This was a big gaming / hobby weekend. Tom is at West Point, and my wife was visiting my daughter at her school for the weekend, so I was a geographic bachelor. The weekend began on Friday with our normal HAWKs meeting. This week we only ran one, large game, instead of the more typical two six-player games. We will be running a large Muskets and Tomahawks game at the HARCON gaming day at Harford Community College next weekend. Friday we set up the table and made sure that all the HAWKs were reasonably proficient with the rules.
Most of us had forgotten how slowly unit move in Muskets and Tomahawks, so the play test was good. We’ll adjust where the players enter so that they get into the action more quickly. This will almost be a demonstration game. The idea is that the HAWKs will be playing and whenever a passer by shows interest, we can provide and unit and get him/her right into the action.
I had THREE events scheduled for Saturday. The first event took place in the morning. Greg and Chris played a Combat Patrol (TM): WWII game while I taped it. The idea was to create a video battle report, including some rules explanation.
It will likely take me all week in the hotel on business travel this week to edit all the segments into something that isn’t too boring and cuts out some of the mistakes.
The second hobby event on Saturday was another play test of Duncan’s Napoleonic supplement for Combat Patrol (TM). I posted some notes from a play test a couple of weeks ago. Duncan made a number of changes and tweaks between the two games. It is working well, but we want to get a few more games under out belt before thinking about going public with it.
We used the same village at the crossroads terrain for the Napoleonic game that we used for the WWII video, but we pushed the woods more toward the edges of the table.
We are getting much closer on the cavalry rules. It is working fine, but we need to think a little more about how to describe what we are doing so that it will be clear and unambiguous to others. We are very happy with the swirling, chaotic nature of cavalry engagements.
Again we used Mexicans as surrogates to make sure we were testing the rules for lancers. After this engagement, elements of four cavalry units were badly scattered and attrited.
The third event on Saturday was a brainstorming session with Chris and Don about ideas for a science fiction version of Look, Sarge, No Charts. It was a good conversation, and I have a lot of food for thought. My next step will be to design a candidate base label to see if all the ideas we discussed are representable in the game.
On Sunday, still being a geographic bachelor, I spent the day on hobby activities again. Last weekend, when I air brushed the German vehicles I showed in last weekends blog entry, I also airbrushed a number of science fiction vehicles I plan to use in 28mm science fiction games with Combat Patrol (TM). One set of vehicles were plastic, Russian-made kits. These come with a number of different weapons. I chose to assemble them as two pairs of vehicles. I think they turned out nicely. These will be light tanks with three-man crews.
I completed painting these four armored personnel carries from Pig Iron. I ordered these right after they announced they were going out of business.
All of the Pig Iron vehicles have the same body, and you can make them armored personnel carries or add turrets to make them a support vehicle or an anti-tank vehicle. I am happy with the way they turned out. I assembled mine so that I can switch back and forth between armored personnel carries and the support vehicles.
I acquired a couple handfuls of bark chips from Duncan, because I have been wanting to make more rocky outcroppings for my games. I use the same sage felt for most of my games, and I even cover my hills with the same sage felt. I wanted these rocky outcroppings to match as well. I had a few scraps of the sage felt from a hill-making project, so I cut them into circles and glued them to some old CDs.
I sprayed the bark chips with black and dry brushed them with a dark gray. Then I hot glued the bark pieces to the felt-covered CDs. Finally I dry brushed them again with a very light gray.
In this picture the felt circles don’t appear to match the ground cloth underneath. Part of the issue is that the ground cloth has been sprayed with a few colors of paint to give it more texture. The other part of the issue is that the ground cloth has had a lot more use — and the nap has been roughed up — so they felt circles and the ground cloth reflect light a little differently. Still, I think they blend better than something that has been flocked or textured and painted.
Finally, I got a bunch of 1:50 vehicles second had at Cold Wars, so I sprayed them green (most were Russian and two US M-10 tank destroyers) and painted the wheels and tracks.
So it was a productive weekend.
