Catchup, news

Two days after the
burst water main. From
our bedroom window.
And yes, they worked
overnight all week.

Just about got over the house being flooded at the end of May - last carpets/etc went in at the beginning of September (which means we're no longer trying to fit N+1 rooms worth of people and stuff into N-3 rooms) , and the new kitchen goes in later this month. Life has been... um... interesting for a while, hence the partial radio silence.

So. 

Time for a catchup.

• Just got back from the Innsmouth Literary Festival in Bedford at the weekend, where the club put on 'The Battle of New Innsmouth', a scifi retake of watery weirdnesses attacking a coastal settlement. Photos below.
• The club put on a game at Sutton Hoo over the summer (thanks to my good friend Andy Hawes) - watch this space for more, or see it at The Other Partizan. Come say hi!
• We also put on a game celebrating Operation: Market Garden (specifically the actions around Nijmegen involving the 82nd Airborne), in the Lincolnshire village of Folkingham, from which they originally took off. Martin S-C's excellent photos are on the club Facebook page.
• Posh Lard has sadly been cancelled (due mostly to a lack of spoons (see above) on my part). Back next year.
• So, sadly, was Hereward Wargames Show, but this time due to a lack of roof on the venue! Again, we'll be back next year!
• Ran a bunch of BattleTech games for the club, shows and even as far afield as Shetland. Again, pictures below, but most of my BattleTech stuff can be found on Tales From The Periphery, my BattleTech podcast and occasional blog.
• Re podcasts, I have two episodes of The Miller's Tale lined up for later this month - and they will both have actual living breathing guests! (and relevant ones, at that!)
• The club's weekly Wednesday evening 'Paint and B***h' session chez moi continues (apart from a break for a month or two when the workshop was full of furniture and guitars (again, see above)), and is a welcome weekly sanity break - thanks guys.

The Battle Of New Innsmouth

Assorted BattleTech:

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.

Bad Squiddo Bofors unboxing

Ok, unbagging, maybe?

This arrived the other day, and I wanted to test the use of my DSLR as a rostrum/video camera, so it seemed like a good idea!

Battle Report - 25 Nov 2019 - "The Finns are coming" - Free Fire

Ok - for those of you who don't remember, Free Fire is the set of generic skirmish rules Rob from our club is working on. They've got a nice core mechanic, and the idea, as I understand it, is somewhat GURPs-like in that there are core rules and then stuff that ties the rules into a specific setting.

Anyway,. If you happened on this game at Hereward, this is the same scenario, only instead of the Brotherhood Without Banners ambushing a Lanister wagon train, it's WW2 Finns ambushing a Russian truck convoy.

Myk and I got the Russians: at least to start with, better commanded and with more men, but the Finns are considerably tougher (they're used to this winter lark) and we were also testing out some new rules both for combat damage and for snipers,. And the Finns had a sniper...

Oh boy, did the Finns have a sniper.

The Russians pile out to both sides of the road having come screeching to a halt in front of an unexpected barricade.

Finns - figures from the Winter War Kickstarter from the early days of this blog :D

More Finns crest a rise, about to make serious inroads into the Russians.
This section and the sniper opened up and made short work of most of these, including taking out their Lieutenant with a single shot.

My section of Russians go for the sensible approach of trying to shift the barricade so we can all get the heck out of here, pronto. 

Meanwhile, the braver than he is useful Russian Comissar and a couple of men try and track down the sniper (Hint, guys, he's behind that tree in front of you.)
We should have had him - one of the rifleman put 5 dice of hits into him and rolled NO damage (wanting 4s on d8s)... 

The braver bits of my section try and hold off the Finns. About here is where the sniper, who by rights should have been dead if either Myk or I could roll dice, splatters my Sergeant's brains all over the snow.

Yes there is tinsel on one of the trees in this Finnish forest. Why do you ask? :D 

"And HEAVE, comrades!"
Cue sounds of impatient gunning of truck engines, and an awful lot of small arms fire hitting the rear truck and immobilising it.

"Run away! Bravely run away!"
(Other captions are available.)

With better dice, and at least one smarter command decision, we might have made it away with both trucks, One, however is better than anyone else has managed with this scenario in this setting!

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.

Battle Report - 28 Oct 2019 - Chain Of Command

View from the German's end.

Dougie from the TFL mob has been working in Peterborough for the last couple of weeks, so generously offered to run a historical game of Chain of Command scenario last night.

Essentially, I got the Germans (with assistance from Carl) defending a village with a platoon, a Flakpanzer and a Pak38 against Gary and Colin with a well-supported US platoon (3 Shermans, apart from anything else). I was slightly distracted by trying to talk my wife through fixing her mother's Mac and iPad (from a distance of 70 miles) so I sadly failed to take notes on the historical details of the scenario, but...

Interesting patrol phase - I got a very well advanced jump off point on the left hand table edge behind a hedge, and a rather withdrawn right flank, which ... didn't work as well as I'd hoped. Gary sent his Shermans down the road, and a scout party and a section across the field (top left) towards the hedge while plastering it in covering fire. With hindsight, given the insane rate at which I was amassing Chain of Command dice, I should have just pulled it back (the picture above shows it after I did so, just behind the further house in the middle). Instead I got clever with an extra phase: the plan was to pop up, nail the scout team and leg it across the road. The covering fire and overwatch rather put paid to that :D You can see what's left of the broken section cowering in back of the house bottom left.

That done, I used one of my CoC dice to move the jump off point, and the other to... well, check the photo on the right. Having moved the jump off point we could (at Carl's suggestion) just managed to use the other Chain of Command dice to pop a Panzerfaust across the road and get a side shot on a Sherman.

Boom.

Heh.

Sadly, that was the high spot of the evening. I popped up the Pak38 for a shot at the second Sherman, doing it one shock and engine damage. With further hindsight (and advice from Dougie) I should have then pulled it back, rather than left it to get shot at by the Sherman in the hopes of a second shot. While I did get one ('so what do I need to hit?' '10' *rolls" 'No problem!') I only did another point of shock and gunsight damage, which... well. Lets just say the Pak38 crew and junior leader joined the huddled and pinned masses behind the house. And got liberally plastered with a 30cal or two.

Force morale down to 2. Were this a campaign, I'd have called it a day, so since it was well gone 10pm, we did :D

Many thanks to Gary, Carl and Colin, and especially to Dougie for umpiring and providing forces. I am, it would appear, a bit rusty at CoC :D

Kickstarter Watch - May '40 Miniatures Early War Fallschirmjäger

Ending on Sunday morning, this is a KS I am definitely backing.

The guys from May '40 Miniatures are also responsible for some lovely 1940 Dutch (which you can see on their website), and it's probably no surprise, really, because, hey, they're Dutch. :D

But equally, don't dismiss these because you don't want to do early war Holland... They're also good for early war in Norway, Belgium and Crete, and what-if scenarios in the likes of Gibraltar (that could be fun!), Malta and England (Operation: Sealion - guess why I'm backing them! I need more opponents for my Home Guard). There's also awesome stuff in the add-ons like a 1/56 resin DFS230 glider for €30!

The KS ends on Sunday, and it's currently touch and go whether it'll make it - I think it really deserves to, because the sculpts are really really pretty[tm], so -- pledge away! Please!

Lunch break MDF building - Dave's Wargames

Needed a brief sanity break from computers, so I spent my lunch break putting together one of Dave's Wargames' 15mm Normandy buildings I picked up a couple of Herewards ago. His buildings (in both 15mm and 28mm) are available from his eBay store, or from The Sleeping Dragon Hobby Shop, who by a useful coincidence will be at the show this Sunday.

Nice kit - pretty much the perfect compromise between MDF tabs so loose they won't stay together without quick-setting glue, elastic bands and swearing, and fitting so tight you have to force them. These are for the most part a pretty perfect interference/press fit, which means that a lot of joins will hold themselves together till the glue dries. (Sarissa run the next closest - a lot of their tabs are unfortunately just a hair too tight, meaning you either need to apply a fair bit of force, file them down (which usually results in them becoming sloppy) or risk the top 'skin' of the MDF delaminating if you don't force it exactly right.)

Also? The neatest designed MDF house chimney I've come across - three layers that fit together to form a square chimney with an actual hole - basically, the middle layer has two 'fingers' to form the sides, the other two are solid to form the ends. AND the house has a chimney breast!

Full marks (and this is a big bugbear of mine when folks get it wrong) for making the building floors big enough to hold a Flames of War medium base. Some companies, who should know better, don't, often because they downscale from 28mm to 15mm and don't think about it.

The one real irritation is that one pair of roof cross-supports was missing. Whether this is a design flaw or I just managed to lose them sometime in the past two years, I dunno - there certainly wasn't space for them on the sprue. The design of the rest actually meant that the small triangular ones were enough to hold it to shape, but it would have been nice to have the lower down cross-pieces (see arrow on diagram) to hold it a bit stiff and plug the holes. The latter I achieved by filling them with some tabs salvaged from bits of the MDF sprue: fortunately Dave designs almost all his tabs the same length, so they fitted rather neatly.

I also had a very minor gripe that the parts weren't as easily separable from the sprue as I'd like, and in some cases left bits that needed a little filing. However, remember this kit is a couple of years old, and I wouldn't be surprised to discover it's improved since.

All in all? A nice little building. I shall tile it and paint it up in a bit.

Chef-du-Pont fine tuning, and some photo editing

...and yet more show prep.

By dint of some juggling, and dodging the thunderstorm that he brought with him, AndyM and I managed to load up his car with Stuff For The Show. We also sat down with my draft Chef-du-Pont plan and managed to figure out how to fit it onto 6 of the 4' x 2' boards that just happen to be lying around spare here, while keeping the number of visible joins in terrain (as opposed to flood plain) down to four (with three of those in 2" wide causeways and the fourth hideable with trees!).

Andy claims his part of one of the boards is done (as it's all flood plain) and I just have to paint it :D I think the plan for that is going to be not unlike the beach boards (blending various brown, green and blue sprays), plus several layers of gloss yacht varnish. I'll experiment, as it might be tricky to get that looking right. (Water always is.)

And I've edited the photos I took yesterday for Rob's Free Fire game, and sent them to him. And yes, those are House Lannister guardsmen :D

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!