Author: Buck

Some months ago Hinterland released additional figures in the line of female hussars and sailors.  At the time, the budget wouldn’t permit an order, but a month or so ago, I finally got around to ordering them.  This weekend, I finished painting the figures.

The picture (above) shows the female sailor pom-pom crew.  The crew is just three figures, the officer in pith helmet, the gunner, and the woman carrying another box of ammunition.  The fourth figure in the background is a sailor from one of the earlier releases and is not part of the crew.

This picture shows the artillery crew.  The crew does NOT come with a gun.  Most of us have extra guns sitting around that can be conscripted into service.  Now my female hussar force has some organic, heavy support.

The princess is quite proud of her unit!

The female hussar unit is not just a bunch or pretty faces, suitable only for parade duty.  They have had a good record on the tabletop in GASLIGHT games.  In addition, they are early adopters of “modern” technology.  In this picture you can see the only non-female member of the regiment, the robotic hussar armed with a Maxim-like weapon.

In these two pictures you can see the entire force, including their new support weapons, self-propelled armored coaches, close air support, and mounted forces (both on horses and on raptor-looking “Death Jaws”).

I painted these figures just for fun.  I found the van on Ebay.  The figures are from Hasslefree.  They’re a bit pricey, but you only need a couple of figures.

This is the Scooby gang ready to do battle with real zombies instead of some guy dressed in a rubber suit with some glow-in-the-dark paint mumbling about “those meddling kids.”  The van is from Ainsty with a few small mods by me.  I found the van in a bucket of “off casts” at a convention.  When I found the die-cast Mystery Machine in the right scale on Ebay, I decided to modify this resin one to match the gan with weapons.

My first public showing of G.A.M.E.R. was Sunday AM at Cold Wars 2014.  Both readers of my blog will recall several posts describing the evolution of this concept.  Though the scenario needed more Germans for balance, the game was fun, the players had a good time, and several asked when the game would be published.

I’m still tweaking the rules and the cards.  Eventually, I’d like to stabilize the cards and get some printed through a print on demand place.  My next play test will be almost all vehicles in order to test out all the vehicle rules.

Eric and several other HAWKs ran a series of Schlegel’s Ferry games.  Schlegel’s Ferry is a fictional town on the upper Chesapeake that begins as an Indian village and advances through time, seeing battles from many different wars.  I ran Schlegel’s Ferry 1664.   The games this year were separated by 50 years.

Cold Wars 2014 was a good show for me.  Dave ran two Fate of Battle games on Friday with his 25mm figures.  Friday I ran 1664 at Schlegel’s Ferry.  Saturday I ran Montmiraile from Dave’s 1814 scenario book.  Then Dave and I ran the 12-player LaRothiere game.  Saturday night Dave ran his Fastov LSNC: World War II game.  Sunday I ran a first “public” showing of G.A.M.E.R., my new WWII skirmish concept.  I didn’t buy much, because a couple of the folks I wanted to visit weren’t at the show, but there’s always Historicon.

Ed Duffy ran this terrific looking modern game using a set of rules he has been developing.  The Americans were advancing across this table to get to some objective on the far side.  I was busy running La Rothiere in the next room and didn’t get to play this, but from all the yelling from the next room, I gathered it was a lot of fun.  In the end the body count was very lopsided, but the “bad guys” won, because the Americans didn’t get to their objective.  According to Ed, they got bogged down shooting bad guys instead of focusing on their mission.

The second game of the day on this table was Sam’s GASLIGHT game.  It featured the Baker Street Irregulars, some other law enforcement types, and Sherlock Holmes facing a large band of bad guys.

This was the first time that Sam had run a GASLIGHT game.  He knew he wanted some puzzle solving.  I cautioned him in advance that when I’ve tried this before, the players soon figured out that a way to get each others clues is just to shoot your opponents, so it becomes a brawl.

Sam came up with something using puzzle pieces and scrabble tiles that were collected by moving round the table.  I was playing Duncan’s WWI game at this time, so I didn’t see how it worked, but according to Sam, it worked really well and the game didn’t turn into a shoot-em-up.

Sam has collected some really interesting terrain pieces.  They were a combination of IMEX, Pets-mart aquarium accessories, and Miniature Building Authority.  I think the table looked quite good.

I have it on good authority that Sam’s wife (pictured above) really had a good time, despite her appearance in this picture.  🙂

The first War Horse con of the year was a success!!

I have been working on eight more battalions of Austrian infantry to complete Nordman’s advanced guard in the order of battle I have been building.  They are now complete.  To finish the plan for my 10mm Austrians, I need one more leader and four more batteries of artillery.

Once again, Sam Fuson hosted a day of gaming at his place on the East Cavalry Battlefield at Gettysburg.  As a play test for the upcoming gaming convention, Cold Wars, Dave and I ran the full battle of La Rothiere.

La Rothiere, which took place in February 1814 as the Allies were advancing toward Paris to depose Napoleon, is an early battle of the campaign.  As the forces became more and more depleted throughout the campaign, I think this is the largest battle.  In the upcoming Last Days of the First Empire scenario book, this battle is broken into three scenarios:  the main battle (French center), the French left flank, and the whole battle.  Saturday we ran the whole battle.

The scenario involves Russian, Austrian, Bavarian, and Wurttemberg forces attacking the French, who were greatly outnumbered.  Marshall Ney had been sent away by Napoleon, but when the Allies attacked, he was recalled.  His arrival, as well as that of the main Austrian force, is governed by random die rolls.

The battle occurred in February amidst intermittent blizzards, so each turn there is a die roll to determine the weather.  In this game, all but the first turn were blizzard, which worked to the French favor as it delayed the Allied attacks.  The objective is to seize six towns.

Other than the blizzard conditions, the battle was a tightly run thing.  The Wurttembergers captured one of the six towns.  Decisive victory could only be accomplished by the side that held all six towns, so the Wurttembergers stole a decisive victory from the French.

Then the Austrians entered the table on the extreme French right and would almost certainly have captured one or more towns.  Eventually, when we had to stop the game to set up the next one, the Allies had inflicted more losses on the French than the French inflicted on them, so the game was a marginal victory for the allies.  The French were poised to get the marginal victory, but a group of light cavalry that had been on a flank attack was forced to retreat.  Being cut off by the newly arrived Austrians, an entire cavalry brigade surrendered!

Dave and I were happy with the way the scenario ran and are ready for Cold Wars

 

This weekend a bunch of us met at War Horse Farm in Gettysburg, PA, for a gaming day hosted by Sam Fuson.  One of the games we played was a WWI adaptation of the Look, Sarge, No Charts family of rules by Duncan Adams.  He has used ideas from the WWII and ACW sets and added some interesting ideas of his own.  It is a very effective combination for early WWI games.  (It may also work for later in the war, but Duncan has only run early war games.

In the scenario, the French were advancing to capture the town you see in this picture.  Some of the Germans were defending the town, while others were coming to their aid.

Duncan has come up with an interesting concept for representing rolling terrain.  See all the “hills?”  The tops of those hills are actually the base level of the terrain, with the gaps representing gullies and depressions.  It really worked well!

This is another test as we work to debug the IFTTT and Zapier automation.