Despite being on the road for business all last week (Monday to Saturday), I managed to paint a couple of figures Saturday evening. With the amount of business travel I have been doing, I haven’t taken the time to paint units of figures and have instead been working on a few random figures that have been sitting in the painting box for a while.
A few months ago, I and a couple of others commissioned Steve Barber to make a handful of early WWII Americans in 28mm for the Philippines, Wake Island, etc. These need the WWI helmets but early WWII kit. Three or four figures have been commissioned, but we need one or two more people to commission a figure in order to complete a squad. If you are interested, please contact enquiries@stevebarbermodels.com.
I just sponsored a second figure, the BAR gunner. This will be figure 4.
Before we started this project, the only suitable figures were from Pulp Figures. The Pulp Figures are excellent, but there are only two five-figure packs with tin hats in their inter-war line. This doesn’t give enough variety for skirmish games. I am hoping with these additional figures, that I can field a platoon that doesn’t look too cookie cutter.
All figures come with separate heads for further customization.
Please contact Steve Barber to commission a figure, which costs about $250 dollars US. It would be great to have 10 poses, to make a reasonably full squad.
Yesterday many of the HAWKs came to my basement to play test our Hoth game for Historicon. This game will handle twelve players. We will make a few tweaks, but though the Imperials decided they couldn’t win on turn one but the won on points at the end, I think the game went well.
“Tank” Nickle kept pushing the Imperial forces to bypass the first lines of trenches and drive for the hangar, which was their objective. There were some slower moving Imperial forces that could have been used to assault the closest trench lines while the faster-moving forces bypassed, but they didn’t really mount a concerted effort to defeat the first line of trenches until late in the game.
The Rebels got two victory points per turn that the four main heroes (Luke, Han, Leia, and Chewbacca) were in the hangar. The Imperials received one victory point for each Rebel they killed. We will also give the Rebels points for killing the AT-ATs. It behooves the Rebels to slow down the Imperial forces so that they get the maximum number of points for heroes in the hangar before the overwhelming Imperial forces start amassing points for killing them. The game is designed to end and points will be totaled when the AT-ATs get close enough to the power generator to knock it out. At that time, they can assault the hangar, and the heroes will have to get on the Millennium Falcon and fly away.
At this point, we called the game. The Rebels were only up by 5 points, but the Imperials were gaining 10 or 15 points a turn, so I assessed the game as an Imperial victory.
I think we are ready for this game at Historicon in July and Barrage in September.
Last night at HAWKs night I had a rare chance to do some gaming. I used the opportunity to play test my Retreat from Moscow game for Historicon. The game will use Combat Patrol(TM) with the free Napoleonic / black powder supplement. I will tweak the scearnio just a bit, but it mostly achieved the effect I had hoped. The French felt pursued, lost troops along the way, and put up a heroic and stalwart defense of the town.
The retreating French were Perry Retreat from Moscow figures. The Russians were a variety of manufacturers, mostly Old Glory.
Toward the end of the game, there was fierce fighting in the town. Geoff’s mounted Cossacks finally joined the fray with a charge over a fence at Frenchmen defending the outskirts of town. Don’s lady cossacks and other forces were attacking the other end of the town. The French didn’t go quietly. Greg’s Frenchmen charged into the teeth of the cannon; Harry’s cavalry took canister at close range; Don’s cavalry took heavy casualties from Greg’s defenders in the barn.
When the French finally failed player morale, they were down to about 15 figures remaining and were completely surrounded.
For the convention game, I will probably add two more retreating French units. I may also make them move as Green, even though they are rated Elite for morale purposes. Otherwise, the flow of forces onto the table kept everyone off balance and kept most of the players very busy throughout the game.
There is an early Tom Selleck movie I like that came out about the same time as Lassiter (a great movie!) and Runaway (a pretty good movie, written by Michael Creighton), called High Road to China. It didn’t get a lot of acclaim, though I think the story is really well done. I think a lot of people didn’t buy Bess Armstrong, but I thought she was fine. Anyway, Sally 4th, in their Hollywood classics line came out with four figures based on the characters in this movie. I managed to get them painted yesterday at 0400 before heading to NJ Con with Eric.
The figures are nicer than my paint job. I recommend you take a look at these figures.
Eric and I headed up to NJCon for the day on Saturday. He and I both played in a RevWar game using The British are Coming rules. It was a fun game with an old school feel and the need to multiply two digit numbers together to reach the final percentage needed to hit. We had a good time.
The real hit for me was playing A Gentleman’s War with Howard Whitehouse. When these rules were announced on TMP, I immediately ordered them. My dad has been collecting old toy soldiers as long as I can remember, and he must have 20,000 of them. I cut my teeth on Little Wars and the illustrations of the same toy soldiers my dad collects being used in games. Of course you wouldn’t want to fire lead projectiles at valuable antiques, so A Gentleman’s War doesn’t require spring loaded cannons. I bought the book and read the rules, which are quite enjoyable to read, even if you never play them. When I saw that Howard was running the game at NJ Con, I signed up to play.
Below are some picture I took. There is something charming about gaming with old toy soldiers. Whether it is something inherent to the large, glossy figures, or the people attracted to gaming with large, glossy figures, gamers tend to be less focused on inconsequential minutiae and more willing to just play the game. The rules are easily grasped after a couple of turns. They could benefit from a PDF chart card that could fit on a single pice of paper, but in general, these are really, really fun rules, and we had a great game.
I really like the activation mechanism, but there seems to be a fatal flow when a force has been heavily attritted. A player activates units based on a card draws. You can see the blue and red markers, indicating that those units have activated. A unit may not activate again, until all of a player’s units have activated once. (There is an exception to this, but let’s go with this for purposes of the blog entry.) Once all a player’s units have activated, all markers are removed, but the turn isn’t over, so units may activate many times during a turn. The problem is that if a player is down to just one or two units, he may activate that small set of units, clear markers, and activate them again, while the other player must cycle through all his units. There must be a way to solve this. I would like to borrow this mechanism for a set of rules I am writing for a secret project for a miniature manufacturer.
I highly recommend these rules. The are an improvement on Charge!, McDuff, and other similar rules without losing that really old school feel.
I just went through the PEL and identified the various games that will be using Combat Patrol(TM) and Feudal Patrol(TM) at Historicon in July. Don’t miss your chance to play in one of these exciting and fun games.
I “designed” and purchased a few HeroForge figures a couple of months ago, just to see how it worked. In previous posts, I have provided pictures of the others. On Sunday I finished the last two. I had originally envisioned them to work with my Border Rievers project, but I think the skirt on the one figure makes her unsuitable.
Despite a lot of business travel and a lot of activity at work, I managed to complete a few more figures for my Retreat from Moscow game at Historicon. The game will use the free Napoleonic supplement to Combat Patrol(TM).
I have had the retreating Frenchmen completed for quite some time. Lately I’ve been working hard to complete the pursuing Russians. In these first two pictures you an see mounted and dismounted Cossacks from Old Glory.
Today I completed a unit of 10 mounted Russian hussars in maroon uniforms. You’ll note that many of the figures are not mounted on snow covered bases. While the retreating Frenchmen are unique to the Retreat from Moscow, I plan to use the other figures frothier games, so I have mounted them on my neutral earth flocking.
Right before leaving for a week in Europe last Saturday for business I completed a unit of 10 Old Glory Russian Dragoons. These are in green uniforms.
In Combat Patrol(TM) I will probably make all the figures have an Accuracy of Regular. The French will be outnumbered and trying to get across the length of the table to a small village with as many figures alive as possible. The Russians will arrive at points along the long edges to keep the pressure on the French and make sure they don’t just lager up in the middle of the table and fight it out.
A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of a figure I “built on HeroForge.” I made a couple of figures just to try out the site and see the quality of the 3D printing. I was quite impressed.
I made a matching mounted and dismounted cowgirl and painted them in the same color scheme.
I also made a pulp girl. There are two versions of the same figure, one with a backpack and one with a jet pack.
I have two more figures from HeroForge to paint. I’ll post pictures eventually.