Landing craft production in full swing

Having recently completed a commando raid game of St. Nazaire. It got me thinking about a D-Day style game and this idea was soon reenforced after re-reading Chapter 28 "Landing in Force" from War Game Campaigns (Donald Featherstone) and Chapter 8 "Disaster at D-Day - and other big games" from Operation Warboard (Gavin Lyall). However, I lacked any landing craft to undertake a game of this sort, and decided to take a similar approach to the St. Nazaire game by using bits of wood and MDF board to create some very basic landing craft.

The landing craft themselves are constructed by cutting a 42mm x 30mm wood to shape with one end angled, adding MDF board on top and for the ramp, and finally adding a pilot house made from some 10mm x 20mm wooden dowel.

The models are painted grey and receive a light sanding to remove any obvious rough areas of wood grain.

Once all the bits were cut out (and I included a gun emplacement) they were such together using PVC wood glue. The wooded models were given a coat of grey and lightly sanded once dry. Then the major details were painted. As you can see from the photos the cargo bays are painted black to give the impression of a cargo area when the models have none to simplify their construction.

Rather than building models with a cargo bay. The bay area is represented by painting them black.

Using the same chalk pastel approach I did with the St. Nazaire models. A light shading of black and blue was drawn over the grey paint before using a light grey pastel to blur and blend in some of the blues and blacks. A white pastel was used to highlight the landing craft edges and corners. Finally, a light shading of dark brown and dark green was used to soften the black representing the cargo bay.

A coat of PVA glue is applied to seal the pastel colours

The finished product made from 4 bits (2 bits of MDF board and 2 bits of wood)

I now need to plan a series of games with some paratroopers capturing a bridge to delay reinforcements, a beach landing, a counter attack, and maybe a final breakout game assuming the landings are successful.

Here are a few photos of the landing craft on the tabletop to show off the models and how the beach landing game may look.