Screw Wars

(I mean that literally but in two different ways.)

I’ve long been inspired by Tony Adam’s woodscrew wargaming army:

https://thewoodscrewminiaturearmy.blogspot.com/?m=1

Unfortunately Tony passed away two years ago. But the spirit of woodscrew wargaming lives on. The Man of Tin blog frequently references Tony’s army, and only the other day I spied some woodscrews being used on Instagram by one of my favourite Instagrammers Wolfliche:

I’d not dabbled in woodscrews before, I did produce some rawl plug Celts and Romans a while back:

And spaceships:

Not to mention my matchstick ancients too:

Or making barbarian hordes from sugar:

But alas I’d yet to dabble in screws!

So I picked some up, a set from Amazon containing 6mm, 8mm, 10mm and 12mm (150 of each) for £9. I got mine in black, thinking that if my humble acrylic paints chip you’ll see the black underneath, instead of silver or gold.

I mounted mine on 20mm wooden discs, and superglued cut off ends of cocktail sticks (toothpicks) for guns:

Giving myself a command base (the two man one at the front), three regular infantry bases, and two heavy infantry bases. I used 8mm screws for those and gave each one two guns. I thought all that assembly would be fiddly, but in fact it was a breeze and that’s with my somewhat shaky hands.

Painting was a strange experience, as I guess you’re trying to hide that it’s a screw, however they’re also so small, people shouldn’t notice at gaming distance.

The guns got painted silver with a dot of black on the ends, I painted the screws themselves blue with red at the top for some sort of helmet (the command base got gold helmets instead). Using a light blue I dotted where the shoulders should be, and then I finished up by adding a black dot, followed by a smaller silver dot to add a visor to the face, and that was it. Not much up close, but…

The further you step back the better the illusion:

Traditionally I’d have to expand this force quite a bit to get some sort of game, but what if I made an opposing force of similar size and then really went for something quick and easy that plays on a 6”x6” board? Something with basically no setup… that could be an idea!