Chef-du-Pont update - turning to 6mm

So, after a couple of evenings of largely Myk and Andy poring over maps, aerial photos and our boards, we've reached a major decision over the Chef-du-Pont game we're building for Posh Lard. 

Myk and I tried out the board layout on Monday at club, and by the time we'd placed the models for the Mont Blanc creamery, it was clear it was all looking a bit cramped. There's about 1500m between the creamery and the Château Isle Marie, and that's essentially 5m in IABSM's ground scale (as close to 6mm scale as makes no nevermind). The best we can do for a sensible table is for that distance to be about 2m, so with 15mm scale buildings that's going to be very very cramped, and a lot of the very recognisable buildings (the Château, the Co-operative and Mont-Blanc creameries, the bridge over the Merderet and some of the groups of buildings on what's now the Rue du Capitaine Rex Coombs) are going to lose their 'look'.

Big breath. Quick look at Baccus' and Heroics and Ros' WW2 prices. Y'know what? Time to switch to 6mm.

Myk and Andy spent yesterday evening plotting roads on our 5 2' x 4' boards (we planned for a sixth, but it turns out to be all flooded, so better left out for easier access. I, meanwhile, actually managed to clear enough workbench space that I can set up the 3D printer and Proxxon hot wire table!

Except more WIP pictures over the next three and a bit months. 

Virtual Lard 2

I spent Saturday 'at' (virtually) VL2: in the morning I ran an IABSM Lite game, with a couple of twists that were only possible on Zoom, and I played SP2 in the afternoon. For a much better report than I can provide for the latter,. do check out Richard Crawley's blog on the subject - great fun and outrageous French accents abound.  Many thanks to Richard for umpiring - excellent game.

I ran a small IABSM scenario set in my favourite corner of WW2 - northern Italy. I nicked an idea from Bloody Omaha in that the Germans were a very small, well dug in force (a section., two '34s, a Stug, a PAK40 and a sniper) run by me as the umpire, and the four  (reduced to three, sadly) players took a cut down British company - 2 sections, a carrier section. 4 Sherman IIIs.

The other twist was that they got a briefing and some recce photos, and from then on (as they were all connected via Zoom) they were restricted to a units-eye view (using an iPhone on a custom stand).

The British reccee photos: an overhead pass and, to quote, "One of the PRU Spitfires made a low pass over the valley this morning. Took MG fire from the church doing it, so the pilot really hopes you appreciate the effort."

They are attacking from the left (south). 

8 Platoon make it across the river, and flush out some Germans in front of the church, as well as an MG34 in the nearer farm,

7 Platoon meanwhile are being very wary of the main farmhouse, in which they keep spotting movement but aren't sure what. CSM Moxon is kept busy yelling for more smoke from the 2".

"Gunner - Jerry tank, right of the pine tree... traverse... no, further right of the wall... fire... GOT HIM!"

We didn't finish, in part because I had three relatively new to IABSM players and was wrestling a bit with the tech. I'd love to run it again: definitely a fascinating game,. and the players seemed to think the viewpoint idea worked.

Mat by TinyWargames, buildings by Empires at War, Battlefront and I think SHQ, figures by Battlefront, Shermans by PSC.

Show prep, and an AAR on one of my scenarios

Spent my gaming time today doing setup work for the show, since we're going to be kicking off trader and game stuff early this year.

Also, to my delight, the Eagles and Lions Wargaming guys on FB posted a video review (I don't think you need a FB account to view it, I may be wrong) of their go at my Valle Della Marie IABSM scenario, which you can find in the 2017 TFL Summer Special (which, like all Lardies specials, contains all manner of good stuff above and beyond that, and is invariably well worth your money). I also ran this twice at OML5, which folks seemed to enjoy. Basically it's a down-and-dirty clear Jerry out of the next bit of Italy scrap for the British.

Ok, not quite the final time....

...as Andy and I decided to see what would happen with Wave 3 of the US landing craft this afternoon.

Answer? Mopping up is really, really hard when the things you're trying to mop up are in hard cover behind barbed wire and they have lots of razor sharp 7.92 mm teeth!

After about three hours, Andy had reduced the Germans to two manned MGs and a pair of 5cm Granatenwerfer. and we called it a day.

A number of interesting takeaways from the game as a whole - most I'll share in the article I've just finished for Lard Magazine, which you'll have to buy :D I was, though, amused to realise I'd been being slightly lenient to the Americans in a couple of rather important places as regards firing at German positions. I don't think it would have affected the outcome of the game, but I think they'd have had to figure out how to concentrate their forces at a weak spot more to get ashore and inlands.

There's more photos for your delectation on my Twitter feed.

For the FINAL time in 2019, Bloody Omaha

Having promised Per and his young lad M that I'd run the game for them, since they missed it at Salute, and likewise AndyM, who's missed every public showing of the game, I arranged to put it on today. Sadly, one other couldn't make it, but I will probabaly arrange another run sometime next year for him and a couple of others. We didn't quite finish - Per had a train to catch - and Andy and I are going to run the arrival of wave 3, seeing if Robert Capa makes it back to Blighty in time for his press deadline and how hard the Germans get clobbered tomorrow afternoon.

I'm not going to write a full battle report, as frankly I'm out of brain after that! (and hopefully Per has many more photos and will write a better one!) Much fun was had, many bizarre dice rolls happened, many photos were taken. For the context of many of them I suggest you check my Twitter feed (man, I have had SO many likes and retweets today), but I'll caption a few in the gallery below. A number have been cropped and adjusted to look like period shots from Robert Capa :D

Huge thanks to Per, M and Andy for playing, and to my wife for... well, not resisting the temptation to bake - those maple apple scones were a) still warm and b) amazing! And as ever to Rich and Nick for the scenario and the rules.

First dice roll of the game on the first activation. Sherman DD fires at bunker. M rolls double 6. Boom.
For an encore a bit later he rolled 5 consecutive 1s on a d6. 

Andy handling disembarkation from a Higgins Boat.... 

Managing the chaos on the beach....

...aka 'this is why all bases are clearly labelled!'

The Butcher of Omaha,

HE pins. Stonks from 4 105mms pin A LOT.

Chef-du-Pont scenery planning

Merderet; Lower Normandy; France
Looking over the creamery (centre right).

Since we're putting Bloody Omaha out to grass (with possibly one more outing this year), it's time for another IABSM showcase table for 2020, I think. This is Chef-du-Pont, a plan from a few years ago I'm now confident to resurrect (which, you guessed it, is why I've been painting US 82nd Airborne!)

The action is available as an IABSM2 scenario in both "Where The Hell Have You Been, Boys?" (by Rich Clarke) and then again in "All-American" (by Dave Parker), and my aim is to upgrade it, nicking the best of both scenarios, for IABSM3. (At this rate I may have to make good on my threat of rewriting all the former's scenarios for IABSM3!)

I got some playing around with Google Maps and various things done this morning (before the cricket started), and I have a rough idea of what the table layout is going to look like.

The tricky bit is positioning the three areas of interest, the bridge at the SW end of Chef-du-Pont (with the Nestlé creamery, and the other factory to the north), Hill 30, and the Château de L'îsle Marie such that their relative positions are about right, and not too much of what's probably an 8' x 6'  board is wasted on flooded fields. Obviously some of it has to be, as the whole point is that the three areas are linked by causeways across the flooded Merderet, but equally I don't want massive areas of the board that are unused patches of wet, and I do want to be able to model enough of Chef-du-Pont for various scenario events to be meaningful (I'm being slightly cryptic in case you haven't read the scenario :D)

Work in progress in Omnigraffle.

Things have been skewed a bit to fit, but the general relative
positions are fairly close. I'm still considering tweaking the
town and Hill 30 round and down a bit more, but don't want
to compromise on the length of the main street in
Chef-du-Pont.

Having done that, the other problem is scale. I'm doing this in 15mm, and the ground scale is roughly 6mm, so all the buildings are 2.5x too large. Hence, the scenery is pretty much always going to be a sktetch rather than an exact replica.

The creamery, adjacent large building and chimney are pretty iconic, so no-will notice or mind overmuch if they take up too much 'real' space in the area allocated for them. What's now the Rue du Capitaine Rex Combs is lined on both sides by terraces, semis and a fairly distinctive farmyard, and I'm anticipating sketching that with some smaller terraces etc from Sarissa, 4Ground, Empires at War and anyone else who's ended up in my Normandy town collection. Then (if you look at the 1944 picture), the rest is hedged, tree filled fields to the water's edge, and a moderate expanse of empty field across the side road from the other factory (which needs to be there because Reasons). The Chateau is easy as Sarissa make one, and it'l be half hidden by woods anyway.

Not perfect, but it'll do to start work. Tomorrow, though, is play testing for the show day!

Battle Report - 18 Aug 2019 - "Bloody Omaha" at The Other Partizan

Loot haul - two blisters from Bad Squiddo Games (which are lovely and will see use soon!)

Spent most of the day (barring a couple of brief diversions) umpiring Bloody Omaha. An excellent day - one young gentlemen stayed pretty much all day and handled the bulk of the American attack.

We never got to wave 3, but by turn 8 the Americans had several breaches in the wire, having come under some pretty serious hammer early on - 2/3 of wave 1 was late, so the Germans had opportunity to concentrate their fire early on. The German artillery wasn't as effective as it could have been - partly Carl and I were swapping umpiring/running the Germans, and there was perhaps a lack of continuity for such things as 'are we walking the fire up the beach?'.

General Cota made it on in wave 2 (yes, I know he should be several beach sectors over, on Dog White, but Robert Mitchum in the rôle is a very iconic image and I couldn't resist :D) He led an advance up the western edge of the beach, almost directly at WN64 which was slow but being quite successful,..

Herewith a gallery with comments (largely me nitpicking, because the camera is unforgiving and it's my game and I can!):

All set up and ready to play. Newly watered marshes front and centre, as well as All The Beach Obstacles and some copious use of Woodland Scenics mid-green lichen. A no-prize if you can tell me what I forget to pack... (There are in fact two things.)

This is probably the one thing that really bugs me about the game that isn't fixable - the board joins. Sadly because of wear and tear and in some cases slightly out of tolerance boards, they can be very visible, even though we hide them with lichen and barbed wire, That said, the original plan was always a modular board (and we do reuse some of the hills in other games), so the square tiles and 'stepped' look are a deliberate design choice. Also, I need to glue the wire on to the barbed wire bases so it sits flatter on the ground.

Flames of War LCV(P) with passengers. I should retouch a couple of helmets but on the whole they've pretty evocative: I would very much like if Battlefront redid the castings when they announce the Higgins boat for the new late war range, as they are a bit scuzzy and a swine to get a brush in the gaps, even more so when you can't easily spot what's what on the casting!

Need to retouch the bases on the mine stakes tp match the shallows rather than the deeper water. Usefully it's AP Army Green, I think, so easy to match... 

An LCV(P) gets hit on its way in... Rob suggested a few floating body markers (and I thought I was obsessive!) :D  It's a good job I have two packs of those explosion markers as as far as I can tell neither of the folks I bought them from still make them! 

I love this shot - taken low over the hills at the back of the table, it almost hides the stepped contours of the board.  

A new addition for this game (in case you missed me rabbiting on about it) was photographer Robert Capa., who appears on wave 1 on one Higgins boat and must leave with one of the empty wave 3 boats. He's very much being portrayed here as the legend, rather than what might be the truth....

...customised from a PSC heavy weapons team guy...

He has a card in the deck. On an activation, he has three actions with which he can move 1d6 each, or use one or two to take a photograph (much like AFV fire in IABSM, a second action means he takes time to compose his shot...) We then roll 1d6, + 3 if aimed, plus 1-3 at the umpire's discretion for choice of subject (the player gets to say what he wants to photograph). Still tuning the numbers, but a total score of 50+ means he gets to keep his job, 100+ means he becomes a legend. -50 for missing the boat back to England (and thus his press deadline).

And just for giggles, we get an iPhone down to board level and 'take' the photo (and crop it and turn it B&W).

So, here's Capa's portfolio for the Magnum agency for Life magazine from The Other Partizan...  

We have the Capa version of this iconic shot on our banner for the game. Part of me is really tempted to have a Higgins boat modelled with its ramp down expressly for Capa... 

This is Capa's original... I also find myself wondering if I can find a small HD spy cam that would fit IN or on a 15mm Higgins boat :D And whether a backdrop behind the boards would look effective...

A BAR team from the Big Red One taking cover in the shallows. The team medic can be seen slightly out of focus right of centre. 

Big Red One rifle sections shelter under a ramp obstacle. 

German artillery plasters the beach - observe the elements of both the Big Red One and the 29th sheltering on the shingle below the sea wall while Capa himself takes cover behind a log ramp.

A mortar section of E company 16th RCT of the Big Red One takes cover behind a 'Czech hedgehog'.  Ahead, engineer elements of E company are attempting to breach the wire protecting the exit from the beach.

So there you go. Thank you to everyone who played, came and said hi, or said nice things, to Carl, Rod and Rob for helping run the game, AndyM (as ever) for scenery, Rich Clarke for the original scenario, and thank you to the Other Partizan folks for inviting us!

Packing for The Other Partizan

I've spent too long staring at code today, so I've put off the last of the painting of bazooka teams until tomorrow. However, this does mean I've had time to pretty much finish sorting and tidying everything else, base a couple of stands of LCVP passengers and actually make some more beach ramps.

Still to do tomorrow: paint the last details, base and label the remaining bazooka teams, paint and base the Higgins Boat passengers, print off the rest of the player handouts, the relevant pages of the original scenario, and a couple of 'boat sections go ashore in THIS order' sheets, find some more D8s (I know I have loads in the Deadzone box), lay the scenery boards out just to check I'm not mussing anything and then stack 'em, find the two pull up banners (one for the game, one club).

This is kind of what Bloody Omaha packs down to (except for the boards which will be in tomorrow's post).

First batch of Higgins Boat passengers. These are purely for the look of the thing, but I found them, so...

Hopefully Anne won't ask why we're short on kebab skewers. I honestly can't remember the last time we had kebabs, so...
Quick couple of minutes with a razor saw and file, superglued at the join, black Halfords primer, heavy zenithal dusting of AP Fur Brown. Lazy but effective.

Top box is all 18 boat sections (minus their bazooka teams), plus the Navy engineer teams, all the American Big Men (and sabot bases), and medics.
Bottom has what feels like several miles of barbed wire and minefield markers.

Reference library, rule book and QRS, big dice, shock and kill micro dice, pin and other markers, tape measures, scatter lichen, dice tray. 

Bottom layer, Higgins Boats (and eventually passengers), bunkers, beach ramp obstacles (15 - possibly need more but we're out of kebab skewers :D), custom activation deck (partly to pack the bunkers in and stop them bending their guns!).
Top layer, explosion markers, beach mine stakes (38 - probably enough now) and hedgehogs (22 - not enough), Sherman DD's.

Germnan mortar teams, small pillboxes, Tobruks and MG34 gunners, US kill markers (basically if a team gets really messily wiped out, their base gets replaced with one of those).
Empty tray for bazooka teams when they're done. (Note to self,. need to free up another 4L box).