Month: December 2014

One of many HAWKs traditions is the Christmastime game at Duncan’s house sometime during the holidays.  Often the game is set in the War of 1812 and often in the winter.  This year Duncan hosted an American raid on a British encampment in Canada in the winter.  The American objective was to capture supplies, loot, and plunder.  The British objective was to hang onto their gear.

In the past, Duncan has used a variety of different rule sets, including GASLIGHT, for these games.  This year Duncan wanted to try using my G.A.M.E.R. rules that are under development.  In general, though there are questions about a set of rules that are still under development, the system worked well enough.

Each player had two six-man groups and a leader to control.  Dave’s troops had high morale (“guts”) but terrible accuracy (“shooting skill”).  He rushed forward toward the enemy and then missed with nearly all his shots and Don laughed at him and taunted him.

There was a furious melee in the woods just behind the plantation house, where Noah is seen in the photo moving his troops.  After the melee, which lasted a few turns, Eric was victorious, and Noah was out of the game.  Don taunted Noah too.

On my side of the table, Bruce occupied the brown building in the picture and then proceeded to decimate Jim’s and my forces.  We thought Bruce’s forces were snipers armed with Gatling guns.  On the first or second turn, Rob incapacitated my officer.  The officer had moved to the edge of the woods in the center right of the picture to locate the enemy.  He found them, but didn’t live long enough to let the troops know.  By the end of the game Rob and I had ground each other to a pulp, but he managed to capture two cows.  Don taunted me as well.

The game was a lot of fun.  Lots of folks brought cookies and snacks, so the holiday season pig out continued unabated as we battled.

Thanks to Duncan for hosting!

I recently ordered some 10mm giant ants from Magister Militium for my fantasy armies.  I went back and forth on whether to make them black ants or red ants.  I decided on red.

I like the looks of these figures.  The giant ants are in sort of a centaur pose.

I thought the praying mantises looked too crowded with all six on a base and too open with just three, so I placed a couple of additional ants on the base as sort of a combined arms team.

Last night was HAWKs night.  There were two simultaneous games.  The first was Kurt Schlegel’s 1973 Arab-Israeli War game based on the battle of Quatre Bras.  Since many of the HAWKs supported the 114th Signal Battalion’s SLPD (see http://bucksurdu.com/blog/?p=3350) the various game masters have taken turns running their version of the scenario at club nights.  This week was Kurt’s turn.

The second game was a play test of Kevin Fischer’s game based on a Japanese anime series.  It involved large stompy robots (actually these are more like battle mechs that have human (or human-like operators) battling each other.  We also had tanks and infantry running around.

Apparently the Egyptians had a slight advantage over the Israelis when the game ended.

The robot game went pretty well for a first play test.  I don’t know the genre, so I don’t know if the game reflects the cartoon well.  It had a few rough edges and can use a little streamlining, but it was fun.

The game only took a couple of hours, so we had a little time for a game of Red Dragon Inn.

Greg Priebe, one of the guys in our gaming group, sent me a note about a toy available at Target stores from the Disney movie, Planes.  It is a good size for 28mm figures and looks like a C-119 cargo plane.  I’ve always liked the look of the C-119.  Before I could take action on his suggestion, I saw this blog posting:  http://www.inlgames.com/c119.htm.

My pulp games involve Duke Morrison and his buddies, “Wrench” Web and “Boats” Morgan along with his love interest, Gianna Nannini, daughter of the great scientist Serafini Nannini.  Duke Morrison NEEDED a plane.  So within a few days, I had ordered one for me and one for Greg from Target.com.

My son took up the challenge of removing all the red stickers while we watched television one evening.  After a lot of elbow grease and a fair amount of Goo Gone, the plane was ready to paint.

I first sprayed the plane black and then with a silver paint.  This silver color was brighter than I wanted, so I gave it a third coat of paint, this time an aluminum color.  I then mixed silver and brown paint to make a metallic rust color, which I applied liberally with a wide brush.

In the picture (above), you can see the difference between the un-weathered engine cowlings compared to the rusty finish on the rest of the plane.

I decided to keep the centers of the propellors silver, but painted the tips of the propellers white.  I like that look.

Then came the challenge of coming up with a name for the plane and appropriate nose art.  After I had considered several names, including Duke’s Duchess and the Granville Gal, Chris suggested Anything But a Twenty.   Granville is the town in which most of my pulp games take place.  “Anything but a twenty” is a reference to the fact that in G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T., rolls of twenty often cause bad — and usually dramatic — things to occur.

Below are candidate nose art I built from some Varga pin-up pictures I found on line, some image editing capabilities on my Mac, and a few other elements.

Below is a closeup of the nose of the airplane with our heroes posing in front of it.  I printed the nose art on clear, matte address labels.  The artwork didn’t have the vibrance of glossy paper.  At first I was a bit disappointed, but in retrospect, I like the washed-out look.  It seems closer to photos I’ve seen after the plane has had a lot of hard miles.  The faded look seems to fit better with the rusty appearance of the plane.

I chose a tail number of NC-61326.  Since “Granville Gal” lost out, I chose to use the zip code of the real Granville, IL, which is the town on which I loosely based my town for pulp games.

And here is one last look at the plane from a slightly more distant viewpoint than the previous close up.  The border around the nose art didn’t quite disappear, but it’s not too obvious either.

This was a fun project.  I rarely build or paint airplane models, as I don’t have much luck with them.  In this case, I think the end result was quite good.

The Look, Sarge, No Charts family of rules uses special dice to take the place of chart cards.  During development of the first set of rules, Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II, I used wooden cubes from a craft store for play testing.  Those cubes are a little smaller than the blank dice that you can buy.  I have been using the store-bought blank dice, but I haven’t updated the size of the labels.

At Fall In a couple of weeks back, the guy who works at the “Dice Lady” booth mentioned that there are die-cut labels that fit the dice.  I found them from On Line Labels.  The company tries to sell you a proprietary software package to make labels that requires periodic updating (and fees).  They also have a template that works with Microsoft Word.  It took several hours (and a call to the On Line Labels help desk) to reformat the labels for Bear Yourselves Valiantly and Fate of Battle.  Previously I have been printing the slightly smaller ones on full sheets of sticky labor paper and then cutting them out, one at a time.  With the newer pre cut labels, once they are printed, they can be easily peeled and stuck onto the blank dice.

From the picture above, you can see that the new labels are slightly larger.  This has allowed me to increase the point size of the fonts by one or two points, making the labels much easier to read.

While these are much easier to use than the .pdf files that I have posted to several Web page, I am very hesitant to post these new labels.  The Internet has create a worldwide culture of people who expect others’ intellectual property to be given away for free and will complain and kvetch in public forum when free stuff isn’t perfect.  With these new labels, you have to move them every so slightly left or right on the page to account for slight variations in printers.  That amount of effort will surely illicit complaints on TMP and inquiries into the nature of my parentage.  I’ll make labels available to my co-authors, but I probably won’t make them available to the general public.

Some years ago, at one of the HMGS East conventions, the giveaway for all attendees was a small sprue of four or five 25mm plastic British colonial figures.  Most of the HAWKs handed me their sprues, because they didn’t do any colonial gaming in this scale and thought I could use them in a GASLIGHT game.  I painted several GASLIGHT units in red jackets to use for service on Mars.

As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been picking away at my unpainted lead (or in this case plastic) collection.  So, to finish off these free plastic figures, I decided to paint them for service in the Northwest Frontier.  The sprues only came with rank and file, so the officers, standard bearer (currently missing a flag), and other special figures are Empress Miniatures, ordered from Age of Glory.

I was in Orlando last week for a conference for work.  I had an opportunity one evening to spend an hour or two at the Downtown Disney marketplace looking for stocking stuffers for my kids and wife.  In the art store I saw this picture and had to take a photo of it.

This weekend I continued to pick away at unpainted 10mm figures.  The three units I finished this weekend were Copplestone 10mm figures.  I like the way the archers are mounted in pairs.  They are easier to paint than individuals, but not as easy to paint as strips of Old Glory or Games Workshop 10mm figures.