Author: Buck

There is an early Tom Selleck movie I like that came out about the same time as Lassiter (a great movie!) and Runaway (a pretty good movie, written by Michael Creighton), called High Road to China.  It didn’t get a lot of acclaim, though I think the story is really well done.  I think a lot of people didn’t buy Bess Armstrong, but I thought she was fine.  Anyway, Sally 4th, in their Hollywood classics line came out with four figures based on the characters in this movie.  I managed to get them painted yesterday at 0400 before heading to NJ Con with Eric.

The figures are nicer than my paint job.  I recommend you take a look at these figures.

Eric and I headed up to NJCon for the day on Saturday.  He and I both played in a RevWar game using The British are Coming rules.  It was a fun game with an old school feel and the need to multiply two digit numbers together to reach the final percentage needed to hit.  We had a good time.

The real hit for me was playing A Gentleman’s War with Howard Whitehouse.  When these rules were announced on TMP, I immediately ordered them.  My dad has been collecting old toy soldiers as long as I can remember, and he must have 20,000 of them.  I cut my teeth on Little Wars and the illustrations of the same toy soldiers my dad collects being used in games.  Of course you wouldn’t want to fire lead projectiles at valuable antiques, so A Gentleman’s War doesn’t require spring loaded cannons.  I bought the book and read the rules, which are quite enjoyable to read, even if you never play them.  When I saw that Howard was running the game at NJ Con, I signed up to play.

Below are some picture I took.  There is something charming about gaming with old toy soldiers.  Whether it is something inherent to the large, glossy figures, or the people attracted to gaming with large, glossy figures, gamers tend to be less focused on inconsequential minutiae and more willing to just play the game.  The rules are easily grasped after a couple of turns.  They could benefit from a PDF chart card that could fit on a single pice of paper, but in general, these are really, really fun rules, and we had a great game.

I really like the activation mechanism, but there seems to be a fatal flow when a force has been heavily attritted.  A player activates units based on a card draws.  You can see the blue and red markers, indicating that those units have activated.  A unit may not activate again, until all of a player’s units have activated once.  (There is an exception to this, but let’s go with this for purposes of the blog entry.)  Once all a player’s units have activated, all markers are removed, but the turn isn’t over, so units may activate many times during a turn.  The problem is that if a player is down to just one or two units, he may activate that small set of units, clear markers, and activate them again, while the other player must cycle through all his units.  There must be a way to solve this.  I would like to borrow this mechanism for a set of rules I am writing for a secret project for a miniature manufacturer.

I highly recommend these rules.  The are an improvement on Charge!, McDuff, and other similar rules without losing that really old school feel.

I just went through the PEL and identified the various games that will be using Combat Patrol(TM) and Feudal Patrol(TM) at Historicon in July.  Don’t miss your chance to play in one of these exciting and fun games.

I “designed” and purchased a few HeroForge figures a couple of months ago, just to see how it worked.  In previous posts, I have provided pictures of the others.  On Sunday I finished the last two.  I had originally envisioned them to work with my Border Rievers project, but I think the skirt on the one figure makes her unsuitable.

Despite a lot of business travel and a lot of activity at work, I managed to complete a few more figures for my Retreat from Moscow game at Historicon.  The game will use the free Napoleonic supplement to Combat Patrol(TM).

I have had the retreating Frenchmen completed for quite some time.  Lately I’ve been working hard to complete the pursuing Russians.  In these first two pictures you an see mounted and dismounted Cossacks from Old Glory.

Today I completed a unit of 10 mounted Russian hussars in maroon uniforms.  You’ll note that many of the figures are not mounted on snow covered bases.  While the retreating Frenchmen are unique to the Retreat from Moscow, I plan to use the other figures frothier games, so I have mounted them on my neutral earth flocking.

Right before leaving for a week in Europe last Saturday for business I completed a unit of 10 Old Glory Russian Dragoons.  These are in green uniforms.

In Combat Patrol(TM) I will probably make all the figures have an Accuracy of Regular.  The French will be outnumbered and trying to get across the length of the table to a small village with as many figures alive as possible.  The Russians will arrive at points along the long edges to keep the pressure on the French and make sure they don’t just lager up in the middle of the table and fight it out.

 

A couple of weeks ago I posted a picture of a figure I “built on HeroForge.”  I made a couple of figures just to try out the site and see the quality of the 3D printing.  I was quite impressed.

I made a matching mounted and dismounted cowgirl and painted them in the same color scheme.

I also made a pulp girl.  There are two versions of the same figure, one with a backpack and one with a jet pack.

I have two more figures from HeroForge to paint.  I’ll post pictures eventually.

Both of you who read this blog will know that I am working on a scenario for Historicon 19 using Combat Patrol, called Retreat from Moscow.  In a previous post, I showed pictures of my retreating French, but I have been in need of pursuing Cossacks and other troops.  I traded with Greg a large box full of Jacobites for some French infantry.  In the meantime, I ordered a  bunch of Cossacks and other pursuing cavalry from Old Glory.  I finished the two bags of mounted Cossacks and will begin working on the bag of dismounted Cossacks soon.  If I get those done in time, I’ll begin working on some mounted Russian Hussars and Dragoons.

While I was working on these, I completed a few other odds and ends.

In the box with the Russian Napoleonic figures, Greg had thrown in a squad of winter German infantry.  They were mostly done except for boots and flocking.

The guys at work were talking about HeroForge.  I wanted to give it a try, so I went to their site and designed a couple of figures.  The printing is excellent, with very little indication of layer lines.

I had been looking for Duck Wader for a long time.  I recently got one from Mark for Christmas, but I recently found this one on Ebay.  It was in terrible shape, and it had been painted in garish blue colors.  I “rescued” it, and repainted it.  Since I have two now, I am thinking about a scenario with twin Sith Ducks attacking a Rebel base.  Hmmmmm.

The Little Wars TV people asked me to come to their clubhouse and run a Combat Patrol(TM): WWII game for them.  Greg and I drove up there yesterday after work to set up and run a 1939 Polish scenario that I have run in conventions previously.

The scenario involved a German attack toward a Polish armored train that was sitting astride their route of advance.  The turret on the train was out of ammunition, but there was a Bofors gun on top that the Poles used effectively throughout the game.

The Germans had two 38(t) tanks, a Pz. I, three halftracks, a full platoon of infantry, and a command car.  The Poles had a platoon of infantry, the Bofors on the train, two Wz-34 armored cars, three tankettes (one with a 20mm cannon).  The Bofors had a limited field of fire down the center of the table, but fortunately for the Poles, the Germans pretty much pushed up the center of the table.

Despite losing a halftrack early, the Germans advanced steadily across the table, but mostly where they weighted their attack on their right.  The Poles began to lose a lot of infantry across the table  They had occupied the building in the center of the table, and for a while, that was the Germans’ only target.  While the Germans only had a little more infantry than the Poles, the Germans made good use of the machine-guns on the halftracks.

While the Poles had lost much of their infantry and the Bofors, they had lost no vehicles.  The armored cars and the machinegun-armed tankettes were advancing on the Polish left, threatening to overwhelm the Germans on that flank.  The tankette with the 20mm cannon was causing the remaining German halftrack (with half a squad of infantry) to seek cover.

At this point, we called the game a Polish victory.  It appeared that all the members of the club really enjoyed the rules and the game, which was gratifying.

The Little Wars TV club is a great bunch of guys.  Greg and I had a very good time with them.  They also have a great facility for gaming.

I have continued to develop the terrain boards for our Combat Patrol battle of Hoth extravaganza for Historicon 2019.  This is a work in progress, because the rocks at the entrance of the hangar / cave still need to be painted.

The table will consist of 30 textured terrain boards that are two feet square.  Three of those boards represent the interior of the hangar (the gray you see in these photos).  The other 27 are winter.  On top of these boards we will place hills, rocks, and other scatter terrain.  You can see the black and gray rocks in some of these shots.  The rocks around the hangar entrance will look the same.

Little by little I’ve been working on my Sally 4th Terra Former modular terrain.  I have been working on making caverns that I could use in pulp games, science fiction games, and others.

In the next few shots, you will see closeups of the tiles with some 28mm figures for scale.

The Terra Former product is really good.  The boxes went together easily.  It took a little work to make the interiors with insulation foam, cork bark, and lots of spakle.  I am happy with the final results.