Winter War 2015: WIP

This model is a bit of a sneak preview of something I have floating around in my head for Force on Force.

He is a soldier from the Finnish Defence Force. This one is a test model, and I am rather pleased with the results.

Basically, although I love developing my African Force on Force campaign setting, set in the fictional country of Zugando, I felt that I would like to explore other areas of the world. Not feeling terrible comfortable with gaming in Afghanistan or similar locations, I began to look further a field for somewhere to set my new campaign.

The  ‘eureka’ moment came when I was researching the 1939 ‘Winter War’ between Soviet Russia and Finland and I thought ‘Aha…I could use this for Force on Force”. All I had to do was let my imagination go a bit wild, and to engineer some sort of conflict between Russia and Finland, set just a year or two in the future.

This has the added advantage of being more appealing to my regular gaming buddy Pulp Citizen. I think its fair to say that the FoF bug has never really gripped Pulp Citizen, and he is decidedly cool on the whole Ultra-modern thing. But as he is by decent part Finnish, and still has relatives over in that frozen Land, I reasoned that he might feel more motivated to play Force on Force if it involved protecting Fins from Russia.

As to the back ground…well I think I have a lot more work to do to iron that out. Rather like VBCW I will do some research, base some things in facts, make some leaps of logic, and then just fabricate a whole lot of stuff, to end up with a semi-plausible background to the conflict. I know Russia isn't really going to invade Finland, and that the two countries are on fairly good terms (diplomatically at least) but it shouldn't be too hard to come up with a reason for the conflict. Just look at Georgia in 2008.

As to the time scale for this project? Well I am still planning to get my Bolt Action Burma stuff finished first, and to wrap up a lot of Modern African stuff I have in the pipelines, so it will be a while before Russian tanks cross the border into Finland, but I am hoping I will be able to get the first few games in before the end of the year.

This figure is from The Assault Group and is a Russian soldier in a wool hat. It’s fair to say there are some similarities between the look of the Finnish Defence Force and the Russian army, and the TAG figures will serve for both, with different paint schemes. Red Star also makes some nice modern Russians.