Category: Wargaming

The design of the cards for G.A.M.E.R. is mature enough that I wanted professionally printed decks for continued play testing.  I set them all up in the correct template and sent them off to Superior POD to be printed.   We had an early glitch in which I need to make some corrections to the files, but the instructions from Superior POD went into my SPAM folder.  Once that was corrected, in less than two weeks I had 16 decks of cards in my hand.  There are eight different backs so that each player could have their own deck without risk of getting the decks mixed up.  I will be using them for the first time on Saturday at our Barrage gaming day.

I mentioned in an earlier post that last weekend I had started a couple f painting projects.  One was to paint up the Reaper Bones science fiction figures that were part of the Bones I Kickstarter.  For me, these are meant to be opponents for the Aliens-like space marines.

I suppose these figures are meant to be painted in Stormtrooper white and black.  There is no situation I can imagine, other than embassy gate guard duty, in which white uniforms make any sense in a tactical environment.  Regardless of how far future you get, we will always strive to camouflage ourselves.  I opted for a brown theme to distinguish them from the green uniforms of my colonial marines.

Many of the figures (see top picture) are armed with something that looks like a reasonable assault rifle.  Some have silly looking GW-like oversized weapons (see middle picture).  Others are just ridiculous.  I am not a GW basher; although, I’ve played almost none of their games that I enjoy, but one thing that really rubs me wrong are those crazy oversized weapons.  They are stupid from a physical/tactical sense, and they are aesthetically painful.  The good news, however, is that much of the rest of the industry has seen fit to follow suit in order to attract the hard-core Warhammer players.

I can suspend disbelieve with the best of them at times, and I really enjoy old black and white movies.  There is a scene in a really good, old, WWII propaganda movie, called Air Force, in which John Garfield is firing a .30 cal machine-gun from his hip.  Silly.  That scene looks like real battlefield footage compared to the figures in the photo above.   Even if you presume some sort of exoskeleton type of assist to carry and hold the Gatling Gun looking monstrosity, you’d look like a ballerina doing a pirouette as soon as you pulled the trigger.

Anyway, the figures are done, and I am ready to put them into a game.

I spent a fair amount of the weekend helping my son with college applications, taking my daughter to the Demi Lovato concert in Baltimore, and some computer work for my moonlighting job.  Despite an increase in my normal state of ear ringing induced by the concert, I did have some time on Sunday for some hobby work.  I washed, primed, and began painting a bunch of Reaper Bones science fiction infantry in armored suits.  I also glued a bunch of Iron Wind turrets to a bunch of GW Epic Warhammer 40k vehicles as a start on my 10mm near future, science fiction project.  Finally, I painted the tunics on 11 battalions of Not Quite Seven Years War 10mm figures for the country of Bergdorfreuthenheim.  I expect to finish all but the NQSYW figures by the end of next weekend and will post pictures then.

In the past two weeks I’ve had a chance to run two GAMER events with vehicles.  As mentioned in an earlier post, the infantry rules are pretty solid.  We find some interesting nuance from time to time that must be addressed, but the infantry rules are largely complete.   As a result of recent play test, I have been able to streamline the vehicle hit resolution procedure, think about terrain effects on vehicle hits, and redesign the vehicle record card, getting it from two 3×5 cards down to two.

In the low-resolution version (in which each figure in a squad has all the same attributes, a double-sided 3×5 card is need for an infantry squad (shown below).  A vehicle requires one of these double-sided cards for the crew and a double-sided card (shown above) for the vehicle.

I found this bridge yesterday at Michael’s craft store.  It is reminiscent of the one that came with the old Marx Blue and Gray Playset, but I think it’s a good size for 28mm figures.

I placed the first figure I put my hands on in front of the bridge for scale.  I think the bridge was about $7.  If you are interested, it was where they have all the plastic dragons and other animals.

At Cold Wars I purchased these new figures that are meant to look like the colonial marines from the Alien movies, specifically the second movie, Aliens.  The paint job is okay, but didn’t photograph very well on my phone with the flash. In particular the faces look awful in these photos.

I am planning on using the GAMER rules that I’ve been developing with these figures for some sort of science fiction skirmish.  I also painted the crew of Serenity, so they’ll get mashed up into the game as well.

Last weekend I began working on some 28mm WWII figures.  When I started working on GAMER, I found that I didn’t have the right figures to make correct squads.  I had lots of men with submachine guns, because I got them to fight giant ants in a pulp game.  So a couple of conventions ago, I purchased a bunch of figures with rifles and BARs.

This morning I put on the finishing touches and flocked them.  I wanted to have these done it time for Fall In.

Some months ago, Chris and I made a bunch of fantasy buildings for our 10mm Bear Yourselves Valiantly projects (white and blue building in the foreground).  Chris noticed that tops of Tropicana orange juice looked like they might be arenas or larger buildings.  I’ve been tinkering with them, but finally finished them this morning.

As my wife and kids are off visiting my mother in law, I invited a few buddies over for a small gaming session.  I find that early play testing rules is often better with a smaller group.  I am still refining the vehicle rules for GAMER and wanted to test some ideas with just three or four guys.  Only two could make it, Chris and Duncan.

I set up another tank-heavy scenario involving a scratch German force attacking an American position.  I was hoping to get a couple of close assaults and some bazooka fire.  I also wanted another test of the vehicle damage procedure.  All seemed to work well, but I still need to think a little about how vehicles interact with cover and vehicle movement speeds.

There Germans started with four tanks, while the Americans just had a Sherman and a Stuart.  The Americans also had two infantry squads, each with a bazooka.  The Germans had two tank hunter teams, one with a panzer faust and the other with a panzershreck.  Even though the Pz. IV fired first, the Sherman knocked out the Pz. IV.  The Germans never got much momentum, and the Americans gradually attritted them.  In the end, it was a convincing American victory.  I just need to clarify a few points with regard to the vehicle hit procedure.  Also, I think that vehicles are moving too slowly.  I also need to play with indirect fire.

After the WWII game, I cooked some hamburgers on the grill and we talked about game design a bit.  In particular we were trying to brainstorm ways to account for the drawbacks of card-based activation without going back to IGO-UGO.

A couple of years ago, Chris, Dave, and I were working on a set of rules for wizard battles.  After the WWII game, we pulled out the wizard game again and fiddled with it some more.  We came up with some good ideas.  When I finish with writing Bear Yourselves Valiantly and G.A.M.E.R., I’d like to resurrect the wizard battle game.

A couple of weeks ago Sammy ran her first convention game at Historicon.  She used my Eureka toy soldiers fighting the Eureka teddy bears.  That reminded me that I had 12 more toy soldiers in my ready-to-paint box.  This morning I knocked them out.  These are the last ones I purchased before they stopped updating the line.  The others were painted to resemble Britains grenadier guard figures, but for these I decided to vary the colors a bit.