02 Hundred Hours - Evade

For our Tuesday night gaming, we had another go at 02 Hundred Hours, this time scenario 5 - Evade.  In this scenario, an RAF pilot has been shot down and the local partisans are trying to get him to safety before the Germans can catch him.

The pilot starts in the lower right corner and must leave the table at the upper left. In between, the Germans are patrolling and searching for him.

The pilot starts his journey.

Germans on patrol along the road as their officer plans at the table in the camp.

Partisans move into the orchard as they move to assist the pilot.

The pilot has been spotted by the sentries on the road!

The dog handler is alerted to the partisans in the orchard.

Partisans move up to engage the German officer.

Partisans take out the dog handler with a Molotov cocktail!  Alas for them, this was their only success of the game.

The Germans surround the RAF pilot.

The partisans rush forward to help but it's too late, the Germans capture the pilot!

This game was interesting.  The pilot has a very difficult job, especially as he is rated as a 'trooper'.  In a future game, I might promote him to a 'character' just to allow him a potential of two activations in a turn.  Towards the end, the pilot's actions were particularly limited, as he kept needing to burn his activation to duck German bullets, until he was finally out of luck.

Downed Pilot

 For our next 02 Hundred Hours game, we are going to play the 'Evade' scenario, in which a crashed pilot must avoid capture by the enemy.  For the focus of this game, I finally finished up this downed RAF pilot from Warlord Games.  

Simone

 This is Simone, from the Bad Squiddo Games' Women of the Resistance kickstarter.   

The figure is based on an image of Simone Segouin, a member of the French resistance.

There is absolutely no way that I could have painted that checkered shirt, so I was very excited to find another image of her in a plain white shirt instead!

Here are a few more shots of my version, including the armband showing loyalty to the Free French forces.

02 Hundred Hours - Sabotage take 2

Lisa and I replayed the same Sabotage scenario that we played last week, with a change in teams. This time I played the attackers, using partisans instead of SAS.  Lisa's defenders were pulpy Germans. Partisans are quite fun.  Individually they tend to have lower skill levels than SAS so are more likely to fail tests, but there is a great degree of variability amongst them, so that each figure can be more characterful than the SAS soldiers.  Partisans also have access to 'Plan' cards which can give the partisans an edge.  The trick for all of the cards, whether Order cards, Event cards or Plan cards is to read them carefully to understand what they do and then remember to actually use them!

As with last week, the target for the attackers is to detonate explosives on the ammo dump in the centre of the table.  Arthur set the table for us, and replaced last week's orchard with a cemetery (lower left).  I could not resist, so my partisans entered the table through the 'dead centre' of the town :)

German She-Wolves following their patrol route.  I've had these figures in my collection for years, and was excited for them to make an appearance on the table.  With regard to the armbands - when I painted these, I really didn't feel like painting swastikas, so instead they armbands are based on the WWI Imperial German black-white-red tricolour.

She-wolf sergeant supervises the patrolling sentries.

Partisans move through the cemetery.

She-wolf sentries spot the partisans, and a firefight erupts!

Partisans defeat the first patrol, but make too much noise!  Other sentries move to engage the attackers.

Now that the alarm is raised, the German officer Col. Klink leads the reinforcements onto the table.

On the other side of the table, a She-wolf patrol gets the jump on Luc the partisan.

But then the patrol is taken out by the partisan explosives expert who lobs a Molotov cocktail at them.

Alas for the partisans, the gig is up.  The firepower of the German defenders is too much, and the partisans are defeated.

Despite the lack of success, I'm keen to try again.  It's a good strategy for the defender to set up patrols in pairs, as a pair of sentries are much harder for the attacker to take out than a single defender.  The attacker really needs to maximise what they can achieve before the alarm is raised.  Once the defenders are alert, the attackers need to focus on escaping the scene as they are not likely to win any engagement.  Look out for more reports as I prepare to host 02 Hundred at Trumpeter Salute in April!

Awful Green (and Purple) Things from Outer Space!

 Craig has been having fun with the venerable game, The Awful Green Things from Outer Space!  This game was originally a free insert in the long-defunct Dragon Magazine in 1979.  The game was created by legendary gamer Tom Wham and is currently available from Steve Jackson Games.

Craig has 3-D printed game components, and is currently working on expanding the game to be a four-player game with two crew factions and two different strains of 'things'.  

But I'm getting ahead of myself!  For those not familiar with this game, a bit of background is going to be helpful.  The crew of the spaceship Zuntar has been exploring the galaxy, and picked up some strange rocks from an otherwise nondescript planet.  This rock inexplicably grew into a strange creature that started to eat crewmembers.  Here is the gameboard, which is the floorplan of the Znutar.  

And here are the 3D printed components.

As an example of the crew, these are the Snudlian crewmembers.  The underside of each crewmember has information on that piece including movement rate, attack dice and constitution.

Other crewmembers include the Redundans, Smabalites, Snudalians and the ship's mascot.

Craig has added Awful Purple Things from Outer Space as a second faction to compete with the Awful Green Things.  Both types of Awful Things come in multiple 'stages':  eggs, young, adults and fragments.  Fragments are a potential side effect of being attacked by the crew.  If a weapon doesn't kill an AT, it might break it into multiple fragments which can each grow into a new AT!

The crew are not prepared to battle the ATs.  They must experiment, typically by trial and error, to find out which tools will be useful in stopping the ATs.  Craig has printed out chits with weapon effects - each time a tool is used, a chit is randomly chosen.  The effects range from no effect at all, to small to large amounts of damage, to potentially exploding the ATs into fragments or even making them grow larger!  These trays hold the chits as they are drawn.

Here's an early shot from the game.  APTs (awful purple things) are starting to spread through the ship, laying eggs and searching for crewmembers to lunch on.  Crewmembers in turn prepare to respond to the invasion.

The Znutar has a few small craft, seen here including the saucer, cockboat and scoutship.

The white boxes are spacesuits, which make the crew harder to kill.

Over time, the crew end up concentrated in a few small areas as the ATs run rampant through the rest of the ship.

Finally, the ATs overwhelm the crew.  Surprisingly, the ship's generally useless mascot survived by hiding out in the computer room.

The game is great fun as long as you don't take it too seriously.  Last night's game was a playtest, and Craig is planning adjustments before presenting it at Trumpeter Salute in April. 

Danuta

Last year (2025), Annie from Bad Squiddo Games ran a kickstarter for 'Women of the Resistance' for her new line of figures based on real women who battled against the Nazis and other fascists during WWII.  Now that it's 2026, I've finally started painting them up!

The first model is not actually part of the kickstarter, but one based on Danuta Danielsson, the 'woman with the handbag' who was photographed taking a swipe at a neo-Nazi skinhead in 1985.  See the link for more info on the real Danuta. Here's my take on her.

I've attached masking tape labels to the models to help remind me who is who!

I don't have any models of 1980s neo-Nazi skinheads so instead, here is an action shot of Danuta taking a swing at a man in a blue suit.