Month: January 2019

I have been looking for a 1:48 scale Ferrari like the one in Magnum P.I. — the original series not the remade crap.  I found this one on eBay after years of searching.  It is 1:43, but close enough.  Then I needed a Magnum, T.C., and Rick.  I went to Crooked Dice to find a figure I could make into Thomas Magnum.

I started with the figure on the left.  I figured mostly it would be paint conversion, but I had to add a collar to make a Hawaiian shirt.

I started with the head on the right, but in person, it didn’t have enough hair.  (I have been watching old episodes of the show, so I know that Magnum has a lot of 80’s hair.)  With some green stuff, I added a little more hair and made the mustache a little bushier, which you can see in the top picture of this post.

I had a hand holding a .45 M-1911 from a box of Warlord U.S. Marines.  I hacked the right hand out of figure and added the hand holding the .45.  You can’t see it in these pictures, but T.C.’s shirt says “Island Hoppers.”   I figure just about any figure will pass as Rick, and I’m sure I have a suitable Higgins figure.

The Magnum faction will be added to the A-Team, Ghostbusters, and Scooby Doo factions in an upcoming wild and wooly To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT game, hopefully in time for Historicon 2019.

I started to build this peel tower for my border rievers games.  This was a nice kit.  I did a bunch of the painting before assembly, which was the right answer, but I think I could do a much better job if I was to build a second one.

All the doors open with tape hinges.

I can’t wait to get this on the table!

This is my submission to the February painting challenge on Azazel’s Bit Box:  https://azazelx.com/2019/01/23/neglected-models-february-2019-community-painting-challenge/

 

Last night at our club night, Greg and I ran a commando game using Combat Patrol(TM).  We are trying to work up rules for sentries and commandos to put into a free supplement.  For purposes of this supplement, the attacker is referred to as “commando” regardless of nationality.  Bottom line: it worked okay for a first run, but we have some work to do.

This scenario involved British Commandos (Guts: E, Accuracy: E, Melee: 2, Endurance: 3, Reaction: 4) attacking a chateau in France to kill or capture a high-ranking officer.  The Germans (Guts: R, Accuracy: R, Melee: 1, Endurance: 3, Reaction: 3) had two teams (5 figures each) that were in fixed positions, three on roving patrols, and two pairs of sentries in fixed positions.  The Commandos were in six, two-figure teams.  This gave them maximum flexibility, but also made it difficult, when the fur began to fly, to mass fires.  The Commandos also had three “Where’s my card?” counters that they could play if the reshuffle card came up before either card of a given number was drawn from the Activation Deck.  Greg played the Germans and worked off of a small board, so the game was “double blind.”

I let the Commandos enter anywhere they wanted on one of the short table edges.  They had to kill or capture the high-ranking officer and exit off the other short table edge.  The table was roughly five feet by three feet.  I used the spotting rules and night rules from the FREE optional rules supplement.

The driving mechanic of the Commando games is the notion of an alert level (AL), which started and 1 and could go up or down based on different events.  The table was divided into a 3×5 grid.  When the AL reaches certain thresholds, the Germans are allowed to take different actions.  For instance, when the AL reached 5, the sentries were allowed to be more active.  At 10, the fixed German units were released to move toward “sounds.”  At 15, the Germans could begin for fire.  At 20, the German reinforcements would arrive.  On the drive home, I also thought that at 30, the Germans could kill the prisoner.  These thresholds are set before the game, but they can be different from game to game.

If Commandos and Germans were in adjacent zones, the AL increased by 1.  If they were in the same zone, the AL increased by 2.  Until the AL reached 10, the Commandos used a modification to the normal melee procedure.  The Commandos couldn’t apply the HtH modifier for their weapon unless they decided to fire during the melee, which would increase the AL.  If the Commandos lost a hand-to-hand, the German player drew a card from the Action Deck to determine if the Commando was wounded or incapacitated like normal.  In either case, the AL increased by 1.  If the Commando won the melee, he too drew card from the Action Deck to determine the result.  If the German was incapacitated, the AL remained the same.  If the German was wounded, he was incapacitated anyway, but the AL increased by 1.  Also, if the hand-to-hand occurred within sight of another German who wasn’t incapacitated during the same activation, the AL increased by 1.  The first three times that small arms fire occurred, regardless of who fired, the AL increased by 2.  In subsequent activations, if the Commandos fired their weapons, the AL increased by 1.

To encourage the Commandos to exercise some stealth, on turns in which none of the Commandos were spotted, the AL decreased by 1.  There was a point after the first German patrol was killed that the Commandos might have concealed themselves back into the woods, but they unluckily ran into a patch of woods occupied by a fixed German unit.  So, instead of decreasing the AL, a melee occurred, which eventually drove the AL to a level that allowed the Germans to begin shooting.  After this point, the German combat power continued to increase as more and more units arrived and more shooting occurred.  Eventually, the AL got high enough that a nearby Pz. 38(t)  arrived on the scene.

A high point for the Commandos came when the 38(t) moved into the courtyard of the chateau.  One of Duncan’s Commandos was caught in the open.  This is the one we dubbed “Mac the Knife” from all the Germans he had incapacitated in hand-to-hand combat.   All of the Commandos was equipped with a satchel charge.  Mac the Knife assaulted the tank, got a penetrating hit, and brewed up the tank.  This of course increased the alert level, but was a major morale boost for the Commando players who were watching their forces get attritted.  The smoke from the burning tank also provided some concealment for the Commandos from the Germans in the upper rooms of the chateau.

We played a few more turns, but the Commandos just didn’t have enough men left to even get to the high-ranking officer.  The Germans began the game with 30 figure and ended with 10.  The Commands began the game with 12 figures and ended with 2.  This was a first play test of a scenario that has so much randomness that it is probably impossible to completely balance, but this particular instance hinged on the Commandos unluckily running into the German patrol early on turn 2.  I the patrol had moved in the opposite direction, if the Commandos had chosen a different entry point, if the Germans had failed to spot, the Commandos might have slipped past, and the game might have been lopsided in their favor.  The AL mechanic seems to work.  The Commands had a good time, despite being defeated.

While Commands were dying in France, Zeb Cook was running a Finland Winter War 1939 game on the other table.  Below are some pictures.  From the whooping and hollering, the game seemed to be a lot of fun, and I really like the look of his table.

I have been painting a bunch of figures in greatcoats lately.  First, they are relatively easy to paint.  Second, they look a little different that other figures on the table.  So I finished two squads of infantry.  The nice this about the Artisan figures is that they come in full squad packs.

For Christmas, a buddy gave me the Konflikt 47 Mudskpper kit from Warlord.  It was fun to assemble and will enable me to run a few “weird war” games.  I’ll bet the Americans wished they had one of these on New Years Even when they were facing the space aliens!  The Mudskipper is my submission for this month’s Azazel’s challenge (https://azazelx.com/2018/12/24/january-2019-paint-challenge-terrain-centrepiece-models/).

When I am painting a batch of like figures, I usually put a handful of random figures on the table at the same time.  Sometimes I just use them as a place to apply leftover paint on the pallets.  This time I had this dwarf and the Lara Croft looking figure on the table, so I finished them at the same time.

 

I focused on actives with family and friends over Christmas and New Years, but I did get a few things painted.

The first were eight Copplestone Cossacks that I found in a flea market bin.  I will use these in my Retreat from Moscow games.

The next batch are a number of fantasy ducks (and other critters) from Star Hat Miniatures in New Zealand.  From previous posts, it is clear that the quirkiness of ducks appeals to me.  I bought into this Kickstarter, and I received my ducks a couple of months ago.  I finally got around to paining them.  I was looking for something a little different after 100 WWII 28mm Russian WWII infantry.

 

 

Now it’s time to work on WWII ETO Americans in greatcoats for Combat Patrol(TM).

Since 2009, we have been hosting a war-game on New Years Eve.  I don’t find New Years Eve a compelling holiday, and I don’t feel like sharing the road with a bunch of drunk people, so we start gaming around 1500 and end a little after midnight, which gives everyone time to get home before the craziness beings.  We usually make the games light, often Christmas themed.  The first game last night was a GASLIGHT game centered around the movie A Christmas Story in which two groups of characters from the movie competed to round up items from the movie, such as the Red Ryder BB gun and blue bowling ball, while the town was being invaded by zombies.  For this game, I set up my Granville, Illinois, town that I use for my pulp and gangster games.

The second game used the same terrain, since it takes a couple of hours to set up.  This time, American troops were defending the town against an attack by space aliens.  In the picture above, you see a crashed space ship in the foreground.  The aliens landed and advanced toward the ship.  The device in the foreground is the macguffin.  The aliens have to get to it and destroy it.  Why not nuke it from space?  The aliens had to make sure that the Americans hadn’t already found and exploited the device.

This doesn’t really follow any narrative, but it is meant to provide a bunch of eye candy.

The aliens did a nice job maneuvering their tanks and infantry together up the roads agains the American opposition.

The game went well.  The Americans had lots of opportunities to knock out the alien tanks, but they had bad luck, missing almost every shot.  While the Americans tore up the alien infantry on the American left flank and delayed the alien infantry on the American right, the aliens knocked out all but one American tank and drove relentlessly to the objective.  Combat Patrol worked fine for a science fiction game.  It was a nice way to spend New Years Eve.