The Year of Skirmish and Cards

Skirmish and Cards

So been a crazy few months, a decent amount of gaming but a little disorganized in projects.

Cards

So due to schedules I've found myself playing card game over board games. Legendary Marvel has been a fun co-op game. With the dark city add on the combination of missions, heroes, and villains give it great replay value. Even if the random pull can make some really hard games. Serves as a good one shot as opposed to Pathfinder Card game.

Meg destroying me in Call of Cthulhu

The other main card game is Call of Cthulhu Card Game. We don't really design decks. We have three different boxes. At the beginning of each game we pick two factions each to mix our decks. It keeps it nicely balanced and keeps the game quick. Basically takes 20-30 minutes from deciding we want to play till game finish.

Skirmish

So been playing mostly Skirmish games, which lead to a lot of terrain projects to make it all work. Infinity is the first one, which needed a lot of new terrain. Most of my 40k terrain is dark grim ruined future ruins. Infinity is more anime espionage, so a very different look. On top of it the reactive turn of Infinity require a lot of blocking terrain. I owned a number of models, but needed terrain.

First game

Luckily, the new starter set came with a good deal of terrain. I naturally couldn't resist getting some more to spice it up. The ad's were a pain to put together but are well worth it.

Adds a nice flair

At historicon I picked up some Old glory sci fi terrain and an official terrain objective building. With some reaper pieces, I can do a relatively good table. Just need to paint them up.

Frostgrave and Songs of Blades and Heroes

I have a number of plays I will discuss in a later blog, these are both fantasy small skirmish games. One for one off games and one for campaigns. Terrain for a ruined city, particularly the floor takes awhile to make. However, my wife gave me a great ten year anniversary gift. Secret Wars makes a plastic board made of 24 1x1 pieces. It has a great bottom connector set up.

Spray and first coat

Some drybrushing

Set up

The following are a couple of in game shots with terrain

Lucky sniper shot takes out the opponents mage!

Historical

The other skirmish game has been Muskets and Tomahawks. The terrain is my buddy Sal's (check the painting the lead pile link). The British are mine, one of the few things I finished this year. They now have flags.

My final work in progress, is the one of the Zulu building, built and primed at this point. This was a 4-ground set in Warlord Games.

Next time I'll talk about the fun of all these rules systems.

First Mid-War Battle and a Team Battle at that

Mid War

So Grimm had a Mid-War FOW tournament scheduled last Saturday. Up to this point I've only played late war games and only my Irish guard are really painted. So, I figured I'd stop by but only play if they needed a fill in.

Of course turns out with me, there were four. We decided on a two on two German versus Russian Mid-War fighting withdrawal battle. Each player had 1500 points. We rolled and the Germans were defending against the Russians.

The battlefield somewhere on the Eastern Front

My team mate has some wonderfully painted tigers. In fact he modified them to match those in Kelly's Heroes. Since this would be four models at 1500 points, I decided to bring my Fallschirmjäger. So, my army isn't painted but I was excited to use them. My list was 2x full troops, hmgs, pak 40s, heavy mortars, nebelwerfers,  LG40s, and commands all with anti tank.

German setup.

Now I've only faced Russians once before. They brought the kind of army I expected. Thirty or so T-30's, lots of troops, full Katyusha, some more tanks, planes, hammer of god artillery and cavalry! They also took Komissar Boris Ivanovich Vasilevsky the 24" Komissar. Naturally they needed the whole table edge to set up.

Tanks, tanks, and more Tanks!

Just a little artillery...

Lots of Russians. Do we have enough bullets?

Since my team was defending, our main goal was to hold. The objectives were in the middle of our deployment, middle right and far right. We planned to have the objectives leave from middle table to right starting turn six. Our right flank would be our final objective and hold it till turn eight.

Two tigers would slow the left flank while the artillery would pound the middle of the Russians. The first few turns saw the Russians moving forward while firing artillery. Our forces returned artillery, hmg, and tiger shots.

Russian arty strike on the Fallschirmjäger.

Tigers holding the left flank.

Right flank holding strong while weakening the Russian mob.

Russians prepping for first charge.

The Fallschirmjäger in the field managed to stop the first Russian charge due to distances but the Komissar held them together. The Tigers on the left pulled back. The following turn the Russians made their charge. Now fearless vets should be fine right? Well see the thing with my rolling... in rpgs I tend to roll very high or very low but in equal amounts. In mini war games it tends to be much more the low....such as now

Seriously! Nine ones!

To be honest this was a game of bad rolls for everyone. This was a survivable encounter had I rolled average. With this many misses the unit was heavily damaged and the 2IC fled.. Luckily between the 2IC, rockets, and tiger we held the objective.

Luckily the Komissar was out of range to help the unit and we retook the objective.

That tiger holding the objective....rolled a one and arty took it out, ouch.

So, we found ourselves in a bit of a problem. We had to hold the objective another turn before we could pull in, and two bases were defending. Could a tiger and the nebelwerfers hold off the tanks, cavalry and remaining troops in the unit for a turn? Now Cavalry is often tough to get in a good position. However, the Russians had gotten it perfectly set to charge the nebelwerfers.

Perfectly set charge on the flank of the nebelwerfers.

Turns out Nebelwerfers are snipers with rifles!

Nebelwerfers turn out to have practiced a lot with their rifles. The hit the magic five times and broke the cavalry charge. This meant we could hold the middle objective till end of turn six. Our right flank objective was secure and too far for the Russians to make by the end. This meant the middle right objective would be the deciding factor. The Russian troops had been damaged but not destroyed. A single Tiger was blocking the objective. The tiger took the risk and assaulted the Russians, he rolled a one during the counter attack and was destroyed. This meant the Russians started the turn with the objective. Game over.

Tigers have bad luck too.

This was a great game. I'm glad I made it to the store. My fellow players were entertaining and easy going. When everyone rolls bad in a game it can get quite hysterical. It certainly got me motivated to paint up my Fallschirmjäger. I find I enjoy Flames of War the most in these team type mega battles. Mid-War has a slightly different balance, I'm curious to see what Early-War is like.

Summer Projects.... and the distractions

Summer Miniature Projects

This is the first summer in a while that I am not enrolled in any classes or massive rewrites of classes I teach (note the word massive, not none). So, while I continue working on the reaper models I originally started working on building some Bolt Action and Napoleonics.  Bolt action I could probably get a game in after in a little while. It and the Napoleonics will also work well for some Savage World ideas I have. The Bolt Action models are the standard Warlord Games, while the Napoleonics are Victrix British Peninsular War.

While Wellington used Germans, not WWII era.

The models overall went together well. The Victrix had some flash. but overall was fine. I normally have built heroic scale 25mm/28mm models. Building historical meant getting use to thin arms and weapons.

Slight Change of Plans

A number of people in one of my groups were interested in Muskets and Tomahawks. This combined with the new Assassins Creed Unity Trailer and reading the excellent book Saratoga, won me over to the era. I've had a number of rpgs ideas and always wanted to build the American Revolution to Waterloo. I made some orders and received a nod of fate. A Wargames, Soldiers and Strategy arrived focusing on the era.

One of the more interesting articles was the discussion of the Seven Year War being the first World War. I admit not knowing a lot about the era and enjoyed filling in the gap. Before that my main knowledge was it cost enough for England to raise taxes on the American Colonies to help pay for it. Speaking of paying, I had debated working on a 40k Ork army. I have some models and a new codex was coming. However, for the same price as a unit of 10 Flash Gitz I got this shipment of models....

135 Historicals vs 10 Flash Gitz, happy with my choice

So, what did I get? First sixty French Napoleonics to face my British and serve in rpgs. Muskets and Tomahawks seemed the easiest to get into quickly. So, for that I bought twenty Indians and nineteen Redcoats. Since it is a missions based, I also bought some villagers and a powder cart.

The cart serves double purpose. Without fail, my Pathfinder players always buy a cart.

Now they have one.

The Redcoats and Indians were Warlord Games models made by conquest. Overall they are good models. However, I will say I had a bit of flash on the models. Not, terrible but definitely needed some clean up. This seems to be random. I had one friend get a clean set, another far worse than mine.

Most models needed weapons to be attached. The flag poles given are brass rods. I kept them separate to glue in when the flags are ready. 

Villagers as always are important. Some will serve as objectives for wargames or rpgs. These models and the cart are Perry Brother Miniatures. As always these are great models. I also finished some Reaper Bones large models, some of the few that need glue.

Cardinal Richelieu sneaks in with the bones minis.

Soon they were all primed some with spray and gesso to test the difference.

Painting Distractions

Had to replace the water heater so sat with the dogs to keep them calm. So lots of base coating of large models (needed for Whispering Tyrant/Carrion Crown campaign).

So, trying to focus but the reaper minis come out a lot when I have excess paint in the tray. Which is great in never wasting paint, but tends to increase what I'm painting at any one time.

Next Time: Quick Board Games and New 40K!