The Western Desert in 6mm

I usually play 1940-ish games in 15mm, but I have piles of 1/300 and 1/285 stuff that never gets used any more, so I thought I might use them to branch out into other theatres without incurring the expense of retooling completely in 15mm.

The first up will be North Africa, for BG Tobruk initially (of course), and then BG Torch when it comes out. I have a H&R 1980s BAOR force on its way as well, but that's a whole other project.

One thing that I'm concerned about though is infantry basing: the thought of manipulating individual 6mm figures makes me throw up a little bit in my mouth, so they'll have to be on multiple-figure bases.

Those of you who already have experience of playing BG in 6mm, how have you based your figures? Do you use twos, threes and fours and swap out bases as casualties are taken, or do you just base in squads/sections and rely on some sort of casualty markers?

I can't speak from experience (yet) but I plan on playing North Africa with 1/285 scale as well. As far as basing infantry, a friend and I were talking about the same issue today and what were considering is basing multiple figures per base (3-5 figures) and using damage markers. Of course you can always use small dice for counters but we're worried they might over shadow the figures at such a small scale.

A thought we had was to use something on the base itself such as beads. It should be easy enough to create with the MDF bases we plan on using, just drill and glue in a rod and use beads to represent figures. It should work well if the beads themselves aren't to hard to take off/on and we don't have little beads littering the floor after every game. As a bonus the rod should act as a handle when moving the base around and if we really want to camouflage the beads as damage markers we could put little flags on the end of the rods to represent platoons

I already have some bits and pieces painted, so I have a head start for the desert war in 1941-ish. These guys are from Heroics & Ros, a 2 pounder AT platoon with little Morris tows. I usually just charge in and paint whatever takes my fancy, but I think that this time I might take a more disciplined approach, and work out what I actually need for my lists and paint just that stuff. That way, maybe there will be more chance of actually getting something finished. (Ha! Yeah, right.)

1941 means lots of Caunter pattern camouflage, which I can't say I particularly enjoy painting. However, it's a lot easier in 6mm than in the larger scales.

I've decided to multi base for BG. IE for BBO the German squad/group is 5 men and a 3 man LMG team. So I going to base the LMG team separately.
Im going to use 5mm 6 sided die to keep track of casualties.

I have gone for 3,2,1 figures on bases to swap out for casualties.

Yep... I did bases with various numbers of figures on for playing in 6mm.

Fitz... those desert models look stunning!

They all look fabulous.

This project has been slightly derailed — or delayed — by the arrival of my H&R BAOR stuff. The Cold War is the period my usual opponent is most interested in playing at the moment, so that's what we'll do... for the moment.