The Iron Hand of Mars

So my current plan is that next year I will run an Infamy Infamy game at Lard events. The working title is "The Iron Hand of Mars" and the game will (as currently envisaged) be loosely based on Lindsey Davis's novel of the same name.

Of course I'll need to include Marcus Didius Falco, the Roman informer (detective to you) and reluctant emissary of the Emperor. Here he is, put together from the Wargames Atlantic Citizens of Rome pack.

He'll be accompanied by the Centurion Helvetius, who will be acting as optio to  the tribune Camillus Justinus (not pictured here).

Falco and Justinus will be escorted by a small party of legionary recruits (all Victrix models).

At present I have some interesting ideas as to how I will run the game but I need to get a good handle on conventional Infamy Infamy play before I can confirm that they'll work. More on this to follow.

Running From Bull Run tweaked

In a couple of weeks I'll be taking Running From Bull Run to Posh Lard in Peterborough. 

I'm making a few tweaks to the game to fix issues that came up at Steel Lard. When Terry and Stewart ran the Union forces on the Saturday afternoon it became apparent that, as the game entered its end phase, they were incentivised not to engage in combat with their Confederate opponents who in turn were not particularly incentivised to advance up the table. 

Accordingly I'll be modifying the victory conditions as follows:

1. The Union forces gain one victory point for each Confederate soldier killed.

2. If the Confederates manage to occupy the Cub Run bridge, any non-rallied Union forces still on the table are counted as if they had routed off the table. Hopefully this will allow for more dynamic play.

More for Rome

I've added a few more figures to the Gangs of Rome collection. First up is the Bad Squiddo miniature "The Seer".

My thinking at present is that she'll function as an incola - an individual dweller of the city who may interact with the gang members during the course of a game. My proposed rules will be something like this:

THE SEER

No one knows where The Seer came from (though some have suggested that she may be a former street-child named Senna). Although blind, she carries a pewter ball that she claims gives her the ability to see into men's futures. 

The Seer always starts the game as close as possible to the centre of the table on ground level.

Place an extra Mob token in the draw during setup. One drawn Mob token must be used to active The Seer. When activated, the activating player will roll 1D6 and move The Seer in a direction of their choosing the full distance rolled in inches.

Should any Gang Fighter activate within 3" of The Seer, she will insist on warning them of danger ahead. Distracted by her prognostications they convert their highest die roll (highest two dice rolls?) to a score of one. This will not happen more than once in the game to any given Gang Fighter. Subsequently, forewarned by The Seer, the player may reroll, or insist on another player rerolling, one complete hand of dice.

I've also made up the last two of the Wargames Factory Germans as a pair of mercenaries acting as hired muscle for one of the gang patrons.

A bit of conversion has gone on here; the guy on the left acquired a hand holding a club from a Gripping Beast set while his mate had some surgery to hold his metal-headed club across his body. He also got some filler added to bulk up a rather feeble top-knot.

The two insula buildings I picked up at Fiasco are built and in the process of receiving upgrades of Milliput kerbstones, sandy pavement surfaces, and 3D-printed roof tiles. Pictures to follow.

A weekend's shopping

I popped into Wargames Emporium on Saturday morning and bought some Victrix Roman legionaries to support the Infamy Infamy plan.

Given that some of the castings are designed as centurions and legates, the 24 figures is going to be enough for just two Groups in Infamy Infamy terms. Not sufficient for a whole force but enough to be going on with from a painting point of view.

Sunday was the annual drive up to Leeds for Fiasco. This event has moved back to the Royal Armouries from the conference venue across the square. The space allocated was smaller and it was a struggle, sometimes, to move around. On the other hand there was a good, busy buzz about the place so maybe the Leeds club will be pleased with the result?

I had a chat with Andy from Sally 4th over his Marcus Didius Falco Pulp Alley game.

This looked fabulous and I must get some of Sally 4th's Roman civilians. The terrain was inspiring from a Gangs of Rome point of view. So much so that my few purchases were all for that setting.

The two buildings will complete what I need for now as we move into an occasional Gangs of Rome campaign from Christmas onwards.

The figure is Bad Squiddo's 'The Seer":

Although she's probably intended for a fantasy setting, I think she'll work fine as a denizen of Rome. She could just be one more citizen in the Mob but I fancy coming up with some special rules at use her as an incola. For some reason the words "Woe, woe, and thrice woe" seem appropriate!

Germania libra!

One thing I'd like to do in the coming year is to learn how to run games of Infamy Infamy. This is a  large-skirmish rule set from Too Fat Lardies. You can regard it as the ancients version of Sharp Practice but I need to work through things thoroughly to catch the differences between the two sets.

The commercial success of Infamy Infamy was hampered by its release coming in June 2020 when the world was preoccupied with other matters. As a result we didn't get the rash of demo or participation games at shows that might have built a buzz around the rules (although John Savage did some fantastic games in the couple of years before publication). As a result of that it doesn't look like Infamy Infamy is high up TFL's list of rules to support with new products.

This is a shame. I quite like the idea of gaming small unit actions in the ancient period. The rules as written focus on Rome and its barbarian neighbours in the late-Republic-early-Empire period. I could imagine commanding punitive columns against the Iceni, fleeing through the Teutoberg forest with a remnant of Varus's lost legions, or trying to capture an Othonian supply convoy with troops loyal to Vitellius. I know Richard Clarke had plans to cover Rome's earlier wars with Carthage and, with a little adaptation, I suspect you could push the rules forward in time to fight, say, Picts in fourth century Britannia.

As a step in the right direction, I've painted up the Germans I picked up at a Whitley Bay antique shop.

The Wargames Factory models aren't the best in the world but these cost me practically nothing and they'll work fine as the unwashed mass at the heart of a force of wild Germans. 

The Warriors are organised, as per the rules, into groups of ten figures. I designed and 3D printed some irregular sabot bases for them.

The group of six slingers required a little more work.

The hands with slings were imported from Gripping Beast's Dark Age Warriors set and I used Green Stuff to add pouches on shoulder straps to carry their ammunition. One of the figures had a little surgery to give his left arm a slightly more dynamic pose and another guy got a wolf pelt from a Victrix Republican Romans pack.

I'll need more warriors and some leaders for the force. I'm hopeful of picking some up at Fiasco this weekend.

There's a possibility that next year I'll run some Infamy Infamy at Lardy Days. I have an idea that might just work (though it would require an inordinate number of trees). More on this later!

Do you know the way to Rīga please?

A few hours playing with leftover bits has given me a piece of location-suitable scatter terrain for the Livonia 1812 campaign.

Here we see a peasant woman standing next to a distantsionnyy stolb or distance post. This would give the distance (in postal miles) to various cities.

Here's a preserved one:

I made mine from some MDF "sprue" left over from a building kit. The top was carved to a shallow pyramid shape and the name boards and ground-level socket were made from thin card. The base is another piece of MDF with the edges chamfered down and coated with filler. 

My stripy pattern isn't quite the same as the preserved one but I think it works. A little static grass around the pole completes the picture.

Here we see some French-allied Prussians marching past while Colonel Têtard-de-Crapaud, the French master spy, reads off the distances.

An alternative situation, allowed for in my Livonian Scenario Generator, is that withdrawing Russian troops have chopped down the post and hidden it in the forest to avoid giving information to the invaders.

This version of the post was a lot easier to build! I simply made angled cuts into a similar piece of MDF to simulate axe blows before snapping it off. The same card socket and ground work complete the piece, much to the Prussians' frustration.

Steel Lard 2025

Saturday was a long, tiring, but ultimately rewarding day as dozens of like-minded gamers converged on Patriot Games in Sheffield for the latest Steel Lard gaming day.

Seven different Too Fat Ladies games were presented and all of them proved popular with players. In fact every game received votes in the "Best Game" category of our awards (of which more later).

The most popular game in terms of pre-event expressed preferences was Ken Welsh's Lincoln’s Life or a Tiger’s Death! This was an American Civil War Sharp Practice affair depicting a period of hard fighting during the First Battle of Bull Run.

The Louisiana Tigers' battle line

The Louisiana Tiger Zouaves (a bunch of reprobates from the wharves and docks along the lower Mississippi) played a major role in the action.

A grey-clad New York regiment advances
across a wheat-field

Ken's terrain made great use of varying ground textures.

The Stone House - now an historic
monument on the Bull Run battlefield 

A unit of US regulars crosses a wheat-field

By coincidence my own game at Steel Lard was also based on First Bull Run (or First Manassass as the Confederates knew it). Regular readers of this blog will have seen the development of Running From Bull Run over recent months.

This time I set the game up on a four feet by twelve feet table. The reason was two-fold. Firstly I wanted the option of running a large, multi-player battle across the short dimension of the table in the event that any of our game runners was forced to withdraw at the last minute.

Mainly, though, I thought it would be fun to have the retreat run from the battlefield to the Cub Run bridge in the morning and then go on from the bridge towards Centreville in the afternoon.  

The morning set up with Union wagons
lining the road to Cub Run bridge

The other half of the table, in each case, was filled with spare troops and vehicles, some of which would appear in the active sector according to card play during the game.

Running From Bull Run uses a card-driven system to represent the forces of Fate as they make life more and more difficult for players who represent Union officers trying to establish some kind of coherent rearguard from a fleeing rabble.

Because of complicated scheduling and one of our attendees crying off due to illness, I had only one player, Chris Clark, during the morning session.

And you know what? It worked brilliantly. Chris ran all of the Union leaders and I drew and played Event Cards. 

Maddened by thirst on the hottest day of the year, Range's newly 
rallied man dash to the Cub Run to fill their canteens

When suddenly the bridge comes under
Confederate artillery fire

Some US Congressmen (and a journalist) have come
out to observe the battle

In the afternoon session, by contrast, I had two Union players (Terrry Pilling and Stewart Goldthorpe) and two (Ned Willett and James Crawley) representing the Forces of Fate. A different experience but no less enjoyable. 

In this game my own Louisiana Tiger models saw action in a victory for the Forces of Fate.

Elsewhere we had a repeat offering of Ian Garbutt and John Elwen's It's a Shit-Show, a very pretty late WW2 game using the What A Tanker rules. Since this game was offered at last years' event it has seen some development work. Jagdtigers made a menacing appearance!

The results for the Americans were perhaps predictable...

Dex McHenry put on a lovely-looking game of Chain of Command 2 based on the Japanese amphibious landings at Mauban in the Philippines in December 1941. 

I understand the fighting was hard in both games. I believe the Japanese were thrown back into the sea in at least one of the actions.

Rather like 6mm games, the terrain really dominates a 15mm Chain of Command presentation. Dex's was very impressive.

Incredibly popular at many Lardy Days are the Kiss Me Hardy 2 games presented by Charley Walker.  This time we had The Battle of Pantry Bay.

I'm not a huge fan of naval games personally but Charley's offerings are always over-subscribed with players engrossed in the detail of stern-rakes and weather-gauges.

Printed game mats have transformed the look
of modern miniatures games

Ian Hemingway gave is his What a Cowboy-based post-apocalypse game What a Scaver. 

I'd seen this recently at Ebor Lard. Very impressive terrain! The son and heir was one of several attendees keen to give it a try.

Last and far-from-least of our games was Mike Wilkins's The Eagle Has Larded. This was a Chain of Command 2 game based on the BBC TV series Allo Allo.  

The terrain was terrific and I understand the game-play was fantastic. Madame Edith playing her piano on the back of a truck may well have constituted a mobile war crime! 

This game was voted as winner of the Wee Derek Award for "Best Game". Congratulations Mike; well deserved!

I should mention in passing that the Wee Derek "Spirit of Lard" Award went to yours truly. I'm deeply touched although I suspect voting chief Dex may have lobbied on my behalf given my stated intention to pass on the reins to him. Kind of like one of those late-career Oscars where the Academy suddenly realise, "Hey, we've missed out so-and-so". Thanks guys!

Afterwards we repaired to El Paso; a Mexican restaurant not far from the venue. It was loud but the food was tasty; thanks to the Barnsley gang for finding this for us.

Finally beers were taken and tales were spun at the Rutland Arms near the station and another day of very satisfying Lard gaming was complete. My heartfelt thanks go out to all who attended and especially to Dex for agreeing to carry the torch forward.

Running from Bull Run Again!

This afternoon I had a very productive run-through of my Running from Bull Run scenario prior to next weekend's Steel Lard.

The objective was to test the changes I made to the Union Leaders, to the options the Fate players have for spending Flag cards, and to revisit the calibration of Victory Points. I also wanted to see how the game looks with my recently painted terrain bits and using the "Rocky Grass" Geek Villain mat.

I was pleased with the visual effect on a 6'x4' table.

This was the first outing for my piles of stores and discarded equipment and for half of the twenty ACW-period telegraph poles I created this last week.

At least part of the turnpike road to Centreville was asphalted (new technology at the time). My version includes an asphalt section made from a couple of lengths of MDF that turned up among the packaging of some household goods. I may add a bit of sponged or stippled paler grey to give an appropriate texture.

I'd already painted a Union officer as a surgeon (a green sash is an indication of his status) and a hospital steward with his medical knapsack (actually not issued until 1862; I guess this was an experimental one being field tested) but today saw the first appearance of the 1st Corps stretcher bearers.

The game begins with Groups of varying sizes strung out along the road. They are from more than one regiment and they begin with two points of Shock per figure. At the start of the game the Union Leaders need to rally them into some kind of order.

Since the last play-test I've added a Surrey (without a fringe on top) to carry the party of members of Congress who followed the army to observe the inevitable Union victory and who now find themselves caught up in the retreat.

The 1st Corps ambulance is another recent addition to the collection. Contemporary reports have ambulances being used by unwounded men who simply didn't want to walk back to Washington!

The feared Black Horse Cavalry again made an appearance.

And Confederate artillery brought the Cub Run bridge under long-range fire.

Confederate infantry were late arriving. This time they took the form of some Louisiana Tiger Zouaves.

It's hard to say who won on this occasion as I was playing the game to calibrate the victory points to be awarded. I think I'm happy with this. Balance is part of the equation but more relevant is how the victory points incentivise players to behave in a way that captures the historical feel of the retreat from Bull Run.

I'm really looking forward to giving the game its first serious outing at Steel Lard.