B-17 - The Bombers

 In my previous post I talked about how I'd played 'B-17: Queen of the Skies' back in the 80s, and how we'd run a large game involving five players and ten bombers. Sorting through the papers in the box I found a lot of the mission logs for that game and, it appears, many others. And they don't all have my handwriting on, suggesting that we may have run a number of two- or three-player games as well. Anyway, a commenter on the previous post waxed lyrical about the names they'd given their bombers, so I noted down every bomber name I could find in the records in my box. And here they are - a small glimpse into the gaming past of myself and my friends, many of whom I've lost touch with now and one of whom is no longer with us.

Queenie
Lady In Red
Lady Fantasy
Blonde Bombshell
Miss Fortune
Pancake
Brief Encounter
Green Goddess
Mrs Robinson
Miss Mash
Doris
Glory B
Miss Take
Sue Anne
Roving Redhead
Friday The Thirteenth
Heart Of Lothian
The Omen
The Flying Latrine
Vienna
Miss Conception
Miss Tree
Feet First
Out Of The Frying Pan
Lady Killer
Down In Flames
Scheherezade
This End Up
The Creeping Terror
Lady Macbeth

And finally, my 25 mission bomber:

The Last Tango

I found that two crew of The Last Tango survived all 25 missions - the co-pilot and the bombardier. The co-pilot was actually seriously wounded on the 25th mission, so was invalided out of the war. The surviving engineer, who flew 12 missions on the plane, Master Sergeant Jock McMahon, score the most kills, with 12, five of which were achieved on one mission. 

Eight Years

I just noticed that today marks eight years since I started this blog. It was originally designed to replace the defunct Stronghold website I ran for 'Hordes of the Things', but very quickly moved away from being a purely HOTT-based site to just general wargaming. And I think it's all the better for that. Still, there's plenty of HOTT to justify it using the old name though.

I'm still enjoying running it, and I hope you all still enjoy reading it.

It's Me!

A few days ago there was a brief discussion on a Facebook post I was following about people having 'personal figures'. That is, people who have an actual miniature of themselves.

Yesterday, when sorting out the armies for my next HOTT52 game, I found mine!

It was sculpted by Sebastian Rogers back in 2004 for the Berkeley HOTT competition that year. Only four figures were cast. Three were painted gold-, silver- and bronze- and former the basis of the first, second and third-place trophies. The original green was used for the last-place trophy. And one figure was left unpainted, and given to me, along with the mold. So as you can see, this is a strictly limited edition miniature.

And here's the figure. Obviously I painted it. I am depicted as the Godfather of HOTT,  wearing my comfy dressing-gown, holding a mug of cocoa and carrying a copy of the HOTT rules (the old v2.0 purple book as opposed to the more recent book with the black cover).

It's a 'heroic' 28mm - the base it's on is 40mm across because I use it as a 'Barker Marker' when I remember where it is.

And those of you who have met me will realise that it is also a rather 'heroic' depiction of my physique.

I no longer have the dressing-gown (although I still have one that's similar), and we gave up our evening cocoa a few years ago. But I still have my HOTT rules.

I can't remember who won the various trophies that year, so if any of you are reading this it would be great to know if you still have your Kaptain Kobold figure.

I do still have the mold, but have never used it.

As Seen On TV

Look! That's me on the telly!

The video of my two minutes of very minor fame back in about 1999 - an appearance on the 'Front Room' magazine programme on the (now defunct) BBC Knowledge channel. I talked about wargaming and my website, and the slot had some very nice shots of my American Civil War figures as a friend and I refought the 1861 Battle of Wilson's Creek.

I was slimmer in those days.

(The video was some kind of rough draft the BBC sent me - hence the time-code along the bottom. The photo was taken in 2006 for a Flickr challenge I used to do in those far-off innocent days.)

Thanks to Jolly Broom Man for triggering this memory.

Campaign Rewards

As any regular readers of this blog know, I'm a bit of a fan of mini-campaigns, where you play a series of battles linked together into a narrative. You'll also know that I've been messing around with Simplicity in Hexes a little bit recently, and that there's a small campaign linked to the rules - The Emperor's Balls.

There's no denying that The Emperors Balls is a lovely piece of work, with an entertaining (if slightly silly) narrative, but one thing I noticed was the lack of reward or results in the games. Each battle is fought in isolation and whilst the result of one battle dictates which scenario is played next, there are no stakes. Essentially it's a simple Best of Three games, with the setups being pre-determined.

It got me thinking that one of the essential features of a campaign - even a simple one - is some kind of stakes. Either the victor should get a reward, or the loser accrue a penalty. Or both.

In classic, old-school, campaigns some of this would be a change in the situation on the game map, plus such things as losses. Pyrrhic victories are possible; you win a battle, but at the cost of your elite guard cavalry, for example. Losing a battle by withdrawing troops so that they can fight another day becomes a possibility. And this is fine is the campaign is relatively involved; if there are multiple participants, players who are losing can withdraw and regroup, whilst the other participants continue the fight.

But in simpler campaigns - the basic two-player ladder campaigns, for example - the stakes need to be simpler. Some of these do count losses from one battle to the next, but the danger here is the horrible Death Spiral, where one player loses a battle so badly that their remaining forces are unlikely to ever win any ensuing battles, thus making their involvement in the campaign uninteresting. I personally like campaigns where losses are mostly or entirely replenished between battles, and each game sees both players on a nominally equal footing. I'm egalitarian like that. The Emperor's Balls adopts that approach, and I like it. But the winner of a battle should get some kind of edge in the next; the trick is to make it worth having, but without weighting the game too heavily in their favour.

In a simple campaign one of my favourite rewards is a one-off bonuses, such as a reroll. So the winner of the previous battle, for example, may be allowed a combat/initiative reroll in the next game. This is nice because it's an advantage, but it's up to the player to decide how and when to use it. A more interesting option, which would work for The Emperor's Balls, is to allow the victor in the previous game to make two rolls for their force composition, and choose which one they wish to have, whilst the loser simply gets what the dice gives them. Again, this gives the victor a choice, the benefit of which is theirs to exploit or throw away. A more complicated approach is to have two scenarios available to each player as the next game, with the winner being able to choose. For example, at present, if the attacker wins Scenario 1 the campaign automatically proceeds to Scenario 2, whereas if the defender wins it goes to Scenario 3. This option would have the attacker being able to choose between Scenarios 2a and 2b if they win, whilst a victorious defender gets to choose between Scenarios 3a and 3b. Obviously this approach requires a lot of scenarios (since each of the four scenarios that branch off the first one will themselves give rise to two options), although some could be reused, but once again it allows a victor to decide how to exploit their win.

I appreciate that this post is a bit of a ramble. A skim through posts tagged 'campaign' on this blog will turn up examples of the idea I've mentioned, and other thoughts as well, and give a feel for the approach I use. What are your favourite campaign 'reward' mechanisms?

Normal Service Will Be Resumed As Soon As Possible?

I realised this morning that it's over a week since I played a game of any kind, which explains why this blog has been uncharacteristically quiet.

Various factors have contributed to this. The primary one is that I have too many things that I'd like to be doing, so I have been paralysed into inactivity. I want to do more Portable Wargame stuff, I want to play around with Squad Hammer a bit more, I have the rules in 'One Hour Skirmish Wargames' to try out, and I even want to play around with a HOTT project I have floating around at the back of my mind. With to many option I am simply opting to do none of them.

I have based a few figures with a view to doing a new HOTT army, so that's progress of a sort.

Extra factors include the fact that it's been stupidly hot this past week or two, and in a house without aircon that saps my willingness to do anything much at all (although on the plus side my wife and I have discovered, and watched prodigious amounts of, 'Longmire'), plus we've been busy at the weekends with various odds and ends, and I even missed my to go to a local music festival (it rained).

I have managed to read the two ECW histories I got for Christmas. I kind of picked them at random, although I assumed that the Osprey Essential History would give me a reasonable overview, which it did. Blair Worden's 'The English Civil Wars' is pretty light on the military stuff, but whilst I found some of it heavy going actually did a great job of covering the complex religious and political shenanigans of the times, so added a lot of context to the Osprey volume. I think I made a couple of good choices, and now feel I have a better understanding of the background to the conflicts now.

Anyway, I have promised myself that I will force myself to play something in the next couple of days, just to kick-start my gaming. Go me!

International Games Week

Our local library always holds a Games Day as part of this, and we've been along for the past couple of years. I hope we can make it this year. It might be worth looking and seeing if there's something happening local to you; it's always a chance to promote the hobby in a public envirionment.

Cancon Aussie Bloggers Meetup

In previous years to this one, Paul of the Man Cave has organised an Aussie bloggers meetup at Cancon on the Saturday. Sadly it appears that he won't be able to make it this year, but would people still be interested in getting together just to say Hi and compare loot? It's a chance to appear in the most prestigious Australian wargames photographic event of the year - The Cancon Rogue's Gallery.

Here are previous years' pictures, courtesy of Paul's blog.

In previous years some people have got together in the evening for food and drink as well, but I'm not sure my organisational capabilities are up to that. However it's an option.

So how about it? Is anyone but me up for a meet on Saturday 27th January?

Rocketship

Many, many years ago I was gifted this resin model. When I say 'many, many' I mean 'nearly 20'. Today I finally assembled it. I always get there in the end.

There's a couple of 15mm figures next to it for scale, part of the same project I put it together for.

Now, does anyone recognise it?

(I mean, I know what it is. I just wondered if anyone else did.)

Six by Six - A Challenge

On another blog I posted a comment wondering why all of the online challenges run for and by wargames bloggers seemed to relate to painting and modelling figures and terrain, rather than actually playing with the things. After all, we are all gamers (if you're not, you're going to find most of this blog pretty dull), so I assume we're playing games of some kind.

After I posted it I thought that perhaps some kind of play-based challenge was in order. I had a vague recollection that I'd seen one, and eventually found it HERE on Boardgame Geek. As described there it's quite involved, and was about refining your understanding of a few games throughout the year instead of playing lots of games only once or twice, but I thought that it would be a good place to start.

So, I am setting myself a blogging challenge for 2017, and am inviting you to join me. The Boardgame Geek challenge requires at least ten plays of each of ten different games. I decided to make my challenge less of a trial of endurance. I'm proposing Six by Six. Why? Ten plays of ten games is probably impractical for most people. I have a butterfly nature; I flit from game to game throughout the year, and certainly play more than ten different ones. But I think I'd be hard pressed to play ten of them at least ten times. I know people who play less frequently than I, or who can focus on fewer games, would find it an impossible challenge. Six games seemed a more practical number, and six plays of each seems quite feasible. It's two games of something every three weeks. Not impossible.

How does it work?

Well, anyone who chooses to take part commits to the following:

Choose six games for the year. It would be great if you chose them all at the start, but I know how mercurial I can be in my selections, so changing them as you go on would be quite legitimate. I probably will.

Post your choices to your blog.

Your challenge for the year is to play, and record in some way, at least six individual sessions of each of your chosen games. I say 'sessions' because you may choose to count multiple games of a small, short game (such as 'Love Letter') as a single session. Or not.

Any tabletop games count, be they miniature wargames (for preference), board-games, card-games or role-playing games. I shall probably select a mix of things. They can be games you are very familiar with, or you could use the challenge to try out games you want to learn more thoroughly.

At the end of the year you should have at least thirty-six game-plays recorded. If you have, then pat yourself on the back. That's the only reward, aside from the fact that you will now have greater experience of your chosen games.

Game reports can be as detailed as you like, ranging from the visual feasts I like to produce from time to time, to a simple one-liner saying 'Played Game X last night. I won.'

It would be good, and probably helpful, to record overall progress in some way; perhaps a cut-and-posted list of the games, with a running total of the number of games next to it. More ambitious people could have links to the recorded sessions.

I suspect that, in reality, I will be the only person doing this, and will post my list of chosen games at some stage over the Christmas break. But if you are interested, or want to spread the word, here are the 'rules' in a handy form you can copy to your own blog:

The Six by Six Challenge 2017

(i) Select a list of Six games. These can be miniature, card, board or role-playing games. You may change entries on the list during the year, but game-plays for games you drop should no longer count towards the challenge.

(ii) To start the challenge, post the link to your blog.

(iii) You commit to play each of  your six chosen games at least six times during the course of 2017.

(iv) When you play a game in your challenge list, record the play in your blog. This record can range from a one line acknowledgment to a full blow-by-blow report.

(v) If you've done it right, at the end of the year you should have at least thirty-six game sessions recorded.

If you do decide to take part (and there's no reason you can't dive in at any point during the year), then drop me a note in the comments, with a link to your blog, and I'll set up a post listing everyone so we can all follow your progress. 

Let's get out there and Play!

Aussie Bloggers Meetup - CanCon 2017

In 2016, this happened:

And in 2017 it's going to happen again:

The details  are as follows (courtesy of The Man Cave):

1:00pm - Initial meet-up in the Board Games section in the Northern Hall at CANCON to say g'day, check out respective loot bags and plan for any shared afternoon shenanigans.

6:00pm(ish) - Pub dinner and extended tall story session.

This year I'm planning on not having a migraine.

See you there?

The Disappearing Clone

Back in February I posted THIS in which I pondered on the existence of a clone of this blog.

At the time I wasn't sure why the clone even existed, but further research showed that such sites are set up in order to gather hits and a solid Google presence, before being converted to other purposes or used for advertising. However I stifled my clone by reporting hundreds of possible links on the site for breach of copyright. And that's what it took; merely reporting the top level domain to Google wasn't enough; I had to pretty much report each post, each tag search and each date range individually. But as I did so the site's presence in Google (and it only seemed to be in Google) grew less and less until basically it disappeared from searches. It still existed, because I'd check every so often, but unless you went looking for it specifically you'd never find it.

Now I see that the link just goes to a domain name registration page; the content has disappeared. I have some slight reservations about claiming the death of my clone; it does say that the domain has been recently registered, so it could be that the individual responsible is going to have another try. But I hope that my fears are unfounded and that a search for my content on Google will return a link to this blog, and not an evil copy.

If you have a blog it's worth googling for your own content from time to time, especially via an image search, just to see if you have acquired a parasite.

Jenny Everywhere Day - 2016

It's August 13th and it's Jenny Everywhere Day.

Enlighten yourself HERE. I imagine contributions will appear through the day as August 13th progresses around the globe.

I had planned to put together a Clobberin' Time game featuring the Jenny Everywhere figure I made for Forgotten Heroes back in June, but I forgot about it until the last minute, didn't feel inspired and then ended up going out to lunch at our local Buddhist temple instead.

So; maybe next year.

I did take another picture of the figure, though.

Gaming Forums

Hi there. You've probably come here from Frothers. Enjoy this old post, which contains the word 'arse'. Then please have a look around at some of the fine, gaming-related, posts that this blog has to offer. Thanks.
Yesterday I discovered that, earlier this year, some kind soul had gifted me a year's membership on The Miniatures Page. I have no idea who you are, but I'm quite touched. Thank you.

Unfortunately I discovered this as I was in the process of eliminating my account from that site, on the grounds that I could no longer stand being associated with a place that seemed to revel in unmoderated racism, misogyny, homophobia, right-wing wankery and Argentinian spam. I'm gone. The Editor can stick the site up his arse which would serve the double purpose of not only being very amusing but also of blocking the flow of his editorial decisions.

The fact that the place is down for two hours every day at the kind of time I might want to use it, so that the hamsters which work the treadmill that runs it can be fed, doesn't help.

The question is, what other sites are worth hanging about on. Once you got past the stuff I listed above, there were some good discussions and sources of information on TMP. Is there anywhere I can go to get the same level of information, but without having to have a shower afterwards?

Thanks.

Update: I see (indirectly) that this has become a thread on TMP. I'm guessing that I probably don't want to look at it.

Update: The rest of the blog's nothing like this post. You may or may not regard that as a good thing.

The Coat

There is no wargames content in this post at all. If that's what you came here for, find another post.

A couple of weeks ago I posted a query about a greatcoat I'd bought at a market in Sydney. Since it appears that I have a couple of fashionistas in my readership, here it is, with its new front buttons.

They are basic gold-coloured buttons with an anchor design; the cheapest thing I could find with the right look at of the right size.

The red lining adds a nice touch of colour to the proceedings.

It's taken me a couple of weeks to get these pictures because, having put the buttons on, the weather warmed up to such a degree that wearing a coat was a complete no-no. Today was the first day that it was cold enough to justify it.

A Great Coat Query

Usually if this blog touches on clothing it is items of a more feminine persuasion. And, let's face it, generally they are much more attractive than bloke things. Bloke things are pretty boring.

However on Saturday I went up to Sydney - to Newtown, specifically - on a shopping expedition. I didn't get what I went for, but I did come away with what appears to be some kind of Italian police or military greatcoat. I won't worry you with a picture of the exact item, because it needs  bit of a clean, but it's similar to this:

I promise to never do a photo of me wearing mine and doing this pose

Mine lacks the stars on the lapels (not worried about that) but, unfortunately, also lacks most of the buttons at the front - four of the six are missing.

What I'm wondering is how easy it would be to source some replacements. However I don't really know precisely what I'm searching for, so I thought that I would turn to my loyal blog readers and see if they can give me a more accurate ID on what I bought. This is what the buttons look like:

Any idea what that insignia is all about? On the back of the button are the words 'FMC, Napoli'. but I think that's just the maker.

If I can't find any replacements then I'll take off the two remaining buttons and just source six suitable buttons; I'd rather have them matching than accurate.

Intermission

There will now be a short intermission, whilst I go camping ...

... and some photo albums of previous camping trips for you to enjoy whilst I'm away.

(You should be able to click them to see the pictures, but frankly I've never embedded one of these things in a post before, so I have no idea if it actually works)

See you next week.

Cloned

This is all a bit mysterious - there is a website - http://morioergames.info/ - which is a clone of this blog.

Whoever has set it up has even created a version of the header with the blue and pink background. It has every post I've ever made, and includes all of the pages too.

I'm truly mystified.

Why? Why does it exist?

(And this post will be on it as well, which is a bit meta. In fact, it appeared immediately.)

Cancon 2016 - Blogger Meetup Photo

And here it is, courtesy of Paul of The Man Cave - the Cancon bloggers meetup photo.

You can read more about the blogger meet shenanigans HERE

Bloggers Assemble!

Yes, Bloggers Assemble!

Well, if you're an Australian blogger. Or one who is in Australia at the end of January 2016.  Why? Because there's a meetup planned at Cancon, on 23rd January. Yes, your chance to put faces to pen-names. Your chance to see fellow bloggers in 3D.

Who would miss an opportunity like that?

I'm hoping to be there. That's reason enough to go, surely?

Anyway, according to Paul of The Man Cave, who seems to be organising it, we'll be meeting at 1pm by the board-games in the Northern hall.

Spread the word!