The one about digital wargaming and digital modeling.

Today marked the third time that I and my mate Jonas, who lives across the baltic in Finland, got together to learn and play 1766:The game of the American Revolutionary War by Avalon Hill.
It came out in -74 so has a few years under it's belt and remains a fan-favourite by all the people I can find who reviews and plays it online.
Myself, I picked it up on an auction at a convention over a decade ago and haven't touched it since. A month or so ago I spotted it somewhere in the back-row of my Kallax (we all have a Kallax, right?) and decided to give it a go as a sologame. 
After some browsing I realised it really is best as a 2 player game so I went looking for it in Tabletop Simulators workshop. Lo and behold, there was a very nice version floating about and I was sold.

(Somewhere here I should mention that we have 3 wonderful and lovely Sphynx's in the house. They REALLY want to do whatever we do, no matter what we do. A couple of favourite things are to chase the ends of paintbrushes, chits and most of all, dice...  So yeah, digital is a godsend now and again.)

TTS is a really nice piece of software and I feel like Im way behind in discovering it. There's a huge community for most big IPs in wargaming as you might know. Not to bad to get into it either, even tho the finer points still eludes me, like importing OOBs automagically into it and how to find and add nice 3d models for the tabletop wargames I wanna play.
In the pipeline the games I am looking at are:
*Altar of Freedom. It is an ACW game I want to try out as I have a 6mm ACW project on the horizon.
*DBA3.0. Again based on my armyprojects that are going on ever so slowly, mainly for DBMM.
*All of the OPR games, mainly Warfleets and the smallgang ones. For these I need to watch some tutorial on how to make armies and inject them into different peoples games (there is a big TTS community for the systems).
*Horde of the Things, HoTT. This came up today with Jonas. We are going to play some P&P-Rpgs on cam together with our better halves and he has a homebrew world thats over a decade in the making. Several past gaminggroups have built alot of the lore in it ny various adventures. I mentioned that we could play HoTT in that world and use the outcomes from scenarios and campaigns as backstorys for the different cultures and countries. He really liked the idea, so we need to figure this out sooner rather than later. Same as for OPR regarding armybuilding tho and my HoTT-rulebook is still in the mail. Ordered it 2 weeks ago so any day now.

Anyhow, 1766..
We played scenario #2, The invasion of Canada which added a few more units and rules to keep track of. Easy enough after a few phases. Jonas won as the 'muricans but next time I get a go at it, as we plan on playing each scenario twice, switching sides thru the campaign.

Screenshot after the last American phase, sadly there were no british left for my turn.

Apart from that my hobbytime today has mainly been about kitbashing some STLs I got in a Kickstarter the other week. They are western-front buildings for WW2 with a train, tracks and whatnot from the KS Neufmarche. It's ofcourse in 28mm so I have been rescaling them to 6mm and at the same time merging the pieces together in Chitubox so they print as one solid model. 
I know, I know..
I should use some 3d modelling software... 

I am _very_ new to CAD/sculpting so have been using TinkerCAD up until now. both for my own modelling and remixing existing sculpts. Imagine my suprise when said TinkerCAD only supports imports under 25mb. Ofcourse the main parts of Neufmarche are above that. 

So instead of finally open and learn Blender, I did it in Chitubox. 
The result was bad... I mean, they print as nicely as ever but hollowed buildings with small drainholes for the extra resin trapped inside just don't work as nicely as just merging the pieces and chopping out everything from the inside and out in CAD.
The models are salvageble, but messy and have some, now hardened, runs of resin in a few places. 

You live and learn. 
Tomorrow I open Blender... Promise.

Factory with a couple overhead cranes and two shops.

Apart from 3 buildplates of terrain (more pictures to come as I paint them) I did some research for my 6mm May -40 french and lined up some models to fill out my OOB for FFT3. 
This meant more lorrys and halftracks, aswell as a few Renault UEs with trailers, AMX 35s and to round it out; Panhard 178s.
If anyone knows of a nice STL for an AMX 33, please let me know. I need it but can't find any.

All free models from various sculptors on Thingiverse.

The evening is still young and I am waiting on my frenchies to finish cooking in the printer, so I should turn my attention to the terrainpieces I started a few days ago an slapped som gluepaint on this morning after the 1766 game. 

Cheers.
/Fred
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