Medieval clergy, cargo containers and a mock vargr

 Arthur and I visited Imperial Hobbies last week, so of course I made some impulse purchases.  First up, I picked up a pack of early medieval clergy from Bob Murch's 1066 line.  Although they are intended for 1066, I will take advantage of the timelessness of their garb to use them in more modern settings, whenever a monk or nun would fit in.

I slightly modified the Mother Superior - she has a greenstuff veil added on top of her wimple (hopefully I got those terms correct!).

My other purchase was a pair of MDF containers from Canadian company Xolk.  I liked them so much I sent in an order to the company for more!  They go together very quickly and paint up easily.  They will do nicely as scatter terrain in the cargo hold for starship boarding actions.

Our recently started Traveller RPG campaign includes a vargr NPC, so I decided to convert one of Fletch's 3d printed werewolves to represent him.  This is clearly not an accurate representation, as vargr are typically shorter then humans, with an average height of only 1.6 m.  So this is a particularly jacked vargr, as he is notably taller and bulkier than Captain Handsome!

Conversion was minor, I replaced his arms with a flamer and a left hand from the bits box.

3D printed resin is regrettably a bit brittle.  You can see that this poor vargr was dropped and his ears were chipped!

As you can see, the Xolk containers have nice detail on the ends.  They can be built with the doors open, but I chose to keep them closed.

 Next week is Trumpeter Salute - I'll hopefully fit in lots of gaming :)

Spaceship scatter terrain plus train crew

 I'm still assembling terrain for spaceship boarding actions.  Cory from Trumpeters generously gave me a whole bunch of 3D printed consoles, cargo pallets and more, and I've also painted up some pieces from Terrain Crate, AK Wargame Series and others.

These doors are from AK Series.  They are not free standing like the Terrain Crate doors, so will need to be attached to the walls.

These are bits from the Terrain Crate Quicki-Mart set.  Not quite futuristic but can still fit into my spaceship.

Cory's 3D printed cargo pallets.

These are 1/35 hand trucks from MiniArt - those handles are very delicate and are certain to snap off right away!

3D printed cargo boxes from Cory.

Consoles:  the three on the left from Cory, and the one on the right from AK Series.

More consoles.  Three on the left from Cory and the one on the right is an AK ATM!

These are the last of the Pulp Figures human spacers - I still have a set of Martians to paint once I decide on their theme.

I also found time to paint up these Pulp Figures' railwaymen.  The chap on the left is a Eureka Miniatures VSF crewman who has been sitting in my lead mountain for about two decades!

And finally a raven that Doug gave us.

Gangsters and WWI games

On Friday evening, Lisa, Arthur and I had our first playtest of Fistful of Lead Bigger Battles.  The game was inspired by Lisa's research into the Kerensky Offensive on the Eastern Front in 1917, where a squadron of Royal Navy Air Service armoured cars reinforced the Russian Army.

The battle featured the Russians and their British allies attacking German trenches.

Lisa included a few special rules, most importantly that when a joker was dealt, one of the Russian infantry units would gain a 1d6 red markers, representing Bolshevik propaganda.  The idea was that any unit that ended up with more markers than troops would be persuaded by the propaganda and leave the battlefield.  As it happened, none of the Russian units reached that break point, but it was fun to pile those markers onto units.

German forces man the trenches.  There was a pre-game bombardment that ended up wiping out the German light machine guns (a Lewis gun team and a MG-08 gun team), and left most of the other units with some shock.

RNAS armoured cars prep for battle: 3 Rolls Royce and 1 Lanchester.

Russian Maxim Gun moves onto the table.

Russian cavalry advances, supported by infantry following up behind.

Russians used this cover to good effect to close with the German infantry.

Russian cavalry charge the German trench.

And then clear the trench!  We used smoke markers to represent shock - as you can see, there is more shock than surviving Germans.  The Germans routed the next time their card came up.

Elsewhere on the line, German defenders attempt an unsuccessful close assault on a RNAS Roller.

However, their assault failed, and then the Germans routed.

In the end, the Russians captured the German trenches.

The verdict is that Bigger Battles gives a good, fun, fast-paced game.  Complexity is similar to a Dan Mersey Rampant-style game.  I had thought that morale might have been an issue, but it wasn't.  Due to the way shock works in this game, a unit that is battered is most likely to fall back and eventually rout off the table.

And then on Sunday, we had our monthly gangsters gaming day.  I got to represent the South Side gang as Moe's Diamondbacks attempted to cut through their territory.  Moe rolled to see how many South Siders were on the street, and ended up with 17 various gangsters ready to stop his single red truck transporting 6 Diamondbacks.

Southsiders open fire on the truck.

They blew out a tire, causing the truck to careen into a nanny pushing a pram.  Morale outrage was assured!

The Diamondbacks, in trench coats, abandon their truck and set off on foot, pursued by angry Southsiders.

After gunning down a Southsider, the Diamondbacks hijack another truck.

But they don't get far - the Southsiders shoot up the hijacked truck and swarm the Diamondbacks as they pile out.

At this point, we pulled the dreaded back-to-back jokers, which is the trigger for the cops to arrive.  Only two of the Diamondbacks clear the table in time, the remainder are arrested.  Most likely, being arrested saved them from rough justice at the hands of the outraged Southsiders!

As a result of this battle, there weren't enough Diamondbacks left to raid my Docksiders' gin joint.  This left me free to bully another business in my neighbourhood into accepting my 'protection'!

Monitor vs Merrimack

 Last night, Doug invited Arthur and me to play his What a Tanker variant for the famous ACW battle of the ironclads at Hampton Roads between the USS Monitor and the CSS Virginia (aka Merrimack).  

To begin with, here are Doug's homemade models of the Monitor:

And the Merrimack:

The game uses the WaT system of command dice, with slightly different effects than in WaT - for example, there is no spotting but there are different dice for movement and steering.  Monitor gets 6 command dice, and Merrimack gets 6 normal dice plus an extra 6 that can only be used for the guns, to allow for Merrimack's full broadside versus Monitor's two guns in a rotating turret.

The ship profiles are a bit different from WaT again, with characteristics for steam (aka speed) and rudder setting.

Our ships started at opposite ends of the muddy-looking Hampton Roads.  Turn gauges are visible in the lower left corner, with different gauges depending on the rudder angle.

Monitor speeds ahead at full steam.

Merrimack uses the turn gauge to bring a broadside to bear on Monitor.

Doug created some creative critical hit effects, including effects such as additional damage points or more specific effects inspired by actual incidents in the battle such as when the Monitor's captain was injured by a hit on the pilot house.


In last night's game, Monitor managed to inflict some damage on Merrimack, but under Arthur's command, Merrimack battered Monitor.  Once I was down to 3 command dice, I decided it was time to exercise the better of valour and fled the battlefield, leaving the Confederate Navy in command of Hampton Roads.

Doug has done a great job with this WaT variant.  Hopefully he'll take my advice and get it into print!

Bolt Action - WWI Eastern Front

 We picked up the new (3rd) edition of Bolt Action for Christmas and this weekend we finally managed a game.  I say "we" but this game was all due to Arthur's planning.  Arthur made a couple of 500-point lists, and built the scenario using info from the main rulebook.  Arthur's main change was to use early WWI armies rather than WWII.  The Russian army had three groups of 12 regular infantry, a squad of 5 cavalry, a Maxim MMG, a nurse and an officer, while the Germans had three groups of 10 infantry, 10 Uhlans, a field gun and a command group.  Here's a snap of the German force, and of course I didn't get one of the Russians!

We invited Sam and Doug to join us.  Sam is our Bolt Action expert, and took on the referee role to make sure we got up to speed with rules changes for the new edition.  This was Doug's first BA game, and he took the Germans to learn the rules on the fly.  Arthur took the Russians and I managed the refreshments.

Arthur rolled for terrain and ended up with this.

As Arthur won the dice roll for choice of deployment, he chose to deploy in the village in the upper right, leaving the Germans to deploy in the open ground in the lower left.  It's not quite as bad as it looks for the Germans as there are a few hills that created a few areas of dead ground that they could exploit, but the openness certainly gave the Germans motivation to get moving.

The first Russian infantry squad set up in the village, in cover behind the stone wall.  I didn't have any markers for 'hidden' so we used 'overwatch' markers instead.  In the background you can see my DIY BA order dice!  The Maxim gun is just barely visible at the right end of the stone wall.

Germans deploy, ready to advance quickly on the Russian positions.

The German field gun deploys on a hill in the table corner where it can blast just about any target on the table.

The scenario starts with a bombardment, which means that most units on the table begin the game with shock markers.  This meant that each unit needed to pass a command roll before it could act, with the unfortunate result that the Uhlans were stuck for a couple of turns before they passed an order check!

To win the scenario, each player wins points for both destroying their opponents' units as well as occupying table quarters.  Here a Russian squad advances into one of the neutral table quarters, but note also the small forest of shock markers it's earned from German fire.  The nurse in the background was able to help save casualties from time to time but not the shock markers.

The Russians took a turn to rally, and were able to shake off the shock markers.  The German field gun kept bashing them, though, and managed to destroy this squad.

Elsewhere the German advance in the centre failed.

Action instead moved to the lower right table quarter with a standoff between Russian and German cavalry.

Alas, the grand cavalry battle never happened.  The German Uhans took too many shock markers, and then rolled poorly on a morale check and fled the table.  We did see the Russian cavalry successfully charge the German infantry.

Much bloodshed happened, the Russians depleted the Germans but were wiped out in the charge.

Bolt Action scenarios mostly have a limit of 6 turns.  The result was after six turns, each side had eliminated 3 of the opposing sides forces (out of an original 6 for the Germans and 7 for the Russians).  However, the Germans had active units in their own original quarter plus the two neutral quarters, while the Russians were only in their own quarter.  This result gave the Germans the win with 5 points to 3.  Doug appreciated his Pyrrhic victory.  Despite losing, Arthur still appreciated the game.  Thanks Sam for keeping the game on track and evaluating the rules for us!

Playing with WWI forces still gave a good game even though the rules are written for WWII.  After all, these forces are pretty similar, they just have fewer troop types to select from.