Buck's Blog

Last night the HAWKs tested out the rules we are working to play zombie games with GASLIGHT.  We intend to include these in The Compendium.

This is a picture of one of the games we played that Chris took with his iPhone.  At this point, Duncan’s corporate babes with guns were surrounded by zombies, but he managed to get most of his folks off the table.  One of them, however, was infected in the process and later turned into a zombie herself.

In the game, whenever you make noise, the place the noise was made is marked with a “noise marker.”  We used green, glass beads.  When the zombie card comes up, you roll to see how many zombies are attracted to the spot.  We typically put them about 12″ from the spot.  Zombies tend to pop up out of heaps of trash, old rags, closets, etc.

The rules worked well.  The consensus was that the zombies were a bit too hard to kill, so we’ll probably make their Save number a little worse, but otherwise, what we did seemed to work pretty well.  Everyone had a good time.

The next (and probably last) GASLIGHT book will be The GASLIGHT Compendium.  The Compendium combines the original GASLIGHT book, Battles by GASLIGHT, To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT, and Adventures and Expeditions by GASLIGHT into a single volume.  In addition there are new rules for Aeroneuf-style fleet actions, personal zeppelins, etc.  Finally, the book will include a few new scenarios.

This weekend we spent all day Saturday shooting new illustrations for the book.  Most of the text has been done since before Christmas.  When adding art to books, I find that it’s best to start at the beginning and work toward the back of the book.  If you start anywhere else, adding art earlier in the book causes all the layout and pagination work after it to get screwed up.  You end up laying out  pages multiple times.  This weekend we got to page 65 of a book we think will be about 150 pages long.

The book will have some of the old clip art and photos that players will find familiar, but it will have many new illustrations.  There are only one or two pages that don’t have a chart, figure, or illustration.  As we are looking at printing this with color throughout the book, we think the final, archival, comprehensive GASLIGHT book will be very attractive.

Above is an example of one of the new illustrations.

Our goal is to have the book read for printing by the end of March so that the book will be read for sale by Historicon in July.  Stay tuned.

Well, I didn’t get much sleep this weekend, but I did manage to finish painting my first pack of zombies for our club project.  They are actually fun to paint.

These were multi-part, hard-plastic figures from Wargames Factory.  I also mixed in a few torsos and legs from some ancient Germans to beef up the “unit” a bit.  My only complaint with the figures is that they come with the left arm molded to the torso.  This means you have to cut off the arm if you want a pose other than the left arm hanging to the side.

Here is a closeup of three of them.  I took an extra arm from one of the sprues and gave it to the zombie on the right for both a club-like weapon and a mid-afternoon snack.

This group features a flowered shirt.  On the figure in the middle, I cut off the arm holding the foot, which was hanging at the zombie’s side, and re-glued it up in the air.

A friend sent me this link:  

Swordfish Article

As many of you know, the name of my tavern for pirate brawls is The Ruptured Swordfish.  More than once, a pirate has pulled the stuffed swordfish off the wall and used it as a weapon.

I saw a link on The Miniatures Page not long ago about a print on demand shop, superiordpod.com.  I got the idea that for my pirate tavern fight convention games, it might be nice to have cards with pre-rolled stats.  In those games, using Blood and Swash, I usually have each player control one of each character class: Swashbuckler, Hero, Swordsman, and Man at Arms.  Over the holidays I photographed each of the pirate figures I use in those tavern fight games and then made these cards.  It took a few iterations with the company to get my cards to match the template for printing, but I’m really happy with the final product.

This photograph shows some figures along with their matching cards.  Note that each character class has a different colored label.  This is so I can quickly sort them into four stacks and have the players draw one from each stack to start a game.

In practice, I plan to get the hard cases used for collectable cards.  Each player will put his cards in one of those cases so he can use a grease pencil to mark off ammunition and hits.

I’m so happy with these cards that I’ve been thinking about other uses of custom cards.  A deck of 54 cards costs about $6.00 plus another $5.00 for shipping.  I made some mistakes on the first order.  Then I wanted to finish making cards for the rest of my pirates.  I just sent in another order for 108 cards, and the total order cost was something like $14.00.  The price is very reasonable.  I’m working on custom decks of cards for GMs of Look, Sarge games.

On 22 JAN, the HAWKs hosted their annual gaming day at Archbishop Curley High School in Baltimore, MD.  The turnout was very good.  We had 24 events run during the day, and every game master had enough players to run his or her game.  Genres varied from fantasy to WWII, with just about everything in  between.

Matt Kirkhart ran two ancients games using his scratch built figures.  These were built from various bits from the craft store.  It’s not often you can describe a war game as “cute,” but these really were.  The game was not silly.  It was a real ancients game, and both kids and adults seemed to enjoy it.

This is a wide shot of the gaming room about mid morning.  In this picture you can only see about half the room.  We had 8 games scheduled to begin at 0900.  We weren’t sure we’d have enough gamers at that time to fill that many games.  While a few games waited until 0930 to start, every game was run (and was full).  We even had two ad hoc games get set up, Ambush Alley and Sea Kreig.

Two youngsters playing in Todd Harland-White’s Airboats, Alligators, and Daemon Rum game.  This is a race by bootleggers to get casks of rum past the revenue men.  The game uses a combination of Jamie Davis’ Future Race rules and Blood and Swash.  My daughter won this game.

Scott Perry ran a beautiful 28mm Carlist Wars game.  He claims to have the largest collection of Carlist Wars figures in North America.  He’s probably right.  This is a very niche period.

Civil War author Scott Mingus ran a very attractive American Civil War ironclads game.  There were about eight players in this game.  Everyone seemed to enjoy it.  I think he did a really nice job on the terrain for this game.  Scott also had some of his books for sale.

Chris and I had 12 players for our 16 player Cold Wars game.  We had just played 2/3 of this game the night before at our regular HAWKs meeting.  We will make only minor tweaks for Cold Wars.  All of the players were engaged and fighting until we called the game.  We started about 45 minutes late.  We made sure the games run by non-HAWKs were filled before starting this 12-player game.  As a lot of folks arrived at 0930, we didn’t really get started until 0945.  The game had a hard stop time, because there were two games scheduled to use the tables after us.  If we had been allowed to play the full time scheduled (if we had started on time), the Germans and Russians might have been assaulting the town.

This is a close-up shot of the Germans approach one of the Polish defensive lines.  The fighting was hot and heavy here for about an hour of game time.  The rules were Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II.  Note how clean the board looks.  This is not prettied up for the photograph!

Contrast the Look, Sarge game above with this view of another game at Barrage.  The aesthetics of the figures are completely destroyed by the charts, special measuring devices, and HUGE labels behind the units.  This game use a popular, expensive, hard-cover set of rules.  Which do you think looks better?

One of the ad hoc games at Barrage was a six-player Aerodrome game.  My kids love this.  In fact for his birthday last year, I bought Tommy a complete set of rules and playing aids.  I can’t afford to send him to college, now, but he can have fun playing this game.  This game ran from about 1400-1800, with players rotating in and out.

Tim Tilson ran an attractive Sudan game using The Sword and the Flame.  This was another player pleaser.  Every time I passed the table the guys looked like they were having a ball.

Peter Hess ran this very attractive pirate game in which mobs of pirates were trying to sack the town, capture the fort, and get away with treasure.  The game lasted four hours and appeared to be exciting to the last.

Over the three-day weekend (which was supposed to be a four day weekend, but I ended up working all day on Friday) I had some time on Saturday and Monday to work on hobby stuff.  I’ve begun working on zombies for our HAWKs zombie club project, but none of them are done yet to show.  What I did finish are some more space ships for War Rocket, some Sikhs, and a few Pulp figures.

Here’s a view of four War Rocket space ships.  The two larger ones (Class IV) are new.  These are really fun to paint.

This is a closeup of the new Galacteer Clas IV ship.

This is the new Valkeeri Class IV ship.  For some reason, all my flash photos of these ships show the purple to be much lighter than they look to me in person.

Before Christmas Tin Man Miniatures had a sale on their figures, so Chris and I put in an order.  I love the John Carter books.  The Deja Thoris figure is so “amply proportioned” and in such as pose as to really be a parody or caricature, but this one isn’t too bad.  I like the incubator and the little bits of alien terrain as well.

Getting away from fantasy, above are some Sikhs from Pulp Miniatures.  You can never have too many Sikhs, can you?  This pack is an army builder, so you get eight in the same pose for the same price as their normal five-pack of individual figures.  Mixed with some personalities and perhaps some heavy weapons, these are going to look great on the table.

The final bit for the weekend remained in the pulp genre and from Pulp Miniatures.  These are their She Wolves, Nazi women with guns.  Actually one of the figures in this photo is from the first She Wolves pack.  I had pulled it from the box so I could match the colors.  I don’t often mix colors any more to make it easier to touch up chips and match previously painted figures.  In this case, I think I did a good job of matching.  Now with ten of these — a full GASLIGHT unit — I can more easily incorporate them into a game.

While it sometimes requires me to sacrifice historical accuracy, in multi-player games, I like to make each player’s figures visually distinctive.  This makes it much easier to determine the owning player during a game.  I might, for example, mix the She Wolves into a pulp scenario, not because I need She Wolves, but because it will be a visually distinctive German unit.

Well, back to the zombies and original Star Trek on DVD…

Right before Christmas I ordered four buildings from Grand Manner.  This is a UK company that makes really nice resin buildings and terrain pieces.  You can buy their buildings unpainted, as I did, or painted.  You have two painted options: wargame quality and museum quality.  I bought mine unpainted, because I couldn’t afford to buy them painted and because I enjoy painting them.

This picture shows all four of the buildings in the Guilford Courthouse set.  They were cheaper as a set, plus Grand Manner had them on sale leading into Christmas.  What really struck me about these from their add in the British gaming magazines and their Web site was the very obvious chinking between the logs.

Here is a close-up of the largest of the log cabins.  You can really see the chinking.  The roof is removable.  There is a removable attic floor as well.  The roofs should probably be brown bark shingles, but I decided to paint them as slate for some color variance.  The bases are textured enough that I could have painted them instead of flocking them, but I like the look of the flocking.  Note the small tufts of grass as well.  It was Sam’s idea to dribble some brown ink down the roof for added interest.

I really like this building.  The porch and porch roof are really nice.  I can imagine this building in a cowoby game, French and Indian War game, or a Pulp game with moonshiners.  I have the Beverly Hillbillies truck from Blue Moon that would look great next to this building.  The porch roof supports both snapped off during prep for painting, but they were nice clean breaks that were easily repaired.

This is the Guilford Courthouse building from which this set derives its name.  This picture doesn’t really do this building justice.  It  is really nice.  Note the combination of rock and brick on the chimney.  Very neat.

The shot depicts the interior, upper floor of the courthouse.  In both buildings with removable top floors, there is an open trap door.  In addition, a few small terrain bits, in this case a crate, are molded to the floor to provide a convenient handle to remove the floor.  This is a really nice feature of these buildings.  Normally I have to glue some other terrain bit to the floor myself.

The interiors of the buildings have detailed floors and fire places.  My only complaint with the kits is that I couldn’t really get a paint brush inside the buildings to paint this detail.  I had to settle for merely dry brushing over this detail so you can see it.

These are great buildings at a reasonable price (at least I thought the sale price was good).  They are easily prepared and are fun to paint.  Service was excellent too.  They shipped from England about 24 hours after I ordered them and arrived within a week.  I highly recommend these buildings.

For Christmas my parents gave me the Acheson Creations’ frontier fort.  I’ve been coveting this for some years.  I had previous built a fort using bamboo skewers from the grocery store.  While these skewers are probably more in proper scale for 28mm figures, I’ve always liked the look of the Acheson Creations’ fort.  I have really wanted to get my French and Indian War figures on the table again.

They also purchase the block house.  This view shows about 85% of the fort, including two of three buildings.  In fact, there are probably too many buildings to fit within the fort and be able to move figures around inside it comfortably.  I may purchase a few more wall sections at an upcoming HMGS East convention, like Cold Wars.

This view shows a close up of a corner of the block house and some Old Glory FIW Grenadiers approaching the open gate.  (I don’t know if Acheson sells gates, but I’ll be looking for them at Cold Wars or I’ll make some from dowels.)

Each of the wall sections has a firing platform.  The platform is a separate piece, which aids in painting.  I glued the platforms to the walls and supports with “tacky glue.”  I find that using a better glue won’t stop the pieces from coming apart during play, and the white glue doesn’t take the paint off with it.

This view is my lame attempt at being “artsy.”  I placed the camera inside the fort and took a picture through the gate of approach British line infantry.  The flash kept casting a pronounced shadow on the backdrop, so I took the photo without the flash and then lightened it with the Previewer on my Mac.

I’m pretty happy with the overall effect.  I can’t wait to play some French and Indian War skirmishes!