ERTL makes a farm house set that is still available for a reasonable price on Ebay. It is perfectly scaled for 28mm figures. My daughter and I just finished painting and assembling it. I modified it a bit by cutting off some of the tabs that hold it together. This allows the second floor to come off without much of a fight. I used a piece of cardboard to add a second floor inside.
This is what it looks like in the box. The kit is hard plastic and assembles easily.
Dave has been planning to run a fantasy game with his impressive collection of figures using GASLIGHT. (He actually used Battles by GASLIGHT.) This was the test of his game for Cold Wars next month.
The scenario involved the “Good Guys” trying to capture the port that our “Bad Guys” relied upon for resupply. The sides were roughly equal in numbers, but the Good Guys seemed to have a lot more magic, which allowed them to summon swarms of rats, create whole forests, launch fire balls, and other fun. The Bad Guys’ plan was to push on our right (the flank farthest from the port), get behind the Good Guys, and turn their flank. It didn’t work. While two Bad Guy Players were wrestling with two Good Guy players, the third Good Guy raced through our left flank and into the port.
The figures above are old Ral Partha figures. They are “Orcs riding Death Jaw.” I’m now in search of a bunch of them to make a GASLIGHT unit for Mars. These will look great with some Europeans riding them instead of Orcs.
He made a few tweaks for Battles by GASLIGHT, and on balance it worked well. For me there were two memorable moments. The first was when my guard cavalry was charged by the unit of freed slaves. If there had been a melee, I would have spanked them, but I failed my morale check to stand. The result was that 1d6 of my figures would run off the table. I rolled a 5. When a unit is reduced to 1 figure, it is removed from the table in GASLIGHT. So some naked slaves with shovels chased off my guard orcs riding dinosaur things! The second incident was when my army commander, some sort of witch deamon thing went into melee with some lizard men. The lizard got a hit, and my witch king thing rolled a 20 for his Save, so I died. You just have to laugh, or the dice will drive you crazy.
Dave has a tremendous assortment of out-of-production figures. His paint job is excellent.
Friday night at HAWKs night I play tested my Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars game for the upcoming Cold Wars convention. I took the scenario from Scenarios for All Ages by Charles Grant. The scenario involved three bridges with both sides trying to capture two or more of them.
I am very happy with the rules development at this point and am ready to start writing the book. I just have a few things to work out, like whether and how to represent “anchored line.” In general, I think the look and feel is about right and the games are pretty dynamic.
In this game, the river is fordable, but units move at the “rough” speed. The French conceded the bridge closest to the camera in the picture above. They captured the other two bridges quickly. The Russians pushed across the conceded bridge and were working to turn the French flank. In the center, there was a lot of back and forth action, but in the end the French retained the bridge. The French saw an opportunity to take out some French guns while still limbered and charged across the bridge. Unfortunately, they didn’t keep any units on the bridge, so some Russian cavalry was able to get behind them and take the bridge. After 3.5 hours of play the Russians had squeaked out a victory.
I’ve posted this before, but I’m excited about the fact that people in our club who have sworn off Napoleonic gaming really enjoy these rules. In addition, long-time Napoleonic gamers also really enjoy the rules. They are talking about how they take two based from their current set of rules and put them on magnetic “sabot” bases to use with these rules.
The other club game on Friday was a play test of Chris’ parrotmen on Venus game. It seemed to go well, but I was busy with the Napoleonics game and didn’t have a chance to see much of it. At one point my daughter called me over to see one of Duncan’s soldiers in the mouth of a giant dinosaur creature.
This was a gaming weekend. Friday was HAWKs night, and we tested the Schlegels’ Kursk game for Cold Wars using LSNC: WWII. Then Duncan, Chris, Dave, Tommy, and I drove to Gettysburg to play Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars with Sam Fuson and a couple folks from his unit. The Napoleonic game was great fun. We had French vs. British and Spanish fighting for control of key river crossing points. The game went back and forth all day. There were six flags on the table to be captured, each worth one victory point to whoever controlled it at the end of the game, and one more victory point for the side that had inflicted the most casualties. When we stopped, after about 4.5 hours, each side had three flags, but the French had destroyed about 1/3 more enemy battalions. It was the most fun I’ve had gaming in a couple of months. I think the rules are working for people who know Napoleonics as well as those who have come to believe that Napoleonic games cannot be fun.
Sunday, between church, indoor field hockey, and walking around the neighborhood so Sam could attempt to sell chocolate bars for a school fund raiser (with little success), I finished some figures I had been working on and off for a week or so.
A couple of months ago, I bought some FASA Dr. Who figures from Greg that were duplicates for him. Among them was this pack of the first five doctors. I remember Tom Baker (the fourth doctor) as a kid, but my buddy Simon from the UK really turned me onto Jon Pertwee (the third doctor).
This picture will cause fits among Dr. Who purists, since this is the third doctor with Romana I (my favorite Romana), but she was the fourth doctor’s companion. Jo Grant (in the outfit from The Carnival of Monsters) is one of my least favorite companions. My favorite, you ask? It’s a tie between Liz Shaw (third doctor) (who is a scientist and holds her own pretty well) and Sarah Jane (fourth doctor) (who is the best looking of the companions).
Okay, maybe K-9 is my favorite companion.
And what’s not to like about Daleks? I had no idea that there were so many different paint schemes for these until I googled “Dr. Who Dalek color scheme.” These are painted as Skaro Daleks.
So why all the Dr. Who figures? Well, I’m working toward a Dr. Who GASLIGHT game for Cold Wars. I think I’m just about there. Dr. Who purists likely will protest my combining of elements from different doctors and episodes. The scenario is loosely based on The Green Death (third doctor, Jo Grant), in which maggots have been mutated to huge carnivorous creatures that seem to infect those they bite and cause death. The scenario will take place in 1940, where Lieutenant Lethbridge-Stewart (the brigadier in the Dr. Who series) and Private Benton (Sergeant Benton in the series) are serving in the Home Guard. During an exercise, they have come across the mutated maggots and begin the game hunting out nests of them to kill them. Unfortunately, rifles do not penetrate the shell like exterior they have developed.
These maggots have one useful mutation: they poop jethric. Jethric is described as one of the most important compounds in the universe during the Key to Time story arc. Well, these little babies now poop the stuff. That’s the good news. The bad news is that Sontarans and Daleks want jethric too, and they have just landed to capture some of the maggots and destroy the rest. If all goes well, a Churchill tank might come to the aid of Home Guard.
In this scenario, the good guys will have The Doctor (third doctor), Romana, and Elizabeth Shaw, each controlled by a different player. (Lots of Dr. Who continuity problems there — particularly if I add K-9 as well.) This will give them three characters who might figure out why the Sontarans and Daleks have landed so that the Home Guard can destroy the maggots before the bad guys run off with some.
The Ice Warriors won’t be part of the game; although, I’d probably add a stack of Silurians if I had them. These were in the bag with everything else, so I painted them up, which wasn’t hard, since they are a single color, green.
In addition to all the Who-lishness, I also painted two more sets of figures from RAFM that I received for Christmas. Above is Johann Ripponoff and his Doom Ray. Below is Dr. Frankenstein.
This began life as a clicky-base figure. I kept the skull the way it came out of the box, but I repainted the rest of the figure. The figure also comes on a strange base with some odd, green, translucent fog. It took a bit of work to cut the figure off that base.
Can you ever have too many zombies? I don’t think so. Some time back, when the HAWKs began this club project, we each bought one or two boxes of the Wargames Factory zombies. They are very nice, but there are no women. Last time I looked, women were more than 50% of the population. Chris and I split this bag of zombies about six months ago, but I just got around to finishing them.
After painting 700 rifles and backpacks on 10mm Prussians, I needed a break, so I painted a few zombies.
The zombie dogs were from a bag for the Zombies board game. I painted two of them. Each of the HAWKs took a few.
Just like when painting gangsters or cowboys, you can have fun painting zombies and zombie hunters.
Speaking of zombie hunters, here’s one with a hack saw in her hand and a severed zombie head in the other other.
After I posted the pictures of my new frogs with slingshots, some folks on the TMP GASLIGHT list started talking about other sources of frogs. I am reposting some pictures from the frog game I ran at Cold Wars using both my frogs and Chris’ frogs.
The theme of Cold Wars was South American wars of liberation. Since Chris’ paints his frogs in brightly colored schemes, as a joke, I submitted this as a theme game. It actually made it into the PEL that way!
In the picture below you can see a scratch-built snail tank. You can also see Chris’ killer bee unit at the top left of the picture.
Below you can see a close assault by my North American frogs on his South American snail tank. In the next turn, the snail was dad and had fallen over. A hurrah went down the North American battle line!
And finally in this picture you can see the North American dragon fly unit engaging a South American heavy cavalry unit.
Chris gave me these frogs with slingshots for Christmas. I painted them up this weekend. These will mix very well with all the Eureka frogs.
Chris also has a unit to paint up. We think we now have enough frogs, lizards, alligators, etc. to run at 12+ person GASLIGHT game. We’re thinking about an “amphibaganza” at Historicon.
I posted pictures of these when I first finished them a few months back. I used a light orange dry brush to highlight the “high points.” Everyone thought the light orange was too close to flesh color and made them look naked. Last week, I repainted their leotard outfits in a darker orange.
Above and below are the Venusians facing off against some creatures from Recreational Conflict.
Recreational Conflict makes the deep sea diver or space man (depending on how you want to use it). The larger one is supposed to be sized for 28mm figures, and the smaller ones are sized for 15mm. I bought the large ones some time ago and painted them up for my undersea GASLIGHT game. I saw the small ones at Fall In, and picked up two packs. I plan to use them as drones or robots controlled by one of the larger ones. I may also mount them onto bases when we begin work on Look, Sarge, No Charts: Victorian Science Fiction.