[Saxon Muster] Not as Pale as the Scots

Hey,

Got more work done on my first unit of Saxons. In a little under 2 hours I put on the flesh, hair and painted the foot gear.

Now they're looking like this:



The photo isn't very good so it's hard to see the improvements. The next shot should be a lot more colorful since I'll be painting up the leggings and tunics.

later
Tom

[Saxon Muster] Thegn of Fools

Hey,

So I've been playing various historical miniature games with a bunch of guys at the Hobby Bunker in Malden. The group has decided they want to put on a campaign game for the Fall. They've chosen to do a Dark Ages Viking game using Warhammer Ancient Battles and its Shieldwall supplement.

So members will kit up a group of Vikings, Saxons, Welsh, Picts and so on and we'll duke it out for several weekends. The Vikings got snapped up fairly quickly, but I was interested in working with the Saxons so that's what I went with. Now all I needed were some figures. Luckily, one of the other members bought up a lot of Saxon figures before deciding to switch to Welsh. So I got around 100 figures, assembled and mounted for cost. Pretty good deal.

Now I've just got to paint 100 figures.

I've got a lot of time and for the early rounds I only need about 60 figures put together to meet the 500 points minimum. However, I'm easily distracted, so I'm putting together a schedule to get through everything and I'm posting my progress here so that I've got my unfinished work staring at me.

So, first up, a unit of 20 Thegns, armored in chainmail, with a leader bearing the dragon standard.





I've mounted all the figures on film canisters using blue-tack. This gives me a handle to manipulate the figures and prevents hand cramp. Next, I based the figures in white jesso and then went back over the metal parts in black (this will make the metallic paint stand out better.

So early stages, but I'm making progress.

later
Tom

To Have and To HAVOC

So Friday/Saturday I went down to Shrewsbury for this year's HAVOC wargame convention. I played in three games and here's what I thought of them:

On Friday evening I sat down to a game of Check Your Six -- a WWII air combat game. In this scenario, a recon P-38 escorted by a batch of F4 Wildcats had to overfly a Japanese airfield and then beat feet before the Zeros in the area shot them up.

I was on the Japanese side, one half of a squadron that had just taken off from the airfield and was moving low and slow. Because the recon plane was worth a ton of victory points, we decided to circle wide, climb and hopefully catch the recon plane as it comes off its photo run -- though we'd have F4's sitting on our butts almost immediately.

We got lucky and the recon plane took a hit going over the airfield greatly reducing it's speed. It was also too big a temptation for us. Pretty much all the zeros rushed the recon plane and didn't give the F4's enough attention. In the event, through some hard jinking, the recon plane managed to sneak off the board while the rest of the zeros got shot up. Of my two planes, the experienced pilot got shot down while my rookie limped off the board with a damaged engine.

Check Your Six has a pretty simple movement system, you pick your maneuver off the chart, adjust speed and altitude as required and then see if you've got any targets to shoot. Moreso than most wargames, air combat is all about maneuver and second-guessing your opponent. There was a definite chess-like feel to the game. I still want something that puts a bit more 3-D in the fights, but that will ramp up the complexity -- I suppose some sort of computer-moderated system could alleviate that.

On Saturday morning, I got up way to early to drive in and to test out the "I Ain't Been Shot Mum" ruleset in a French Indo-China game. We had a group of French Foreign Legion and Algerian troops who were tasked with the job of clearing a road of mines. Somehow, today would be the day we'd be jumped by the Viet Minh.

So the big twist with this ruleset is that platoons of troops are represented by "blinds" until enemy units get close enough to spot you or you de-cloak for some reason. Of course, the Viet Minh had a number of dummy blinds and they pretty much papered the board with their blinds while we only had just as many blinds as we had troopers.

The other interesting detail with the rules is that each platoon is represented with a card and each turn, cards are drawn at random to determine what activates and what doesn't. The presence of some "end of turn" cards mean that a turn can end without a given platoon activating. Further, some platoons have "Big Men" attached to them, leaders or NCO's who get their own card and can force a partial activation of the platoon. So, if your Big Man card comes out early, do you go now at reduced effectiveness or hang on and hope to make the whole platoon go with a leader bonus and risk the turn ending before you get to do anything?

I've cleared my share of roads in Vietnam so I knew what the smart play was here -- you send infantry out along the sides of the road to roust the enemy and protect the mine-clearing convoy. Once you've beaten back the enemy, you can proceed down the road. There followed several turns of skulking in the tree line trying to spot the blinds and force them to drop. Finally, we decided we were just going to sit there forever so we pushed forward.

On the right, the Algerians encountered a batch of Viet Minh and got held up scraping them out. That all ended when the Algerians rushed the position -- close combat, when you team has a leader gives you a boat-load of dice and a convincing win against leaderless troops. So my Foreign Legion waded out on the left side, uncovered a group of Viet Minh on another hill and swept them right off, followed up back to a rice paddy and then discovered about half the enemy units waiting in a small farm.

Meanwhile, we'd tried to tentatively advance down the road, when a Recoiless Rifle blew out one of our armored cars. Our vehicles immediately went off-road. The other AC got shot up by the Rifle, but the tanks (when they managed to go) put down a punishing barrage on the right-hand side of the board, suppressing the machine gun teams that were chewing up our Algerians.

But breaking the left-hand side was grinding up the Foreign Legion and in the end, we ran out of time about halfway down the board.

I think the rule set was good, but the scenario was problematic (and yes, I lost so take this with a grain of salt). The biggest problem was that every platoon had a Big Man card, plus platoon leaders. So there were a ton of cards that could activate a platoon or squad and tracking which unit/sub-unit had already acted that turn was a pain. Further, the rules are explicit and say that not *every* unit gets a big man card, only a few of them. Reducing the number of Big Men cards would've made things go much faster and made the choice about activating the Big Man less interesting.

For my part, I didn't break up my support platoon and attach the various MGs and mortars to the rifle platoons. That would've given me much needed firepower as I moved up the side.

Still, I really did like the rules. The hidden movement was good, there were opposed rolls and the variable turn length/activation kept you in the game.

A quick lunch at Moe's and then back for a round of Ambush Alley. As you might guess, this is a game about fireteams sweeping dense, insurgent-filled urban areas. So Baghdad, Mogadishu, and like environs. The game has gotten some pretty good press and Osprey is publishing a polished upgrade of the rules that will cover both asymmetrical warfare and more conventional conflicts. So I wanted to give the rules a spin to see about picking up the full rules later this month.

I was on the side of the Marines in charge of a 4-man fire team. We had to cross the board taking out "hotspots" (i.e. insurgent spawn points) along the way while fending off waves of poorly armed, badly trained, but highly motivated troops.

The game bogged down for the US very early. One of our fireteams got caught out and chopped to pieces by the insurgents. So there was some stalling while we got a replacement team. Our one good piece of fortune (from the nefarious "Fog of War" deck that kept dishing out the pain), was the assistance of an M1 Abrams tank. One high-explosive round later and the insrugents who'd hit us were buried under rubble.

Once we got sorted, I moved my team and the tank towards the right-hand side of the board. The tank couldn't really move into the narrow streets but I'd use it to support my drive up the side where two hotspots were located. As I came up on the first hotspot, a car loaded with insurgents came speeding towards me. I promptly shot everyone out of the vehicle. Finally I took cover near the first hotspot. The rule is that you have to sit on it for a full turn to clear it. So I went into overwatch and promptly shredded several waves of insurgents trying to pick me off. Seriously, six guys would run up, unload, we'd be fine and then we'd wipe them out to a man. The tank also made a few telling shots, but a lucky RPG round wounded the tank commander and dinged our main gun (sadly a TV crew recorded the action in a propaganda coup for the bad guys). The tank had to drive off, but it had done it's job.

With one hotspot secured, we rushed down the side of the board, slipping past an angry mob into a courtyard where the next hotspot was located. When insurgent reinforcements were called up, our hotspot was the indicated spawn point. Luckily, it was just a single red shirt. We handily took him out and claimed the spot.

My job was finished. On the left-hand side of the board, another fireteam got hammered letting the third team secure a hotspot. However, the current score was still in the insurgents favor thanks to the injuries they inflicted on us. Our only hope was a mad dash to the back of the board to grab one more hotspot. They dashed up the street, failing to draw any fire and managed to sit tight on the hotspot, claiming it and winning the game.

The game was a little frustrating at first, it didn't seem like we'd be able to make any headway at all (that Fortunes of War deck was a real pain). But once we cracked through the stiff line of resistance we ran riot into the backfield and racked up the score. If the insurgents had a bit more defense in depth they might've slowed us up just enough. That said, it takes a lot of insurgents to generate the fire needed to bring down US regulars. Our first batch of casualties was just really poor dice rolling. On average we could shrug off just about everything that came our way.

One of the guys who'd played a few games earlier said it best -- "The regulars are godlike until they blow a roll and then they're toast". I really liked the set-up and it has me interested in the Ospery version of the ruleset coming out later this month. I got a chance to look at a pre-release copy of the book as well as the "Road to Baghdad" supplement that will be coming out. The supplement is interesting because in all the scenarios they include "historical outcomes" -- well, for the Iraq war the historical out come is "The US won decisively only suffering a couple of friendly fire casualties". Making the scenarios a more interesting game is going to be quite a challenge.

So that was the games. I also hit the dealer tables. I picked up a couple packs of 28mm WWII partisans and some ASL stuff.

There wasn't much I was interested in for the evening, so I joined my gaming friends and we went out to Coral Seafood in Marlborough. The food was pretty darn tasty and there was the usual post-con banter. I was slated to be in a game this morning, but I decided I'd rather be lazy today and sleep in so that's what I did.

Overall, I'm pretty happy with HAVOC. I played in three games using three different systems that I really wanted to try out. My win/loss record wasn't so great, but I had fun in all the games and that's what counts.

Sharkmen and Ironclads

Busy day today, but it started off with some gaming.

First up was some 15mm sci-fi skirmish and playtest of the Impact rule system. On one side we had a group of Space Sharks (replete with Self Contained Out-of-water Breathing Apparatus) backed up by a couple of squads of Andorrans, two shark guys in power armor and a group of Space Ogres. They'd landed on New Tennessee and taken over a small farm. Opposing them were Space Rednecks, their rag-tag collection of vehicles and a squad of Space Legionaries (no idea why they were there).

We set up (hiding some of our troopers) and they came at us. Probably the most interesting thing was one of the shark guys got into a car and rolled over a bunch of enemy troopers. In the end we lost because the space rednecks set fire to the things they were supposed to destroy but we didn't know what their objective was so it was hard to defend against.

The rule system was fast and simple and it used a card-activation system which I enjoy. The basic mechanic was roll 1 die for the quality of your troop (d4 to d8 depending) and the defender rolls their quality die plus another die for any cover. You compared each roll (from highest to lowest on both sides) and scored pins or kills. The problem was that the shooting was very ineffective compared to close-combat -- in shooting, the defender had the extra cover and there really wasn't any way for the attacker to add anything. The GM mentioned that there were rules for support weapons that added an extra die and that would probably be useful in the future. It was a shakedown of the rules and a fun time.

We finished up pretty quickly so I got into a one-on-one game of Hammerin' Iron a Civil War naval ruleset. We had the classic Monitor vs. Merrimack clash. I was in the Merrimack. I was slower and less maneuverable and less armored than my opponent, but I had a broadside that could peel open a fortress -- if I could bring it to bear. The system is kind of interesting, you put down these hexes that your ship "travels" on. This helps determine firing arcs and can be used to resolve rams and other bookkeeping efficiently. You have pseudo-random control over your ships in that you draw a hand of five cards from one of two decks (one more movement oriented, the other more firing oriented). Firing is resolved via a bucket of dice and it's cumulative critical hits that will win the day rather than actually doing enough damage to sink the enemy. My ship had over 2600 hull points so it wasn't going down easily. But every five damage points, another critical hit roll came up.

So I plodded after my nimble opponent. He kept plinking at me. I wasn't able to get a good broadside on him for awhile, but my front-mounted guns did start a couple of pesky fires that did some damage. Finally guessed right, put him on my broadside and hammered his ship causing a smokestack hit that reduced his speed. He returned the favor a couple rounds later and it devolve into a very slow fight until I made a bad critical hit roll and blew up.

So obviously I hate the game. :) No, it was interesting. It probably would be more fun with an extra ship or two on both sides. I think one-on-one fights are a little too small, but you want to be careful or it's going to get way too complex if you have a lot of boats.

So that's what I played today.

Pyrrhic Victory

So today I wandered down to the local hobby shop to participate in a little game of Battletech.

Battletech is one of the oldest "giant stompy robot" games and is probably the brand leader in that particular genre. I used to play it a bit back in the day and while I sat in on a demo game with a friend a couple years back, it's really been years since I've played.

The guy running the event has a nice batch of mechs and he's also got some great terrain set up. He (and his girlfriend apparently) spent a lot of time crafting GHQ Terrain Maker tiles so you could play a 3-D game without worrying about the measuring tape. There were eight of us (about three of whom had recent play experience) and the idea was that we'd pair off into groups of two and fight to the nuclear explosion. The survivor would then square off against the next guy to win his fight and so on until one stood supreme.

I was playing a heavily modified Huntsman which is a 50-ton run-and-gun mech. It was fairly speedy, had jump jets to fly around and had a couple of medium pulse lasers, an AC10 and a PPC -- so it could fly around and hit you with the lasers or it could stand still and hammer you with the PPC or it could fly around and shoot everything and then shut down from all the heat it generated. Pretty standard. My opponent was in a lighter mech who was even speedier and had fairly accurate medium lasers but no heavy punch (or at least no heavy punch that wouldn't force it to slow way down).

The basic problem revealed itself almost immediately: my opponent was just fast enough that win or lose initiative (and he usually won), he could control the range and if he won (forcing me to move first), I had to move carefully, or he'd jump in behind me and take shots at my vulnerable rear facing. His shooting was accurate but didn't do much damage whereas my shots were less accurate but could really put the hurt on if they connected.

So we spent a long time jumping around like fleas while taking pot shots at one another. He got a lot of hits, but he never hit the same spot twice so I was in halfway decent shape. I only hit him every now and then, but I kept scraping through his torso armor. We played pretty much the entire game scouring away at each other.

Then I screwed up a piloting roll, fell over, and snapped off my left arm. I was pretty sure that was about it, but I staggered to my feet and chased after him. Determined to end this one way or another, I charged in close, let fly with everything I had left and obliterated him. I won. I was a wreck, a one-armed, skeletal assembly shambling across the field, but I'd beaten my opponent. So now it was on to the next free guy.

It turns out the next free guy was the only one left. Me and my guy took so long to finish that everyone else was out except for the finalist. We both took a turn to cool off our engines. He was holed up in a castle (built strictly as a tourist attraction) and looked to be tough to winkle out. But he had taken on at least 3 other mechs and was in as bad a shape as I was.

There was only one thing to do -- go balls out and finish this.

So I moved into range and we traded shots. My salvo ripped him to shreds and his return fire returned the favor. We both went up in nuclear fireballs. So...a satisfying end? Well, it was fun and I got a story out of it. I think the only winner was the pilot who went unconscious and was declared eliminated since he at least woke up to find himself the loser rather than everyone else who just flat-out died. In any event, we packed up the game and retired for beer and lunch.

I still don't know about this game. It's all about the mechs to the exclusion of everything else and I feel like there's a few steps in the hit/damage process that could be consolidated to speed things up. But it is a well-supported game and has enough opponents that you could get a game together every so often.

I did really like the terrain the guy had set up. I was surprised to discover that the tiles were just that -- tiles and that you have to paint/flock them to be whatever terrain you want. Considering all the work you have to go through to get the tiles put together, I wonder why you wouldn't just go the distance and buy sheets of blue foam and cut them into hex shapes yourself. In any event, having a bunch of them put together could make for some really nice hex-based games (either hex games converted to minis or free-forms mini games on a hex grid).

For King and Queen!

Today I dropped by Hobby Bunker to participate in an English Civil War game put on by Boston Trained Bands. There were some amazing figures in 15mm -- I can't believe how well-painted they were. I can barely get a base coat on a hulking warjack in 30mm.

I opted for the Royalist side (seriously, the King was dumb but endearing, while Parliament was dour and grumpy -- not to be confused with the band Parliament who are funky and freaky). The situation was early in the war. Prince Rupert had just won a victory but fell back to the town of Aylesbury to repulse the Parliamentarian reprisals (involving a complex series of motions and amendments and points of order no doubt). Our job was to take command of the forces and defend the town.

Each side got 2 regiments of infantry (musket and pike) along with a regiment of cavalry. My confederates said that the cavalry was exciting and fun while the infantry were just plodders, but since the ruleset was new to me (Regiment of Foot by Peter Pig) and because I feared botching the vital charge and losing the game, I opted to take one of the infantry regiments and stand fast against the on-rushing hordes.

I spread out along the east side of the village facing south towards the river that bisected the table. The other infantry regiment continued the line to the west and the cavalry stet up ahead and to the west a bit. I thought this was a mistake and that he should've put his cavalry in column to charge over the sole bridge. This would dissuade the enemy from rushing the bridge, but still give him options to peel off to the west if necessary.

Once set-up, we wandered off into the shop while the Parliamentarians got set up along the southern half of the board. When we came back, things looked rough. Their cavalry were primed to charge over the bridge and right into the center of town. Meanwhile, two huge blocks of infantry were poised on the east and west sides to come marching down and surround us. The block on the west had a fairly open approach and easy access to a road to come curving in on us.

Things did not go well for us early on. Our cavalry rushed out and then charged a column of infantry in the flank -- who promptly about faced and blasted half our cavalry from the saddle. The only good news is that it encouraged the enemy cavalry to chase after them rather than barrel into town as they were poised to do. Some bad motivation rolls meant that the infantry on the west side was slow to re-deploy. Meanwhile, my guys mostly hunkered down behind their hedges and watched the steady approach of a mass of men. I felt like we were getting pulled apart and with our cavalry so depleted, things didn't look good. When the rest of our cavalry was run down by theirs I was pretty sure things were going bad. I was redeploying my reserve trying to figure out which gap to plug, until I was advised to just hang tight, I'd need them once the eastern wing of the enemy hit my line.

I was also advised that I should try to stay behind hedges because they were like pillboxes in a WWII game. This was very, very true. A line of enemy infantry formed up and rushed my guys. The Regiment of Foot system uses a bucket-o-dice resolution system where you roll a *lot* of d6s and pick out the high rolls as hits (followed by a saving throw). The very first time a unit fights in melee during the game it gets 5 bonus dice (on top of the 19+ dice it's already rolling for a full-strength unit). However -- if you attack a unit behind a hedge, you lose 6 dice. So he was already at a disadvantage to start with and it only got worse with each round of combat after that. In two turns I shredded his unit. I was down to only 3 stands, but I got some good motivation rolls and deftly slid the injured unit to the side to fend off a potential column charge while my reserve unit replaced them in their spot.

Meanwhile two other units had engaged the other part of my line. I say line, but really I had more of a zig-zag shape. The enemy forged across the river in two columns, but couldn't readily charge through the hedge (he'd only be attacking with his lead element and get clobbered, so he turned one line and started sniping at me. Now another rule came to my aid. If an enemy unit moves or shoots within 4 inches of you, you automatically get defensive fire. Since he was wedged between two of my units every one of his shots drew two in return. This was a war of attrition he couldn't win and so he charged by unit in the open (again drawing defensive fire and losing stands). He pretty much shattered against my line.

The other unit now formed up and prepared to assault through the hedges against my unit that had been reduced to 3 stands from his first assaults against me. Since melee is between single units only, I couldn't bring any of my larger units in to help and things looked bad for my guys. But he only had enough action points to redeploy into line not actually charge. My unit in the open got a good motivation roll and promptly rushed in to attack. He failed to react to my charge and the resulting melee swept his entire unit from the field. His commander was isolated and I had two full-strength units compared to his one. He declared the flank lost and that was pretty much the game.

While I'd been dealing with all of this, the other flank had done pretty well. Our cavalry hadn't gone out without a fight and one brave line of infantry managed to gun down the rest of the enemy's cavalry. That meant it was down to another clash of infantry regiments on the west side of the board as well and some aggressive redeployment forced the Parliamentarians to move very cautiously. Only a few desultory shots had been exchanged on either side, but the enemy hadn't forced the issue and now faced the choice of assaulting through hedges (which as you'll recall is a very bad idea in this game) or marching down the road and taking lots of defensive fire from units sheltering behind the hedges. In either case, he'd given us too much time to set up and with the eastern flank a loss, he called it quits too.

All-in-all the game was very interesting. Bucket-o-dice games are kinda weird. The GM said it was mostly done to ensure consistent averages over the course of the game, but in that case, just figure out what the "average" is going to be for a given situation and then use FUDGE dice to adjust the average up or down (or not at all as is most likely). The "average hits" could even factor in the saving throw and the whole thing would speed up immensely. But I'm always trying to speed up combat resolution in that way.

Also, those "hedges of steel" really saved my bacon. The town had any number of hedge-lined fields surrounding it and I'm not sure how I would've forced my way past them if I was on the attack. I suppose the ideal situation would be to bring both infantry blocks in together on the same wing and then feint with a couple of units to force the defenders into a location and then strike with the others. Alternatively, try to catch the units as they're repositioning although that's best done with cavalry. Probably the attackers needed some light reinforcements to provide reserves that could exploit a breakthrough. Or maybe we just had tons of great rolls.

Overall, though, a fun game (course it was, I won didn't I?). They tried to talk me into buying a DBA army for their tournament next week. Yeah...DBA is a weird game. The problem isn't the rules (although their writing style is most charitably described as "opaque") or the slightly chess-like way the game runs. The problem is that it's built for tournaments and rather than almost every other wargaming period where historical opponents fight one another, you're allowed to throw armies separated by 3-4,000 years at each other. When my ancient Egyptians take on your Japanese samurai there's a problem. Still, they said they had loaners so I might check it out just to say I played it.

Border Reivers and Battling Robots

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.

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

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.

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