Cangames - Trench Crusade - Batt Report

Howdy folks,

Another Cangames related post...I was really pumped when I saw a Trench Crusade game pop-up in the schedule that I immediately jumped all over it. Seeing that my buddy Mike was running the game, I also knew it was going to be a really good session.

So I have been seeing a lot of posts and comments regarding Trench Crusade for the past year or so, and like I said, when I saw it on the schedule, I was really pumped to give it a shot. In a nutshell, if you haven’t heard of it, Trench Crusade is the ongoing fight between heaven and hell with demons moving onto the earthly plane while also capturing the context or the setting of World War I. The battlefield has become this apocalyptic trench line and no-man’s land where religiously inspired factions can fight the armies of hell. Whatever your religious flavor is, that’s cool, my main focus on this has definitely been more so on the concept, art, the overall idea, and the setting of World War I feels very fitting.

Overall, each character/player has a variety of stats, kind of the normal ones…shoot, melee, health, and maybe a couple of others…the Classics. The main thing with each of the factions and the character types or leader type, is they have their own individual traits, specials, and accumulating a blood rating provides another potential modifier to the number of dice that you can use in your attacks and in your defense.

All that to say, I was looking forward to see how the models looked on the table and give this a shot. Now, admittedly, I think I have forgotten more than I remember about the game, but I do remember having a lot of fun so we’ll just have to go by the pictures and have some random comments there.

Enjoy the pics!

The overall battle. The shrine in the middle complete with skulls, and wall segments, and what not on the periphery. Each player started from their own corner and just slug-fested from there.

My army from hell, big ole demon on the left, the dapper looking lad next to him is my hell knight, and three pig looking things that I couldn’t remember what they were. But they are Piggly, Wiggly, and Fred.

The hell night took a step on the battlefield takes long range shot at one of the French looking figures, which I think were LDS.

Piggly jumps into the battlefield, and set up near one of the objectives (I guess I should’ve mentioned there were a number of objectives for each player to control gaining one victory point or per round objective).

You can see some movements around the table. Piggly gets knocked down bottom right part of the picture. The LDS Troops are moving to a corridor or walkway, squaring off against Piggly. At the top part of the picture you can see some Stosstruppen, can’t remember their faction, And at the top right of the picture, some very British inspired troops are slowly making their way into the field.

Youcan see the corridor where the walkway has become a very target rich environment Piggly‘s in their Wiggly’s in there and I think Fred is as well. Lotta back-and-forth between the demons and the LDS, and I think at one point one of the British players starts throwing grenades at us caue, well… we’re at target rich environment. My pig dudes are really good on the melee side of the action.

And around this time, I finally realized that my big ass Demon has a killer special action where I get to swing a couple of levers and cause a lot of chaos. It’s pretty awesome. So my demon flies over the wall and starts hacking the LDS to pieces

The demon does the devils work, and then heads over to the other side of the field to start dealing with the British type dudes.

And of course, the hell night is able to do double range attacks again, which is pretty awesome and he looks pretty gnarly.

Random action shot between the LDS and the stormtrooper type dudes, shooting through windows and what not.

All well, my hell knight and demon clean up the mess on the right side table.

Certainly by this point, the mechanics of the game are going pretty quick for us. And each faction is scoring hits on the other, victory points are being tallied up quickly. As it turns out the storm trooper dudes are getting about three points per round because they’ve been pretty free clear for most of the game. The next couple of rounds take us to the end of the game. The demons take some serious hits when all the pig dudes are gone and my big ass demon is killed, which ended up being really anticlimatic. But I think in the end I ended up with the second highest amount of victory, points, and the game was super enjoyable overall. 

Cangames 2026 - Random Table Shots

Howdy folks,

As has been tradition for myself for sometime now, the past weekend was attendance at Cangames time! A great way to pass the long weekend, and this year was no exception, in fact I think the Con was even better this year. Not only did I build up the courage (and fight procrastination) to run a game, it was fully attended and then some...more on that in a later post.

This post is all about the 'random' table shots that I was able to grab...the games and tables that I was able to fit in between the schedule. It felt like there was an increase in games overall, and the miniature table top was no different in that respect. There were some classic, some that I wasn't familiar with, and some new favourites.

Hope you enjoy the pics.

Force on Force (FoF) has become somewhat of a classic staple at Cangames, and there ware folks who travel from abroad to make it just for the FoF. Chris ran another scenario this year, I wasn't able to get in on the game, but this one looks like a different setting compared to years past. Chris runs his FoF in 20mm scale and always has a very dynamic scenario for players.

Ed and Andrew came in from the Maritimes for the day and topped it off with running a 15mm Rapid Fire Ost Front scenario. I tried this one out last year, and really liked the ruleset. I think this scenario is a similar Soviet push against German defenses, but in this case was a little more dynamic with added defense in depth that challenged both players to maximize resources and priorities - do the Sov's get bogged down in mop up or push for the objective prioritizing the threat; do the Germans commit all at once or whittle the Sov's down.

Michael Ball and The Face of Battle was a staple in my 'early' years of attending Cangames, and while he had taken a break from the Con, last year he returned with version 2 of his ruleset. His table is always a treat to look at. I believe he runs his games at 20mm, and in this case we're looking at D-Day-esque adventures.

Last year, Duncan had run a Korean War scenario with B-29's getting bounced hard by North Korean Migs...it was an excellent scenario, and he brought it back this year. The table was pretty straight forward and lots of top gun excitement by everyone. This is the Mig Alley expansion to Blood Red Skies by Warlord Games. The models are great, and hey...who doesn't love a good air combat game?

Chris also ran a couple of serials of The Walking Dead in 28mm. Again, a very popular setting and a lot of fun was had by folks.

Brian always runs a game or two at the Con. This year he had a Pirates inspired game, not sure the ruleset, but the minis looked excellent.

Painting Update - 02 Hundred Hours

Howdy folks,

I hope all is well in your slice of the world. I am sitting her listening to the sound of the wind and sadly seeing all of my snow disappear. Just a quick post today, but wanted to share some progress that I have been making with the Grey For Now games 02 Hundred Hours starter box.

I had posted a while back my absolute joy in having completed the SAS commandos from the starter box, and can happily say that I think I am half way through the German side. Admittedly the progress has been a little slow, with more time taken that I would have liked to square away the painting scheme that I wanted to follow for the German sentries. Yes, I did go down an OCD rabbit hole, but at the same time I found a few excellent blogs and tutorials that I have adapted. As you will see in the pics, I have a mix of early war to late-ish war patterns for my troops. I had never tried early war before, so that was a great exercise and opportunity to use other colours for my Germans beside Vallejo 830.

As much as my OCD was struggling with the paint scheme decision, hands down the activity that took a large amount of time...and literal skin...was the assembly process. The figures are excellent, there is so much detail opportunities in each one. Very very frustrating was the finnicky nature of some of the components, i.e. gun slings breaking, dog leashes being nearly impossible to salvage let alone take off the sprue without any breakage.

I hope you enjoy the pics...more to follow in the future. One thing I will say, these figs as frustrating as they were to assemble are just excellent and were a really great palette cleanser from my Marvel Crisis Protocol push.

Cheers.

Group shot so far…

Two troops kitted up as Military Police…

Not part of the starter box, available separately…German sentry rising late for watch.

Trying out a few different uniform schemes.

German NCO in late-war uniform…and a couple of dogs (there are 6 available in the starter set)

German officers…with and without greatcoat. The figure on the right, I elected to paint-up emulating Henry Cavill’s character from “The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare”. The game allows for a commando being dressed undercover with various conditions and movement options. I painted this one up using the coat gets from the raid to liberate Apple.

A few more shots of Herr Cavill. I took one of the arms from the SAS sprues that was sporting a sten smg and I ended up adding a suppressor to go along with the characterization from the movie.

2026's Trek up Mt. Shame

Painted

15mm         0    

28mm+       16, +12

Terrain        0

  

Bought        0

Progress   +16

Painting Update - more 02 Hundred

Howdy folks,

I hope all is well on your respective fronts. I will admit the past month or so has been very busy and hasn't given me the chance to post as much as I had initially planned to, hopefully next month will be kinder with that.

Anywho, as the title says, this is a quick update on my painting progress with my 02 Hundred Hours purchases that I made at this years CanGames. I have already finished all of the SAS figures from the starter box, here, and I thought I would keep up with the other Allied troops that I bought. For this post, I present for you, a blister pack that looks to be an assortment from Artizan Miniatures range of WW2 British and Commonwealth.

These have been packaged up for Grey for Now, but looking at Artizan's website, the blister I bought is sourced from SWW115 and SWW118. These are meant for the North Africa expansion and are SAS reinforcements and when I saw them, I figured what the hell...I'll get them, try out the game, and probably pull the trigger on expansions later.

While the starter box and Wargames Atlantic contributions are plastic, these SAS reinforcement figures are metal...so the detail is there, but not as crisp as the plastic sculpts, but they do have some good weightiness to them.

Anyhow, inspired by some Osprey pics and Rogue Heroes stills, I painted them up in what I guess is somewhat classic look...I did not flock the bases as I had originally intended. After I had painted up the bases and added some wash, I thought they were strong enough on their own.

I hope you enjoy the pics.

 

Running up that Lead/Plastic Hill...

Painted

1/200             4 

15mm          53    

28mm+        36, +4

Terrain           1

Fabricated

     

Bought      +36 

Progress   +58