After a couple of months without a bagged gift we decided to hit you hard with a haul of possible freebie frames this month. Courtesy of our friends at Warlord Games you will have received one of four splendid sprues: British Commonwealth Infantry, British 8th Army, Afrika Korps, or Italian Infantry and Blackshirts. If you didn’t get the one you wanted – quick, get back to the shop and buy another copy of the magazine!

All of these minis are suitable for your Bolt Action WWII adventures in the desert. Desert warfare has been described as a tactician’s paradise and a quartermaster’s nightmare, and this was evident in North Africa in 1940-43. As wargamers, we tend to be less concerned with the supply issues and delight in the nuances of the combat. Although harsh, the desert battlefield was almost devoid of interference, allowing the professional skills of the soldier to be applied tactically for purely military purposes, something that we can bring to the tabletop in our games.

On page 30, our resident painter Callum brings you a guide to getting your free figures desert-ready in no time at all, and we have hat-trick of further forays into the sun with articles on building Biscari Airfield, an excellent 10mm Desert War figure collection, and Rommel’s Favourites – the Bersaglieri. I would also like to point you in the direction of our Historicon 2022 report – it’s great to see this grand old convention firmly back on its feet again after last year’s lockdown curtailed event.