

This is essentially a collection of photographs culled by Zaloga, mostly, from the WWII US Army Signal Corps photo collection. It is divided into chapters with a very short introduction at the beginning of each chapter. Like the second volume it is packed full of pictures of all the US Armor deployed in the ETO. Unlike the second volume though this one has a lot of “catalog” pictures of the various vehicles as well. These photos give you a nice factory fresh view of the vehicle ready to be handed over to a crew. Again there are plenty of pictures of knocked out vehicles although probably more German than American this time since it covers the Normandy breakout period. As a bonus there are photos of 2^nd Armored Division armored infantry in the short lived camouflage suits.

I really only have the same criticism that I did with the second volume in the series in that when there are three photographs to a page they are just a little small.

If you are a WWII US Army armor buff then this is a must have for your collection. The list price is $44.95 but I think I paid about half that getting it through Amazon.

Review - Armored Victory 1945, Steven Zaloga

Armored Victory 1945 Steven Zaloga

US Army Tank Combat in the European Theater from the Battle of the Bulge to Germany’s Surrender

Stackpole Books, copyright 2012

At heart I am a fairly serious tank buff (from a modeling perspective) with my interest, primarily, centered on WWII US and German vehicles. This last week I had an opportunity to get three of Steven Zaloga’s more recent books on the US armored forces during WWII in Europe. The first to arrive was “Armored Victory 1945”. This is actually the second volume in a two volume set and just happened to be the first of the three books to arrive.

This is my first Zaloga book that was not published by Osprey. This is essentially a collection of photographs culled by Zaloga, mostly, from the WWII US Army Signal Corps photo collection. It is divided into chapters with a very short introduction at the beginning of each chapter. Each photograph has its own caption with quite a bit of information and often including the location and the unit that the vehicle belonged to. I know I have seen at least a third of these photographs in other publications but the rest were new to me and the caption information, even on photographs I have seen, is almost invaluable . The bulk of the photographs feature the numerous varieties of M4 Sherman tank, but almost all US armored vehicles appear on the pages. There are more photos here of the M24 Chaffee ( nicknamed the Pantherpup but GIs) and M26 Pershing (Designated the T26 at the time of their deployment) than I have seen anywhere else.

Pages feature 2 – 3 photographs with captions and if I had a criticism it would be here. When there are 3 photographs on a page they tend to be a little to small to make out all the details that interest me as a modeler. That’s about the worst thing I can say about this book. There is a huge variety of photographs, including plenty of examples of knocked (some still burning) US and German tanks. In fact if you are interested in modeling a knocked out vehicle this book as more pictures of destroyed Shermans, Panthers, Jagdpanzers, Hetzers and Jadgtigers than I have seen in a single collection.

If you are a WWII US Army armor buff then this is a must have for your collection. The list price is $44.95 but I think I paid about half that getting it through Amazon.

Review - Hermann Goring Panzer Division in Sicily Campaign Series

I am ever so slowly accumulating Germans for my Hermann Goering company for Flames of War and since I'm a bit obsessive about research on these things I have been gradually accumulating books on this division. Today my newest book arrived: Hermann Goring Panzer Division in Sicily Campaign Series by Claude Gillono and published by The Factory Publishing out of Australia. Let's just say that this is page for page one of the most expensive books I think I have ever purchased. The closest rival would be the Saga rulebook which weighed in at $40. This little book is 32 pages long, 36 if you count the covers, which to be honest, do have pertinent information. It works out to a dollar a page, a bit of sticker shock.

This is primarily a picture book and it has 2 photos on just about every page. There is a short introduction and history of the division in the front as well as a brief organization chart of the division as it appeared in Sicily. Which by the way is yet another source that confirms that the HG panzergrenadiers were at least partially equipped with the SdKfz 251/1. There are four pages of colors plates, five if you count the back cover. There is also a page that illustrates the nature of the clock face emblem used by the division to indicate a vehicle's unit (battalion and company) in addition to a variety of other emblems found on the color plates. Unfortunately the chart is on the inside of the back cover and is black and white and as I recall color was an important part of the clock symbol. However, I do have that information in another book (Hermann Goring from Regiment to Fallschirmpanzerkorps, by Roger Bneder and George Petersen, published by Schiffer Publishing).

Great photos, a bit disappointing in that the vast majority are of the StuG IIIs and StuH from the third battalion;  9th, 10th and 11th companies. The quality of some of the images is amazing and there are some unusual shots as well. Overall its a pretty good book, quality information, great pictures by very pricey to say the least.