The D&D Experience

 

A while back, our neighbor expressed an interest in trying Dungeons & Dragons, because she is a fan of The Big Bang Theory.  Personally, I’ve only randomly seen a handful of the shows, generally when someone else was watching them, but I dug in a bit to see what sort of experience she was expecting.

After some consultation on various roleplaying game Discords, I came to the conclusion that the key elements were likely to be rolling some d20s (and other polyhedral dice), doing a bit of roleplaying (i.e. light improv with character voices), anf fighting a battle on a battle mat or some sort, and that we’d probably be good as long as it said D&D on the box. I also concluded that the whole thing would flow more smoothly if I didn’t have to stop and look up the rules, so I went retro and ran with original Dungeons & Dragons plus some of the rules from the Greyhawk supplement and abandoned any thought of trying to play 4th or 5th editions, both of which were used on the show.  I don’t like to risk using my original books at the table, but I have the 2014 40th anniversary reprint to use as a table copy. (I was appalled at what a 2014 set went for the in Gen Con auction last year, but I need to use something…)

We recruited one of the neighbor’s friends, a recent college graduate with some 5th edition experience, and my wife to round out an adventuring party.  They agreed that pregenerated characters would be acceptable, so explaining character generation was one more thing off my plate.  

Heritage Dungeon Dwellers, from sets 1206, 1207, and 1208

For my own amusement I decided that I’d staff the game with vintage miniatures since I was using vintage rules, so our player characters, a fighter, a magic user, and a cleric, were chosen from Heritage Dungeon Dwellers from around 1980. 

Miniatures loaded for transport

The opposition was provided by some Minifigs ME  “man-orcs” and “true orcs”and it doesn’t get more vintages than that, as they were the first range of fantasy figures. I also turned out to need a baby dragon, so I dug into my (mostly organized) boxes of my vintage “pile of potential” and came up with one from Heritage, a #1005 from their Dragons range, released just before they went out of business.  Drawing on

my somewhat rusty speed painting skills, I got him ready in about an hour and a half all told.  It’s the first figure I’ve painted in months, so I am hoping this will help break the painting block.

I kept with my vintage theme in setting up an adventure, and started the characters in Stoneharrow, the main town of my first D&D campaign.  Rumors reached them of a nearby village troubled by goblin raids, and of a reward for driving off the goblins.  I wouldn’t ordinarily set things on rails to this extent, but I wanted to get in a few set-pieces that would provide that “D&D experience”.  So I wanted the scenes to be “visit the village”, “fight with the goblin lookouts”, “explore the cellar”, and “the arrival of the dragon”.

Notes for the adventure, kept to two A5 pages

I set the pregenerated characters to be 3rd level to give them some survivability and each of the players chose the class that seemed interesting to them.  I also threw in a 2nd level fighter henchman so that the magic user might be able to avoid getting into a hand-to-hand fight with the goblins.

We finally gathered this past Saturday. After some final preliminary work to pick some spells, our brave adventurers crossed the Great River on a ferry, arriving in the little village of Barl’s Landing.

They roleplayed their way through an encounter with the village leader and the innkeeper, and collected some information about the goblin threat, including a rumor that an ogre was also about, and that a dragon had been seen flying over the area.  When they eventually headed for the ruined tower that the goblins were using as their lair, I pulled out a Dungeons Pop piece from my toy collection.  This came from a Kickstarter which did eventually deliver after many delays, and I was glad to put one of the pieces to use.

Scene reconstructed later

They found the tower, with a few goblin pickets visible, and quickly came up with a plan to distract them on one side while the rest of the team snuck up on the other.  That’s when they discovered that the guards also included an ogre.  So, the magic user put the ogre to sleep and a quick fight left them in possession of the upper works, although a dying goblin fell through an open trap door to alert those still below.  They hastily blocked the trap door with the ogre’s body, and debated their next course of action, and whether it was likely that there was another exit from the underground works.

We removed the tower for convenience; goblin counterattack in the lower right

As it turned out there was, so the goblins attempted to charge up the hill and clear our brave adventurers back out.  Everyone looks deep in thought above as they decide what to do.

The adventurers decided to pull together a hasty defense, and meet the goblins.  This turned out well for them, as they killed several goblins immediately.  I decided I’d check morale for the goblins, who broke and ran, leaving our heroes in possession of the field.  Since we were running short on time, we skipped forward to the part where they acquired the baby dragon from its cell and brought it to the surface, and we wrapped the evening up with the encounter with the mother dragon, who agreed that she now owed them a debt they could collect at some future time.

Our players and their miniature adventurers

If we ever decide that this isn’t a one-shot and that we’re continuing on, we have several threads we can follow up, such as the dragon debt, and a map of other goblin hideouts in the area which could be of use to the local authorities.  

Everyone had a good time and stayed engaged, and our neighbor noted that she now understood how one of these sessions could go on all day.  I was pleased that they were creatively problem solving by the time we were done, and that they noted and discussed several incidents in which the non-combat utility spells they hadn’t chosen would have been perfect, so they were also creatively engaging with the rules.  (I didn’t set that up, by the way.)

One postscript on my choice of the original rules:  I showed my wife a 4 page character sheet I’d been using in my most recent 5th edition game, and she agreed that that would have been overwhelming.  I don’t know what the Wizards of the Coast D&D start sets look like these days, but I hope they are considerably simpler than the base game.

Gen Con 2026 After Action Report (29 July to 2 August 2026)

Indianapolis welcomes us again

It has taken a little longer to get this report written than I had hoped, but here we are at last. A convention on the scale of Gen Con demands some planning on the part of an attendee. This was the 10th time I made the pilgrimage since we started attending again in 2014, after a lapse of more than three decades, so I have the routine pretty well practiced by now.  After taking last year off from running games, my brother was ready to be back at it this year, so we agreed that we were going to run two sessions of Dragon Rampant and two sessions of Burrows and Badgers, each for six players. All of them were to be titled “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”. We bought our badges (admission to the convention), but were not lucky in the February lottery to distribute the available downtown hotel rooms. We decided that we would stay with my brother in Bloomington and commute in the one hour drive each day.  My wife therefore elected not to attend this year, and we settled down for the next milestone, the publishing of the preliminary events list in early May.  Two weeks later the attendees’ event wish lists are processed.  When the dust settled from that, I had a personal schedule with two games, two seminars, and two dance events in addition to the four games we were running, and we had filled 23 of the 24 seats on offer in our games.

I’m going to digress here with a minor pet peeve. My brother and I have often heard people offer the opinion that Gen Con should arrange more of their favorite game, whatever that might be.  Gen Con organizes the spaces and runs the ticket distribution system to allot players to games, but they do not run any games.  All games are provided by companies who offer games to promote their wares, recruiting  whatever gamemasters may be needed by whatever means are available to them, or they are provided by individual gamemasters, either independent or gathered into gamemaster collectives, who volunteer their time, energy, and personal collections of material to run whatever they feel inspired to share. If someone wants to see more of their favorite game (especially older ones) at Gen Con, the best way to make that happen is to submit an event and run it. One does not need to let their hobby rely on the industry. I will hop off my soap box now… 

Since I needed to haul a fair amount of stuff to do my part in running miniatures games I decided that I would drive this year.  I have been regularly soloing on trips to visit my father, a distance of 560 miles, so I didn’t think that the 620 miles from my house to Gen Con would be that much harder.  I did figure I would need a recovery day after the drive, since my brother’s house is another 50 miles past the Gen Con location.  I set off on the morning of Monday, 27 July, and reached his house after thirteen hours on the road, including the rest breaks.  We used Tuesday to make sure everything was organized, laying out and repacking the troops for the Dragon Rampant game and finalizing and printing all of our handouts.

Three warbands sorted and double-checked

We took a leisurely trip up to Indianapolis on Wednesday after lunch to sample the “Day 0” activities, including sampling the food at the Block Party and attending The Stink, an ice breaker gathering to unofficially kick off the convention. (I do not have the credentials to be a participant in the Trade Day activities on Wednesday for educators and industry people.) While at The Stink we ran into Nelly from the long running vlog Nelly’s Nerdy Adventures and I ended up on the Day 0 report talking about looking forward to running some games. (It’s around 6:00 minutes in…)

Setting up for “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, DR version

We got up to Indy on Thursday morning without any issues, loaded our scenery and miniatures into our collapsible wagon, and hauled them to our assigned tables, with a little side trip out to the Block Party to pick up my morning caffeination from the Helm Coffee tent.  They appeared to be doing a brisk business everytime I stopped by, and I remembered them fondly from previous Gen Cons. We had been assigned to Tables 21/22, Green, Hall C.  As you can see, the Green area was denoted by the table cloth.  We discovered that we were in the last row of tables next to an aisle, with the back entrance to the Exhibit Hall on the other side of the aisle, so we had a lot of people wander by to see what we were up to. 

For our Dragon Rampant version of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, we placed three warbands on each side of the central pond, with a command hierarchy (from first to third) designated.  The Lady of the Lake, depicted by a Ral Partha Elf Princess (catalog 01-021), would hear the entreaties of the most senior surviving leader on each side, and lob a scimitar, as it were, to whichever one first convinced her that they had what it took to rule the kingdom.  Bonuses to the entreaty roll were available to any side controlling the auxiliary objectives on either side of the table.  We set it up that way hoping that each player would feel that they were contributing to the overall effort.  

Note the table designator signs. A lot of effort goes into organizing for smooth running.

The Centaur general and some of his crew work to seize the Dragon Stones objective.

Eventually senior challenger leader made it to the pond and was granted the sword

For convenience, and not to spend too much time laying out a backstory that was irrelevant to the actual play, we designated the two sides the “incumbents” and the “challengers”.  In the first run, the challengers just barely got the sword, needing the die roll boost from controlling one of the auxiliary objectives, and managed to get it off the table.  

We were pleasantly surprised to find that all six of our pre-registered players showed up, although we had anticipated that anyone willing to sign up for a game at the same time that the exhibit hall was due to open was likely serious about playing. They all seemed to be having a good time, so we were happy to be running the game for them.  They were a mix of grognards and younger people, and we took the opportunity to jest that most of our miniatures were older than the young people.  While some of the miniatures may have been recently production from Ral Partha Legacy or Iron Wind Metals, I don’t think we had anything on the table originally sculpted after 1985. In addition to Ral Partha, our warbands included figures from Heritage, Hinchliffe, Minifigs, and even some early Citadel Dark Ages historicals from about 1980, before the release of the earliest edition of Warhammer.  One passer-by noted that it had been a long time since he’d seen that many “true 25s” in one place.  Our scenery was more recent.  We relied on commercial scenery this year, with mats from Cigar Box Battles and trees and pond from Monster Fight Club, along with a few more vintage pieces, such as some 1980/90s resin buildings from Hovels to form the village, the second auxiliary objective.

From this angle, you can see that we were right up against the Exhibit Hall

In submitting our events, we had allowed ourselves one hour to reset and find a bite of lunch between games.  I packed my lunch, since an hour is scant time to forage at Gen Con.  Our second game on Thursday was the only one that was undersubscribed, with five players signed up for the six seats. However, all five of them showed up, and my brother played the extra position.  Interestingly, for a game involving as many dice as Dragon Rampant, the second game played out as a near duplicate of the first.

Overheard from a passer-by, “Any game with a triceratops is already awesome!”

Once again the challenger leader rides up to the pond to be granted the sword

Once the games were over we packed everything back in the wagon and took it back to the car.  We then had time to spare to visit the Block Party one more time for some food and conversation with random fellow attendees about how their convention was going before we headed over to the stadium for a game we were both going to play.

Sometimes they play a different game here

The whole playing field of Lucas Oil Stadium is made over into more gaming space.  With the extra high ceilings and the industrial air conditioning, the stadium is a pretty nice place to play.  My brother noted that we should consider requesting it (again) next time. 

Kingmaker

We had signed up for what turned out to be a three player game of Kingmaker, in the current Gibson Games edition.  We have played more of this as the earlier first Avalon Hill edition, and I’ve even played the original Ariel edition.  In fact, we played the Avalon Hill edition when my brother visited in May, so that version was relatively fresh in our minds.  It ended up being my turn to be the goat (not the GOAT!); my faction managed to crown Edward of March (Yorkist #2) after Richard (Yorkist #1) died when plague struck York, but I was stomped on by my brother who revealed the office of Chamberlain of the County Palatine of Chester with 200 extra troops in Wales (guess where I was…) before I could escape.  I spent the rest of the game (not too long) trying to build up a faction to re-enter the scuffle, but we noted that the 3rd player could win by summoning parliament and assigning his faction most of the unclaimed offices, so he did.  Really, we had had a long day and had that hour-long drive to get back to our beds, so it was not the winter of our discontent, so to speak. 

We had arranged Friday to be a quiet day, with the expectation that we would get our shopping done and sit in on the Gen Con auction for the miniatures and the collectibles.  I was mildly disappointed in my morning seminar, as it turned out to be focused on getting your “actual play” channel to work, and I was hoping for something more actionable for my next home roleplaying game.  

The Gen Con Exhibit Hall is ridiculously huge

I had prepared for my visit to the exhibit hall by annotating a copy of the map with the booths that I knew that I wanted to see, and I got through most of them on Friday after the seminar.  I had to keep the shopping light as I had everything with me in a book bag (unless I wanted to try out the new bag check vendor implemented last year).  I did stumble into an opportunity when I found that the line was short at Ginny Di’s booth, so I was able to meet her briefly.

I thought she always carried a sword?

After lunch I played a short game of Dragonbane under the auspices of the Free League team (see above regarding sources of games). We accomplished our objective within the two hour window for the game and avoided a dangerous combat.  This was good for the characters, but did mean the GM didn’t have a chance to show off Dragonbane’s combat system, which is pretty good.  I’ve run Dragonbane at home, but hand’t had a chance to sit down and play. 

Auction lightly attended at some point during “miniatures”

After the game I met up with my brother at the auction.  If I had been a colletor of Battle Tech or Ogre miniatures, I would have been in luck, but as I am not I was able to keep myself from buying anything without too much trouble.  I even took a turn through the Consignment Store without finding anything that had to come home with me.  

Downtown Marriott’s Gen Con themed hot dog stand

The auction has space at the downtown Marriott, and I noted that they had put up a Gen Con tehemed hot dog stand this year.  Part of the atmosphere of Gen Con comes from the fact that a lot of the service industry downtown plays along with us.  So, to encourage them to continue to play in the future, I decided to have a hot dog for dinner between the “miniatures” and “collectible” sections of the auction.  Happily for my budget, there was nothing in the collectibles auction that I was deperate to own, so I did not buy anything. My brother had his eye on a rare set of Fineous Fingers miniatures, but eventually decided that getting home safely was more important, so we packed up and drove back. 

On Saturday we were back with our other two games of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, although this time the contenders were anthropomorphic animals as our rules were Burrows and Badgers, also published by Osprey Games.  As with previous years, we did not think it wise to try a multi-player version of B&B, so we set up three parallel two-player games.  Getting the sword from the pond was just a slight re-theming of the “capture the paychest” scenario we’ve used in previous years.

My board; different Cigar Box Battle mat, but more Monster Fight Club

As usual I got too busy gamemastering to take too many pictures. Most of the complications of B&B are in the warband creation phase, and we bypassed that by handing out pre-generated warbands.  Nevertheless, it takes new players a couple of turns to come up to speed with the rules, so we keep busy. Continuing with the trend noted above, all six pre-registered players showed up for the morning game, including a couple who had played with us in a previous year.

All three boards and six warbands laid out

Let the games begin

We reset the boards, had a bite of lunch (packed again), and then played our afternoon session.  I will admit that we were completely amazed when, for the fourth time, all the players showed up.  Now I know that everyone intends to show up when they buy their tickets, but travel mishaps and illnesses occur, and by Saturday afternoon I would not blame anyone for being too tired to show up.  In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we chose the run the two-player games on Saturday.  We can run with any even number of players, and one of us can substitute in if we should have an odd number.  Our record for the weekend was a first for us: 23 attendees for 23 tickets sold; perfect attendance!

We decided we’d have a decent dinner before heading home but it had started raining, so we found ourselves at the downtown Marriott again; their restaurant is acceptable.  That’s where we were when the tornado warning alarms went off.  Happily for us, that didn’t take long to clear, so we were able to head home after we finished dinner.

I didn’t really take any pictures on Sunday.  I had a seminar on fairy tales, and two sessions of English Country type dancing, all run by the wonderful ladies of The Revel Alliance.  It would have been more fun had my wife been able to make it, but I was still glad to take a little break from the gaming and be active for a while.

Getting home after Gen Con took a while.  I left my brother’s on Monday morning and stopped for the night in the Detroit area to visit my father.  I stayed over an extra day with him and then finally drove the rest of the way home on Wednesday.

It was Friday before I got the car completely unloaded, took a picture of my shopping, and packed away the miniatures I’d taken along. At my age, burning the candle at both ends requires preparation and recovery.

Overall it was a great time, and I am hoping to be able to go next year.  I’ve been thinking about what games it might be fun to run …

Gen Con: The Aftermath

Sunday morning was rainy at Gen Con, but the Block Party was still going, so I could get some coffee. There was some shopping, and some dancing, and I have been on my way home since yesterday morning, with visit with my father to break up the 12 hours of driving. I shall hope to get the proper After Action Report posted by Saturday.

Gen Con Day Three — Played

Both of our Burrows and Badgers games ran yesterday and all of the players looked like they were having a good time. All twelve pre-registered players showed up, giving us a perfect record for the weekend with 23 of 23 showing up to play. It would appear there is a taste for some indie minis games at Gen Con ….

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Gen Con Day Three — Setting Up

We have half an hour to spare in setting up for today’s games. We will be running two six player sessions of Burrows and Badgers today. We ought to try multi-player B&B sometime, but for Gen Con we have opted to stay with 3 one on one set-ups. Past experience leaves us confident that this will work.

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Gen Con Day One — Grognard Time

After running our two games today, we are relaxing by playing the current Gibson edition of the Ariel/Avalon Hill 1970s War of the Roses game Kingmaker.

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Gen Con Begins (officially)

My brother and I arrived at Gen Con yesterday for the unofficial Day Zero kickoff. Today we are starting off with an 0900 official game of Dragon Rampant for six players, and repeating it at 1300. The first game went well, and we hope the second game will go well too. More to follow in the After Action Report.

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More July Games

A Surprising Day for the Home Guard

 The week of the 5th of July was a busy on.  I’ve previously posted about the game day I had the opportunity to engage in with my elder son Norman on Tuesday the 7th.

On Thursday the 9th it was time for a HAWKs Geezer Game.  Duncan Adams has been hosting the Geezer Games since August 2016, shortly after he retired. However, I was only able to start joing in the fun in January 2025 after I finally retired.  These games are typically held from 10AM to 2PM, on the Thursday of weeks in which there isn’t a HAWKs meeting.  Many different games have been played across this series of get togethers, though we have been playing a lot of Combat Patrol since I joined up.

Duncan was playtesting a hypothetical scenario for Historicon for six players involving British Home Guard, a landing party from a German submarine, a downed aircraft crew and so forth, in a British seaside town. I ended up controlling a party of Home Guard (miniatures depicting the cast of Dad’s Army) and a group of shotgun-armed women of the Women’s Land Army.  Overall this was a fun departure from the usual straight-up WWII tactical games we’ve been playing.  I have always enjoyed a multiplayer game with hidden objectives, possibly at cross-purposes.   

The Land Army meets the Luftwaffe

While the Germans eventually succeeded in their overall mission of rescuing the one surviving aircraft crewman, my forces acquitted themselves well.  The women, in particular, accounted for three of the four crewmen, but the last one slipped out of range and a parting shot from the shotguns had no effect.  As the picture above shows, it would be nice if we could somehow play Combat Patrol and keep the table cleaner, but it is a somewhat marker-heavy game.

On Saturday the 11th I went back down to Norman’s house for a rare second visit in one week.  We had two games on our agenda.  The first was the Dux Bellorum game we didn’t play in our Tuesday get together. I checked my records, and the previous Dux Bellorum game we played was back in April 2024, over two years ago, so it is no wonder that the rules needed a bit of review.

British (Welsh) attack a Saxon camp

After some discussion we chose an attack on a camp as the scenario. I took the encamped Saxons, which allowed me a moderate advantage in my force balanced by a disorganized starting position.  Norman took a mostly mounted force of Welsh, the game’s collective nomenclature for post-Roman British with less Roman influence than the alternative Roman-British army list.  We noted that this ended up being reminiscent of  the raid on Catraeth in Y Gododdin, which may be better known to wargamers in its retelling by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company.  

It didn’t take as long for Norman’s force to come to grief as it did for the Shining Company.  We were reminded that cavalry just doesn’t have the staying power in this game to go toe-to-toe with infantry warbands for too long.  Nevertheless, it was a fun game, and we resolved (again) to play it again sooner than two years from now.  

Norman observed that the rules would be good for a Tolkien game, and I have been considering painting and basing some Prince August fantasy figures to populate such a thing.  I’m also reminded that it is a compact game; the base table size recommendation for using single 60mm wide bases as units would be 3’ by 4’, so it should fit on most dining room tables. We also had only six and seven stands respectively in the game, so it doesn’t necessarily require very many figures.  This puts it in the same category as something like DBA.  I wrote up a review after our first game back in 2012, but it might be worth doing a revised review on the basis of additional gaming.

After we cleaned up Dux Bellorum Norman set up the day’s main event, a Proxia battle also involving William, my second son.  

He chose a scenario from the Red Book (Grant and Asquith, Scenarios for All Ages), “Making the Best of a Bad Job”, in which a tired column of troops on the march blunders into an encamped enemy force while attempting to transit the table.  A battle ensues that neither party would have chosen. William took the role of the Occiterran commander and the encamped force, and I had the marching column.

At the end of the day, I had successfully exited some of my troops, but the casualties incurred in preventing William’s counterattack from cutting access to the road left me below the troop level need for a victory (i.e., I lost…).

It was an interesting game, and we are always glad to see Norman’s impressively painted Proxian forces on the table.

Following that game there’s been a bit of a hiatus.  I had planned to be visiting my father in Michigan, but moved up my trip by a day when he was having some issues and needed some help.  The planned visit precluded Historicon this year, but I’ll be finishing up the month with another visit to Gen Con. I hope there may be time for another post or two before the Gen Con After Action Report, but we shall see.  My brother and I are hosting four miniatures games at the convention, two each of Dragon Rampant and Burrows and Badgers.

Games with Norman; DBA and Neil Thomas 19th Century

 My son Norman had a random day off yesterday, so I took advantage of my retirement to head on down to his house for a visit with the grandchild and a bit of gaming.  The original plan was to start with some Dux Bellorum, however …. While it is a game I enjoy, we don’t play it often enough to remain comfortable with the rules, so when I put the boxes on the table, I suddenly realized that I should have reviewed the rules in advance, because I wasn’t up to relearning them on the spot.  Next time, do better! (And that may be as soon as this coming Saturday…)

We dug into Norman’s collection and decided to put his recently expanded collection of dwarves on the table against their traditional foes, the orcs.  While this was a fantasy game in appearance, we followed Norman’s recent custom of deploying the armies as historical analogues from the DBA 3.0 lists.  Thus, the dwarves were based on the Tudor rebels of the late Wars of the Roses, and the orcs were based on the ancient Britons. 

Wars of the Dwarves and Orcs

I took the dwarves, since their track record to date has not been good, and I wanted a handy excuse for why I would be losing.  Much to my surprise I pulled off a victory in the first game, despite being hampered somewhat by a difficult hill in my deployment zone.  So we racked up the forces again, with the orcs attempting some revenge with a raid into dwarvish territoy.  (As DBA works, both armies have the home terrain type of “arable”, so the difference was that I got to choose the pieces that were semi-randomly deployed.) Although it was a close game, the dwarves pulled off another victory, so we decided that it was, perhaps, time to play something else … 

Norman is a more sensible gamer than I am, so he has managed to restrict himself to three gaming projects stored at his house, the collection of 1/72 scale plastic DBA/Hordes of the Things armies, a collection of 28+mm fantasy figures suitable for Frostgrave or D&D, and the 1/72 scale Proxia collection of 19th century imagi-nations figures that we typical play with the rules from Neil Thomas’s Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe (19CE)  We are scheduled to be playing a 19CE game with all three of us, including my son William, this coming Saturday, so we thought that it might be a good idea, after the Dux Bellorum problem, to revew those rules.  

Norman dug out his H.G. Wells-ish toy inspired scenery, and we turned to the book for a generic scenario to be played on a very compact 2x2 battlefield. Norman has recently completed a couple of units of militia for one of his Proxian armies, so we decided to get them on the table with an 1848-ish battle between a rebel army and a monarchical old order army.  I immediately volunteered to be the rebels.

Some of the new militia

Some random rolls (from the book’s scenario description) left us with a few twists; a third of my army was late to the battlefield, arriving on the 3rd turn (of 10), and Norman’s artillery was also bogged down and never made it at all.

Initial position; victory was decided by control of the town and the hill

Norman’s troops enjoyed a quality advantage.  In the 19CE rules, failed morale rolls result in the loss of an additional troop stand, units having four to begin with.  I don’t think his professional army failed a morale check and I am pretty sure that my rebels never succeeded in one.  This did seem to bring the right level of brittleness to my army.  Once all of my troops were on the table I enjoyed a numerical advantage of 6 units to 4 units, but with the quality difference, I needed it.

Rebel skirmishers in the woods

I was also allowed to deploy a band of poor quality skirmishers in the woods at one corner of the battlefield.  Norman decided to take advantage of his qualitative superiority and surged forward to attempt to seize the town.  He seized it, was thrown out, and seized it again in the course of the short game.  While their morale never cracked casualties mounted on the government side.  The battle for the hill was also a seesaw, and, as night fell, the last intact rebel infantry unit reached the otherwise empty hill, while the government forces held the crucial town.  Overall, it ended as a draw.  We both felt that we had lost and that we had it in the bag at different points in the game, so it seemed pretty well balanced overall.

I don’t think that either of us has written up a review of the rules, but now that we have a half a dozen or so games played over the past several years, I think that we could manage a fair one. (Positive, too; we do keep coming back to them, although we also have a game using the Whitehouse and Foley rules  A Gentleman’s War on our extended agenda…)

2026 in Gaming; An (almost) Mid-year Day Report

July 2nd is Mid-year day, with 182 days behind and 182 days ahead.  I didn’t really want to add a third post to the blog yesterday, but I did want to comment about how this year has been going before we get too far away from the middle of the year. While I did write up an overview of last year’s activities, I didn’t get as far as writing up anything about a plan for this year.

HAWKs Game Day on 30 May; Charge! and a ‘red book’ scenario

Schoeffen-Buschhagen and Stanzbach-Anwatsch cavalry clash on the bridge

As of this week, I have been in 27 miniatures games, so I’m somewhat behind the pace to match last year’s 67 games.  In fact, I’ve just ahead of where I’d want to be to make my goal of 52 games.  

I’ve played those 27 games with 19 different sets of rules so far this year, which may be somewhat ahead of the pace implied by the 30 sets of rules used last year. Given that I have been thinking that I am plying with too many rules to have a good grasp on any of them, this may be of concern and bears some watching.  Unfortunately for consistency, I also have an agenda item to try out some fantasy mass battle rules (particularly Midgard, Hobgoblin, Age of Fantasy Regiments, and Warhammer 1st edition) and revisit some older sets (particularly Chainmail and Knights and Magick) that haven’t been out in several years, so that may keep me from concentrating on the more frequently played rules.

By the end of the year last year I had used figures from my own collections in just 17 of those 67 games, and I resolved to spend more time this year getting my own figures on the table.  Given that I have 16 collections of figures in playable quantities, that was just an average of about once a year per collection, and most of those games didn’t come anywhere near using every figure in a collection.  It would not be hard to argue that the totality of my figure collection is underutilized.  This year, 11 of the 27 games have been with my own figures. That’s better, but there is still room for improvement. 

It has not been a good year for painting.  I did a handful of fantasy figures as a test of the Army Painter Speedpaint Pens (and might do a report on that after one more little test project) and the two dozen 18th century Indians for Armies for Kids (AfK), but that’s all I’ve finished so far.  I did get new prescription reading glasses recently, and they were helpful in the AfK painting session this week.

Muster of Minifigs ME Orcs and Goblins

Muster of Minifigs ME Free Folk

I have a lot of things I’d like to have painted, such as the retrogaming Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) project, so I need to concentrate more on that.

So, not a bad year so far, but with room for improvement.

I’m thinking that next year’s goals are going to be to do more with less, and that will probably entail concentrating on some revisits to the gaming of the 1970s and 1980s. But more about that later …