2024 Review - Rolling Dice

It's been a very patchy year in terms of playing games, mainly due to six months working full time and a lack of spare time to spend on actual wargaming. Nonetheless, I've had a couple of excellent games of Strength and Honour, despite still not having a proper grasp of the rules, several very enjoyable pre-dreadnought and WW2 naval games, some one off games of old favourites including Saurian Safari, Bag The Hun, Knights of the Sky and Back of Beyond, together with some new things like Blood Red Skies (of which I am not a fan). Not everything has been a success, the MiG Alley introductory game being a good example, but on the whole it's been a rewarding, if less than extensive spread of wargaming over the course of the year. Unfortunately, its also been very inconsistent, with a strong start fizzling out after three or four months, only picking up right at the end. I really need to make more of an effort to get to the club and to pick up my solo efforts at home, when I have time to set up a game, especially to try out new rules and get stuff on the table after I've spent so much time painting it. I have some ideas for 2025 that might help this along in the right direction. 

Submarine Safari Sea Creatures

 

I have a decent collection of plastic prehistoric sea beasties for Submarine Safari but few of the smaller creatures, so I have ordered some nice metal ones from HLBS. If you spend twenty quid on dinosaurs they also send you a free copy of Saurian Safari and Submarine Safari as pdfs, which I thought was great customer friendly service, especially when I just asked if the underwater reptiles counted as dinosaurs and was immediately sent the rules free of charge. Top marks to Richard from HLBS!

Submarine Safari

 

The Saurian Safari game last night went down very well, so I'm thinking of reviving my underwater prehistoric hunting plans using the Submarine Safari variant originally published in Wargames Illustrated. I collected quite a lot of plastic subaquatic wildlife for this and somewhere I have a couple of packs of the old HLBS deep sea divers to use for hunting parties. It could be a lot of fun!

Saurian Safari Club Game

That was absolute carnage but good fun and a great way to make use of my very old dinosaur hunter collection. In the end two of the expedition gun bearers were eaten but numerous prehistoric beauties were blown to smithereens in the process. I think everyone enjoyed it, so another game may appear at some point in the future, perhaps set in the Ice Age or even underwater for a change of scenery.

Saurian Safari Supplies

 

I've been getting the stuff ready for the Saurian Safari game at the club tomorrow night and I'd forgotten just how much clobber you need to run the game. I have boxes of plastic dinosaurs, jungle, temple ruins and various other bits and bobs, along with some metal figures, the rules, record sheets, tables, reference charts and lots of assorted dice. For what is a very simple game I think I need some sort of Victorian manservant, valet, or similar underling to help me shift it all!

Saurian Safari Club Game Competiton Rules

 

I spent an hour or so this afternoon rewriting the original player briefing sheet for the Saurian Safari club game, with a few tweaks to make it more suitable for individual or pairs of hunters rather than teams. I'm happy with the end result which should make for an enjoyable game. I've also reworked the record sheet for the player characters to tidy it up and add some additional options. The plastic dinosaurs have also been located in the loft, so it's just a matter of working out a method for dinosaur placement and hidden movement using the hexon terrain tiles instead of a simple grass mat.

Saurian Safari Reboot

       

I thought it might be fun to reboot Saurian Safari at the club this year, having not run a game for many years, the last one being in 2014. This used to be a club favourite and we even turned it into an award winning show participation game, with the twist being pirates vs dinosaurs. I've got the rules somewhere and no shortage of plastic dinosaurs to go on the rampage, so have advertised a game in a few weeks for both old and new players to take part. I just have to remember how to run it!

Pulp!

I'm a sucker for a free figure special offer, so a 28mm Biggles bundled in with a pre-order copy of the new Pulp! rules from Osprey was a no brainer. I've played quite a lot of games in the Pulp interwar skirmish genre using a variety of rules including, for example, the excellent Fistful of Lead, so already have some suitable figures and terrain. I am thinking of using the new rules as a substitute for Saurian Safari, one of my favourite pulp style games, so I'm hoping it will include rules for big game hunting, specifically for dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasties!

Hexon Plans

I'm sure this will be very useful!

I got to open my big box of Xmas Hexon terrain tiles yesterday and have been playing around with the tiles, hills and roads, thinking up interesting ways to make the most of them before the other half asks any awkward questions. Apart from AK47 and Saurian Safari, which I've used the club Hexon for in the past, I have devised a few cunning plans of my own including, for example, using 1/144th scale model aircraft for low level WWII Russian Front air wargaming, converting the board game Tank on Tank to 15mm miniatures and even an AK47 inspired 'Imaginations' modern jet dogfighting game. One thing it would be ideal for is Wings at War, especially the Thud Ridge Vietnam module, which would be easy to set up with the Hexon tiles. However, it would be a shame not to utilise the hexes for game mechanics, so I'm also going to delve into Bob Cordery's library to see what he has come up with for hex based wargaming. It's all good stuff and I'm sure I can make the most of the new terrain, given a bit of research and development?

Happy HeXmas

This year I'm asking Mrs Xmas to get me a set of Hexon tile terrain including the tiles, some hills and some roads. I have used Hexon for years at the club when playing AK47, Saurian Safari, Galleys and Galleons and Knights of the Sky, amongst other things, so I'm pretty sure having my own set will be a good investment. 

I'm planning to use it for the aforementioned games but also for various air and ground based wargaming projects including MiG Alley, Target Locked On!, Gruntz and No End In Sight, for example. The hills and terrain tiles could even be used as tropical coastline and islands at a push. I don't know why I didn't think of it before to be honest, as it will be a real game changer for all sorts of reasons, especially as I'm now not going to be at the cub for the foreseeable future.

Discount Dinosaur

I popped into the local charity shop after work today and found a very nice plastic dinosaur for two quid, which I promptly snapped up for use in Saurian Safari games. I haven't played this for years but I still keep an eye out for suitable toys to use, just in case I get round to setting up a game at some point. I think this one is a 1/40th scale Papo Spinosaurus, which goes for about twenty quid new, so a bit of a bargain. It certainly looks impressive next to a slightly bemused 28mm Norman knight...it's behind you mate!

Jungle Skirmish Terrain Board Finished

I had a go at painting the small skirmish board that I textured the other day, using a combination of cheap artists acrylic paints, some almost empty rattle cans and a lot of dry brushing. The end result isn't too bad and not far off what I was aiming for but it needs a coat of ultra matt varnish to tone it down a bit I think. This may or may not get used for jungle themed games including lost world safari and dinosaur hunting expeditions, or for historical skirmish actions in Vietnam and Africa. It's now going to be set aside, however, so I can get back to the Sandbox Skirmish project.

Mini Skirmish Terrain Board

 

On Saturday I found a boxed picture canvas in the local charity shop, very similar but much smaller than the one I turned into a desert themed terrain board a couple of weeks ago. This board is only a fraction of the size, at 55cm x 47cm or just under 2' x 2', so only really useable as a skirmish board or for smaller scale games. I decided to texture it but had to remove the stuck on felt circles and stitching first. The felt circles just pulled off but the stitching had to be sanded down, as it just wouldn't unpick and had to be left in place. I managed to cover it up in the end but it was a bit of a saga and hasn't completely disappeared from view.

To cover it up, I added a thick coating of acrylic paste, followed by a mashed in coating of sand, small stones and scenic dead grass fibres. It has now set and will be overpainted once I've added a bit more texturing. I haven't decided how to paint it yet, with several possible options on the table including tundra for 15mm WW2 Commando raids, 10mm 'Cold War Gone Hot' in Norway and 15mm Frostgrave. I also thought of No Mans Land for 15mm trench raiding or jungle for French Indochina and Vietnam. I was even thinking of the latter for Saurian Safari dinosaur hunting, which is something I've done before in 28mm but would scale down really well to 10mm, using the Magister Militum dinosaurs and Pendraken figures.