Category: Wargaming

At Historicon, Sam announced that she wanted to make her own wargame.  We talked about figures, because she wants to paint.  I bought her a bag of Old Glory Cowboys to paint at a convention a couple of years ago.  She said she wanted to do something different.  Eventually, we hit on the idea of her using the teddy bears and toy soldiers I have painted from Eureka so she could concentrate on terrain.  She plans to use GASLIGHT for this game.

She plans to find miniature building blocks to use as barricades and defensive positions and jacks as obstacles.  In this picture she’s painting roads.  Note the colors are supposed to look like a game board.

The “trees” for her game are meant to look like candy on a stick.  This shot is of her painting them to look like peppermints.  The bases are wooden wheels from the craft store.  The tops of the trees are round sponges from the artist supply area of the craft store.

She asked that I NOT play in this game when she runs it the first time for the HAWKs.  She wants to do it on her own.  This should be cute.  I’m glad she’s showing an interest in the hobby.

We played the third, and final, play test of the Zombies by GASLIGHT rules last night at the HAWKs meeting.  We’ll play zombies again, but we wanted to get the zombie rules squared away, because we want to publish them soon as a .pdf giveaway to promote the upcoming release of The GASLIGHT Compendium.

Zombies by GASLIGHT, which is about four pages long, uses To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT as its base.  In this picture you see that one of the player’s figures failed its Scuffle roll in melee with a 20 and fell down.  This figure eventually got up, disengaged, and survived to the end of the game.

The scenario involved a helicopter with some police and valuable medical equipment crashing.  The players’ job was to get to the helicopter, rescue as many of the police as possible, and get off the table with the medical supplies.  This scenario was the most fun we’ve had with zombies.  About 25 zombies started on the table, most 12″ from the helicopter, but some behind the players on the road to safety.  I thought this was going  to be  a quick scenario, since the players were driving trucks.  In this post apocalyptic world, vehicle maintenance has suffered, and the players had trouble keeping their vehicles running.  At one point, when a zombie reached into a truck window, the figure driving the truck failed her Scuffle with a 20 and fell out of the truck!

In this picture you can see the players’ trucks closing in on the downed helicopter crew, but the zombies are close behind.  At this point the players began shooting like crazy, which just about doubled the number of zombies on the table in two turns.  The black truck in the foreground had just finished running over four zombies, killing them.

In Zombies by GASLIGHT, if zombies are within in 12″ of a live human, they move toward the closest one.  If that is not true, they move toward the nearest noise marker within 24″.  If neither condition is true, they move in a random direction.  In this picture, Sister Mary Smith and Wesson (in the group of figures just behind the truck in the foreground) was left behind battling zombies while the trucks continued to the helicopter.  By the end of the game, she had 30 zombies crowded around  her!  Twice she was wounded.  When wounded, you have to make a Save to see if you become a zombie.   She passed both times, surviving until the end of the game.  I may have to paint a medal on that figure for future games.

In the end, the players got one of the three crewmen and the medical supplies off the table.  (They only got one of the three crew off, because at one point Sam fired a shotgun into the mob of zombies crowded around the unconscious figures.  She killed almost all the zombies, but also took out two crewmen.)

This was great fun!

Well, Cold Wars is over for this year.  I had a really good time.  I ran several games, and they all went well.  I had a chance to play in a FIW game with my kids.  I even found most of the stuff off my shopping list and managed to avoid too many impulse buys.

We drove up Thursday night and played Magblast (cards) and Betrayal at the House on the Hill (board game) with some buddies.  Friday I ran three games.  The first was a Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII France 1940 game involving a French force trying to keep a road open against German opposition to allow the rest of the French to pass.

Eric and Andrew, long-time LSNC players were on the French side.  Andrew has been playing LSNC since before the rules were published.  He is growing up, and apparently his “kid dice luck” has deserted him.  When the smoke cleared, none of his French tanks remained on the table.

Friday afternoon I ran a BAPS game as part of Don’s article project.  He had the same scenario run three times, once with Battleground, once with BAPS, and once with Disposable Heroes.  He intends to write an article comparing the three games.  From what I could tell, the outcomes were pretty similar, ending in a grenade throwing contest for control of the house in the center of the board.

Friday night I ran the French and Indians come to Schlegel’s Ferry.  Schlegel’s Ferry is a fictitious town on the upper Chesapeake that starts with two groups of Indians fighting for control of the area.  The area grows through a series of scenarios:  Indians vs. Indians, Indians vs. Dutch settlers, French and Indian Wars, War of 1812, American Revolution, American Civil War, World War I spies, 1920’s gangsters, 1950’s alien invasion, and post apocalypse.  I ran the FIW version, with the French squeaking out a minor victory by getting a few soldiers into the stockade.

Saturday morning Chris and I ran our 16 player LSNC game of the battle of Lvov in Poland.  I’ve described the scenario in a previous post.  This was the fifth time we’ve run it.  We didn’t get quite enough players to run the full game, so we cut off the Polish attack portion and just played the German and Russian attacks on Zboiska.  This was the first time the Germans or Russians have gotten to the town with more than a handful of platoons.

Sam Fuson wanted to play Germans, since he had played the other forces in previous iterations of the scenario and because he “had an idea” of how he wanted to attack.  We dubbed his idea the “von Fuson” plan.  The Germans punched through the Polish cavalry, avoiding Chris’ infantry on the Polish right due to their anti-tank guns.  Eventually, the Polish cavalry was forced back into Zboiska and constituted most of the defenders.  Chris’ infantry was beaten back by Eric’s German infantry and eventually retreated back toward the town as well.  On the Russian side, Kurt pummeled poor Andrew (again having lost his kid luck) while JJ pushed through the Polish defenders at the creek.

The Germans reached the town first, but the staunch Polish defenders pushed them back.  By the end of the game, botht he Germans and Russians were fighting for the town.  The Germans and Russians were not allowed to fight each other, so they used clever tactics like moving their forces between their “allies” and the town to slow them down.  In the end, the Russians had about twice as many bases in the town as the Germans, so we called it a Russian victory.

Saturday afternoon I played a Brother Against Brother French and Indian War game with my kids.  Tommy and Sammy were on the French side.  I had the Indians on the British side.  Brother Against Brother is a very bloody system.  On turn one, I moved my Indians to the edge of the woods in open order.  Then my daughter opened fire with her Courier du Bois from behind a stone wall and wiped out an entire unit.  Taking advantage of the long reload time for rifles, I then sent my second unit across the field to work my way around her flank, but my movement rolls stunk and she got another opportunity to shoot at me.  By the end of the fourth run, I only had 2 Indian figures left.  Despite my miserable showing, we had a good time playing a game together.

Saturday night I ran my GASLIGHT gangster game.  The scenario, a reprise of the one I ran for the HAWKs on New Year’s Eve, featured two gangs and police.  One gang had captured a senator’s daughter and had also hijacked a shipment from the other gang.  The second gang then came to town to get their money back and also to rescue the girl to ingratiate themselves with the local police. 

Almost immediately, despite my warnings, the gangsters began firing tommy guns.  This, of course, demanded a response from the police who came out with BARs and shotguns.  Lots of 20’s were rolled, blowing up two car engines and jamming several weapons.  In the chaos, the police found the hostage and got her off the table.  Another group of police found the vault with the stolen loot and managed to get away with it as well.  Atypically, the police won!

My last game of the convention was co-run with Chris Palmer on Sunday morning.  It involved the South American frogs fighting for independence from their Spanish overlords.  With the time change, our 0900 Sunday morning game was largely empty, so a group of teenagers from Howard County, MD, filled it. 

The game featured a number of scratch-built tank vehicles.  This scene shows a lone South American frog leader (who was unattached because the rest of his unit had been wiped out) preparing to take on the Spanish artillery crew single-handedly.  Surprisingly, the cannon crew abandoned their gun and charged the lone leader.  They were joined by the commander of the self propelled gun who chose to dismount and charge rather than reload his cannon.

In this picture note Chris’ war snail has been shot.  The Spanish frogs scored a catastrophic hit, which killed the snail, but the crew survived and later charged the Spanish frog king.  They were unsuccessful.  Despite the rout of the Spanish king’s guard, the Spanish king defeated the South American guard, the snail crew, and a unit of South American frog spearmen.

Interestingly, the South American players decided to leave their fort and attack the Spanish frogs in open ground.  (In this picture you can see the Eureka war turtle in the background.)  At the end of the game, all the South American vehicles were destroyed, and the Spanish still had three.  Both armies were almost devoid of infantry.  We called it a minor Spanish victory.

I picked up a few items in my one hour of shopping that I needed for Historicon.  We’re still on track to release The GASLIGHT Compendium at Historicon, so watch for lots of GASLIGHT games there.  I’ll even be running at least two that are “straight historical” games; although, the scenarios will be ahistorical.

From a previous post, you know that I’ve been working on some props for an upcoming GASLIGHT photo shoot.  One of the props I’ve been working on is this six-barreled, Colt-Webly shotgun.

The high mounting of the ammunition magazine makes it difficult to aim.  The weapon is designed to be fire by a heavy man to repel boarders or discourage large groups of unfriendlies.

This is a closer a closer look at the left side of the receiver mechanism.  Note the double trigger.  The front trigger is for semi-automatic fire.  The rear trigger is used to three-round bursts.

This is a view of the right side of the receiver.  Note the copper dial near the near brass strap.  This is used to adjust the amount of gas vented after each round.  When set properly, a round will fire every time the front trigger is pulled.  If not adjusted properly, the receiver won’t cycle properly.  Sometimes this can cause rounds to mis-feed.  In extreme circumstances, particularly when firing a three-round burst, it can cause the receiver to explode.  This has been known the ruin the day of the operator and make him quite surly.  This is another reason the weapon is most often employed from the hip.

A couple of posts back, I mentioned an Officer Professional Development (OPD) Chris, Sam, Ed, and I ran for the 114th Signal.  I posed a couple of pictures.  This weekend Sam gave me a disk of photos taken by the battalion’s official photographer.

The group photo was taken right after Chris and I arrived before we started setting troops on the table.

Sammy gave the rules a nice plug, but this was about teaching some tactical lessons and team building, not selling books.

Sammy came up with the caption for this photo, and I couldn’t resist using it!

Yesterday, Sam Fuson (who set up the OPD with the 114th Signal) invited a bunch of us to his house to play a scenario he wrote using LSNC.  The situation involved an ahistorical combined US/German attack on the Russians right after WWII.  The “allies” (US and Germans) had to cross the Elbe and attack a large Russian force.  The scenario was excellent.  We played from 1030 to 1700 with a short break for lunch and had a great deal of fun.  My 11-year old daughter commanded a battalion of Russian infantry.  Kid luck kicked in, and she almost couldn’t miss.  I think she had precision guided mortar rounds!

Sammy uses 1:72 plastic figures and similarly sized vehicles.  This has allowed him to create his large LSNC: WWII collection pretty inexpensively.   At 1:72nd he uses a single vehicle to represent a platoon.  He has taken the base label information, reformatted it a bit, and rubber banded the labels to the vehicles as shown.  He also uses different colored rubber bands to denote different organizations.  While I prefer the look of 10mm for this scale of gaming, what Sam did was quite effective.

He mounts his infantry just as indicated in the rules.  There is not a huge different in the look of the infantry between the 10mm and 20mm figures.

As the game progressed, on the “allied” left, the German player aggressively pushed toward his objective near the little town shown in the picture above.  He may have been too aggressive.  He kept pushing his tanks and infantry forward without softening us up first.  As a result, we Russians were stationary blazing away at him while he was moving.  With a combination of “kid luck” from my daughter’s infantry and an equally aggressive Russian player pushing his tanks and mechanized infantry around the German flank, we were able to eventually grind up this attack and retain control of the town.

Even compensating for her medicine wearing off, my daughter was very excited by this game and is really looking forward to a future battle.  Her tactical instincts are good; although, sometime she wanted to be too aggressive.  One time I let her advance out of cover to go after some German tanks.  She had a great time, but probably should have remained in cover, since the Germans ran up some Panzer Grenadiers and a hot firefight ensued for three turns.  Sammy did a good job as GM; the scenario was very good; the gamers were there to play, rather than test their manhood; Sam’s wife kept us well fed; and all of us had a great time!

In bits and pieces over the last two weekends I finally finished one of the two weapons I am building for the upcoming GASLIGHT photo shoot.

As mentioned in an earlier post, this started as a bright yellow Nerf fun.  I added a few gears and other bits from the craft store and things I have collected in my boxes of bits.  After spraying with Krylon Fusion (which sticks to plastic) I then dry brushed the gun metal and hand painted the rest of the details.

I’m pretty happy with the results.  This has been a fun diversion.  I hope to finish the six-barrelled rifle this coming weekend.

Chris Palmer, Sam Fuson, Ed Duffy, and I staged an officer professional development event for the officers of the 114th Signal Battalion today.  There were two main purposes for the event: team building and learning some tactical lessons.  Sam is the human resources officer (S-1) for the battalion, and he organized the event.  He and Ed set up the table before Chris and I arrived.  Chris and I brought the troops, set them up, and ran the game for the group.  Afterwards I conducted an After Action Review with the officers.

We ran an event like this about 18 months ago for the same battalion; however, only four of the officers from that game are still in the battalion, so mostly they were novices.  We used Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII (which Chris Palmer, Dave Wood, and I wrote) for this game.  LSNC: WWII seems to be a good set for conducting this kind of event, because the rules were easily learned and the players could focus on the tactical situation.

The scenario was based on the fighting around Lvov in 1939 Poland.  The Germans arrived at Lvov and began to surround the town.  The Germans occupied high ground near the town of Zboiska and shelled Lvov.  Among the Polish defenders was the 10th Mechanized Brigade.  When the Russians arrived a few days later and completed the encirclement of the town, the Poles surrendered.

In our scenario, however, we presented a hypothetical situation that required all three forces (German, Russian, and Polish) to maneuver.   There was no coordinated operation between the Russians and the Germans in reality, but we wanted to create a scenario that provided some interesting tactical challenges.

The table was shaped like a “T” with the Russians and Germans pushing across the top of the “T” to seize the town of Zboiska in the center.  In the meantime, the Poles counterattacked down the vertical part of the “T” to seize the high ground and destroy the artillery batteries shelling Lvov.

The officers, ranging from second lieutenants to majors, quickly grasped the rules.  Very few of them  had ever played war games before this event.  After just a few turns, they were running the game themselves with Chris, Ed, Sam, and me just answering the occasional question.

This is the fourth time we’ve run this scenario, which was originally designed for Cold Wars 2011 next month.  Each time it has played very differently, but the outcome has been in doubt until the end.  We conducted an After Action Review after the game and discussed a number of tactical lessons.

In one case a Russian infantry battalion was completely wiped out by two defending Polish battalions.  That Russian battalion was supposed to create a penetration through which the Russian tanks were supposed to push.  The officers quickly adjusted their plan and pushed the tanks through another penetration.  We’ve noticed that often gamers will focus on killing enemy troops instead of the mission.  The Russian objective was the town of Zoiska.  Interestingly, the Russian commander made the decision NOT to race for the town, since he would arrive without infantry support.  Instead he pushed left and right from the penetration.  It was exactly the right tactical decision in this case.  On the other flank, the Germans, however, tried to root the Poles out of some woodlines, which they could have easily bypassed with their panzergrenadiers and tanks.  The Polish commander, instead of a frontal assault on the Germans defending the artillery on the high ground, used one battalion to fix the Germans while pushing another around the flank.  It was the only time we’ve played this game when the Poles managed to take the high ground.

It was interesting to see how a group of Army officers approach the game.  During the AAR, they seemed to have learned a few tactical lessons and have had a good time.

For an upcoming GASLIGHT photo shoot, Chris and I have been bashing together toys and odd bits to create fake Pulp weapons.  I’m working on two, a six-barrelled gun and a six-barrelled pistol.  Hmmm.  I didn’t realize I had a theme going until I typed that last sentence.

This shows the early stages of the six-barrelled rifle.  The basic building block consisted of seven pieces of PVC pipe and a PVC connector.

At this point, the rifle has been assembled and decorated with gears, etc.  You can’t see much of that, but I wanted to show this picture for scale.  The round portion on the top will be fitted with a slide carousel as a Lewis-like ammunition magazine.  I’ll be dry brushing the weapon with silver paint and then painting the decorations in other colors so they stand out.  I’ll also be adding a cardboard “stock.”

The six-barrelled pistol began as a Nerf pistol.  I took this one from my son, but I replaced it with a new one.  With some gears and other bits from the craft store, I’ve been decorating the gun.

Here’s another shot for scale.  Again you can’t see too many of the decorations.  At this point, I have sprayed it black, so that it’s ready for dry brushing and other detail paining.

While the lighting in this picture is poor, you can see some of the details I’ve added.  Look closely.

Last night the HAWKs tested out the rules we are working to play zombie games with GASLIGHT.  We intend to include these in The Compendium.

This is a picture of one of the games we played that Chris took with his iPhone.  At this point, Duncan’s corporate babes with guns were surrounded by zombies, but he managed to get most of his folks off the table.  One of them, however, was infected in the process and later turned into a zombie herself.

In the game, whenever you make noise, the place the noise was made is marked with a “noise marker.”  We used green, glass beads.  When the zombie card comes up, you roll to see how many zombies are attracted to the spot.  We typically put them about 12″ from the spot.  Zombies tend to pop up out of heaps of trash, old rags, closets, etc.

The rules worked well.  The consensus was that the zombies were a bit too hard to kill, so we’ll probably make their Save number a little worse, but otherwise, what we did seemed to work pretty well.  Everyone had a good time.