Category: Wargaming

A a semi-club project, several of us are making stores to build a shopping mall as a setting for zombie, post apocalypse, and modern games.  This weekend, I finally finished the first of two that I am building — a hobby store.

The stores are made from uniformly-sized boxes for scrapbooking paper.  I have decorated mine with a tile floor, a textured wall, a back room, and shelves full of games.  The store even has games on shelves.  If you look closely, you may recognize one or two.

I made a gaming table with 2mm WWII tanks and infantry.  The gamers are from Victory Force.

My second store is going to be a wine shop, but I’ll probably spell it “Whine Shoppe.”  I am hoping this inspires the others to get going on their stores.

On the spur of the moment (almost), Rob, Chris, Greg, and I got together for an impromptu four-player game of Songs and Blades and Heroes.  This was only my third game using these rules.  The activation mechanism is interesting.  As a four player game among buddies, where we can fill in the time between activations with kibitzing, the rules worked fine, but it seems that the rules work best with just two players.

Chris and I were the good guys.  Greg and Rob played the bad guys.  Both sets of bad buys included a mix of skeletons, zombies, and a handful of special figures.  Greg had some kind of specter who looked like the Grim Reaper.  Rob had a sort of specter thingy that had a “terror” special ability.

We didn’t take time to talk about our game plan, but it turned out that Chris and I both moved toward Rob’s force.  Since Greg’s forces were slow-moving, poor quality troops, he advanced slowly and didn’t get into the thick of the action until Chris and I had hammered Rob’s guys pretty hard.

When Rob hit 50%, his remaining forces had to make a morale check.  He did reasonably well, but a bunch of his folks ran off the table.  Then his specter got into the action, forcing a bunch of Chris’ guys and my guys to run away.  I think one of Chris’ guys ran off the table.

This is where the final, big action took place.  The zombies moved slowly and didn’t activate too quickly, but they fought pretty well.  I lost a couple of guys in the final battle, but then Greg went over the 50% threshold and most of his remaining zombies ran off the table.  At that point we called the game.

Combat in Songs of Blades and Heroes is conducted with an opposed die roll.  It’s pretty straight forward, except since I have only played a couple of times, sometimes it’s hard to remember what is a plus to the attacker and what is a minus to the defender.  Otherwise, there is nothing too novel about combat.  Where Songs is innovative is in the activation scheme.  The active player can choose to try for one, two, or three actions per figure.  He chooses a figure to activate and decides whether to roll one, two, or three dice, trying to tie or beat his quality number.  So why not always try for three activations?  If you ever fail two activations, your activation ends, and initiative passes to the enemy.  So, while three dice might get you more actions, it also increases your chance of the initiative shifting.  So why not always just roll one die?  That’s safe, but often you want to try to move and conduct combat (two actions), or conduct an aimed bow shot (two actions, where shooting without taking careful aim is just one action), etc.

As mentioned earlier, I think it is a fun system for a two player game with just a handful of figures on each side.  I only had seven figures, for instance.  Games with just a few figures on each side seem to be in vogue these days.

We had a good time.  This made my 25th game of the year, so I am well on my way to my 50-game goal.

As we are beginning to think about Look, Sarge, No Charts near future and science fiction rules, we are already beginning to put together units and terrain in advance of development.  These buildings were recently released by Brigade Models.  My daughter painted them for me.

I didn’t want them to be in a single gray or brown.  I wanted them to look as if people lived in them and painted them according to their own sense of style.  These sure don’t look dull!

As I am assembling part of my force, I got my hands on a large collection of Epic Warhammer 40k figures.  Then I picked up a bunch of turrets form Iron Wind Metals at a convention.  Combined together, they don’t immediately jump out at you as GW figures.

In my continuing quest to reduce my unpainted lead collection, I have been picking away at odds and ends have been sitting in my “ready to paint” box or penny packets of recent acquisitions.  Recently, Hinterland released a few more figures in their line of female hussars.  Above you can see two of the robots that round out my force.

I have no idea who makes this Indian figure (below).  It has been on my painting table for a couple of years, so I decided to paint it.  It is closer to 30mm than 25mm.

Brigade Models (not Brigade Games) makes this Austrian WWI dog cart machine-gun.  I don’t have any other 28mm WWI figures, but I figure I can mix them into a pulp game at some point.

Chris found the Trojan Bunny on Shapeways.

I think the globe and other accouterments are from Mega Miniatures.

These cute little robots are made of dental plaster by Windsword Accessories (http://www.windswordaccessories.com/17-science-fiction).  I will likely pick up a few more.  They were very fun to paint.

In several of the Look, Sarge, No Charts rules sets, a number of special dice are used to resolve various combat effects, such as morale checks, rolls to close with the enemy, and rolls to stand when charged.  During a recent G.A.M.E.R. (see previous posts) play test, Chris suggested that the card mechanism being developed for G.A.M.E.R. might work to replace the dice in Bear Yourselves Valiantly.  I made up cards for him for those rules.  The experiment went well, and Dave wanted a similar deck of cards for Fate of Battle.  I ginned them up and posted them to the Yahoo Group.  Above is a sample.

The consensus is that these are a little easier to read than the various dice.  They also remove the table clutter of the dice.  Finally they eliminate the need for players to memorize which dice are used in which situations and the search for the right ones.

In a previous post (http://bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=3749), I described a game that Duncan ran at a club night using G.A.M.E.R. to represent the skirmish fight between two formed units.  That play test was so successful that Duncan sign dup to run it at HISTORICON.  He has been working on how to represent the formed troops are are important to the game but are not controlled by the players.  These pictures of paper mock-ups of what he is building.  I think they look pretty darned good.

After working on the Armies for Kids project (see related post on Chris’ blog), we pulled out Imperial Assault to give it a test run.  We played the tutorial scenario twice.  I as the Empire player won both tutorials, but the second iteration was very close.  My probe droid turned out to be the most valuable player in both games.

In general I like the game.  I like the way that range and accuracy are taken care of with all the special dice.  Simple and elegant.  I can live with the fact that figures have no facing and can fire 360 degrees — it’s after all Hollywood.  I don’t like the fact that cover either blocks line of sight or has not effect.  This worked better in the old Star Wars Miniatures game.

Then we set up the “skirmish game.”  I like the random missions, and the balance seemed about right.  This time, the rebels spanked me 50 points to 15.  Ouch!

We had a good time, and I think a couple of the folks were up for playing out the various episodes of the campaign.

This was a busy weekend of activity with the kids, so I didn’t get much hobby work done.  My daughter’s First Robotics Team had a Cinderella moment at the DC Regional Competition on Saturday and is not qualified for the World Competition in St. Louis.  On Sunday I took my son to Frederick to a store where he could try out and purchase professional darts for the dart board we got them for Christmas.  The we took him to a local Italian Restaurant to celebrate his 18th birthday.

I found this figure in a box of unpainted lead a few weeks back and decided to knock him out.  I haven’t finished painting flocking the base, but the figure is done.

Except for the bases, I also completed these two figures (actually I finished two of each of them).  These are Laurel and Hardy in the French Foreign Legion as depicted in the movie Beau Hunks.  I don’t have any Foreign Legion figures, so I don’t know what I’ll do with them, but I really enjoy Laurel and Hardy movies, so I couldn’t resist these figures.

Last night at HAWKs club night I ran a largish G.A.M.E.R. game.  Chris could only handle six players in his Bear Yourselves Valiantly game, so I too everyone else.  Most of the folks had played G.A.M.E.R. before, so we were able to jump right in.

The scenario featured four German infantry squads (with Panzerfausts and machine-guns) plus two Pz. IV H tanks and a Stug III trying to hold three buildings against three understrength platoons of British and American paratroopers supported by two Shermans and a Cromwell IV.  The initial setup was a bit chaotic with the paras entering two opposite corners, one German squad occupying each building, and the fourth German squad and the German tanks arriving as reinforcements.

I was pretty happy that the rules were able to manage a ten-player gamer with lots of vehicles without bogging down.

The Allied forces did a good job of focusing on the objectives (the three buildings).  The Germans had a good initial deployment with two machine-guns covering the approaches to the buildings.  (Unfortunately for the Germans, Don didn’t seem to be able to hit anything all day with his machine-guns, so the Paras got pretty close to the building in the foreground of the above picture.

Dave’s “die rolling” was typically abysmal.  At one point, all three weapons on one of Dave’s Pz. IVs were jammed.  He did manage to machine-gun Kevin’s American bazooka crew.  Kevin got off two bazooka shots first: one bounced, the other missed.  Dave traded shots with Jim’s Shermans.  When the smoke cleared both Pz IVs had brewed up, as did one of the Shermans.

In the end, while the Allies were very close to capturing the buildings, but time ran out.  Jacob had nearly captured the building pictured above.  Kevin was inside the first floor of the larger, central building that Kurt had softened up with HE from his Cromwell.  Duncan was just outside the third building, and had killed the Germans defending the wall.  Despite heavy casualties, with another hour of game time, the Allies would probably have taken all three buildings.

Chris experimented with a new idea for Bear Yourselves Valiantly in which the units were battling in the Mines of Moria.  Also, I made a deck of cards for Chris to replace the various special dice.  While Chris said the scenario experiment didn’t go well, he said the cards were well received.  Apparently the limited ability to pivot and move didn’t play well with the limited mobility of the caverns.

Below is an example of some of the cards that potentially replace the special dice.  I was able to get more information on the cards and also make the font significantly larger.  I am thinking about making these available on the Look, Sarge Yahoo group for people to download and print for their own use.