The Rhodesian Bush wars and The Catalan Company

I have been playing Force on Force with my friend Steve for a while now. We get together on Sundays and we go through the Scenarios of some of the  FoF books. We have been playing mostly from the Afghanistan scenario book, and mostly infantry missions, but we will start in a couple of weeks playing a scenario from the Fallujah  book which includes vehicles. We really like the system and we have been having a lot of fun, so much so that I ended up buying all the scenario books and have been going through them in detail. In particular I really like the Bush wars one, and I am putting together forces to go through the scenarios that take place in the Rhodesian bush war, the Congo Crisis and the South African Border wars. These wars are really interesting because they were really proxy wars between the Soviet Union and the USA in many ways (with Americans fighting as "freelancers" in some of them), and even if for the general public they remain somewhat obscure, they are tactically and historically very interesting and definitely fun to wargame.

I worked on some African bush terrain last week, and it is coming out nicely. I bought some aquarium plants at Michael's and some decorative dried brush

then I cut the tall grass in squares and glued them to round bases. Then I brushed some Elmer's glue to the bases and buried the base in modeling sand. After it dried, I stuffed some of the dried brush in between the blades of tall grass and added a bit more glue.

 

then I took the base and lightly spray painted brown on the base and on the tips of the grass to give it a dried and distressed effect. and once it dried out I cut with scissors the extra dried brush that was sticking out to make it look like it was a patch of over grown grass in the jungle.

 

 I need to make quite a few of these, but they do not really take much time to make and they are so much cheaper to make than trying to buying them commercially, and in all honesty, they look nicer than some of the ones that I have seen online.

Another project that I am working on is my Catalan Company for Art de la Guerre. There is a tournament coming and I want to get them ready to play. I finished some of my Aragonese cavalry  and started some Teutonic knights with metal barding for another list that I am putting together.

So, Next, I have to finish up all my Almughavars and start painting Rhodesian light infantry figures and Alouette III Helicopters.....