Gen Con Day One — Grognard Time

After running our two games today, we are relaxing by playing the current Gibson edition of the Ariel/Avalon Hill 1970s War of the Roses game Kingmaker.

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Gen Con Begins (officially)

My brother and I arrived at Gen Con yesterday for the unofficial Day Zero kickoff. Today we are starting off with an 0900 official game of Dragon Rampant for six players, and repeating it at 1300. The first game went well, and we hope the second game will go well too. More to follow in the After Action Report.

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More July Games

A Surprising Day for the Home Guard

 The week of the 5th of July was a busy on.  I’ve previously posted about the game day I had the opportunity to engage in with my elder son Norman on Tuesday the 7th.

On Thursday the 9th it was time for a HAWKs Geezer Game.  Duncan Adams has been hosting the Geezer Games since August 2016, shortly after he retired. However, I was only able to start joing in the fun in January 2025 after I finally retired.  These games are typically held from 10AM to 2PM, on the Thursday of weeks in which there isn’t a HAWKs meeting.  Many different games have been played across this series of get togethers, though we have been playing a lot of Combat Patrol since I joined up.

Duncan was playtesting a hypothetical scenario for Historicon for six players involving British Home Guard, a landing party from a German submarine, a downed aircraft crew and so forth, in a British seaside town. I ended up controlling a party of Home Guard (miniatures depicting the cast of Dad’s Army) and a group of shotgun-armed women of the Women’s Land Army.  Overall this was a fun departure from the usual straight-up WWII tactical games we’ve been playing.  I have always enjoyed a multiplayer game with hidden objectives, possibly at cross-purposes.   

The Land Army meets the Luftwaffe

While the Germans eventually succeeded in their overall mission of rescuing the one surviving aircraft crewman, my forces acquitted themselves well.  The women, in particular, accounted for three of the four crewmen, but the last one slipped out of range and a parting shot from the shotguns had no effect.  As the picture above shows, it would be nice if we could somehow play Combat Patrol and keep the table cleaner, but it is a somewhat marker-heavy game.

On Saturday the 11th I went back down to Norman’s house for a rare second visit in one week.  We had two games on our agenda.  The first was the Dux Bellorum game we didn’t play in our Tuesday get together. I checked my records, and the previous Dux Bellorum game we played was back in April 2024, over two years ago, so it is no wonder that the rules needed a bit of review.

British (Welsh) attack a Saxon camp

After some discussion we chose an attack on a camp as the scenario. I took the encamped Saxons, which allowed me a moderate advantage in my force balanced by a disorganized starting position.  Norman took a mostly mounted force of Welsh, the game’s collective nomenclature for post-Roman British with less Roman influence than the alternative Roman-British army list.  We noted that this ended up being reminiscent of  the raid on Catraeth in Y Gododdin, which may be better known to wargamers in its retelling by Rosemary Sutcliff, The Shining Company.  

It didn’t take as long for Norman’s force to come to grief as it did for the Shining Company.  We were reminded that cavalry just doesn’t have the staying power in this game to go toe-to-toe with infantry warbands for too long.  Nevertheless, it was a fun game, and we resolved (again) to play it again sooner than two years from now.  

Norman observed that the rules would be good for a Tolkien game, and I have been considering painting and basing some Prince August fantasy figures to populate such a thing.  I’m also reminded that it is a compact game; the base table size recommendation for using single 60mm wide bases as units would be 3’ by 4’, so it should fit on most dining room tables. We also had only six and seven stands respectively in the game, so it doesn’t necessarily require very many figures.  This puts it in the same category as something like DBA.  I wrote up a review after our first game back in 2012, but it might be worth doing a revised review on the basis of additional gaming.

After we cleaned up Dux Bellorum Norman set up the day’s main event, a Proxia battle also involving William, my second son.  

He chose a scenario from the Red Book (Grant and Asquith, Scenarios for All Ages), “Making the Best of a Bad Job”, in which a tired column of troops on the march blunders into an encamped enemy force while attempting to transit the table.  A battle ensues that neither party would have chosen. William took the role of the Occiterran commander and the encamped force, and I had the marching column.

At the end of the day, I had successfully exited some of my troops, but the casualties incurred in preventing William’s counterattack from cutting access to the road left me below the troop level need for a victory (i.e., I lost…).

It was an interesting game, and we are always glad to see Norman’s impressively painted Proxian forces on the table.

Following that game there’s been a bit of a hiatus.  I had planned to be visiting my father in Michigan, but moved up my trip by a day when he was having some issues and needed some help.  The planned visit precluded Historicon this year, but I’ll be finishing up the month with another visit to Gen Con. I hope there may be time for another post or two before the Gen Con After Action Report, but we shall see.  My brother and I are hosting four miniatures games at the convention, two each of Dragon Rampant and Burrows and Badgers.

Games with Norman; DBA and Neil Thomas 19th Century

 My son Norman had a random day off yesterday, so I took advantage of my retirement to head on down to his house for a visit with the grandchild and a bit of gaming.  The original plan was to start with some Dux Bellorum, however …. While it is a game I enjoy, we don’t play it often enough to remain comfortable with the rules, so when I put the boxes on the table, I suddenly realized that I should have reviewed the rules in advance, because I wasn’t up to relearning them on the spot.  Next time, do better! (And that may be as soon as this coming Saturday…)

We dug into Norman’s collection and decided to put his recently expanded collection of dwarves on the table against their traditional foes, the orcs.  While this was a fantasy game in appearance, we followed Norman’s recent custom of deploying the armies as historical analogues from the DBA 3.0 lists.  Thus, the dwarves were based on the Tudor rebels of the late Wars of the Roses, and the orcs were based on the ancient Britons. 

Wars of the Dwarves and Orcs

I took the dwarves, since their track record to date has not been good, and I wanted a handy excuse for why I would be losing.  Much to my surprise I pulled off a victory in the first game, despite being hampered somewhat by a difficult hill in my deployment zone.  So we racked up the forces again, with the orcs attempting some revenge with a raid into dwarvish territoy.  (As DBA works, both armies have the home terrain type of “arable”, so the difference was that I got to choose the pieces that were semi-randomly deployed.) Although it was a close game, the dwarves pulled off another victory, so we decided that it was, perhaps, time to play something else … 

Norman is a more sensible gamer than I am, so he has managed to restrict himself to three gaming projects stored at his house, the collection of 1/72 scale plastic DBA/Hordes of the Things armies, a collection of 28+mm fantasy figures suitable for Frostgrave or D&D, and the 1/72 scale Proxia collection of 19th century imagi-nations figures that we typical play with the rules from Neil Thomas’s Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe (19CE)  We are scheduled to be playing a 19CE game with all three of us, including my son William, this coming Saturday, so we thought that it might be a good idea, after the Dux Bellorum problem, to revew those rules.  

Norman dug out his H.G. Wells-ish toy inspired scenery, and we turned to the book for a generic scenario to be played on a very compact 2x2 battlefield. Norman has recently completed a couple of units of militia for one of his Proxian armies, so we decided to get them on the table with an 1848-ish battle between a rebel army and a monarchical old order army.  I immediately volunteered to be the rebels.

Some of the new militia

Some random rolls (from the book’s scenario description) left us with a few twists; a third of my army was late to the battlefield, arriving on the 3rd turn (of 10), and Norman’s artillery was also bogged down and never made it at all.

Initial position; victory was decided by control of the town and the hill

Norman’s troops enjoyed a quality advantage.  In the 19CE rules, failed morale rolls result in the loss of an additional troop stand, units having four to begin with.  I don’t think his professional army failed a morale check and I am pretty sure that my rebels never succeeded in one.  This did seem to bring the right level of brittleness to my army.  Once all of my troops were on the table I enjoyed a numerical advantage of 6 units to 4 units, but with the quality difference, I needed it.

Rebel skirmishers in the woods

I was also allowed to deploy a band of poor quality skirmishers in the woods at one corner of the battlefield.  Norman decided to take advantage of his qualitative superiority and surged forward to attempt to seize the town.  He seized it, was thrown out, and seized it again in the course of the short game.  While their morale never cracked casualties mounted on the government side.  The battle for the hill was also a seesaw, and, as night fell, the last intact rebel infantry unit reached the otherwise empty hill, while the government forces held the crucial town.  Overall, it ended as a draw.  We both felt that we had lost and that we had it in the bag at different points in the game, so it seemed pretty well balanced overall.

I don’t think that either of us has written up a review of the rules, but now that we have a half a dozen or so games played over the past several years, I think that we could manage a fair one. (Positive, too; we do keep coming back to them, although we also have a game using the Whitehouse and Foley rules  A Gentleman’s War on our extended agenda…)

2026 in Gaming; An (almost) Mid-year Day Report

July 2nd is Mid-year day, with 182 days behind and 182 days ahead.  I didn’t really want to add a third post to the blog yesterday, but I did want to comment about how this year has been going before we get too far away from the middle of the year. While I did write up an overview of last year’s activities, I didn’t get as far as writing up anything about a plan for this year.

HAWKs Game Day on 30 May; Charge! and a ‘red book’ scenario

Schoeffen-Buschhagen and Stanzbach-Anwatsch cavalry clash on the bridge

As of this week, I have been in 27 miniatures games, so I’m somewhat behind the pace to match last year’s 67 games.  In fact, I’ve just ahead of where I’d want to be to make my goal of 52 games.  

I’ve played those 27 games with 19 different sets of rules so far this year, which may be somewhat ahead of the pace implied by the 30 sets of rules used last year. Given that I have been thinking that I am plying with too many rules to have a good grasp on any of them, this may be of concern and bears some watching.  Unfortunately for consistency, I also have an agenda item to try out some fantasy mass battle rules (particularly Midgard, Hobgoblin, Age of Fantasy Regiments, and Warhammer 1st edition) and revisit some older sets (particularly Chainmail and Knights and Magick) that haven’t been out in several years, so that may keep me from concentrating on the more frequently played rules.

By the end of the year last year I had used figures from my own collections in just 17 of those 67 games, and I resolved to spend more time this year getting my own figures on the table.  Given that I have 16 collections of figures in playable quantities, that was just an average of about once a year per collection, and most of those games didn’t come anywhere near using every figure in a collection.  It would not be hard to argue that the totality of my figure collection is underutilized.  This year, 11 of the 27 games have been with my own figures. That’s better, but there is still room for improvement. 

It has not been a good year for painting.  I did a handful of fantasy figures as a test of the Army Painter Speedpaint Pens (and might do a report on that after one more little test project) and the two dozen 18th century Indians for Armies for Kids (AfK), but that’s all I’ve finished so far.  I did get new prescription reading glasses recently, and they were helpful in the AfK painting session this week.

Muster of Minifigs ME Orcs and Goblins

Muster of Minifigs ME Free Folk

I have a lot of things I’d like to have painted, such as the retrogaming Minifigs ME (Mythical Earth) project, so I need to concentrate more on that.

So, not a bad year so far, but with room for improvement.

I’m thinking that next year’s goals are going to be to do more with less, and that will probably entail concentrating on some revisits to the gaming of the 1970s and 1980s. But more about that later …

Dusting Off A Song of Blades and Heroes

It’s been a long time since I posted twice on the same day, but it made sense to me to split the Armies for Kids post from the report on a recent game.

Our roleplaying group has been playing the current edition of RuneQuest for the last 18 months or so, and we have been considering the question of whether it might be time to switch things up a bit.  We know that we are looking for something with a tactical combat system that can resolve fights fairly quickly, and my list of possible candidates includes Tales of Blades and Heroes, which is based on the Song of Blades and Heroes fantasy skirmish rules.

Ultimately, I’d expect to run some sort of one-shot adventure with Tales before we make any final decision, but I thought that it might be a good idea to dust off Song to remind myself of the basic mechanics.  Therefore, I volunteered to run a game this past Monday. 

Battlefield overview; the objective was the town on the far right

Most of the action ended up centered on the bridge

I decided that I would use the 1/72 Portable Fantasy Game box for this one.  The backstory of the scenario, drawn from the campaign map, is that an orcish raiding part in boats landed on the west bank of the river and hurry inland to raid a small town.  I set up a simple mat, with the river on one edge, and the town in one of the far corners. Two warbands were organized for each side, of a notional 300 Song points. As things worked out, the orcs were having a terrible time with their activation rolls, and eventually the defenders of the town slew the orc’s troll and routed one of the orcish warbands, so we called it a day. 

As expected, it took a little while to become fluent with the rules again, but we eventually did, and things moved along more quickly.  I was reminded that one of the things I like about the rules is that you can read the situation from the board; you don’t have to remember anything about how you got to this point in previous turns (e.g. no need to remember that some figure ran on his previous activation and is therefore entitled to a dodge modifier).  I was also reminded of a recent discussion I was part of regarding points systems; while I used the game’s point system to speed up the set-up of this scenario, I will note that the orcs have a considerable losing streak against the humans.  This is attributable to the humans’ “quality” advantage (a game statistic that governs how successful a figure is in taking actions), and I would suggest that the point system does not accurately account for the difference (i.e., a balanced game would seem to require more points for the orcs than for the humans).

In the interest of getting home quickly I did not pack the game properly back into its box, so I finally got around to getting it all properly stowed away this morning. 

Handling the troops, I wondered just how long it had been since they had been on the table, and how long it had been since I had played Song.  I reviewed the game log and found that the 1/72 fantasy individuals hadn’t been out for a game since May 2023, when they were used for a test game of Knyghte, Pyke, and Sworde  while accompanying my wife to a singing competition.

The last time I had actually played Song of Blades and Heroes turned out to have been in December 2022, when I took the boxes on the road and staged a game at a friend’s house as a demo for his college-aged son.

It was nice to get the rules and figures back on the table.  It probably would make sense if I spent more time playing and painting fewer projects (i.e. gaming minimalism), but that is a post for another day…

HAWKs Armies for Kids Painting — That’s a Wrap

Seven HAWKs gathered yesterday to finish painting the figures for the 2026 Armies for Kids (AfK) giveaway. Historicon is now just two weeks away, so I suppose one might suggest that we cut it a little close, but even a simple paint job on American War of Independence figures has taken a bit longer than last year’s Spanish-American War figures.

We save the best for last; the final batch was a mass of American militia (mostly the old Accurate figures) painted in a very non-uniform way.  The project coordinators can now finish up the basing and load the figures and other gear into the boxes.  Next year’s AfK project is expected to be 1/72 American Civil War, so that should be a little easier to paint.