Buck's Blog

In a previous post I showed pictures of my recently completed Griffons, American Eagles, and Stukasauruses for my Cold Wars Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, USAAF, and RAF game.  I mentioned that I intended to use a slightly modified version of X-Wing for the game.  I found a cool site that allow you to make custom movement dials.  From that site, I made these:

I plan to print them on card stock and find some fasteners that will allow them to spin.  They should be good enough for one or play tests and the convention game.

I found another site that lets you build the ship/pilot cards, but a lot of the words are in French.  Hopefully I’ll find a similar site in English before long.  Otherwise, I’ll have to make up cards myself — which shouldn’t be too hard.

 

Despite recent knee surgery that had me flat on my back for a couple of days this week, I have managed to finish up some projects that have been in progress for a couple of months.  I finished the last 80 of my 10mm fantasy figures!  But this post is about my upcoming Cold Wars 2015 Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe, USAAF, and RAF game.

In previous posts I showed pictures of the Eureaka German “Stukasauruses” and the Americans riding on giant eagles.  To go along with those forces, I wanted to put together a squad of British infantry riding on griffons.  Once again, Major Objective games came through with custom assembled and painted Brits.  The griffons were from Reaper Bones.  I used those griffons, because the plastic material from which they are molded makes it very easy to cut off the bases to make them look like they were flying.

GW style flight stands are pretty expensive.  I bought a bunch of 1/8″ clear plastic rod from an on-line hobby site and cut it into two-inch lengths.  I bought two-inch diameter MDF disks from the guy at the HMGS East conventions who sells self-serve Chinese takeout boxes full of bases.  A little work with a drill put correctly-sized holes in the bases and griffons.

In this picture you can see the American on giant eagles (left) chasing the giant pterodactyl “bomber,” Brits on griffons (right) attacking the bomber from the front, and the German Stukasaurus (center)  “fighter escort.”

You can see the control levers and the turret I made to fit on the “bomber.”  The turret can rotate.

When I run this game at Cold Wars, I plan to use a slightly modified version of X-Wing.  I think the pterodactyl will have the stats of the Princess Leah shuttle, including the range-five weapon.

 

Last weekend I spent most of Saturday helping the software folks on a First Robotics Team.  I still managed to get a little painting done on Sunday.  I am still banging away at trying to clear all the 10mm fantasy figures out of my unpainted lead pile.  Along the way, however, I also finally decided to paint this tank gray.  It has been sitting on my painting table for months waiting for me to decide.

I worked to knock out the few remaining Pendraken figures I had left from a batch Chris acquired from Ebay.  The figures seem a little large for 10mm, but they are good enough looking dwarfs for my tastes in fantasy figures.  (After all, how realistic to fantasy figures need to be?!)

Heavily armored and armed dwarf knights?  How slow do you think these guys are going to be on the table.  Find a place you want defended and concentrate on other units.

Some of these spears are a bit flimsy.  I lost one just popping them off the popsicle sticks I use for painting.  After a couple of games, they might become angry geriatric dwarfs with canes.

I don’t know what these figures are really supposed to be, but I decided to paint them in garish colors and call them orc berserkers.

I still want to add a little landscaping to this base, but I like the way he turned out.

I’m not sure when these forces will see action — or if they’ll see action — before our large Bear Yourselves Valiantly game at Cold Wars 2015 in March

I have been working for over a year on a Weird World War II project involving the Eureka “Stukasauruses.”  In an earlier post, I showed the American infantry riding on giant eagles.  I am also mounting Brits on flying griffons.  The scenario I will run at Cold Wars 2015 will involve this giant pterodactyl carrying secret mega bombs to some key Allied facility.  The pterodactyl will be escorted by Stukasauruses.  The Allies will attempt to shoot it down.  I plan to use somewhat modified XWing for this game.

It is not done yet — end the title of the post, “work in progress.”  I plan to add some straps as details and also add a dual machine-gun ball turret on the platform on its back.

For ease of transport, I glued a piece of magnet to its back.  The weapon / driver platform is on a piece of metal which will be affixed to the magnet during game play.

I’ll post more pictures when I get it finished.

 

Two days ago I posted pictures of Betty’s pie stand for my pulp village.  Last night I finished Bob’s Burger Wagon, the second Ainsty kit available through Recreational Conflict.  As with the pie stand, this kit assembled easily.  The notches in the roof are a little small for tabs on the sides of the wagon for was removal during game play.  I had to widen them a little.

Most of the decorations were made in PowerPoint, printed on card stock, and glued to the sides of the wagon.  This wagon and Betty’s Pies will make a nice addition to the Frosty Bar in the park near the center of Granville.  The cub scouts are from Reaper Chronoscope, and “Bob” is from Pulp Figures.

At Fall In 2014, Recreational Conflict sold this MDF building.  It is for their line of figures for British football hooligan games.  I guess the game has been deemed as offensive in the UK for portraying football violence as a game.  So gassing thousands of folks on the Western Front is okay, but beating up a few people at a soccer game is not.  Anyway, Recreational Conflict has two buildings.  This is one that I finished today.

This kit went together easily — even without instructions — and painted easily.  I don’t know the manufacturer, but it wasn’t pre-painted like the 4Ground ones.  That’s just as well, because I could paint the exposed tabs in the same color as the rest of the building to avoid that look of the 4Ground buildings.

The roof comes off.  I plan to add this to the park in my town (Granville) I use for pulp games.

For our first club night of 2015, Duncan hosted his WWI version of the battle of Four Corners (Look, Sarge, No Charts: 1914) , and Noah and his son hosted a Sangin (name of the rules) modern Afghanistan skirmish.  I played in the modern game, because I wanted to see how the rules worked.

Noah put together the terrain with Miniature Building Authority Middle East buildings over a Cigar Box Battles mat.  He added some Woodland Scenics trees and a scratch built rocky mountain.  The table looked quite good.

We were using the rules called Sangin, which are a set of rules for modern skirmish actions.  I don’t know if they are Afghanistan specific or Southwest Asia general, but there was a lot of detail that gave it an authentic feel.

Each player had about eight figures, representing a Taliban group or an understrength infantry squad.  I had a mortar team and small group of infantry.

The game had a couple of interesting mechanics.  First, figures have a rating, called “body,” which determined the number of phases (and the sequence of activations) within a turn.  All of my figures got four activations in a ten phase turn, but better troops could have activate more frequently and worse units could have activated less frequently.  I have to say that with different figures in the squad activating in different phases, it could get difficult, even with eight figures to keep track of who was supposed to activate when.  Some colored marks or something might have been helpful.

Second, after a figure activated (executing up to three activation points), the figure is marked with a chip that indicates how it ended the activation (e.g., kneeling, hidden, prone, running, etc.).  The markers had the modifiers for the soldier for spotting, shooting, and defensive benefit when a target.  That was quite convenient, but there were a number of additional modifiers that still required the use of the chart card — at least until we get more familiar with the rules.

This is the first game I have played in quite some time that used percentile dice.  I always liked percentile dice until I realized that if you have no modifiers less than 5%, you can get the same effect with a d20.  Still, there is an intuitively please aspect to knowing that you have 45% chance of success, which means you have to roll 01 – 45 on percentile dice.  In Sangin, figures each have base percent chances of success for things like shooting, using heavy weapons, spotting, morale, etc.  These base percentages are modified by wounds, cover, posture, etc.  That worked pretty well.

Another aspect of the rules that will take some getting used to is the ranges.  The burst radii for weapons seemed really large.  They were probably in scale to the scale of the figures without any distortion, but none of us know that when we started.  That meant that grenades had unexpectedly large burst radii and troops were deployed too close together.  In the above picture, you can see a large percentage of Chuck’s squad incapacitated and marked for morale checks (white squares) as a result of a 60mm mortar shell.

I have to say that in general I like when the ground scale is close to the figure scale.  I took a lot of flack for that over the years with Beer and Pretzels Skirmish where even on a large table figures seldom got beyond medium range.  Keeping your ground scale close to your figure scale also tends to under-represent the value of rifles over submachine guns, pistols, and carbines as well, but somehow it feels better to me.

In general, there were a lot of things I liked about the rules.  I think I will want to play them a few more times before making any decisions, but I think they have a lot of potential.  I think with more experience using the rules, Sangin will run quickly and play well.  I am looking forward to the next time Noah runs them.

While eight of us were playing Sangin, the rest of the guys were playing Duncan’s WWI Look, Sarge, No Charts variant.

As mentioned in a previous post, I have been working on this set of 10mm “Fellowship of the Ring” figures from Copplestone Castings.

To make it a full set, the bag came with a couple of extra figures, that I suppose were meant to be the characters in alternative poses.

As I have mentioned in previous posts, I have been picking away at my unpainted lead collection.  Recently I’ve been knocking out 10mm fantasy figures that I had collected over time.  Back when RLBPS carried the Copplestone 10mm figures at conventions, I picked up a few packs.  Over the past week or so, I finished them off.

The platypuses are Magister Millitum, but I finished them this week as well.  I wish that Magister Millitum had platypuses in more poses.  Note that I painted one of them as Perry the Platypus from the Phineas and Ferb cartoon.

Copplestone has a number of units called “city…” which I think are supposed to be Gondor, but he doesn’t have the license to the Tolkien stuff.

These were fun to pain in small batches.  Normally I paint large batches for maximum throughput, but in small batches I find I take my time and add some little details here and there.

The last pack of Copplestone figures I have finished is his “Fellowship of the Ring” pack.  I will post pictures of them when I get them mounted on bases.

For the sixth year in a row, the HAWKs rang out the new year at Casa Surdu with an evening of gaming.  Though many of the regulars were unable to attend, we still had a large crowd — 12 gamers plus a couple of kibitzers.  The plan was to play three games.  The first was the traditional Santa Claus game using GASLIGHT.  The second was a large X-Wing game with almost everything I have.  And the final game for 2014 was Red Dragon Inn.

The first game was set in my pulp town of Granville, Illinois.  We used To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT as the rules.  In this scenario Santa has been shot down by Venusians and crashed near the Sinclair gas station.  (You don’t see the sleigh in this shot, because I took it before Chris arrived with the sleigh.)  The objective of the good guys was to gather up as many packages as possible and get them to Duke Morrison’s waiting airplane, the Anything but a Twenty, for subsequent distribution to deserving boys and girls.  The various groups of gangsters who inhabit the town were trying to gather the presents for themselves.  In addition, the Venusians (see the gold space ships in the park not far from Duke’s plane), were trying to capture the sleigh and/or reindeer so that they could study the technology.  There was also a small group of Nazi Fifth Columnists in the town who were interested in capturing Santa’s giant mechanical nutcracker and clockwork Santas.

The packages were scattered around town, and the gangsters were likewise distributed in buildings.  Duke Morrison, “Boats” Morgan, “Wrench” Web and their soldiers and sailors started near the Anything But a Twenty.  The Venusians began near their ships.  Santa and a few of his units landed near the Sinclair station.  Nearby were professor Serafini Nannini and his lab assistants, who moved to investigate the crash, as well a group of friendly snowmen and snowball fighting kids who had a vested interest in helping Santa.

Many of Santa’s other allies, like teddy bear infantry, toy soldiers, additional kids with snowballs, Moonraiser’s Marauders, and additional snowmen arrived in the first few turns, their arrival location being randomized.

The HAWKs tradition is for my son to be Santa.  The other unfortunate tradition is that Santa always has gotten killed.  When my son was younger, that was disheartening for him.  This year he didn’t want to play Santa, but we made him anyway.  Spoiler alert: Santa lived.

The game began with Santa righting his crashed sled and calling four remaining reindeer to his assistance.  Four reindeer weren’t enough to lift the heavily-laden sleigh, but they were enough to pull it slowly.  In addition the clockwork Santas and giant nutcracker were enlisted to push the sleigh as well.

Hermie and Rudloph jumped into a nearby roadster and, after a slight mishap which involved getting their car stuck in a hedge — it turns out that Hermie is a poor driver, they began collecting packages.  The nearby friendly snowmen collected packages and brought them to Santa while a group of kids with snowballs repulsed a group of gangsters and pursued a second one.

At the other end of the town, another group of snowball wielding kids and a group of penguins battled with angry snowmen and gangsters to secure an egress route for Santa.

Angry snowmen and gangsters tried to set up a roadblock to stop Santa’s sleigh while other gangsters (on the street to the left of the one in this picture) set up a bucket brigade to haul packages from a building to a “borrowed” bus.

Moonraiser’s Marauders (from the Island of Misfit Toys) attacked Bonnie’s gangsters, but took the worst end of the subsequent melee.  This gave Bonnie, Harry the Horse, and the Limey’s gangs an opportunity to try to cut off Santa’s movement toward Duke’s plane.

Yukon Cornelius and the Bumble, hitched their red and yellow panel van to Santa’s sleigh and began towing it up the road.  This freed up the reindeer to fly to the rooftops of Granville business to retrieve presents that fell during Santa’s crash landing.  At the same time, Duke Morrison was battling Venusians and other bad guys.  Tanks as having a bad dice night, rolling many 20’s.  It was probably inevitable that Duke would be incapacitated before the end of the game.

Many of the gangsters began trying to ram into either the panel van or the sleigh itself to stop it.  At the same time, the Nazi “she wolves” boarded the sleigh and engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Santa.  At this point, I was worried that Santa was going to die again this year, but he passed all his Save rolls and cleared the sleigh of enemy boarders.  The Venusians came alongside in a “borrowed” vehicle and began shooting at Santa.  Still Santa Saved, while toy soldiers and teddy bears defended the sleigh.  After four hours of play, we determined that there was nothing the bad buys had left in their bag of tricks to stop Santa from linking up with Duke Morrison’s men.

The final count on presents was 24 to the good guys and 14 to the bad guys.  Santa lived.  It was a convincing good guy victory.

I tore down Granville (a significant task) while everyone partook on breaded chicken over pasta with garlic bread.  The chicken recipe came from my aunt and was prepared much earlier in the day.  My wife heated it up while we finished the GASLIGHT game.   This gave me time to put away all the buildings and figures.

The second game we played was X-Wing.  I wanted to put all — or nearly all — of my X-Wing ships on the table.  Each player had three fighters or perhaps a smaller number of larger ships.  Bill brought the Deep Space Nine station from the Star Trek version of the rules to use as a communications satellite.  This became the objective.  The rebels swooped in to knock it out, but were surprised to find that it was fully operational and guarded by several squadrons of Tie Fighters.  Does that sound like the plot of Empire Strikes Back?

Some of the rag tag group of rebel ships were piloted by experts.  Some of the ships were older relics piloted by novices.  The Empire had a couple of aces, but also a couple of academy rookies.  The rebels also had the Mellinium Falcon piloted by Han Solo and a small cruiser.

I don’t know if Princess Leah was on board, but this ship was impressive on the table — even though it was armed with just a single weapon.

The Tie Fighters ganged up on the Falcon, eventually turn it into an impressive fireball.  While the Falcon was keeping many of the imperial fighters busy the other rebel battle group ground their way toward the communications station.  Despite heavy losses, they reached the station and were surprised by the heavy armament.  Several rebel fighters exploded as they approached.

The communications satellite was an easy target.  Despite the many shields, the rebels eventually punched through and began inflicting damage.  Then the cruiser came into range and began to fire.  A turn or two later, the communications satellite too exploded.  A good night for the rebels!

X-Wing ended about 1130.  While my wife passed around champaign in anticipation of the ball dropping in Times Square, we set up what we thought was going to be a quick game of Red Dragon Inn.  The game ended close to 2:00 AM with Bruce finally besting my daughter.

I’ve never understood the fascination with New Year’s Eve, but these marathon gaming sessions, while somewhat exhausting to host, are a nice way to finish out the year and start the new year.  What’s not to like about good food and fun games with buddies?!  I played my 42nd and 43rd miniatures games for the year — falling short of my 50-game goal.