Month: March 2017

I am proud to announce the release of FREE a supplement by Duncan Adams for Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII. The Slaughter So Swift: Look, Sarge, No Charts: 1914 is a supplement for fighting battles in the early months of WWI, when battles were fluid and uniforms were still pretty.

Duncan drew from three sources to create this supplement:

• Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII,
• A Union So Tested: Look, Sarge, No Charts: American Civil War, and
• His own research on World War I.

He has been running games using these variants for a couple of years at gaming conventions. Based on a demand from many of the people who played in his games, I encouraged Duncan to put his ideas on paper. The result is a free supplement that you will enjoy if you are interested in that historical period.

The Slaughter So Swift is a supplment to Look, Sarge, No Charts: WWII. You will need a copy of those rules to use this supplement.

You can download the supplement here.

You can find more information about the Look, Sarge, No Charts family of rules here.

I ran two Bocage games at Cold Wars using Combat Patrol(TM): World War II.  Both games went well.  In fact three of the American players form the first time I ran the game came back to play Germans in the second game.

The second time I ran the game, the American advance was more orderly.  The American infantry advanced on line with support from the Stuart and their halftracks.  The Stuart took a Panzerschrek shot that disabled its tracks, so it spent the rest of the game as a pillbox.

Both games went very well, and all the players seemed to have a really good time.  They also quickly grasped the rules and were quickly self-sufficient.

Dave is writing a supplement to Combat Patrol(TM): World War II to adapt the rules to the Boer War and the Zulu War.  At Cold Wars he ran a Boer War ambush scenario using the to-be-released supplement.

The HAWKs, mostly Kurt and Eric, ran a series of games on Schlegel’s Ferry.  The initial concept for Schlegel’s Ferry was to run a game on the same ground in various historical periods, and update the map for each battle.  Initially we ran early Indian vs. arquebus-armed settlers, French and Indian Wars, American Revolution, War of 1812, and American Civil War.

The last couple of years, Eric has run a series of games with a holiday theme, from St. Valentine’s Day to Christmas.  Using Blood and Swash, these games are always a crowd pleaser.

Zeb Cook and I ran a Winter War 1939 with Combat Patrol(TM): World War II and Zeb’s Winter War supplement.  The Russian objective was to advance up the road, capture some supplies, and hold open the road for later extraction.

The Russians were forced to advance across open ground.  Initially they only suspected the locations of the Finns, but they soon were taking withering fire.  The Russians received some very bad morale results.  While they inflicted some damage on the Finns, a combination of Finn good shooting and Russian poor shooting mad the game a one-sided affair.

Despite the one-sided outcome, I think the players still had a good time.

The HMGS Legion of Honor presented Don Hogge with an award for his excellent Congo game at Cold Wars.  The game looked terrific, and the players had a great time.

Three HAWKs won awards at Cold Wars: Don (for his Congo game), Greg (for his This is Not a Test post-apocalyptic game), and Eric Schlegel (for one of his Schlegel’s Ferry holiday games).

Geoff Graff once again ran his Lego pirate game for kids at Cold Wars 2017.  As usual, the kids had a terrific time!

I completed another tank battalion and a few attachments for Look, Sarge, No Charts: Near Future and Science Fiction.  This battalion came from an ad hoc hodgepodge of things.  The vehicle above is from a set of small Russian kits I found on Ebay.  They seem to make these kits in both 1:48 (I have some for Combat Patrol) and 1:144 (for LSNC).

You can see the battalion laid out in this picture.

Most of the vehicles in this battalion began as Epic Warhammer 40k.  I then picked up a bunch of turrets from Iron Wind Metals at a convention and glued them to the Games Workshop hulls.  While it is clear how these vehicles began life, I think the effect is pretty good.  It will make a nice “irregular” force.

The vehicles across the top of the pictures above and below are not Games Workshop.  I got them in a flea market at a convention.  They are for a science fiction game I hadn’t hear of before, and I don’t think they or the game are still available.  I wouldn’t mind a few more of them.

Below are a few more of those Russian-made kits.  They provide a number of parts that are used to customize the vehicles.

These Russian-made kits are not assigned to any of the tank battalions.  I intend to use them as attachments from higher headquarters to weight the main effort or help balance the game somewhat.

I found this article on the Warlord site very good.  I always greatly curtail weapon ranges from their theoretical maximum when designing rules.  Typically, I use 25% of maximum effective range.  My only quibble with this article is that the term effective range IS defined:  it is the distance at which an average marksman has a 50% chance of hitting a man-sized target.  What is an “average marksman” can be determined experimentally on a range.  In any event, the rated maximum effective ranges of modern weapons are determined in this way.

This weekend I found another battalion of Reaper Car tanks that I had forgotten I had.  In the original Kickstarter fulfillment, Reaper was short a few of this type of tank.  They arrived after I had finished the other battalions (see previous blog posts).  I painted them in a variety of camouflage patterns.  I decided that I would paint these in a black “special operations” color scheme.

This picture shows the entire battalion: four companies of three platoons each, plus a battalion headquarters base.

Painting them in shades of black and gray seemed a little bit like cheating, but I am happy with the final result.  When we start play testing Look, Sarge, No Charts: Science Fiction, I think this battalion will have some sort of stealth or cloaking capability.

I am going to call this unit the “Shadow Battalion.”