WW2 WInter Finns – Spring Cleaning 2024

Project Blog by hpdandy

Recommendations: 7

About the Project

A couple years back the local gaming scene discovered Bolt Action and got very excited about it. I had already been playing for years but, my primary gaming partner packed up the family and moved out of state to learn to be a farmer in preparation for taking over his wife's family farm. With the new interest in historical gaming, I was happy to be able to get back to my WW2 projects. I already had a complete late war German force and a German Africa Corps. I had started some Americans and Brits. I had Soviets on sprue and I had picked up enough miniatures, still in box, to build Italians. With the new players flocking to the "big four" forces I wanted something very different. My old gaming partner had a very successful run with the Greeks he had built, so I looked to the lesser know, and limited forces in the various Bolt Action books. That's when I decided on Finland. Not only is the force uncommon, but they are limited in options but, have some fun units and force special rule. Being an avid 3d printer I quickly found a set of stl models I liked and in a short week and fully printed my army. Now if I had only finished the Finnish....

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As the force stood after making a tournament appearance and was then shelved...

Mar 30 2024

As I had mentioned in the “About the Project” section, I had decided to 3d print my winter Finns. The thing was, it was going to be for a tournament and I had a very short amount of time to make the army.

I’m a big advocate of 3d printing for war gamers, especially if you are a historical player. When ever I try to pitch historical war gaming to others one of the big selling point I mention is, there is no intellectual property issue with historical war games. You can source you little men and vehicles from anything. Any company, any model kit, anything you make yourself is ok to bring to the table…as long as it’s the correct scale and reasonably represents what it supposed to be. You even get a little wiggle room in the area of scale. 28mm can be covered with 1/48th to 1/56th vehicles. Realistic scale to heroic scale people. I’ve known several gamers run their infantry towards the heroic scale 28mm and run their vehicles at 1/56th. Something about the infantry being more detailed and not skinny looking and the vehicles at 1/56th being more historically accurate. Or something. To each their own.

The second big selling point I pitch is, once you have a historical force in whatever scale you chose, you will always have that force to use across multiple gaming rule sets and there is no company that can wave their magic IP wand and make a unit, vehicle, force no longer exist, or power creep you into bigger and more expensive models/kits.

So, with my Finns, I had got everything based but, I was unable to get the force fully painted in time for the tournament. This was not going to be an issue though since there were so many new players no one really had a fully painted army yet and painting was not part of the overall scoring.