Relief of Luckpore and Alpha Strike

Martin was back in town last weekend and six of us managed to get together for a couple of games, beers, pastries, and dinner.

The Luckpore game was a little lopsided, with the British side having too much of an advantage. This is likely due to us playing it as a once-off game instead of in the context of a campaign, where the British become saddled with Fatigue and low ammunition as the campaign progresses. I will need to make some tweaks to the game to make the contest more interesting for both sides. I have ordered a few packs of Essex Mughal musketeers to paint as matchlock men for an Indian prince, so we will visit these rules again once they are done.

For the second game we played a game of Alpha Strike. Now that we are more familiar with the rules, play is faster and more relaxed.

For the game in August I hope to run a game of Peter Pig's Conquerors and Kings, and maybe a game of Deth Wizards.

Battletech: Alpha Strike and Azul

Scheduling difficulties meant only Adrian and I were at this month's session, which was held at his place.

We played a game of Battletech: Alpha Strike, which was simple enough to set up and play to a conclusion within two hours. We hope to bring in more advanced rules in our future games.

We then played three games of Azul, which I have seen played before but had never learned the rules of. I really enjoyed it, and hope to be able to play it again.

Kings of War and Battletech Alpha Strike

The dwarven convoy crosses the bridge as the goblin forces close in

We managed to get five players around the table on Sunday, with an old friend whom I haven't met or gamed with in the last 20 years joining the group. Once again it would be a double-bill afternoon.

We played a game of Kings of War using a scenario from Battlegames' Tabletop Teaser. The scenario involved the dwarves having to get a couple of cannons off the table, while three separate goblin forces came at them.

Another goblin force approaches from the other side of the river

The dwarves had the option of keeping their cannons limbered, which would allow them to move faster, or unlimbering the guns, which would give them much-needed firepower, but means much slower progress.

In our game the dwarven players decided to move most of their force to counter the larger goblin force to their left. This allowed me, commanding a goblin force to the right, to ford the river uncontested and threaten the guns.

The dwarves hold off the goblins approaching from the far bank...

The dwarves deployed their miner unit to try to fend off my goblins, but the poor dice-rolls meant the goblins were able to fight them off and continue to move towards the cannons.

(For the record the dwarven side had spectacularly poor combat dice-rolls, while the goblins had excellent morale dice-rolls.)

The dwarves were finally forced to unlimber their guns to unleash grapeshot at the approaching goblin unit, which gave them ten dice, hitting on 6s - they scored 1 hit.

but the goblins from the near bank forded the river and cut the guns off!

I feel the game gave interesting tactical choices to the dwarven players, and to a lesser extent the goblin players too. It's certainly something I will want to run again in the future.

For the second game Adrian took us through Battletech Alpha, the third version of Battletech we have tried since we started our monthly sessions.

The game was fast enough, but lacks a lot of the granularity of the "original" Battletech. Thinking of it now I feel the game was designed the way it was not because it was a good way to design a mecha game, but because it was a cut-down version of the "full-size" game, and if one didn't imagine oneself as playing a mass-combat version of Battletech, the game would be less attractive.

Me running a Mad Cat again

After playing three versions of the game, my current favourite is Destiny. But given how many models the gang have bought and will (hopefully) paint, I guess we will need to come back to Alpha Strike to make sure everyone's models have a chance to get bloodied.

Battletech: Clan Invasion Expansion Box Set

First painted figures for the year.

A few weeks ago FG passed me the models from the Battletech Clan Invasion box set because I wanted to paint up a Madcat. Over the long weekend I decided I would try to paint up the remainder of the box since I have chosen a relatively easy paint scheme. This is the result.

I don't know what the names of the mechs are, or how many points they represent in the game - we are looking at at least three versions of the Battletech game now - but hopefully they will see some action soon regardless.

Napoleonics and Battletech Destiny

The Austrian cavalry take the heights north of Aspern, while simultaneously the Grenzers advance towards the orchard west of the town.

Desperate fight for the heights.

Mecha mayhem!

Yesterday Rick brought along the 15mm Austrians that he had bought literally ten years ago for their first game ever. While we own a French, an Anglo-Allied, and an Austrian army between us, we have seldom played Napoleonics as all the rules we have tried before we too labourious to prep for and play; systems like Age of Eagles required special labels for the command base of every unit on the table, the application of which already take up a chunk of time.

When Rick mooted the idea of playing a game, I revisited the To the Last Gaiter Button rules for FPW, and decided to give them another go. Looking at the distances and ground scales, I realised that the game could easily translate to Napoleonics by halving the scale and making one unit a battalion; better yet, by seeing the number of bases as a representation of the Combat Effectiveness of the unit and not the number of troops in the unit, it made it easier to translate historical orders of battle to game.

At this scale we could only play games with one or two divisions aside, for the our scenario I decided to depict only one part of a larger battle, in this case the Austrian attack on Aspern, pitting 11 battalions of infantry, four double-squadrons of light cavalry, and three foot batteries (each of 2 bases) against seven battalions of infantry, three double-squadrons of light cavalry, and one foot battery of the French. Unbeknownst (but suspected) by the Austrian players, the French would be reinforced in the middle of the battle by two double-squadrons of heavy cavalry.

The game uses a grid-based movement, and the players were initially a little surprised by the short movement and "shooting" ranges for infantry, but they pretty soon warmed up to it and realised that the limited movement meant that once a formation is committed to a particular axis of attack, it would be difficult to change one's plans. This was made worse by the fact that the game had a running clock: the Austrian had to capture the whole of Aspen (represented as two grids in our scenario) by 30 on the clock for a victory, and to capture the road leading from the south into Aspern for a major victory. At the start of each turn each side rolled a d6, with the side rolling higher choosing whether to move first but let the other side choose which of the scores to add to the game clock, or letting the opponent move first and choosing which score to add instead.

In our game the battle centred on two actions: an artillery bombardment followed by an infantry assault from the west and the north of Aspern, and a fight for the heights north of Aspern. Our game actually ended more or less as the historical battle did at the end of day 1, with the Austrians controlling half of Aspern and the French still keeping the road south open.

For our second game we played Battletech Destiny, which as I understand it is not a set of wargame rules, but a mash-up of the combat rules from the Mechwarrior: Destiny RPG and Battletech Alpha Strike rules.

I enjoyed the more streamlined combat resolution of the game, but perversely I would have preferred to keep the fiddly hex movement and facing of Battletech Classic.

Our group will be trying out the Alpha Strike rules in the future too, so stay tuned.

Battletech Alpha Strike Timberwolf

So after the last Battletech game we played I asked about piloting a Timberwolf (aka Mad Cat) because to me it is the quintessential mecha. Sadly, I learned that it is a Clan Mech and that it is anachronistic with all the other mechs the other guys have painted. Nevertheless, FG passed me his models from the Alpha Stroke kickstarter, and I painted the Timberwolf.

I used a Clan Ghost Bear variant colour scheme for the mech. The model is quite easy to paint, and dark grey is a rather forgiving colour.

Will this be the first of several Clan Ghost Bear mechas? Only time will tell...

Billhooks, Battletech, and Beer

Last Sunday we actually managed to get five of us together for an afternoon of gaming.

We opened with a game of Never Mind the Billhooks in preparation for the release of the Deluxe edition of the rules later this month. I used the set-up for Towton, and the game started with twenty-four 16-figure units on table, or close to 400 15mm figures. The archery was savage and decimated the front ranks on both sides before the Lancastrians finally made melee contact and the Yorkist right flank collapsed. Norfolk entered the table just before this happened, and decided to turn back to London.

We then played a test game of Battletech, which was really fun. Regular readers may remember that I have been looking at Battletech Alpha Strike and Reaper CAV as possible options for our regular mecha game, but now I am thinking Battletech (regular) may be a contender for the times we have enough players to play a team game.

We are now organising another session for the end of the month, when I hope to try out a grid-based Napoleonic game based on the To the Last Gaiter Button rules, and another game of Battletech.

ZOD Tank Company and Pendraken Sci-fi Marines

 

Even though I already own a small quad mecha force in the form of my Heavy Gear Caprice mechs, and a "Mad Max" style force in the form of my Dropzone Commander Resistance force, I have always wanted a Cold War era style mechanised force with tanks and IFVs.

I looked around for a long time, and eventually I decided that the best way to get the models I wanted in the smallest numbers of deliveries was to get a ZOD tank company off ebay and two packs of Pendraken's sci-fi marines.

The ZOD models are cheap "scale-less" models sometimes advertised as 15mm, but as you can see from the photo above they are closer to 10/12mm, with the vehicles being much wider than they should be "in real life", although the aspect ratios look fine for tabletop models.

For the camouflage I used a "bands and wedges" pattern, which I created by spraying the models with brown primer, then putting masking tape over the models, and then spraying a sand colour, and removing the masks. They are obviously not practical in real life, but at this scale, when looked at from certain angles, they do break up the shape of the vehicles.

Heavy Gear Caprice Mounts and Iron Wind and Reaper Chaos Warriors

I apologise for the scarcity of posts over the past few months, but I have been doing more RPGing than wargaming; but I have been painting.

These are the Caprice Mounts from the Heavy Gear kickstarter. They still need to be based, but the paint job is done. I painted them specifically with the mat that we are using for the game in mind, and I am quite pleased with the result.

These are the Chaos Warriors type I painted for our RPGs: twelve archers and twelve axemen from Iron Wind Metals, and two boss characters from Reaper. I shoot them on the 2D terrain tiles I use for RPGs because that was the main reason I bought and painted them. In our Dragon Age game they represented Hurlocks; in a Lone Wolf game they will likely represent Drakkarim. Of course they can be used in fantasy wargaming as generic Chaos Warriors too.

Continuing in the same theme, I am now painting twenty Frostgrave barbarians, with the short-term aim of using them as Avvar barbarians for the next arc in our Dragon Age campaign. I made the decision to paint them with white-and-black face and body paint as they are depicted in the computer game, which does make them a bit more specific and limit their use as historical figures. But the two test models I painted this weekend suggests that the white-and-black scheme does work in 28mm, so I will proceed as planned.

I will have a few months to paint the barbarians, because from the next session Jonn will take over as GM and continue our Shadowrun game, and after that fg will be making his GMing debut with Cubicle 7's Adventures in Middle Earth. I am pretty excited about both, and as much as I enjoy GMing, I welcome a break from having to do all the prep work before each session.

Mecha Sunday and Fun with Laser

As the gang are backing the Heavy Gear Blitz Kickstarter but we are a little intimidated by the rules, we decide to give two sets of mecha rules a spin to see whether we will like them.

The first one we tried was the introductory version of the Battletech rules. We each piloted one mech. It was a bit of a learning curve but the details allowed for some hilarity, like when the two mechs piloted by wahj and fg engaged in a kicking match, and both fell down - one with both hips damaged and the other one his gyros shot out; it was like a scuffle in a retirement home between a guy with Parkinson's and a guy with broken hips.

Two mechas have fallen down and can't get up!

The second game we tried was Mech Attack. This is a much simpler system which features a clever mechanic where each weapon type has a different damage profile and depletes the armour in a specific fashion. I liked the rules on first reading, but was bothered by the fact that there was no arc to the armour. I came up with two options to tweak the system, but neither was satisfactory. The third came to me at 4am in the morning and worked well enough with the rest of the rules I decided to try them this afternoon.

The gang liked the modified Mech Attack rules well enough that we will likely use it with our Heavy Gear models - but then again, the release is in 12 months and we have plenty of opportunity to try other sets of rules.

I loved the Battletech rules myself, but I think the details means it will be difficult for use to pilot more than one mech per player; with Mech Attack, we can conceivably pilot 2 or 3 with practice, perhaps more.

We then ended the session by trying to take photos of the mechs with laser effects. wahj brought along a green laser pointer and with the aid of some incense I had and a tripod we managed to produce a laser hit effect.

This photo shows the set-up we used.

Grown men playing with toys of robots, laser pointers, and fire... I guess it could be worse...