Category: Wargaming

I completed a five page quick start guide, complete with two large photo examples. I will try this out on a couple of folks at NASHCON later this month. I think it turned out well.

Last night we had large attendance at our HAWKs gaming night.  I think we counted 18 people!  Greg and Don ran the French and Indian War game they are running at NASHCON, and Dave ran his “Rescue the Prince” Bear Yourselves Valiantly fantasy game, also for NASHCON.

The FIW game seemed to go quite well.  There was lots of carnage.  After the game, Don and Greg agreed that the play balance was about right.

Lizzie got tuckered out after leading her French Marines for several hours.

We game in the Parrish House of a local church, so Duncan, Don, and Bruce took time from the game to practice singing hymns.  The hymn was something about the modifiers for open order troops in the woods in three-part harmony, I think.  🙂

Dave’s game involved a group of “bad guys,” goblins and rats, trying to break into a town to kill an elven prince while also holding off the elven rescue force.  While it was a very tight game, the “good guys” were able to break the prince out of the town.

There’s something impressive about 25mm figures on the table.  Until I got involved with 10mm figures for the Look, Sarge family of rules, everything I did was in 25mm.  Dave mounts his fantasy figures on magnetic sabot bases for use with Bear Yourselves Valiantly.

Today Dave, Chris, Tank, and I got together to shoot all the photographs for the Bear Yourselves Valiantly rule book.  It took much of the day.  It might have taken longer, except we had figures from Fate of Battle to use as guides.  In some cases we were merely reproducing figures from some of the other Look, Sarge, No Charts books.  In other cases we had to shoot completely new examples, because Bear Yourselves Valiantly is different.  We finished by mid afternoon.  Now I have a couple of weeks of “post production” ahead of me.

As mentioned in a previous post, we have been working with Magister Millitum on a cross promotion of their new, exciting line of fantasy figures and our new, exciting rule book:  Bear Yourselves Valiantly (http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/LSNC__FAM.html).

The picture above is of figures that are actually from their ancient figure lines.  These are listed under both the ancient codes and the fantasy codes.  They are referred to as Han Chu halbardiers and Classica heavy infantry.

These are two different groups of bowmen.

The cavalry comes with 12 figures in a pack.  For the knights, I thought that ten figures were enough and used two of the figures as commanders.

I’m not normally a pike and shot gamer, so I thought this pose of the pikemen with their pikes over their shoulders was really neat.

And here are examples of more esoteric creatures.

We will be getting together on Saturday to shoot the photos for the rule book.

I have written a number of blog posts about my use of cards for a new skirmish system I have been developing.  I was reading a recent article in Miniature Wargames about generating enemy forces for solitaire play.  Now, I’ve never done much solitaire gaming, as I’ve generally been lucky enough to find or build a gaming group whenever I’ve moved to a new area, but this idea intrigued me.  The author of the article had some really interesting ideas.  I did enjoy Ambush some years ago.  I was thinking, however, that I could replace the use of charts and tables to generate enemy units, locations, cover status, and activities with cards.  The US Army has something called a SALUTE report (Size, Activity, Location, Unit or Uniform, Time of report, and Equipment).  If we eliminate “U” and “T,” it seems to me that you could divide up the card by the other letters.  Then you could use a series of card draws to generate enemy forces.

First draw:  Is there a new enemy unit?

If so, second draw:  What is the size of the unit?  A vehicle?  A squad?  This would cover both the size (“S”) and whether they have any special equipment (“E”), such as a machinegun, flame thrower, etc.  I think the results in this section of the card would need to be made generic so that a player would be able to select something “about right” from the figures and vehicles he has on hand.

Then make the third draw:  What is the enemy’s location?  (Yes, this is out of order for SALUTE.)  I see a dial of some sort like I use in G.A.M.E.R.  It seems to me that the randomly-generated enemy should be sort of cover, but perhaps not.  I guess I just don’t like the idea of a lots of enemy units popping up in an open field at short range.  It can happen, of course, but shouldn’t be the norm.  (By the way, just because they’ve been put on the table doesn’t mean that friendly forces have spotted them.  Normal spotting rules would still apply.)

Fourth draw:  What are they doing?  This might be dependent on the location draw.  If the enemy is in cover, then they are …  If they are in the open, then they are …  Options might have then fire at a nearby player unit, moving toward a player unit, defending something, etc.  This needs to be fleshed out.  Thought experiments while running will only go so far.  I’ll need to put this on the table many, many times to come up with a good list of options.

When do you initiate this process?  Is there a maximum number of enemy units that can be placed?  Lots of questions, but it seems worth fiddling with at some point.

I have too many other irons in the fire just now to spend a lot of time on this, but it will keep me busy on my next few runs.  I am thinking about this as a companion to G.A.M.E.R.

On Military Matters released Dave’s and my scenario book over the weekend.  See their announcement here.

My daughter, Sammy, has been painting terrain pieces for members of the HAWKs for some time now.  She doesn’t enjoy painting figures, but she seems to really enjoy painting terrain.  She is relatively inexpensive, so it’s been a win-win.  The HAWKs get something painted that was deep in their painting cue, and Sam gets a few dollars to spend on whatever teenage girls spend money.

This was Sam’s most intricate project to date.  Duncan had asked Sam to paint this building he found in a flea market.

We think the building is from Grand Manner.  If you have never gotten buildings from Grand Manner, you’re missing a real treat.  They are fully sculpted inside and out.  The detail is fantastic!  They are premium priced, but worth the money.

Some years ago I bought several of their ACW buildings during a sale, where you could get a set of ACW buildings for a set price.  They painted up really nicely.

I think Sam did a terrific job on this building.

As usual, she did the entire thing herself.  I bought her a nice box for her paints, but she has been using her painting profits to get more bottles of paint, brushes, etc.

Sometimes she’ll ask me for suggestions on colors, but largely, she does this independently.  In this case, I suggested green shutters to give the building a little color.

 

I finished these some time back but didn’t post any pictures.  These are Bones figures.

 

The other day, when we played the vehicle-only game, I started thinking about how to handle vehicles without turrets.  I wanted to avoid modifiers to the cards.  I had a “rule” that said that turret hits on vehicles without turrets were hull hits.  But I thought that didn’t take into account the lower profile of these vehicles.  So I changed to rule to say that hits on turrets were misses.  That didn’t seem to account for the fact that these vehicles couldn’t really go “hull down.”  It seems to me that an even greater portion of these vehicles is exposed in order for the gun to be able to fire, since the body of the vehicle is typically wider than a turret.

    In G.A.M.E.R. there really isn’t the same notion of “hull down” as in other rules.  If the part of the vehicle hit is behind cover, such as a wall or hill crest, the vehicle is protected — just like for infantry.  I’m thinking about using laser pointers, because in G.A.M.E.R., the terrain is its actual height on the table.  (In other games terrain is often some abstract elevation.)  So if the laser is blocked by something between the shooter and the hit location on the vehicle, the vehicle is protected.

    This is the long way around saying that I don’t want to add any modifiers, but I want to account for the unique characteristics of these vehicles.  What I’ve decided to do is color the hull section yellow on half the cards that indicate a turret hit.  If you draw one of these cards with the yellow, a turret hit is converted to a hull hit.  If you draw one of the other cards (with no yellow), the turret hit is a miss.

Before I make a final decision, I want to try this out in another vehicle-only game.

I finally finished my American WWII infantry riding on giant American eagles.  In an earlier post I mentioned how I was able to get Major Objective painting service to mold and paint the riders for me.  The eagles were collected from flea markets over the past few years.

All of this effort was to have opponents for my Eureka Nazis.

The delay in finishing this project was bases.  I ran out of Games Workshop flight stands.  It turns out that none of the hobby stores in the area had any in stock.  I was going to mount them on the round, wooden bases you see in the picture above.  I get these from a guy at Historicon who sells as many wooden bases as you can stuff in a Chinese takeout container for a fixed price.  All I really wanted was the clear plastic rods.  So, I ordered a ten-pack of plastic rods from Tower Hobbies.  They arrived in three days, and I finished this project this weekend.  I think they look pretty cool.