Did a fair amount of war gaming this weekend.
Started off on Saturday with a skirmish game set in Scotland during the 16th Century. The local tenants weren't coming across with their protection money having switched to a rival family so we rolled into town to show them the error of their ways.
The rules were based off of Spear Song, a set designed for Medieval warfare and adapted for the crude firearms available. I took two squads of four men each, most armed with muskets, but the leaders hefting melee weapons. The defenders were scattered between the two villages but we were allowed to enter along any edge, so we positioned ourselves to fall on one hamlet while our cavalry set up just in charge range of the enemy.
It was a fairly lopsided affair. We outnumbered the defenders and once our cavalry got stuck in, there was no help from that quarter. I spent most of my time holding the line and firing (somewhat ineffectively) at the enemy. Eventually, he rushed me with a couple of his men, but my line held (mostly) firm and I brought down his close combat troopers. After that, the ending was a given. All told it took about two hours to play.
The umpire was fairly upfront that this was a test of the rules and a new scenario so he solicited a fair amount of advice. Clearly the defenders needed more troops or the attackers needed a time limit or tougher victory conditions. The rules were pretty simple and didn't take much to pick up. I was amused to note that while our muskets took a full round to reload, the enemy trooper with the crossbow (normally a slow reloading weapon) could fire each and every turn.
So it was a bit of a cakewalk, but I did have fun (well, of course I did, I was on the overbearing side wasn't I?). Afterwords I helped a gentleman and his wife make their way from the hobby shop to the nearby model railroad store. Apparently he lives in Western MA and had made the trip special to find stuff to expand his WWII model railroad layout. The hobby store had a bunch, but he was also looking for DCC equipment and that he was only going to find at the model railroad shop. So I had him follow me over in his car (I was going over to torture myself with G-scale trains anyway).
I like being helpful. Rarely do I do something helpful for an older man and get a huge hug for my efforts. I fear I've rather enabled his addiction, but I'm sure he'll enjoy having DCC on his layout.
Anyway, today I played some Warmachine. I'm picking up a few models for this because there's a bunch of people playing it on a semi-regular basis. Since I haven't finished painting up the small force I've got, I played with the Khador "loaner" set they've got. For those in the know, it's Sacha and her Heavy Jacks. For everyone else, it's a Russian Commissar and her stompy iron men of the revolution. I went up against a nice young woman playing the necrotic forces of evil. She gave her minis names, it was awesome.
In the first game, I managed to tie up her heavy warjack with my melee jack. I got in some good early punches but failed to account for my opponent's Crushing Claw. Khador mechs are noted for their heavy armor but the claw just opened me up like a tin foil can. Luckily, on my right flack, my other heavy jack and Sacha closed in on the enemy warcaster and in a hail of mortar fire and bullets managed to put her down.
We were supposed to switch off with the other two people playing, but their fight got a lot more protracted. We hung out for awhile and then decided to play a quick second round with just a caster and two heavy jacks apiece. In this second round, I decided to ignore the advice of the rulebook and took a defensive stand. As one of her jacks moved through the trees, I blasted them with more firepower until it was scrap. Then I moved up to fall upon the last jack, but it rushed me instead. Luckily, I took the hit and both my heavy jacks ganged up on it and chopped it down pretty quick. A second win to me.
So I won both games, but I mostly got lucky. Her warcaster was really set up to mow down hordes of troopers and I mostly had robots. Still, we went out to eat afterwords so no hard feelings I guess.
I'm going to be pretty rigorous on this game. I've got just enough stuff to play a basic game and I might eventually decide to graduate from a 15 to a 25 point army, but just from watching the other game I can see that it's a game I don't want a super deep investment in. It's enough to be able to have something around to play on a semi-regular basis.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Friday, July 2, 2010
Odin save us from the fury of Saxon Archers!
Hi,
So when I was in Rochester about a month ago and I picked up a copy of Strandhogg -- a set of Viking Age Skirmish Rules. Tonight I gave the rules a little bit of a playtest.
An overview of the rules
So, like the rules say, it's a Viking Age Skirmish game. Small groups of men (under 50 per side) go at it tooth and claw wherever the longships land. The game has a focus on Viking vs. Saxons or Normans on the English shore, but the rules can easily accommodate other Viking foes (which includes just about everyone in Europe and a few Native Americans). The rules handle this by recognizing that a guy with a sword is a guy with a sword no matter who he swears allegiance to and that it's largely a matter of training and experience that determines a warrior's effectiveness. The rules also recognize that in the rough-and-tumble warfare of the period, a good leader can really swing the tide.
Players create an "army" consisting of a noble and up to three warbands who follow him. There's a point system and like all such systems it's a little bit suspect, but in my playtest the values seemed pretty good. There's a worksheet that includes important rules and lets you quickly work out what your forces are. Your warbands are made up of warriors of several types -- Warriors, Levy, Archers, or Peasants -- you can mix and match if you like, but it will increase the bookkeeping a bit.
Once you've got you armies, you set out the terrain, discuss any special rules and draw a fate card for each warband in your army. Fate cards are a set of lucky events you can call on to help you out in different situations. You also set up activation cards. Using a standard playing deck, each warband gets a card and you shuffle this mini-deck together to determine the order of warband activation. I really like these randomized activation systems. It adds a bit of uncertainty and forces a bit of careful planning that's lacking from UGO-IGO activation systems.
When one of your warbands is up to go, it tests for morale (usually caused by casualties). Failed morale checks cause your warriors to flee and makes you that much more vulnerable. As your warband gets smaller, the leader has a harder time keeping things together.
After morale, comes missile fire. Missile fire is handled really well in this game. Each figure takes an individual shot against an individual target that it can see. There are clear acetone templates that you center over the target. Roll low and your target is hit. Roll too high and the shot misses, but there are other numbered zones on the template. If another figure falls under the zone you rolled, it gets hit instead. So you can shoot into melee, but there's a chance you'll hit your friends. It also means that unless your warband is in a Shieldwall formation, it doesn't want to clump up too much. Targets who are hit make a saving throw and if they fail they're probably dead.
The next phase is movement. As long as your warband stays in the command radius of your leader, this is pretty simple. Move your commander up to 6" and then arrange the warband around the commander within the command radius. Things get a bit tricker when a group goes out of command, but you'll try hard to avoid that since they'll be weaker in combat. There are simple rules for dealing with obstacles and rough terrain and it moves along pretty swiftly. If you want to close with an enemy target, you have to test against the moving figure's courage.
Finally, it's melee time. It's an opposed die roll so both sides get to participate. After working out the various modifiers (mostly based on a figure's troop type), the high roll wins and the margin of success determines the result. I'm a big fan of opposed die rolls that resolve a round of combat in one go so this is a big plus for the game in my book.
Once all the warbands have gone, you shuffle the activation deck and go again until one side or the other achieves it's objectives. Pretty simple really.
One fine day on the English coastline
So I decided to set up some figures and have a little fight. I don't actually have a selection of Viking miniatures so I raided my AT-43 collection for some proxy figures. The Vikings were played by the Therians and the Saxon defenders were Red Blok troopers. I didn't do anything too fancy. The Vikings consisted of two warbands made up Warriors bearing sword and shield. The Saxons had two large groups of Levy troops and a smaller warband of Archers. I set up a couple of cargo containers and walls to rough out a couple of beach-side huts and turned them loose.
At first, the Vikings had things all their own way. Good activation card draws let them rush up to the wall before the Archers could draw a good bead on them and started tearing through the Saxon levies. With a +2 modifier to their rolls, the Vikings were hacking them down mercilessly. But once they cleared the wall, they were within close range of the archers who started peppering them with fire and picking them off one by one. On the Viking right, the advance was stalled as the Vikings' courage failed them and they refused to advance into close combat. This let the Saxons gang up on the one or two who made it into contact with them and they managed to hold them up or kill them outright.
Between the archery and the swarms of levies, the Viking Left lost heart and soon it was just the Viking Jarl facing off against some angry levies. The Viking right did better and wiped out their opposing warband, but they were exposed to the archers who were slowly whittling them down. Then the Viking Jarl fell to one of the Saxon commanders and I called the game at that point.
Final thoughts
So what did I think? The game played pretty fast. I didn't use mounted troops so I didn't get a chance to cover that and I mostly ignored my Fate cards so that didn't have much impact, but in a game where you're paying attention, it could be a lifesaver.
The Vikings lost pretty badly, but I put that down to poor tactics on my part and not getting stuck in with the Archers sooner (or at all really). The Archers would break pretty easily if the Vikings had concentrated on it and once they were out of the fight, they could probably handle the levies pretty handily. Certainly there was a pretty big pile of levy casualties when the game was called.
Commanders and Nobles (leader types) are really tough to take out. They've got monstrous combat scores and they've got a small track of hit points. In addition, you can't have more than 2 figures gang up on any one figure. So the best way to take down a leader (if you can't snipe him out with an arrow) is to go up with one of your leaders and grunt. Have the grunt take the first swing and you'll have a small bonus on the follow-up attack with your leader. Still, it's a lot of ties and no-effect hits and even when you do succeed, you haven't taken him out of the fight.
Missile fire seems pretty deadly since if you don't make the save you're dead and the best save is 50% in the open, but it just means that you really have to close fast since there's a minimum range for missile weapons and an Archer's hand-to-hand score is terrible.
The game is certainly a good candidate for convention games since the rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up. You could also multiple nobles on a side, each leading their own warband. This allows you to have slightly more complex games than simple line battles by giving each noble separate (and possibly conflicting) goals to achieve.
All in all, a pretty interesting little game.
later
Tom
So when I was in Rochester about a month ago and I picked up a copy of Strandhogg -- a set of Viking Age Skirmish Rules. Tonight I gave the rules a little bit of a playtest.
An overview of the rules
So, like the rules say, it's a Viking Age Skirmish game. Small groups of men (under 50 per side) go at it tooth and claw wherever the longships land. The game has a focus on Viking vs. Saxons or Normans on the English shore, but the rules can easily accommodate other Viking foes (which includes just about everyone in Europe and a few Native Americans). The rules handle this by recognizing that a guy with a sword is a guy with a sword no matter who he swears allegiance to and that it's largely a matter of training and experience that determines a warrior's effectiveness. The rules also recognize that in the rough-and-tumble warfare of the period, a good leader can really swing the tide.
Players create an "army" consisting of a noble and up to three warbands who follow him. There's a point system and like all such systems it's a little bit suspect, but in my playtest the values seemed pretty good. There's a worksheet that includes important rules and lets you quickly work out what your forces are. Your warbands are made up of warriors of several types -- Warriors, Levy, Archers, or Peasants -- you can mix and match if you like, but it will increase the bookkeeping a bit.
Once you've got you armies, you set out the terrain, discuss any special rules and draw a fate card for each warband in your army. Fate cards are a set of lucky events you can call on to help you out in different situations. You also set up activation cards. Using a standard playing deck, each warband gets a card and you shuffle this mini-deck together to determine the order of warband activation. I really like these randomized activation systems. It adds a bit of uncertainty and forces a bit of careful planning that's lacking from UGO-IGO activation systems.
When one of your warbands is up to go, it tests for morale (usually caused by casualties). Failed morale checks cause your warriors to flee and makes you that much more vulnerable. As your warband gets smaller, the leader has a harder time keeping things together.
After morale, comes missile fire. Missile fire is handled really well in this game. Each figure takes an individual shot against an individual target that it can see. There are clear acetone templates that you center over the target. Roll low and your target is hit. Roll too high and the shot misses, but there are other numbered zones on the template. If another figure falls under the zone you rolled, it gets hit instead. So you can shoot into melee, but there's a chance you'll hit your friends. It also means that unless your warband is in a Shieldwall formation, it doesn't want to clump up too much. Targets who are hit make a saving throw and if they fail they're probably dead.
The next phase is movement. As long as your warband stays in the command radius of your leader, this is pretty simple. Move your commander up to 6" and then arrange the warband around the commander within the command radius. Things get a bit tricker when a group goes out of command, but you'll try hard to avoid that since they'll be weaker in combat. There are simple rules for dealing with obstacles and rough terrain and it moves along pretty swiftly. If you want to close with an enemy target, you have to test against the moving figure's courage.
Finally, it's melee time. It's an opposed die roll so both sides get to participate. After working out the various modifiers (mostly based on a figure's troop type), the high roll wins and the margin of success determines the result. I'm a big fan of opposed die rolls that resolve a round of combat in one go so this is a big plus for the game in my book.
Once all the warbands have gone, you shuffle the activation deck and go again until one side or the other achieves it's objectives. Pretty simple really.
One fine day on the English coastline
So I decided to set up some figures and have a little fight. I don't actually have a selection of Viking miniatures so I raided my AT-43 collection for some proxy figures. The Vikings were played by the Therians and the Saxon defenders were Red Blok troopers. I didn't do anything too fancy. The Vikings consisted of two warbands made up Warriors bearing sword and shield. The Saxons had two large groups of Levy troops and a smaller warband of Archers. I set up a couple of cargo containers and walls to rough out a couple of beach-side huts and turned them loose.
At first, the Vikings had things all their own way. Good activation card draws let them rush up to the wall before the Archers could draw a good bead on them and started tearing through the Saxon levies. With a +2 modifier to their rolls, the Vikings were hacking them down mercilessly. But once they cleared the wall, they were within close range of the archers who started peppering them with fire and picking them off one by one. On the Viking right, the advance was stalled as the Vikings' courage failed them and they refused to advance into close combat. This let the Saxons gang up on the one or two who made it into contact with them and they managed to hold them up or kill them outright.
Between the archery and the swarms of levies, the Viking Left lost heart and soon it was just the Viking Jarl facing off against some angry levies. The Viking right did better and wiped out their opposing warband, but they were exposed to the archers who were slowly whittling them down. Then the Viking Jarl fell to one of the Saxon commanders and I called the game at that point.
Final thoughts
So what did I think? The game played pretty fast. I didn't use mounted troops so I didn't get a chance to cover that and I mostly ignored my Fate cards so that didn't have much impact, but in a game where you're paying attention, it could be a lifesaver.
The Vikings lost pretty badly, but I put that down to poor tactics on my part and not getting stuck in with the Archers sooner (or at all really). The Archers would break pretty easily if the Vikings had concentrated on it and once they were out of the fight, they could probably handle the levies pretty handily. Certainly there was a pretty big pile of levy casualties when the game was called.
Commanders and Nobles (leader types) are really tough to take out. They've got monstrous combat scores and they've got a small track of hit points. In addition, you can't have more than 2 figures gang up on any one figure. So the best way to take down a leader (if you can't snipe him out with an arrow) is to go up with one of your leaders and grunt. Have the grunt take the first swing and you'll have a small bonus on the follow-up attack with your leader. Still, it's a lot of ties and no-effect hits and even when you do succeed, you haven't taken him out of the fight.
Missile fire seems pretty deadly since if you don't make the save you're dead and the best save is 50% in the open, but it just means that you really have to close fast since there's a minimum range for missile weapons and an Archer's hand-to-hand score is terrible.
The game is certainly a good candidate for convention games since the rules are pretty simple and easy to pick up. You could also multiple nobles on a side, each leading their own warband. This allows you to have slightly more complex games than simple line battles by giving each noble separate (and possibly conflicting) goals to achieve.
All in all, a pretty interesting little game.
later
Tom
Friday, April 2, 2010
Hey,
This past weekend, I went to HAVOC. HAVOC is a historical miniatures convention held in Shrewsbury MA. This year I played in two games, both set in WWII at a very low tactical level.
The first game, on Friday night, was Cat Hunt -- our band of brothers was being sent out to blow up a pesky German Tiger that had been giving command fits. The game ran on "Behind Enemy Lines" a quasi-RPG system for WWII that had originally been published by FASA and which was then taken over by a smaller outfit which has since gone out of business. So it was quirky throwback time. Our mission was to take out a German Tiger tank that had been giving command fits.
There were only 4 of us, so we each took two characters. I took both the corporals. One of them had a BAR and the other had a satchel charge to be used on the Tiger. The plan was that the guy with the bazooka would immobilize the tank (the odds of us actually killing it being kind of low) and then my guy would run up and satchel charge the thing. We had a set of open fields marked off with boccage that we had to make our way through in order to set up a flank/rear shot on the tank. About the only thing we knew for sure was the rough location of the tank and that darkness was falling. Beyond that it was anyone's guess.
The character sheets were kind of awesome. You had a collection of stats that included things like Hearing and Smell (and a catch-all Perception stat) all of which were based off of good ol' 3d6 (although they said 13 was average so it was tweaked a bit). Then you had a suite of skills which covered your shooting/stabbing/etc. There were two different types of resolution in effect. Sometimes (like when sighting an enemy), you would roll 3d6 and add it to your relevant stat (sight...or maybe perception). High rolls (north of 25-28) were usually successes. When you tried to shoot someone, you would roll 3d6, subtract your skill and try to get under your relevant stat (I believe you had a shooting things stat). Luckily, that was about as complex as the system ever got so despite the divergent sub-systems, it wasn't too hard to work with. The only other weird thing was the movement. You could crawl 2" but run up to 12" and there were no fatigue rules so you could run for as long as you wanted. So it only made sense to run. But once darkness hit, you'd be checking vs. your Agility not to fall down (and maybe hurt yourself). So it was a real slow push near the end.
We made our way forward without too much difficulty (although it got very slow as I mentioned earlier). We all froze when an officer pulled up in his kubelwagen and scanned the area. But he didn't spot us and left. Once we reached the final line of boccage next to the tank, we could hear some digging going on. My two guys got there early and pushed into the hedge. The guy with the charge spotted one of the digging Germans and decided to creep out to give the bazooka guy a chance to get in and find the tank, but he slipped going through and alerted the digger. The German came over (under the watchful gun of my other guy hidden in the boccage). He called over another soldier to help him search the corner where my first guy was pretending to be dirt.
Just then another player stepped through the boccage and calmly slit the first German's throat. Here's how great close combat is in this game: the character's body weight vs. that of his opponent forms a modifier. The second soldier, realizing too late that his buddy had just been replaced with an American whipped out a pistol and shot at him. That's when I opened up. The German went reeling back and the American caught a bullet, but it wasn't enough to keep him down and he followed up with a second lethal attack.
While all of this had been going on, a couple soldiers had worked their way down the boccage and had located the tank. One of the troopers had a rifle grenade and it was his intention to try and use it like a mortar to bring down a grenade on the engine deck and perhaps get the tank. This caused a bit of an argument about how it would give away our position which was true, but in games like this, you kinda have to let people do their own thing. Anyway, he held off until the stabbing started and then decided it wasn't going to get any better. So he makes a perfect shot and while it doesn't do any real damage to the tank, it completely disorients all the Germans who'd been taking cover on/near the tank.
At this point the bazooka guy takes his shot. It goes right through the side of the tank and sets it alight. At this point, my two guys consider it mission accomplished and we book out of there. The bazooka guy takes a second shot at the half-track into which the Germans had fled, but he missed and it drove off into the night. Still, it was a mission success.
Other highlights included:
* The soldier with super stealth and knife killing skills who wasn't very strong, or agile, or perceptive. It wasn't clear how he was supposed to be able to find targets to stealthily sneak up on them.
* Only a minor war crime. The Sgt. used his Thompson to gun down a line of guys...who turned out to be Eastern European labor conscripts. Oops.
Overall it was a fun game. I had a good time.
The second game was "The Rule of LGOPs". LGOP = Little Groups of Paratroopers. The ruleset was a home-brew system called point blank. Here we commanded a squad of men rather than an individual trooper. The real interesting bit here was the chit-draw activation. The GM draws a chit. If it's American, we get to activate two guys. There are two leader types in each squad and so if you activate them, they can auto-activate guys within an inch. Great for moving groups of men, terrible when a grenade hits. I like chit-pull better than "you go - I go" systems, but it does mean you can have weird set-ups where you go and go and go, and it also means there are times when you just sit there while they go and go and go. I got caught out by that twice and it can really suck. I think the real problem is that I don't normally play a lot of games with that system so I forget about covering my butt for bad runs of luck.
In this scenario, we arrived on random board edges and our job was to take three bridges, a manor-house and neutralize an 88cm flak gun. Well, it was Sicily and we were facing a lot of Italians. The dicing meant that we mostly wound up on the same half of the board, so that was convenient. Only one team was radically out of place and it had a good view of the house. My guys started out near a small building overlooking the south bridge point. We trotted up to the back of the building (again, maximum movement was 4" per impulse and even though we got 5 impulses a turn, it seemed really slow). This is when we noticed the Italian half-squad and machine gun in the yard taking a shot at another team moving through the fields. Since they failed to spot us, we rolled in a couple of hand grenades and bayoneted the ones who were left. Meanwhile, we dumped another grenade into the building (where the Italians and conspicuously failed to notice us). We took a few pot shots, but only manged to suppress them. At this point, half of my team went around to the front to storm the building through the front door and take them out. This is when the chit system bit me the first time. In my haste, I had not noticed the two Italians behind the stone wall across the road. They threw their own grenades and then blasted the rear guy with a shotgun. Then they got a second chit and did it to me all over again. Luckily, their grenades and shooting were for crap and only one guy was really incapacitated. The other half of my squad got into position and blew them away with the heavy machine gun. Finally, I went inside and mopped up.
Leaving the wounded guy behind to cover the bridge, the rest of the squad pushed on to try and help take the house or the far bridge. We made good time and I was headed towards some vineyards. I knew I was going to have to spend a lot of time slowly pushing through the vineyards (I'd be in rough terrain and that would slow us to about 2"/impulse). Luckily, I didn't have to worry about it too much because a tough, veteran German squad had been crawling through the other way and were there to intercept us when we arrived. The grenade didn't do much, but it did stun most of us and when they drew another chit the next turn, they just cut the squad down to a man.
Obviously, I preferred the first game over the latter because I "won", but the second game seemed a little more "fiddly" for some reason and less engaging. I really liked the chit-pull system, but that was about it. Shooting was kind of complex (you roll some d10s in groups, first group you check to see if you jam, subsequent groups get penalties so you're looking for different target numbers all the time). It just didn't seem to flow as well (although close combat vs. stunned guys was a lot easier than in the first game -- no idea how a straight up melee fight goes). But it wasn't a terrible experience and up until I died, I was really doing pretty well.
So that was HAVOC for me.
This past weekend, I went to HAVOC. HAVOC is a historical miniatures convention held in Shrewsbury MA. This year I played in two games, both set in WWII at a very low tactical level.
The first game, on Friday night, was Cat Hunt -- our band of brothers was being sent out to blow up a pesky German Tiger that had been giving command fits. The game ran on "Behind Enemy Lines" a quasi-RPG system for WWII that had originally been published by FASA and which was then taken over by a smaller outfit which has since gone out of business. So it was quirky throwback time. Our mission was to take out a German Tiger tank that had been giving command fits.
There were only 4 of us, so we each took two characters. I took both the corporals. One of them had a BAR and the other had a satchel charge to be used on the Tiger. The plan was that the guy with the bazooka would immobilize the tank (the odds of us actually killing it being kind of low) and then my guy would run up and satchel charge the thing. We had a set of open fields marked off with boccage that we had to make our way through in order to set up a flank/rear shot on the tank. About the only thing we knew for sure was the rough location of the tank and that darkness was falling. Beyond that it was anyone's guess.
The character sheets were kind of awesome. You had a collection of stats that included things like Hearing and Smell (and a catch-all Perception stat) all of which were based off of good ol' 3d6 (although they said 13 was average so it was tweaked a bit). Then you had a suite of skills which covered your shooting/stabbing/etc. There were two different types of resolution in effect. Sometimes (like when sighting an enemy), you would roll 3d6 and add it to your relevant stat (sight...or maybe perception). High rolls (north of 25-28) were usually successes. When you tried to shoot someone, you would roll 3d6, subtract your skill and try to get under your relevant stat (I believe you had a shooting things stat). Luckily, that was about as complex as the system ever got so despite the divergent sub-systems, it wasn't too hard to work with. The only other weird thing was the movement. You could crawl 2" but run up to 12" and there were no fatigue rules so you could run for as long as you wanted. So it only made sense to run. But once darkness hit, you'd be checking vs. your Agility not to fall down (and maybe hurt yourself). So it was a real slow push near the end.
We made our way forward without too much difficulty (although it got very slow as I mentioned earlier). We all froze when an officer pulled up in his kubelwagen and scanned the area. But he didn't spot us and left. Once we reached the final line of boccage next to the tank, we could hear some digging going on. My two guys got there early and pushed into the hedge. The guy with the charge spotted one of the digging Germans and decided to creep out to give the bazooka guy a chance to get in and find the tank, but he slipped going through and alerted the digger. The German came over (under the watchful gun of my other guy hidden in the boccage). He called over another soldier to help him search the corner where my first guy was pretending to be dirt.
Just then another player stepped through the boccage and calmly slit the first German's throat. Here's how great close combat is in this game: the character's body weight vs. that of his opponent forms a modifier. The second soldier, realizing too late that his buddy had just been replaced with an American whipped out a pistol and shot at him. That's when I opened up. The German went reeling back and the American caught a bullet, but it wasn't enough to keep him down and he followed up with a second lethal attack.
While all of this had been going on, a couple soldiers had worked their way down the boccage and had located the tank. One of the troopers had a rifle grenade and it was his intention to try and use it like a mortar to bring down a grenade on the engine deck and perhaps get the tank. This caused a bit of an argument about how it would give away our position which was true, but in games like this, you kinda have to let people do their own thing. Anyway, he held off until the stabbing started and then decided it wasn't going to get any better. So he makes a perfect shot and while it doesn't do any real damage to the tank, it completely disorients all the Germans who'd been taking cover on/near the tank.
At this point the bazooka guy takes his shot. It goes right through the side of the tank and sets it alight. At this point, my two guys consider it mission accomplished and we book out of there. The bazooka guy takes a second shot at the half-track into which the Germans had fled, but he missed and it drove off into the night. Still, it was a mission success.
Other highlights included:
* The soldier with super stealth and knife killing skills who wasn't very strong, or agile, or perceptive. It wasn't clear how he was supposed to be able to find targets to stealthily sneak up on them.
* Only a minor war crime. The Sgt. used his Thompson to gun down a line of guys...who turned out to be Eastern European labor conscripts. Oops.
Overall it was a fun game. I had a good time.
The second game was "The Rule of LGOPs". LGOP = Little Groups of Paratroopers. The ruleset was a home-brew system called point blank. Here we commanded a squad of men rather than an individual trooper. The real interesting bit here was the chit-draw activation. The GM draws a chit. If it's American, we get to activate two guys. There are two leader types in each squad and so if you activate them, they can auto-activate guys within an inch. Great for moving groups of men, terrible when a grenade hits. I like chit-pull better than "you go - I go" systems, but it does mean you can have weird set-ups where you go and go and go, and it also means there are times when you just sit there while they go and go and go. I got caught out by that twice and it can really suck. I think the real problem is that I don't normally play a lot of games with that system so I forget about covering my butt for bad runs of luck.
In this scenario, we arrived on random board edges and our job was to take three bridges, a manor-house and neutralize an 88cm flak gun. Well, it was Sicily and we were facing a lot of Italians. The dicing meant that we mostly wound up on the same half of the board, so that was convenient. Only one team was radically out of place and it had a good view of the house. My guys started out near a small building overlooking the south bridge point. We trotted up to the back of the building (again, maximum movement was 4" per impulse and even though we got 5 impulses a turn, it seemed really slow). This is when we noticed the Italian half-squad and machine gun in the yard taking a shot at another team moving through the fields. Since they failed to spot us, we rolled in a couple of hand grenades and bayoneted the ones who were left. Meanwhile, we dumped another grenade into the building (where the Italians and conspicuously failed to notice us). We took a few pot shots, but only manged to suppress them. At this point, half of my team went around to the front to storm the building through the front door and take them out. This is when the chit system bit me the first time. In my haste, I had not noticed the two Italians behind the stone wall across the road. They threw their own grenades and then blasted the rear guy with a shotgun. Then they got a second chit and did it to me all over again. Luckily, their grenades and shooting were for crap and only one guy was really incapacitated. The other half of my squad got into position and blew them away with the heavy machine gun. Finally, I went inside and mopped up.
Leaving the wounded guy behind to cover the bridge, the rest of the squad pushed on to try and help take the house or the far bridge. We made good time and I was headed towards some vineyards. I knew I was going to have to spend a lot of time slowly pushing through the vineyards (I'd be in rough terrain and that would slow us to about 2"/impulse). Luckily, I didn't have to worry about it too much because a tough, veteran German squad had been crawling through the other way and were there to intercept us when we arrived. The grenade didn't do much, but it did stun most of us and when they drew another chit the next turn, they just cut the squad down to a man.
Obviously, I preferred the first game over the latter because I "won", but the second game seemed a little more "fiddly" for some reason and less engaging. I really liked the chit-pull system, but that was about it. Shooting was kind of complex (you roll some d10s in groups, first group you check to see if you jam, subsequent groups get penalties so you're looking for different target numbers all the time). It just didn't seem to flow as well (although close combat vs. stunned guys was a lot easier than in the first game -- no idea how a straight up melee fight goes). But it wasn't a terrible experience and up until I died, I was really doing pretty well.
So that was HAVOC for me.
Sunday, April 6, 2008
Party at Charlie's
Hey,
So this weekend was HAVOC. A weekend-long miniature wargaming convention in Shrewsbury, MA. Mark and I ran a large game of Charlie Company on Saturday afternoon.
Charlie Company is a Vietnam game where players take on the roles of Lieutenants and Sergeants in a platoon and fight their way through various missions. Most of the time, when we play we only have one platoon. So that’s 5 players at most (1 Lt. and 4 Sgts.). In practice we usually have 3-4. But it’s certainly possible to do a bigger game and that’s what we set up for HAVOC.
In our scenario we had two platoons march in along a broad front and establish two ambush zones. Then the company commander and some Cobra gunships would strafe a VC camp, driving the troops out into the ambush. As is usual for Charlie Company, the plan goes completely FUBAR almost immediately and the platoons had to assault a heavily entrenched NVA position.
The signup sheets said we had a full game, but we only had 7 players. A bit of a disappointment, but still more players than we’d ever had in one game of Charlie Company. Luckily, no actual Vietnam vets participated. I expect that they’d self-select out, but I can’t imagine how awkward it would be to game that.
However, the game was a stark reminder of how old the historical wargaming set is getting. By tradition, the youngest players are the Lieutenants. In this case, one player was clearly qualified. I forget exactly how old he was, but he was probably in college. The next youngest player, who took on the other Lieutenant, was older than Mark and I. Two of the players claimed that they had been wargaming since we were in diapers.
Those two players were the “Eds”. Imagine a crusty old mountain man wargamer. Now double him. Those were the Eds. If I’m ever a player in another Charlie Company game, I want the Eds in my platoon. They were hell on wheels. They were in the same platoon and their Lieutenant basically just sat back and let them win the whole game. We gave a quick explanation of how American squads would set up an L-shaped ambush pattern, but these guys were planning a few improvements before we even started discussing it. When the game started, they rushed their troops in and set up. When plans changed, they just assaulted the bunkers. They used smoke grenades for cover (something which the rules allow, but which I don’t think we’d thought to use in our games) and just piled into the bunkers and sorted them out.
Meanwhile, the other platoon was having classic newbie syndrome. They advanced very cautiously, thought for a long time about what they were going to do and got completely flummoxed when things changed on them. The only good thing was the one guy who covered the rear and was less surprised when the local VC forces ambushed them from behind. They had about six casualties while the platoon of the Eds had like two or three.
Overall it was a fun game. I screwed up on the die pools for the VC forces which was kinda brutal so I just fled out early after they started taking hits. Our total game time was about 2.5-3 hours so we had plenty of time to clean up afterwards.
Larger games seem like they’d be more fun and the system is simple enough that even when people were kind of dithering, things still moved along, but the scenarios really need some thinking through to make sure that there’s always a challenge for the various platoons. Although Mark did inspire an Urban game in Hue during the Tet offensive. I’d almost certainly play that with just a platoon and maybe a couple of extra players here to represent local ARVN forces or something. Two platoon in a city would be a real nightmare to track.
Afterwards, all the players seemed pretty happy with the game so I guess that’s about as good as you can hope for.
later
Tom
So this weekend was HAVOC. A weekend-long miniature wargaming convention in Shrewsbury, MA. Mark and I ran a large game of Charlie Company on Saturday afternoon.
Charlie Company is a Vietnam game where players take on the roles of Lieutenants and Sergeants in a platoon and fight their way through various missions. Most of the time, when we play we only have one platoon. So that’s 5 players at most (1 Lt. and 4 Sgts.). In practice we usually have 3-4. But it’s certainly possible to do a bigger game and that’s what we set up for HAVOC.
In our scenario we had two platoons march in along a broad front and establish two ambush zones. Then the company commander and some Cobra gunships would strafe a VC camp, driving the troops out into the ambush. As is usual for Charlie Company, the plan goes completely FUBAR almost immediately and the platoons had to assault a heavily entrenched NVA position.
The signup sheets said we had a full game, but we only had 7 players. A bit of a disappointment, but still more players than we’d ever had in one game of Charlie Company. Luckily, no actual Vietnam vets participated. I expect that they’d self-select out, but I can’t imagine how awkward it would be to game that.
However, the game was a stark reminder of how old the historical wargaming set is getting. By tradition, the youngest players are the Lieutenants. In this case, one player was clearly qualified. I forget exactly how old he was, but he was probably in college. The next youngest player, who took on the other Lieutenant, was older than Mark and I. Two of the players claimed that they had been wargaming since we were in diapers.
Those two players were the “Eds”. Imagine a crusty old mountain man wargamer. Now double him. Those were the Eds. If I’m ever a player in another Charlie Company game, I want the Eds in my platoon. They were hell on wheels. They were in the same platoon and their Lieutenant basically just sat back and let them win the whole game. We gave a quick explanation of how American squads would set up an L-shaped ambush pattern, but these guys were planning a few improvements before we even started discussing it. When the game started, they rushed their troops in and set up. When plans changed, they just assaulted the bunkers. They used smoke grenades for cover (something which the rules allow, but which I don’t think we’d thought to use in our games) and just piled into the bunkers and sorted them out.
Meanwhile, the other platoon was having classic newbie syndrome. They advanced very cautiously, thought for a long time about what they were going to do and got completely flummoxed when things changed on them. The only good thing was the one guy who covered the rear and was less surprised when the local VC forces ambushed them from behind. They had about six casualties while the platoon of the Eds had like two or three.
Overall it was a fun game. I screwed up on the die pools for the VC forces which was kinda brutal so I just fled out early after they started taking hits. Our total game time was about 2.5-3 hours so we had plenty of time to clean up afterwards.
Larger games seem like they’d be more fun and the system is simple enough that even when people were kind of dithering, things still moved along, but the scenarios really need some thinking through to make sure that there’s always a challenge for the various platoons. Although Mark did inspire an Urban game in Hue during the Tet offensive. I’d almost certainly play that with just a platoon and maybe a couple of extra players here to represent local ARVN forces or something. Two platoon in a city would be a real nightmare to track.
Afterwards, all the players seemed pretty happy with the game so I guess that’s about as good as you can hope for.
later
Tom
Sunday, March 2, 2008
Back in Black
Hey,
So my NVA figures are now pretty much fully painted. I skipped out on the backpacks and went straight for the black. Guns, boots, they're pretty much set.
Next step is to get these guys based and flocked. I'll have to hurry up and get that done over the next couple of weeks, we want to grind out a playtest before the actual convention.
later
Tom
So my NVA figures are now pretty much fully painted. I skipped out on the backpacks and went straight for the black. Guns, boots, they're pretty much set.
Next step is to get these guys based and flocked. I'll have to hurry up and get that done over the next couple of weeks, we want to grind out a playtest before the actual convention.
later
Tom
Sunday, February 17, 2008
NVA Base
Hi,
So as part of gearing up for the Vietnam game my friend Mark and I are running at HAVOC, we need more NVA troops...a lot more. Mark picked up a couple of packs of Revell plastic NVA and it's my job to put together a company (40 figures) worth.
Mark warned me that painting the soft plastic Revell figures would be difficult. So far, I've just cleaned them off and put on a base coat of white gesso and it all seems to be going pretty well. Took me about an hour and a half or so to clean, trim and base coat all the figures. We'll see if I'm just getting lucky when I start in on color tomorrow.
Luckily, because all the players are on the U.S. side in the game, the enemy figures don't have to be painted to museum quality standards. In fact, a group of NVA might spend several rounds in combat unseen by the U.S. squads so some of them might not even appear on the board.
So my basic painting plan is:
I'm hoping to take care of painting steps 1 and 2 tomorrow. Updates as they happen.
later
Tom
So as part of gearing up for the Vietnam game my friend Mark and I are running at HAVOC, we need more NVA troops...a lot more. Mark picked up a couple of packs of Revell plastic NVA and it's my job to put together a company (40 figures) worth.
Mark warned me that painting the soft plastic Revell figures would be difficult. So far, I've just cleaned them off and put on a base coat of white gesso and it all seems to be going pretty well. Took me about an hour and a half or so to clean, trim and base coat all the figures. We'll see if I'm just getting lucky when I start in on color tomorrow.
Luckily, because all the players are on the U.S. side in the game, the enemy figures don't have to be painted to museum quality standards. In fact, a group of NVA might spend several rounds in combat unseen by the U.S. squads so some of them might not even appear on the board.
So my basic painting plan is:
- Flesh
- Olive drab...just about everything really
- Kahki backpacks
- Black belts, boots weapons.
- A single leader
- A single "grunt" figure
- The LPD and RPG heavy weapons together on 1 base
- 3 stands of 2 "grunt" figures each.
I'm hoping to take care of painting steps 1 and 2 tomorrow. Updates as they happen.
later
Tom
Sunday, February 3, 2008
Vietnam in HAVOC
Hey,
So one of the big historical miniature conventions here in Massachusetts is HAVOC. I went last year and had a good time. This year, I've decided to bid a game.
A friend of mine has been running Charlie Company, a nice set of Vietnam wargame rules from RAFM. This is the game that really kindled my interest in historical wargamming. Playing the game inspired me to do a fair amount of research on the period and I feel like I really learned a lot from it. I really appreciate the way the game puts you 'in the shoes" of an NCO or CO. The rules are pretty basic, but that frees you up to consider the tactical problems and work out solutions for them.
At any rate, it's been a lot of fun, but I always wanted to do a "big game" of Charlie Company where you had enough players on the American side to run more than a single platoon (so 6-10 people). The rules certainly make that manageable but finding enough people was always a challenge.
Enter HAVOC. I've taken the lead and bid a game of Charlie Company which will mostly make use of my friend Mark's terrain, figures, markers, etc. But he was game and I've got some work to do beyond managing the paperwork with the convention. We don't have nearly enough VC forces for the game we want to play so Mark picked up two packs of Revell plastic soldiers and I'll be painting them up. I've never done soft plastics before and I'm told they're a bit of a pain. Luckily, as the VC forces are all NPCs, their paint jobs don't have to be spectacular (indeed, the figures don't even appear until they're spotted, which can be a tricky proposition if your leaders are all inexperienced).
So over the next month or so, I've got to paint and base 40 VC figures. Actually, for this scenario, they'll be the tougher NVA troopers. I figure I'll do most of the work painting them on the sprues, then clip them off, touch them up and mount them on bases. I'll be mounting them in pairs to help reduce handling time and to make it easier to move the troops around. Hopefully there will be some pictures soon.
later
Tom
So one of the big historical miniature conventions here in Massachusetts is HAVOC. I went last year and had a good time. This year, I've decided to bid a game.
A friend of mine has been running Charlie Company, a nice set of Vietnam wargame rules from RAFM. This is the game that really kindled my interest in historical wargamming. Playing the game inspired me to do a fair amount of research on the period and I feel like I really learned a lot from it. I really appreciate the way the game puts you 'in the shoes" of an NCO or CO. The rules are pretty basic, but that frees you up to consider the tactical problems and work out solutions for them.
At any rate, it's been a lot of fun, but I always wanted to do a "big game" of Charlie Company where you had enough players on the American side to run more than a single platoon (so 6-10 people). The rules certainly make that manageable but finding enough people was always a challenge.
Enter HAVOC. I've taken the lead and bid a game of Charlie Company which will mostly make use of my friend Mark's terrain, figures, markers, etc. But he was game and I've got some work to do beyond managing the paperwork with the convention. We don't have nearly enough VC forces for the game we want to play so Mark picked up two packs of Revell plastic soldiers and I'll be painting them up. I've never done soft plastics before and I'm told they're a bit of a pain. Luckily, as the VC forces are all NPCs, their paint jobs don't have to be spectacular (indeed, the figures don't even appear until they're spotted, which can be a tricky proposition if your leaders are all inexperienced).
So over the next month or so, I've got to paint and base 40 VC figures. Actually, for this scenario, they'll be the tougher NVA troopers. I figure I'll do most of the work painting them on the sprues, then clip them off, touch them up and mount them on bases. I'll be mounting them in pairs to help reduce handling time and to make it easier to move the troops around. Hopefully there will be some pictures soon.
later
Tom
Sunday, November 4, 2007
Spugs!
Hi,
So this weekend was mostly stay-at-home, but the upside is that I finally got around to painting up a mess of Spugs. I painted up all three squads of basic troopers. They just need a little touch-up work and the heavy-weapon guys need some work on their tanks/hoses. Not quite sure what I'm going to do about those yet.
I'm not a fantastic painter, but these guys came together pretty well. They use a yellow and white scheme (based off of the coloring of desert locusts) so the contrast isn't quite as high as I'd like, but they've come together well and with a little bit of finish work I can start using them in various games (probably 5150 with some Legion of Steel UNE to serve as the human side).
I still have a small batch of spugs to paint up, but they're going to require a bit more work with assembly than the basic troopers did. The Comm spugs have some fiddly bits that will need an accelerator to get the glue to set up quickly and the Spugnaught may require pinning, which is something I've never done on a figure before. Still, it's nice to have made such great progress on these guys. Once they're finished off I can start buying some more!
I'm looking at the Hydrassians, the Drakh and the Quar. But there's also the airship pirates idea I've been kicking around.
later
Tom
So this weekend was mostly stay-at-home, but the upside is that I finally got around to painting up a mess of Spugs. I painted up all three squads of basic troopers. They just need a little touch-up work and the heavy-weapon guys need some work on their tanks/hoses. Not quite sure what I'm going to do about those yet.
I'm not a fantastic painter, but these guys came together pretty well. They use a yellow and white scheme (based off of the coloring of desert locusts) so the contrast isn't quite as high as I'd like, but they've come together well and with a little bit of finish work I can start using them in various games (probably 5150 with some Legion of Steel UNE to serve as the human side).
I still have a small batch of spugs to paint up, but they're going to require a bit more work with assembly than the basic troopers did. The Comm spugs have some fiddly bits that will need an accelerator to get the glue to set up quickly and the Spugnaught may require pinning, which is something I've never done on a figure before. Still, it's nice to have made such great progress on these guys. Once they're finished off I can start buying some more!
I'm looking at the Hydrassians, the Drakh and the Quar. But there's also the airship pirates idea I've been kicking around.
later
Tom
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Memo to self...
Artizan makes a line of air pirate/zeppelin troopers in it's Thrilling Tales/Pulp line.
Friday, September 14, 2007
Building the Fleet
Tonight I started in on the WWII coastal forces I picked up at GenCon. These fights were the real spur to get me back into wargamming so it's appropriate that I start with them. The fact that they're also a snap to paint up (mostly shades of grey) was another motivator.
I had a couple of ships by Skytrex and a bunch of others by PT Dockyard. Skytrex is traditional metal while PT Dockyard casts in resin. This was my first time working in resin and, I'm sorry to report, it's clearly not my idiom. At 1/600th scale there's some very tiny, very fine bits to glue onto the models and on the Dockyard ships all these bits came suspended in a thin sheet of resin.
So the idea is that you cut the guns and stuff out from the sheet and then stick 'em on. All very simple in theory, but in practice it's way too easy to snap off gun barrels and sometimes the flashing is almost impossible to remove. The Skytrex stuff had it's fair share of delicate pieces, but at least getting them off the sprue wasn't a hassle.
So I suspect that my future purchases in this line will be of the Skytrex variety.
But aside from gluing my fingers together, I got them all finished and tomorrow I'll stick them on bases and prime them. I also put bases on a squad of my Spugs. I expect that the ships will go pretty quickly and once they're done, I'd like to paint up the basic foot troopers for the Spugs.
I had a couple of ships by Skytrex and a bunch of others by PT Dockyard. Skytrex is traditional metal while PT Dockyard casts in resin. This was my first time working in resin and, I'm sorry to report, it's clearly not my idiom. At 1/600th scale there's some very tiny, very fine bits to glue onto the models and on the Dockyard ships all these bits came suspended in a thin sheet of resin.
So the idea is that you cut the guns and stuff out from the sheet and then stick 'em on. All very simple in theory, but in practice it's way too easy to snap off gun barrels and sometimes the flashing is almost impossible to remove. The Skytrex stuff had it's fair share of delicate pieces, but at least getting them off the sprue wasn't a hassle.
So I suspect that my future purchases in this line will be of the Skytrex variety.
But aside from gluing my fingers together, I got them all finished and tomorrow I'll stick them on bases and prime them. I also put bases on a squad of my Spugs. I expect that the ships will go pretty quickly and once they're done, I'd like to paint up the basic foot troopers for the Spugs.
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