15mm World War Two

I've been playing Nuts! by Two Hour Wargames on and off for about a year now. Once you get your head around the rules, it's a fun solo or co-op game. I've had it on the back burner for a while, being busy with work and life.  But I'm going to pick it up again.

When I first got into Nuts!, I thought the game was squad level.  But in fact, it's platoon level.  So you can end up with 40+ figures for each side plus reinforcements. I started building my forces with 28mm figures. After I accumulated a bunch, I dove into the rules and ran several satisfying campaigns.  Things went well, but started to get stale after a while. In every game I had the same terrain and figures every time.  I started re-thinking my 28mm decision.

First, the table was getting crowded, as I like to play on a 4x4.  Also, Nuts! really shines if you have a big collection of support choices like tanks, AFVs, artillery, MGs, mortars, etc. This is very costly in 28mm.  Then the terrain at 28mm also takes a lot of storage and is also expensive.  While most of my WW2 terrain could double for 40K games, it couldn't for Fantasy/LotR which is my first love. So I'm reluctant to plunk down a lot of money for a bombed out Belgian row house!

So I'm converting to 15mm WW2.  For $46 I now have replaced all my US and German platoons.  It cost more than twice that for the same figures in 28mm! I've also picked up some 15mm terrain, which is readily available for WW2 games thanks to the popularity of Flames of War.

I've been working steadily on getting both US and German forces ready. I'll be adding Russian and British, and then US Marines and Japanese.  At 15mm prices, I can actually afford to collect all this.  Here's my German Grenadier platoon.

These are all Battlefront miniatures, which I just picked off the rack at my LGS. The platoon blister comes with a command section, four NCOs, machine guns, and a mortar team.  It's all I need for a game of Nuts! in one package. The two StuGs I had laying around from the old FoW Open Fire boxed set. For now they are the only support options for the Germans. Here are a few close ups.

I researched the StuG camouflage patterns and discovered that they seemed lightly airbrushed.  Since my airbrush is broken, I did the right thing and ignored the historical accuracy.  I just blobbed on stuff the way it looked good to me.  Below the StuGs, I pulled out a squad leader and a few grunts to show some detail.

That's it for now.  I'm working on my US rifle platoon this week and hope to polish it off by next weekend. Since I have a US rifle company for FoW already, my US platoon is going to have access to a lot of reinforcement and support options.  It'll be good to have all that FoW stuff pull double duty.