Day: July 20, 2015

In this post, I am including a mix of games hosted on Saturday by the HAWKs at Historicon 2015.  They are in no particular order.  Enjoy!

Several of the HAWKs and I ran our zombie shopping mall game at Historicon.  This shot (above) is the calm before the storm, before the game began.

We used GASLIGHT with the free Zombies by GASLIGHT supplement.

The theater that Bill built for the game even had Dawn of the Dead playing on the screen.

Mike Miller from Texas was the winner, getting 7 points of supplies out of the mall.  He controlled the A Team, but only Face made it out.

Dave (far left) and Duncan (far right) teamed up again to host the Battle of Vittoria using the Fate of Battle rules.  They tweaked the scenario a bit from Cold Wars, and by all accounts the changes made the scenario more interesting for the players.  I was busy running my own game at the time, but the players appeared to be having fun.  There was a LOT of movement, unlike many Napoleonic battles are have armies lined up hub-to-hub across the table.

I thought the table also looked good!

Noah Guibalt, one of the HAWKs, ran a popular and well-attended Skirmish Sangin game Saturday afternoon in the HAWKs room at Historicon.  The following pictures are in no particular order.

I ran this game twice at Historicon, once for kids and once as a normal convention game.  The basic scenario involves a squad (or so) of German Wehrmacht infantry and a US tank crew defending French VIP prisoners in a castle (Schloss Iter) in Austria against Waffen SS troops sent to kill them.  This is a real incident that happened in the last week or so of WWII.

The pictures are in no particular order and mix the two games together.  The intent is not to provide a battle narrative, but rather to show some interesting pictures of what turned out to be two fun games.

In the version aimed at kids, the defenders won.  There were three “key” prisoners in the castle (for game purposes).  The attackers killed one of the three.  Since the defenders maintained two of the three, I called if a defender victory.

In the general version (which also had some younger gamers) the attackers fought their way into the courtyard and killed all the defenders.  In all the play tests and running of the game, this was the first attacker victory.

For rules, I used my under-development GAMER system (see previous posts).  The rules worked well, and I think the players caught onto them quickly and easily.

These pictures are mostly from the HAWKs room at Historicon 2015, but I did get out of there once in a while to check out other gaming.  I didn’t arrive until mid afternoon on Friday, so I don’t have pictures of earlier events.

On Saturday at Historicon 2015, Eric Schlegel hosted the 5th Armies for Kids Giveaway game.  The event is for kids under 10 years old.  Each younger gamer who participates in the event walks away with enough PAINTED figures (for both sides) to run a game at home, some terrain, some unpainted figures, some paints, etc.

This year’s event featured 40mm ACW figures, mostly Sash and Saber, through the kind donations of many folks.  Maynard Creel, Ed Mohrmann, Phil Kearnan, Keven Pinder, and Eric Von Reyn provided the figures.  Ed hired Phil to paint all the Confederates that Ed purchased, and Phil subsequently donated and painted the mounted officers.  Chris Johnson once again provided terrain for the kids to take  home.  These included wooden fences and a  paper bridge over which to fight.  I realized after I got home that I need took any good close-up pictures of the figures that Phil painted, but they were amazing.  The HAWKs held a couple of painting bees during the year to paint up all the unpainted figures that had been donated.  Our figures did not look nearly as good as Phil’s.

Eric used his ACW rules he has created specifically for kids games.  They flow nicely, and the kids always have good time.  Eric’s rules also include his “test of history education in US schools.”  When a specific card is drawn from the deck, he asks one side or the other an ACW history question.  If the kids on that side get it correctly, one unit gets an extra activation.  If they don’t get it correctly, the other side gets a chance to “steal” the extra action.  I learned a lot from these nine year olds, like the “fact” that Grant commanded the Army of Northern Virginia and that Robert E. Lee was the president of the Confederacy.

The game involved both sides trying to capture the hill seen in the center of the picture (above).  The Rebs got there first, but they were eventually driven off by the Yanks.  The boy on the far left of the picture was the last Reb in the game.  His single remaining figure killed five or six Ynaks before being gunned down.

This was our fifth such giveaway event.

We hosted four games specifically targeting kids at Historicon 2015:

• The Armies for Kids Giveaway.
• Geoff’s Lego pirate game.
• Duncan’s game based on the Warriors books involving tribes of warring cats.
• A version of my Defense of Schloss Iter game tailored for kids.