Blood Bowl returns and it's glorious!

The death of Games Workshop's Specialist Games proved short and they have released a brand new edition of Blood Bowl! After what GW did to Warhammer Quest, I think many old BB players waited for this release with fear in their hearts. Now it looks very much like GW is giving us the new edition we're all hoping for! The rules are left intact and we get a new box with top notch components. The last time I bought a Games Workshop product new from the store was in 2009 when I bought the third edition of Space Hulk so I wanted to vote with my wallet and made this a day 1 purchase. Whoa, that's seven years already! I thought Space Hulk 3rd edition came out yesterday!

I'm sure you can find everything you want to know about this new edition from the Internet already so I'll just add a few notes.

I'm really happy with all the components. Everything is top notch quality in my mind and the box contains plenty of value for its (in GW scale) moderate price point. I hope this will attract new players from the boardgaming crowd as I think it could compete in that market. Note that even though GW hasn't released all the old teams as official rules in the "day 1 DLC" -type death zone book, there is a Ravening Hordes style pdf in the new which GW released and which you can use to play all the teams that don't have new official rules yet.

The new orc team looks great, especially the Black Orc. He really looks like he's having the time of his life out there :)

Size-wise the new models are a bit bigger than old Blood Bowl models, but not so much that they can't be used on the same pitch as long as they are in different teams.

 As you probably know, the new pitch has larger squares and the new models have larger bases as well. This means that old models fit on the new pitch but not vice versa. Actually, the old "big guy" base now fits on the new pitch just fine.

 I guess in a pinch you can play with new models on an old pitch, but it's going to be a tight fit unless you play a very loose formation:

So there you have it. It's nice to get some love from GW to some of it's non-core games and I hope this makes them enough money so they continue to support it. Next up it's time to have fear in our hearts over what they'll do to Epic. 

6mm Black Powder ACW

Hi all,

Here's a report of the regimental level ACW game I hosted at Warcon using my 6mm collection. I'll also give you info on the scaling and the setup of things as I gather from the Google search traffic I'm getting on Hail Caesar that a lot of people are wondering on how to apply the Warlord Games rulesets to 6mm.

Scaling

Black Powder is a 28mm game and meant to be played on a huge table. The recommended depth of the table is something like five or six feet. The amount of figures needed in 28mm is something from 16-20 models per unit upwards and an army required by most of the sample scenarios would take hundreds of 28mm models. For someone with limited space and painting time this can be a dealbreaker.

As it happens, the game scales quite nicely to 6mm models when you simply halve all ranges. All the ranges used in the game are even numbers so there are no awkward half-inches to deal with. The effect on table space is not quite as drastic as with substituting inches with centimeters (as I've done with Hail Caesar). This makes the standard 6x4 foot wargames table the equivalent of a 12x8 foot table. Lots of elbow room.

The standard frontage of an infantry unit in unmodified scale is about 240mm to 300mm. In half scale the same range is 120mm to 150mm. My ACW infantry is based on 25mm wide (Fire and Fury) stands, and five of them gives me a nice looking unit 125mm wide and 50 models. For small units I use three stands just to keep the unit symmetric with the command stand in the middle. My artillery is based on 25mm stands too and I used two of them side by side for a battery of guns. Open order formations are simply represented by placing the stands one inch apart.

A Union brigade of  one standard unit, two small units and a leader.

The Scenario

I was determined not to return to Gettysburg for a while, but I spotted a nice and easy scenario in Wargames Illustrated 245. I needed a simple and straightforward scenario with simple terrain I could easily build in a convention 300 kilometers from my home. In WI245 there is a regimental Wheatfield scenario written by a David Brown for the Guns at Gettysburg rules (an ACW variant of General De Brigade). I adjusted the OOB to Black Powder and used the scenario map and the map from Maps of Gettysburg to do my version. The reinforcement schedule worked quite well as it was without tinkering with which turn the units would arrive.

In the scenario, three Union brigades defend the wheatfield and the adjacent hill against an attack by three larger, veteran Confederate brigades. The Union forces will receive plenty of reinforcements but will they arrive too late to keep the Wheatfield in Union hands?


The Game

We had four players participating in the game. Two had read the rules but no-one had played the game before. I had played Hail Caesar, which is quite similar, but this experience worked to my detriment a couple of times as a rule or a modifier would be subtly different and I would try and play the rule the wrong way. All the players had some experience from miniature wargames (and one was a fresh convert from the grim, dark future with no prior experience with historicals). I think we were pretty much at home with the ruleset by turn three so points to Black Powder for clarity and ease of learning!

One Union brigade was deployed on the Wheatfield in the center, one was protecting it's right flank on the hill and one was on Wheatfield lane ready to support the ones in the front. Two Union artillery batteries were also on the road.

The Confederates kicked off the game by marching on the table from the woods south of the Wheatfield. They had the veteran status but the Union forces facing them had a stone wall to take cover behind.

The reserve Union brigade saw an opportunity to threaten the Confederate left flank and marched on with great speed.

This forced the Confederates to deploy their reserve brigade to counter, and with a similarly good activation roll they now deployed into line withing musketry range of the Union brigade still in field column. Uh oh..

The volley of musketry caused some casualties in the Union column, and they hastily started to form line. One regiment was too disordered to comply, and had to remain in column. (Red markers are casualties, yellow markers are disorder)

At the Wheatfield the Confederates took their sweet time to reach the Union defenders (two consecutive failures in command checks, I think). When they charged, the Union forces protected by the stone wall had no trouble repulsing the attacker. On the Confederate right the skirmishers were pushed back but this was not enough to remedy the obvious blunder of charging headlong into a stone wall.

The hill objective received a charge as well. Freshly Raised troops versus Reliable veterans, so the result was clear? Nope, the Confederates were repulsed again.

To make things worse the Union forces took their opportunity to cut the Confederate line in two and capture their artillery while they were at it! The desperate Confederates on the right flank assumed a defensive posture.

On the Confederate left both parties were pretty beat up but the Confederates had failed to gain a breakthrough.

 Even on the far Confederate right the regiment had trouble brushing aside the skirmishers in front. The noose was tightening on the right flank as three isolated Confederate regiments were slowly being encircled.

As all of the Confederate attacks had failed and Union reinforcements were flooding to the field we decided to call the game. The utter failure of the attacks owed a bit to hasty scenario conversion and to my own tactical blunders. Design-wise, I think there wasn't an appreciable difference between veteran troops and the green troops they were facing. The "drama" of the scenario would have had the initial Union defenders running and the real fight would have been fought between the reinforcements and the worn out Confederates. To make this the probable outcome I'll need to tinker with the stats a bit. I think as far as tactics go, I shouldn't have attacked that wall head on but rather flank the position as I had room and time to do so.

The Black Powder rules felt nice and light. The troops were easy to maneuver and there were just a few modifiers to learn. I think the ruleset works best for a carefree saturday evening game where you don't want to stress out on the minutiae and just want to have a lot happen on the table with not much effort. I think I have to look at the skirmisher rules again though as one small skirmisher unit held a full close order regiment in melee for three turns I think. Was that just good luck for the boys in blue?

Anyway, it was a great evening and I had the pleasure to play with three gentlemen I haven't played with before, one of whom will hopefully be a new convert to historical wargames!

Converting Hail caesar for 6mm, first playtest session

I got Hail Caesar on the table today together with one of my regular opponents. I have been toying with the idea of starting a new period, and with the release of Hail Caesar by Rick Priestley and the release of new Greek sculpts by Baccus, I'm tempted to do a hoplite greek set.

Shining bronze, detailed shields and naked greek men. What's not to like?

There are some considerations before I pull out my Visa. First, will Hail Caesar work with 6mm miniatures, and what basing would work well? Second, is the game better than say, Warmaster ancients? Well, I've only skimmed the rules of Warmaster and never played it, but since both games are Priestley's work, it's a good base assumption that the new game is more refined than the old. Do I hear the cries of "Cult of the new!" over the horizon? Maybe it was just the wind.

Hail Caesar is primarily designed to be played with 28mm miniatures on a table which allows a 36" space between the opposing lines at the start of the battle. I wanted to try out one of the example scenarios in the rulebook, but there were no guidelines in the book on what size the tables are in the scenarios. Now, Priestley states many times in the book that players are free to tailor everything to their needs (as if we needed permission) but I think in published scenarios it is nice to know the relative distances between the forces as this impacts scenario balance. I asked about it on the Warlord Games forum and got a reply from Priestley himself:

Most of the games were played on Alan or Michael Perry's wargames table - both six feet wide and usually ten or twelve feet long depending on how its set up.

The Sassanid game and the Roman/Celt game were played on John Stallard's table - which is more like five feet by ten if I remember right - it does depend on how things are set up. The Roman/Celt game was re-photographed after the event - the Sassanid game was photographed as we played.

Three feet apart is good for a very standard type of 'line em up' style game - basically both sides deploying within six inches of the table edge of a four foot wide table. That's a realistic table size of most people I think (including me!). The games in the book are all much more narrative apart from the Sassanid game - which is fairly close to a line 'em up game - so the sides start off often much further apart. Three feet puts both armies out of 3 moves at the start of the game - which is what I'd aim for.

Rick

Now, 6 feet is a pretty deep table, 182,88 centimeters to be precise. It's possible to have a table that big in your average home but it will be difficult to set up a game and have enough terrain on it to keep it attractive. Here's where the 6mm scale shines. Baccus miniatures are designed to look best on a unit stand with a 60 millimeter frontage. The frontage of your average 28mm Hail Caesar unit is stated to be somewhere around  160-200 millimeters, that is eight to ten infantry wide, if they're based individually on 20mm bases. Suppose I just shrink the game so that each inch from the rulebook counts as a centimeter? This means that the 6 foot deep table would now be only 72 centimeters deep. That's almost a DBA sized table! This means I have to shrink the units as well. A Baccus infantry stand 60 centimeters wide would with this scale be the same as a 152,4 millimeter wide unit on a "big table". Close enough for me, and I'm sure it works gameplay-wise as I'll probably end up doing all the armies for this set anyway. The depth of the units is not an issue according to the author, anything that looks appropriate should work. I think for depth I'll stick with the 1:2 ratio to the frontage, as this would allow the stands to be used in a variety of games.

I deemed it necessary to play a test game or two with the rules before committing any money to figures, so I made some print & play units for hoplites, light infantry in open order and cavalry.

Here's an example of the units I made. I drew them on a computer, printed them out and glued them on cardstock. The hoplite units are, at the moment divided into two blocks, as it allows me to use the different formations in the game without resorting to markers. There's a small light infantry unit which I though should at most be half as deep as a hoplite formation. Then there's a small light cavalry unit. The "figures" should have a footprint more or less equal to what the corresponding 6mm figures would have. 

The example scenario we played was a small two division versus two division fictional battle set in the Peloponnesian war. The Spartans and their allies are attacking a road held by the Athenians and their allies. A simple line battle with no special twists. There was an ambush rule in the original scenario, but that would have been difficult to do without an umpire so I didn't include it.

The opposing forces meet. The many dice near the units are for keeping track of casualties as you don't remove figures from the units in a game of Hail Caesar. Another thing in favor of 6mm armies, but it does give the game a cluttered look until I get some casualty tokens.

The game was straightforward. The Spartans advanced on the Athenians. The Athenians, being more numerous, attempted to flank the Spartans with poor success. Battle was joined, casualties suffered, and the Spartan elite hoplite phalanx was left king of the hill, being the only unit not shaken at the end.

This was a learning game so we got some rules wrong which were possibly game impacting ones. That didn't matter as we had a fun evening even with these small forces. It took us around three hours to play the scenario and after learning the rules, I think this'll finish in less than two. The 6mm basing worked well for the hoplites and cavalry, but I still have to think about the basing of light infantry. They can change between open order and formed quite easily and making open order visually obvious gives me some thought. Should I have one or two of those small rectangles with figures in scattered formation or put them on a circular stand? With a circular stand the open order formation is immediately obvious, but it might be difficult to position the troops in some situations, and you can't have a long string of skirmishers when they're in one "horde". In the very least, I might end up doing separate versions for light infantry in formed and open order mode as it won't be much trouble. 

Every Phalanx shaken except the Spartan one. No, I don't want to hear the catchphrase.

I can't give much insight on the rules before I play a couple more games. It's obvious however that veterans of Warhammer and Warmaster should feel right at home in this one. The terms are different but the rule mechanics are very familiar. Especially the different special rules which you can give units had a very Warhammer-y feel to them. The biggest departure is probably that you don't need to pay wheeling costs for units. You just move into the direction you want and pivot the unit to the facing of you desire when you finish. If you move within 12" (or 12 cm in my case) of an enemy, you have to face that enemy and can only move towards or away from that enemy as long as you are within 12". If you announce a charge, you have to move into contact by the most direct route, eliminating the chance of overly agile flank charges. It seems to work fine, but I'm not yet sure if hoplite warfare has the right "feel" with these rules, or if they're more at home in the dark ages.

Ok, if you actually read this far, you're a better man than I and deserve a rest. I'll continue on the subject on a later date as my plan evolves.

How many figures?

I've begun work on the OOB for bull run by taking the official Fire & Fury scenario OOB as a template and working from that. The F&F scenario is in the 150 scale so I've been converting the number of stands to 200 scale, rounding up or down where necessary. It looks like I'll end up with about 83 infantry stands for the union and 71 infantry stands for the conferedates if I don't change much in the OOB's. Thats 154 stands of infantry in total. I've counted up my already painted stuff and I have about 75 infantry stands worth left to paint. Also, I'll have to rebase my old stuff once the litko bases arrive. So far, so good. The painting effort doesn't seem unreasonable. If I base the infantry stands to 10 models per stand it will total 750 infantry plus some scraps of artillery, cavalry and leader models I think it'll total about eight to nine evenings worth of intensive painting but hey, what else was I going to do this summer? Read War and Peace? (actually, yes).

Fitting it on the table

Ok, so I went to the venue we'll most likely be playing on today and looked at the tables there and how I could connect them together. It looks like the best table depth I can do without being too narrow or too deep and not needing to start buying plywood is 160 centimeters. Width is not so much of an issue as there are plenty of tables to connect. 160 centimeters of depth gives me a slice of the battlefield pictured above. I rotated the rectangle the best I could to fit the important parts of the battlefield on the table. It's a compromise, but what isn't in this world? I would have liked to have chinn ridge and bald hill completely on the map, but it is important to have some space on the other side of the stone bridge for Union troops to deploy on. I might trim the map a bit from the right hand edge if need be to fit the field on two Citadel grassmats and to save on not having to buy as many model trees. Besides, the Island ford probably couldn't serve as a Union entry point as the trail leading from it to the Union positions goes very close to confederate troops I do not intend to include in the OOB for this scenario. I'd say it's just safe to assume the Union troops wouldn't risk moving troops by this trail. Credit for the map this butchery of mine is based on belongs again to Hal Jespersen and his site. I'm just hacking his work to pieces for my own sinister ends.

So, to give players the possibility to still maneuver more than this map allows, I thought I'd make it possible to conduct off-map movement. The entry time for a force can be altered depeding on entry point. For example, if a union brigade marches from the east, it can choose to appear at the stone bridge or at the Sudley church a couple of turns later. I'll have to figure out how long it will take for a force to march via the roads but I think it's doable. It should be possible for a brigade to march via Groveton to threaten the enemy from a different direction, don't you think?

Scaling Bull Run.

So what will I need and how much of it? Figure-wise I have already a nice start in 6mm Baccus miniatures, the first base I ever made pictured above. The stuff I have, however, is based on the Polemos rules with a 28 figure 6cm*3cm stand being the norm. For Fire and Fury, I'll need to rebase.

Fire and Fury uses infantry based on 1"*3/4" stands, which converts nicely to 25mm*19mm stands which a SI system oriented person is more keen to understand. The stand represents either 150 or 200 infantrymen making the groundscale either 45 or 60 yards per inch. I've chosen to use the 200 scale for Bull Run to make the task of painting them easier and because fitting the game on a reasonably sized table will be difficult enough on the 200 scale as I'll reveal later.

Fire and Fury has been designed with 15mm figures in mind, with 3 figures per stand, but I see absolutely no problem in using 6mm figures with the same stands, as the groundscale will be closer to the figure scale and I'll get a better massed effect by putting more figures on the stands. I will have eight to ten figures per stand, standing in two ranks. Sort of like on the image above, only on smaller bases. 

The  The Wikipedia article on Bull Run cites the number of soldiers engaged as being approximately 18 000 men per side. Using the 200 scale, that means I will need to do about 36 000 / 200 = 180 stands of models for this project. This might be reduced somewhat when I design the scenario and see who will be controllable by the players, but if I'll put 10 models on each stand, I'm going to have some work ahead of me. The good thing is that I have roughly half of that already painted up!

Yes, I know there is a Bull Run scenario in the Great Eastern Battles supplement for Fire and Fury. I just haven't seen a copy I could procure at a manageable price anywhere.

Then the battlefield itself. Looking at the very  wargames friendly map on the Wikipedia article, we can see that the fighting was centered around the area of Henry house hill. A lot of the Wikipedia ACW maps are made by one Hal Jespersen, and they're great. You can find a collection of his maps at http://www.posix.com/CW. Now, the thing I don't like about many wargames based on historical battles is that the scenario sets up to a point in the battle when the die is already cast. The armies are facing each other in the historical positions and there is very limited maneuverability left for the player. You simply roll a lot of dice and see if history repeats itself. Now, I want a scenario where I have the possibility to choose different strategies than the ones the generals of history took. I want this scenario to give some maneuverability to the player so he can move in from a different direction if he wants and use the troops at his disposal in different ways. I think the battle of Bull Run gives good opportunities for this.

Now ideally, if you want to give good maneuverability to the players, you should have a playground which has (take a look at the map now) Sudley church in the north, Groveton in the west, old Warrenton road to the south and the Stone bridge with enough elbow room beyond it to the east. That would give the players some good road march options and enough space to try and maneuver. The problem with that is not that I'd need a lot of miniatures terrain. The problem is the table size.

If one inch of table represents sixty yards, then one mile is 29 inches which is about 73 centimeters.  The battlefield area I'd want to cover is about 4 miles times four miles. That is nearly three meters across per side. That would look impressive, but there is no way that anyone would be able to reach the center of the board where the action is the hottest. Damn you, real world!


 So, I'll have to trim my grandiose plans and figure out a couple of tricks to be able to fulfill my wish to give the players ample maneuverability...