6mm Games and a New 1/72 Challenge

 In the previous post I was painting some 6mm characters and commanders with the intention of using them in a game of Fantastic Battles by Nic Wright. I had mentioned back in March that my sons and I had tried them for a Renaissance game with Leonardo machines, and that the rules were not what I was looking for to run a multi-player convention game.  I wanted to give them another try, and my friend Chris Palmer agreed to be my guinea pig, er, opponent.  As I noted, I am interested in squeezing more gaming out of small spaces at the moment, so I wanted to use the 6mm troops.  I took my box of 6s and a Cigar Box Battles general purpose mat to Chris’s house and we played on his dining room table.  We used armies of orcs (basically impetuous barbarians) and Romans (doughty and drilled).  Allowing for some first time rules look up, we got through a battle in about two hours. As anticipated, this worked better in a more standard fantasy context, and as a two player game looking for that 1-2 hour game.  I look forward to playing it again, and will hold a formal review until we get at least one more game in.  As for an informal review, Chris ordered a starter army of 6mm elves from Baccus Miniatures after the game, so I think that it is safe to say that he was favorably impressed.

View from the Roman right flank as the battle opened

Another view, from behind the Roman center

This past week business took me to Colorado.  Since I knew that the first leg was going to be over three hours in the air, I decided that I would take the tray table game with me and try it out as intended.  Apart from the fact that the Roman legionary infantry did not make it back into the travel box after the fight against the orcs and I was compelled to improvise a bit on the order of battle, I am happy to say that it worked splendidly. The children’s play organizer did a good job of keeping dice and damage tokens confined.  I played two games, with each side (Romans and Sassanid Persians) having one win.  (I should go put the infantry back in the travel box before I forget about it again … ) It was nice to have something to distract myself from the fact that I was packed in a thin-walled metal tube hurtling through the sky six miles above the ground for a little while.

Now, on to the challenge.  Most of the miniatures content on YouTube is Games Workshop related, so I’m always interested when something shows up that isn’t.  There was a video posted on the Tabletop Minions channel last week (Friday, 7 July 2023) in which Uncle Atom presented a route to get into the hobby from scratch with a budget of $100.  The HAWKs presented a similar challenge back in 2003, although our $100 budget then specifically excluded the tools and painting supplies that were necessary to build the projects.  According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the $100 November 2003 budget translates into $165 in June 2023.  Add that to the excluded paint, glue, and tools, and it looks like we were pretty generous in our conditions back in ‘03.

Uncle Atom’s budget includes paint, brushes, and tools.  After considering the matter for a while, I went shopping.  Here’s what I came up with:

I decided to follow Uncle Atom’s advice and start at the Dollar Tree.  For $5.50, I came home with a craft knife, some glue, and a package of cheap brushes that I won’t care about when they get messed up.

For rules, I decided that I would use Nordic Weasel’s Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde, which is available at Wargames Vault for $9.99. KPS is a skirmish game using only standard six sided dice, with forces of up to 20-30 figures per side, but still usable at smaller levels.  So, as troops get painted, the games can begin before all the figures are finished.  Uncle Atom allowed that d6s were probably available for scrounging, so we’ll count them as free although I could have bought a package of them a the Dollar Tree for $1.25.

For figures, I decided that this was a good excuse to paint a set of 1/72 scale figures I’d been wanting to do anyway.  For $25 (including shipping!) on eBay, I was able to find a box of the Italeri Medieval Tournament.  This set was originally pointed out to me over on Benno’s Figures Forum when someone posted pictures of the civilians from the set they had painted.

This set includes some tournament knights and specators, plus a viewing stand and the barrier for jousting.

In addition, it comes with one set of the Italeri Hundred Years War English.

It also comes with one set of their opponents, the Hundred Years War French.

The box contains a total of 55 foot figures and 20 horsemen, which should be plenty for a reasonable KPS game.

In order to paint these figures, I would need some primer.  I already have a can, but I priced Krylon Fusion matte black at $6.98.  I’ve used this successfully on 1/72 plastics before.

Uncle Atom used an Army Painter starter set with 10 colors and a brush for $30, but in looking around on Amazon I found a pack of 16 Vallejo “Medieval Colors” for $28.74.   It includes a black and a white for mixing and an assortment of metallic colors, but is a little short on browns, so I’ll have to see what I can do with mixing.  At least most of the horses are caparisoned, so the lack of horse variety will be less apparent.       

To finish the miniatures, a large (60ml) bottle of Vallejo satin varnish cost $7.96.

I ordered a set of three small brushes from some unknown supplier on Amazon for $6.59. I am dubious about their durability and ability to hold a point, but we shall see.  I intend to use the cheaper Dollar Tree brushes as much as possible to save wear and tear on the little brushes.

I priced felt for a ground cloth from Joann Fabrics.  They’ll sell you a yard of 72” width felt for $7.99.  I haven’t gotten over to the local Joann to see what they have in stock yet. That would give me a 3’ by 4’ battlefield with some left over for other possible uses in a potential Phase 2.

So, there we have the plan. The grand total for all of that is $98.75, leaving a surplus of $1.25, enough to buy one thing at the Dollar Tree if necessary.

I am going to count a few things as free which might be reasonably found around a house.  I will need some sand for base texturing.  If I wanted the easiest and cheapest circular bases I could find, I would mount the troops on pennies.  Since I intend to use these troops after I paint them, I will mount them on steel washers which will engage with my magnetic transport boxes, but the pennies would actually work as well for most people.  I will use some white glue.  I will also mount the troops on large craft sticks for painting as I usually do since I have a huge box of them, although strips of corregated cardboard could easily be salvaged and would work as well.

The scenery situation is a bit dire, with nothing but the contents of the box and a ground cloth.  I’ll also count as free some buildings from the  Dave Graffam Models free sample selection. Those are still some way off in the future.  

Given the scenery situation, if I actually get this completed, my Phase 2 challenge will be to enhance the game with a $50 scenery budget.  That will still be under the $165 current value of the 2003 challenge. 

By the way, I might note that my 2003 challenge entry was a 54mm medieval project, using figures that are now out of production.  While I’ve added a few things to the original set, it remains one of my top 6 most played projects since I started keeping records in 1999, so I count it as a solid success. 

 

And now for something completely different … “FP3X3PW”

 TL;DR : A wargame to play on an airline tray table…jump down to the pictures if you don’t need the background…

Last weekend was a good one for gaming.  There was a meeting of the HAWKs on Friday night.  I played in a WWI 1914 battle with Duncan Adam’s collection of 28mm WWI miniatures using the Square Bashing rules for a gridded game.

On Saturday I drove down to the Washington area to play some games with my sons.  We had a couple of rounds of DBA in an ongoing tournament of most of our existing 1/72 scale armies, followed by a 19th century imagi-nations game using Norman’s Proxia armies and Neil Thomas’s rules from his book Wargaming Nineteenth Century Europe 1815-1878. He noted that this was our fifth game with these rules, so I am starting to have a grasp of what my forces should be trying to do.  We played scenario 41, “The Dominant Hill” from C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames (a.k.a. The Green Book).

On Sunday, one of the other HAWKs members hosted a monthly Saga day at Critical Hit Games in Abingdon, Maryland, so I took my pair of freshly painted Normans to try them out along with the rest of my Norman warband. (It needs another batch of cavalry and enough archers to fill out a batch to really shine, I think … )

Four sets of rules in three days is almost a convention level of play, so I felt that the month had gotten off to a very good start.

However, that’s not really the topic of today’s post.  In the usual convoluted way in which the Muses work, two weeks ago I was reading the Nordic Weasel Games Discord discussions, and conversation turned to Demon Ship, a hot new game from Black Site Studios. It doesn’t really look like anything that would be to my taste, but it was noted that one of its features is that it has a small enough footprint to be playable on an airline tray table.  I like miniaturized things in general (hence this hobby), so I search the web to find out what the dimensions of a tray table might be.  (About 15” by 10”, by the way…) The algorithms decided that I must really want a kid’s folding tray table play organizer. While I had’t realized that such a thing even existed, it did seem like it might be a good idea for keeping miniatures and dice contained, were one actually to wish to play a miniatures game in flight. There followed a rapid group brainstorming session, and one of the other posters suggested that I look at the 3x3 variants of Bob Cordery’s Portable Wargame. Bingo! That mapped neatly onto a set of 3” squares with a reserve zone at either end.  I figured that I could use my existing 6mm DBA/Hordes of the Things troops based on 40mm frontages. I promptly ordered the organizer and the two Portable Wargaming Compendia, all of which arrived over the weekend while I was playing other games.

When I got back from the Saga game I started getting things organized, starting (naturally…) with the organizer:

I dug into my scenery supplies and came up with a piece of sage felt, already somewhat mottled by spray paint, in the approved HAWKs manner.  I cut a piece to size, and marked off the grid:

Since the scenery requirements are fairly minimal, I thought that I could borrow scenery from the 6mm project box along with the troops, at least for long enough to get an idea of what it would look like.

The hills in my 6mm box are a commercial product, purchased at a Historicon when it was still at the Penn Harris…approximately 1989.  They didn’t quite fit neatly within the grid.  I scrounged around the basement looking for more blue felt, to cut a piece for a river which wouldn’t hang over the edges, but I am apparently out of blue felt right now.

I cut a couple of somewhat abstracted hills out of foamcore and covered them with more felt, simply glued in place with white glue. In the absence of blue felt, I dug around in my cupboard and found a roll of disused neoprene stream from Deep Cut Studio.  Since I wasn’t using it for anything at the moment (a little too straight for my taste), I decided that sacrificing 10” of the six feet I had was acceptable. I cut it with some curve to it, about half of the original width.

Conveniently, when Mark Cordone originally proposed the 3x3 grid version of the Portable Wargame, two of his sample armies were Romans and Sassanid Persians, both already painted and among my 6mm collection.  So the next step was to give it a try.

The suggested scenery generation table gave me the river with no other terrain.  It took about four turns and perhaps twenty minutes for the Sassanid army (to the right) to break the Roman left wing.  As played, Roman reserves had one turn to re-establish a presence in their left sector, and failed.  Round one to the Persians…

I’m not sure that a steady diet of this would be satisfying, but as something to stick in my carry-on bag to while away a flight, or to be available in the evenings on an otherwise dull business trip, it seems to be good.

After that, it was time to consider how I was going to render the troops portable.  Most of my troops are on steel bases of one sort or another, and the storage/travel boxes are lined with magnets.  The 6mm troops, however, go way back and are on matteboard.  I considered cutting foam for a while, but decided that it was probably better to dip into my stock of flexible steel bases and go with magnets.  I already had a small plastic box earmarked for a game that was supposed to fit in a carry-on, about 5x8x2 inches, or approximately the size of a reasonable trade paperback book. I added some flex steel to the two buildings borrowed as a built-up area, and the trees were already on steel washers.

Here’s the box, packed with the two armies, the scenery, dice, and damage tokens:

Opening it up, the hills are on top of a piece of foam.  While I didn’t want to try to fit the miniatures into the foam, having some foam as a back-up to help stabilize anything that might come loose seemed prudent.

Once the hills and foam are removed, we reach the troop layer.

While the rules found in the PW Compendia don’t contemplate using too much scenery, I decided that the extra set of trees wasn’t really limiting things too much.  Even if they weren’t there, there isn’t enough room to squeeze in a third army.

In the near term, I would like to type out a quick reference sheet to fit in the box, and I have some metal Roman buildings from Irregular which I could paint to swap for the generic English/fantasy thatched cottages currently in place, and I have seven other armies, both fantasy and historical, which could be magnetized and would be available to choose before a trip.  The two PW compendia include a couple of different takes on PW fantasy, including a 3x3 Hyborian Age version, so I see no reason not to include all the available troops as options.

If the Muses choose to inspire me to paint some additional 6mm troops (or monsters or heroes), well, I also have somewhat limited gaming space at home these days (with my main table being 3x5 feet), so some 6mm mass fantasy combat might be fun.

Meanwhile, all I need is a flight … 

Thinking About What to Do With Those Russian 54mm Flats; A Limited Fantasy Environment (Part 1)

 I don’t know how the rest of you think about this, but I have my miniatures divided up conceptually into “projects”, which is my term for a batch of miniatures that “go” together.  This is usually a combination of period (e.g., Late Bronze Age, Hundred Years War, Renaissance, Fantasy) to include various IPs (e.g. Buck Rogers, Burrows and Badgers) and scale (e.g. 1/72, small 25mm, heroic 25/28/30/32mm, 40mm).  For each project, I usually have a baseline rules set that I am using or planning to use.  Some projects have multiple sets of rules. Usually figures are based consistently, but projects intended to support multiple different styles of rules sometimes end up with a mix of basing.  My old school 25mm fantasy is probably the worst offender in this category, with a mix of 60mm squares with 4-8 foot figures for mass battles, individually mounted vintage figures generally on 25mm wooden bases with flexible steel underlayers, and figures mounted on steel washers (generally 1” or 0.75”). I have 60mm square magnetic movement bases to allow the individuals to be grouped for easier participation in mass battle games.  

 

I belong to a wargames club, the HAWKs, that specializes in historical miniatures wargaming, although we all play a broader range of tabletop games in our personal capacities.  Because of the commitment to miniatures,  though, we sometimes have a need for something that can be set up quickly, especially for times when (in the Before Times) we had an unexpectedly large number of players show up for a club night, or for when it’s too quiet at a convention.  We have evolved the Battle in a Box format to address that need, as described in the write up for a contest we ran for producing interesting BiaBs. The ideal BiaB is one that has its own scenery and the rest of the support gear (dice, rules, rules, handouts), and can sit quietly on a shelf waiting to be grabbed on the way out the door to a club meeting or convention.

 

So, what’s the difference between our established Battle in a Box and the Limited Environment that I am thinking about?

 

I am thinking of the Limited Environment as something that would be portable, and support several different play styles; ideally these would include role playing games using miniatures, skirmish games (1:1 small unit actions), mass battle games, and wargames campaigns (i.e. map games with armies and politics with the potential to generate tabletop battles). It would be “limited” in the sense that anything that would cause you to lay down a mat and a bunch of miniatures would be capable of being represented in miniatures, so that your armies will not have horse archers if no horse archer models are available, and your role playing characters are going to encounter wolves if that’s what you have models for.  I tend to believe that art (and miniatures games are a form of performance art) is better for limitations anyway.

 

Since this is just for my own purposes, and not designed to meet any external criteria such as those provided by the Battle in a Box Contest, the question of just how portable in needs to be can be answered with some flexibility.  My Portable Fantasy Campaign currently resides in 1 12-liter Really Useful Box, 3 6-liter Boxes, and 1 2.5-liter Box.  I have tested this out; the 12, the 2.5, and ONE 6-liter Box can be banded together into a lightweight package which will fit (as seen below) in the overhead compartment on a typical commercial airliner. (I’m guessing this was a Southwest 737, since it was on the way to GenCon a couple of years ago).  For a road trip, all three 6-liter boxes are still manageable.

So, with a fairly comprehensive Limited Environment already in hand, why start another?  Because it’s there? That’s probably the real answer, but I also do like my games to attract attention at a convention, and 54mm, even if flat (or maybe especially if flat) are easier to see than the 1/72s...

Tiny Library — A Bookish Digression

This has not been a particularly good month for hobbies.  I have ended up with enough time to daydream a bit, but not much more.  We have been spending some decompression time watching some relatively kind and calm television series, including Tiny House Nation, which got me thinking about a Tiny Library (not a Little Free Library although that’s a good idea in its own way), but something that would fit into a tiny house, or, more practically, be suitable for hauling along on an extended retreat (or, as my son noted, 

suitable for an emergency evacuation...we used to live in a flood zone).  This Tiny Library would presumably be supported for the retreat by a painting package, and a miniatures package (the Portable Fantasy Campaign).  It’s also implicit in the selection that I might have access to another gamer or two...

So here’s how it breaks down.

FICTION

1) The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien (India paper edition)

2) The White Company, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Books of Wonder edion with Wyeth illustrations)

The fiction section requires no particular explanation.  These are my two favorite most reread books.  To some extent, they also support the “wargaming retreat” theme as possible sources of scenario inspiration.

NON-FICTION

3) How to Cook Everything:The Basics, Mark Bittman

This one is a practical choice, intended to carry me through an extended period of civilized meal preparation, i.e. not camping nor in survival mode.  If I did need to camp, I have a couple of specialized camping cookbooks geared toward Coleman/Primus stoves and campfires.

4) Histories, Herodotus (tr. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World’s Classics)

5) The Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (Landmark edition)

6) The Expedition of Cyrus, Xenophon (tr. Robin Waterfield, Oxford World’s Classics)

The main history of Greek and Persian conflict before Alexander is covered by these three books, all of which are editions with good academic supports (i.e. footnotes and commentary).  I have ben looking for time to dig deeper into this period, and a retreat/sabbatical would be a perfect opportunity.

ROLE-PLAYING

7) Dungeons & Dragons, Gygax and Arneson (original edition with supplements)

8) The Traveller Book, Mark Miller 

9) Fate Accelerated Edition, Valentine et al.

There are several thoughts going on with these selections.  The Traveller Book is the most complete one-volume version of this classic science fiction RPG.  I’ve been a fan since the first printing in 1977, and it’s always good to have a version of the game along on a trip because of the amount of inherent solo play there is in character creation and world building.   The Dungeons & Dragons set has been chosen for the practical reason of being the fantasy game I would wish to run next.  Preparations for such a game would be a reasonable retreat activity, but it can also be used for some random setting solo play with the aid of some early random dungeon tables.  The original rules were reprinted in 2013, so I usually carry around the reprint edition when I’m working on something.  Bringing my tattered original copy from 1976 is a sentimental move.  Fate Accelerated is here because it is generic with respect to genre, simple, and very thin.  If other people were not along on this retreat, it probably would not see use, but it also takes up very little space.

MINIATURE WARGAMES

10) Dragon Rampant, Dan Mersey

11) De Bellis Antiquitatis 3.0, Phil Barker

12) Setting Up a Wargames Campaign, Tony Bath

13) One Hour Wargames, Neil Thomas

Among the four categories, this one is probably the most subject to revision.  Part of this is due to the category needing an additional support package to be of use at all.  So, anticipating that the aforementioned Portable Fantasy Campaign would be the basis of the support package, Dragon Rampant is one of the main rule sets which ordinarily goes with that.  (Practically speaking, this doesn’t really need to be here; the actual physical box with the miniatures stuff has Dragon Rampant, Hordes of the Things, and A Song of Blades and Heroes already tucked in the box.) 

DBA is on this list as the current family favorite ancients rules to support the painting project implied by the Greek history books.  

One Hour Wargames is included for two reasons.  The primary reason is that its scenario collection is already scaled for small armies and for a 3’ by 3’ game surface (which is what I have for the Portable Fantasy Campaign).  The second reason is that there are simple rules for a variety of periods in case one needed a bit of a break, and was open to improvising a game using cardboard counters or some such in lieu of actual miniature troops.

There are three alternates that would be reasonable choices in this category.  My signed sentimental copy of Donald Featherstone’s Solo-Wargaming has some ideas on how to get through a period without other gamers around.  A copy of Morschauser’s How to Play War Games in Miniature could be a direct substitute for the “all periods” aspect of One Hour Wargames, and is something of a sentimental favorite even though I am not attached to any particular physical copy of the book.  If One Hour Wargames were replaced, a need for C.S. Grant’s Scenarios for Wargames would be greater.  The “Green Book” is also both rather rare (in general) and sentimental (in the form of my particular worn and much annotated copy).

Different choices in miniatures would imply different rules; choosing to paint 1/72 scale 18th century figures rather than Greeks and Persians would call for A Gentleman’s War instead of DBA; bringing along some Dark Ages figures to work on might call for Dan Mersey’s Dux Bellorum, and so forth...

IMPLIED SUPPORT

As mentioned, the choice of cookbook has to do with what sort of kitchen one might be able to access; having just an Instant Pot would imply a different cookbook, as would expecting access to be restricted to just a camp stove.

The role-playing games would necessitate a bag of dice and a stock of office supplies (notebooks of quadrille paper, notecards, colored pencils, etc.).  The would also benefit from access to the miniatures in the miniatures support package.

As mentioned the miniatures books imply access to a package of miniatures.  This should include at least a basic painting kit, some tools and basing supplies, and some miniatures awaiting painting.  

I haven’t double-checked it lately, but I had pulled out eight boxes of Zvezda plastics, which I had calculated had the troops necessary to support the four basic armies which might be needed for the project (two slightly varied Greek armies for the Peloponnesian War, two different Persian armies to do Cunaxa, and the Persian War to be done with a mix of them).  I haven’t sized them, but they should fit in a 9 or 12 litre Really Useful Box along with the basing supplies and tools.  My travel paint kit would probably suffice, although I’d want to make sure that the bottles were full before heading off on a six month retreat.

So, there you have it, a thought experiment made (somewhat) real ...

(Edited 10/29/20 to remove typing errors...)

Encounter at the Old Stone Bridge

 You know that your family is deep in geekery of various sorts when the activity for the morning of your son’s wedding finds you setting up a skirmish game in the hotel room. (Of course, the groom and the groomsmen were engaged in a game of Magic: The Gathering at the time...). My brother and I are running two sessions of Osprey/Oathsworn’s Burrows and Badgers for Gencon, and we thought that it was an opportune time to practice a bit more before the convention.  Happily, a work desk in the room allowed us to set up something about 2 feet by 3 feet.  We just used the basic battle scenario, looking to rout the opposing warband, and entered along the road from either direction.

The Battlefield

My brother chose a warband led by Reynard the highwayfox, with Red Sam the armored squirrel as his lieutenant, backed up by three mice, one of whom was a magic user.  I had a troupe of six, led by Blacknose the otter, with Wild Ned the highlander ferret as his lieutenant, a mole landsknecht, a crossbow-weasel, an herb-hedgehog, and a highlander mouse.  Reynard’s band advanced quickly and began to cross the bridge, but were met by Wild Ned who engaged in an extended fight with Red Sam.  As other beasts piled into the fray, Reynard attempted to wade across the river, only to be sorely wounded by a crossbow bolt from the weasel.  By the time he finished wading across, it only took one more bolt to drop him.

Reynard’s beasts reach the bridge...

At the bridge, beast after beast joined the fray, and soon it was too much for Sam.  A final blow from the mole put him out of action, and the battle was over.

...but the ensuing melee doesn’t go well for them.

It was probably just as well, because it was time to get dressed for the wedding.  So, we ended the day with a beautiful ceremony and the addition of a new member to our family.

And then there was a wedding....

Road trip recap

In the previous post I mentioned that I made a road trip to Michigan to celebrate Christmas with my family.  My brother and I have been working on a fantasy gaming project most of the year, with the intention of running some games at conventions in 2016 using our vintage miniatures collections.

This was supposed to have been a simple operation, but was complicated this year by the Ral Partha/Ironwind Metals Kickstarter to revive Chaos Wars and put a lot of the Fantasy Collector Series elves and orcs back into production, and by a related urge to go into collector mode and recreate the armies that I owned and/or longed for as an adolescent gamer back in the mid-1970s with the help of eBay.

Because my brother lives in Indiana and I live in Maryland, our opportunities to put games together have been limited.  He visited here in May, and we met at Gencon in August.  We started discussing the possibility of doing some gaming around the margins of the Christmas visit, and things started falling into place when my aunt offered to let us use the game room in her basement, so we had a 4x6 table available without having to bring folding tables.  At that point we decided that we could play Chaos Wars, but that we would not reasonably be able to put on a Ringbearer test game.

My brother offered to bring the terrain, based around a Cigar Box Battles ground cloth, and some troops, and I packed up my travel kit as well.  I've showed pictures of elements of this before.  I did some research and concluded that a 12 liter Really Useful Box was the largest that would fit under the seat in a typical airline cabin, so I built my 1/72 scale fantasy skirmish project to fit into one.  It is all ready, just "grab and go", and I brought it this time to provide the basis for scenery for a 25mm skirmish game, just in case.  For this trip, I also added the original edition paper copy of Chaos Wars.

Since I was driving, not flying, I also loaded two 6-liter Really Useful Boxes with a selection of multiply-based vintage Ral Partha figures from my collection.  I strapped the whole assembly together with a couple of lengths of nylon webbing and a "Strap-a-handle".  The final dimensions were about 11x17x12 inches.

Most of my mass fantasy armies are based on 60mm square wood bases, with flexible steel bottoms (from Litko).  My boxes are then lined with sheet magnets.  As can be seen from the photo below, the 60mm square bases do not tile the box with 100% efficiency.  I can fit 18 bases per box, which leaves some extra space.  I filled that with figures on individual steel washer bases, or some of the newer Aurora Project bases, which are one inch wood circles with Litko flexible steel bottoms.  This seems to hold pretty well.  The two box pictures were taken at the end of the return trip, after an eleven hour drive, and everything is still holding.  I did deliberately leave home one or two taller figures that past experience as shown to have insufficient "grip".

I also had to leave at home a couple of units of lancer cavalry whose lances are a little too tall to fit in the 6-liter boxes.  Eventually, I expect to have a 12-liter box with the magnet sheets for overly tall figures, but the dimensions will limit that to road travel rather than air.

In the previous post I gave a link to a battle report on our Chaos Wars battle, which I posted to the Ral Partha forums.  Since my brother had brought troops and had a scenario plan, we only ended up using about half the units I brought with me, but the package is easy to carry once all loaded and assembled, so it wasn't a big deal.  While we didn't end up playing an individual figure skirmish game, I will note that I chose the individually-based figures with an eye toward that, just to keep options open.


With all of the figures showing up from eBay, and with the expectation of the imminent arrival of the Ral Partha Kickstarter box with 200 more, I have been trying to keep up with painting at any opportunity.  I took my full travel paint kit with me (rather than the TSA-compatible flying kit), and had a couple of mornings to work on things.  I only finished two figures, though.  The left-handed elf archer is a Tom Meier sculpt from the old Ral Partha 98-006 Dungeon Party boxed set, an eBay acquisition, and the female on the right is an H-21, a warrior woman (looks more like a rogue to me) from the Royal Armies of the Hyborean Age range, one of three figures from that range that I stripped and repainted this year that have been in my collection since they were new.

Basing is still in progress on those two.

I bought a copy of the Osprey wargames rules Lion Rampant when they were released, but time management got away from me, and I still have yet to try playing them.  They have received some good buzz online, though, and we have a couple of HAWKs members who are working on retinues. When it was announced that Osprey would be publishing a fantasy variant, I went ahead and pre-ordered a copy on speculation.  One of the club members sent out a link to  a review of Dragon Rampant just before Christmas.  It looked like this was going to be something I would play. Unfortunately, my pre-order copy was due to arrive after our departure on the day we drove to Michigan, so I splurged on a Kindle copy and was able to read it on the trip up, during the periods when it wasn't my turn to be the driver. (Thank you, Irene!)

My older son was also staying at my aunt's house, where we had staged the Chaos Wars game on Saturday, and was kind enough to assist me on Sunday morning in playing through the rules, with a couple of warbands I built with what was in my travel boxes.  He is not a fan of games using activation rolls, so I knew that he would be a bit dubious, and we did have a couple of turns where we passed the dice back and forth as we each failed to activate anything.

Dragon Rampant uses a freeform system for representing things on the table.  In the medieval/historical version, units have either 6 or 12 figures (generally corresponding to mounted/foot), and casualties are intended to be removed.  In the fantasy version, units have 6 or 12 strength points, and you are free to depict the unit with whatever seems appropriate.  If the unit does not have 6 or 12 models, casualties/damage are shown by markers on the table.  Since I didn't grab my gamemaster box for this trip, we made do with dice.  This ends up reminding me (favorably) of Hordes of the Things, in that you can generally find some game category (with the possible addition of special abilities) to allow you to assign values to pretty much any miniature you might wish to use.

I took a band consisting of a dragon (greater war beast with optional flame attack and flying), a land dragon captain (heroic elite cavalry, depicted as a single figure), some lizard riders (javelin armed rather than bows, with reduced range and a cost break), and some goblin infantry (being green-skinned, they were deemed to be a sort of reptile-man for the day).

Norman's warband had six units, a heroic single-figure heavy rider leader, some heavy foot elf pikes, some sharpshooting elf bows, a spell-slinging single-figure elf princess using the "scouts" profile for stealth and ranged attacks, and allied centaur heavy and light warriors (using the heavy and light rider profiles).  As expected for a trial game, we had to flip through the rules a bit (difficult with the Kindle edition, I'm afraid) and I'm sure that we missed some options as far as our actions went.  There is a quick reference sheet in the book, so I expect that having a couple of those on the table will reduce the need to flip pages considerably.  In fact, I tend to expect that one will be able to play this from memory and your warband profile sheet by the end of the first game.

I'm looking forward to trying this out with the other interested club members soon.  I note that there is a (joke?) rule in this game giving a glory (victory point) bonus to warbands consisting entirely of pre-1984 miniatures.  My centaurs in this game are right on the borderline, but everything else on the table was well within that, so I expect that will not go over well with the rest of the club when I try to (habitually) claim that bonus...

We drove home on Monday, and I was pleased to find that my Ral Partha/Ironwind Chaos Wars Kickstarter box had arrived while I was away, so that made for a nice post-Christmas surprise. (OK, not that much of a surprise--they were very good about keeping us updated on shipping.)

Mine was full of all manner of Chaos Wars goodness.  I'd ordered the large version of the starter set, a package of additional command figures, a unit of elf pikes, an elven colossus, and the new figures sculpted for the Kickstarter.

They threw in samples of skeletons and dwarves, which will apparently be the next Kickstarter.

We also got a handful of bonus figures, originally all from the Personalities and Things That Go Bump in the Night range.  The winged panther is new to me.

The elven colossus, shown here with the new sculpted Tom Meier elves, was originally sold in the early years of Ral Partha as part of a small series of 54mm painters' figures, and resembles, in larger scale, the earliest of the Ral Partha elves.  They suggest using it as a giant animated statue with the 25s, and I think that I'll do mine in verdigrised bronze, a technique that I'll being trying out on some Bones designated as Frostgrave statues before I try it on this.

I'll try to post some New Years project thoughts tomorrow.  While I am really enjoying this revisitation of fantasy gaming, I also want to make time for the Not Quite Seven Years War again in the new year.

Huzzah 2015

A belated report:

Huzzah, the annual convention excellently run by the Maine Historical Wargamers, took place in Portland, Maine, from May 15th to May 17th.

This was my fourth Huzzah, and my favorable reports on the previous three events led my club, the Hawks, to dispatch an expeditionary force this year. Counting our remote member, Ross Macfarlane, we had eight in attendance, and hosted seven official games.

Ross and I have typically been deciding on our Huzzah games at the previous convention, so we had known for a long while that we were planning on running two Charge! games using the Prince August 40mm home cast figures, as part of the ongoing action in the Not Quite Seven Years War. Having chosen the project, the decision to drive was made for me, because the stuff needed can't really be brought on an air trip. So, I and my SO drove up on Thursday, and were ready to start bright and early on Friday. Huzzah added a Friday afternoon gaming block this year; if things keep going this way, perhaps Friday mornings will be next...

Ross and my son Norman both arrived around lunch time on Friday, from opposite directions. Ross and I are working on a set of fast play Old School fantasy rules as part of what I've been calling the Aurora Project. We wanted to take the opportunity of a face-to-face meeting to put a game on the table as part of the rules development process. Hordes of classic 25mm fantasy figures would have been difficult to carry along with the 40mm NQSYW figures, so I brought my 6mm DBA/Hordes of the Things box and we improvised a bit.

We hastily drew up a scenario in which a combined force of elves and men attempted to drive off a force of orcs and allies before they could complete an elaborate spell to destroy the castle (seen below around the middle of the table).




The woods, visible around the middle of the table on Ross's side, turned out to be a significant factor, as the humans and the elves got separated and their attacks were not coordinated. Mounting casualties eventually caused the elves and men to retreat, and the orcs were able to complete their spell and destroy the castle.



With that experience, we can now proceed with rules refinement.

Ross and I staged the first of our NQSYW games Friday evening. The scenario was "A Chance Encounter" from Scenarios for Wargames by CS Grant. This is a meeting engagement, in which advance guard from the two armies (the Northern Alliance and the Pragmatic Coalition) attempt to seize and hold a strategic village. In this scenario, both sides had approximately equal forces, with a balanced mix of light infantry, line infantry, cavalry, and artillery.



As it played out here, the Coalition forces were able to seize the village before the Alliance forces reached it.


However, to the south of the village, an extended cavalry melee commenced, which was eventually won by the heavier Alliance cavalry. As usually, terrible casualties were suffered by the Wachovian Hussars. As night fell, Coalition forces held the town, but were surrounded by Alliance forces, and the ultimate victory would have depended on whose main body arrived first the next morning. I'm sorry I didn't make some notes on the strengths and positions, as it would have made an interesting follow-on scenario for a future game.



Our second game was on Saturday afternoon, and was Scenario 1 from the same book. I got so involved in actually running the game that I didn't get any pictures of it myself. Here's one taken by Chris Palmer, Pragmatic players to the right, Alliance players to the left:





In this situation, an advancing Pragmatic army was faced with an Alliance army holding a defensive position based on two towns, supported by three small redoubts. The Pragmatic players chose to mass their cavalry opposite the open area to the right of their line, and the Alliance players also deployed their cavalry in the same zone. The Pragmatics planned to demonstrate against the town on the left, strongly attack the town in the center, and advance behind a cavalry screen to seize the redoubt on their right. The demonstration on the left eventually proved too costly for the Wiegenburg regiment, which was forced to withdraw. In the center, the Pragmatic attack handily carried the the town. On the right, the attack was delayed while the cavalry battled it out. Eventually weight of numbers told for the Pragmatics, and the Alliance cavalry was forced to retreat, but the melee last long enough for the sun to be setting before the attack on the redoubt could be carried out. The Alliance army was deemed to have held the position long enough for reinforcements to arrive, stalling the Coalition advance. All in all, with a marginal win and a defeat, it was not a stellar little campaign for my forces. While we can often beat our traditional rivals of North Polenberg, the stouter troops of Rosmark have proved to be too hard a nut to crack in recent encounters, and it may finally be time to sue for peace...

Huzzah runs an informal flea market on Sunday morning. I was pleased to find a box of Exin Castillo castle blocks, which are nicely sized for 25mm figures.



My younger son has been looking for an expansion to the Exin castle I've owned for years, and was very pleased to find that I had acquired a "12", one step up from the "11" we've had, so I expect some sort of castle-based scenario in the future. I was able to re-home a bunch of the Reaper Bones figures, particularly the ones from Bones II, and then used some of that money to invest in a group of vintage Hinchliffe Byzantines and allies, which I'll report on later.

We headed home around lunchtime on Sunday, and I was able to use the amazing elements of modern technology to coordinate our Gencon event registration while in the passenger seat on the way home.

Overall, it was a great convention, and I hope to be able to attend again next year, if my son's college graduation isn't the same weekend...

Gencon After Action Report (edited, now with pictures)

One of my oldest friends, Joe,  suggested this year that we try to mount an expedition to GenCon. He was a member of my original D&D group in 1976. My brother, also a 1976 D&Der and a resident of Indiana, somewhat to my surprise, agreed that this sounded like a good idea, so we started to make it happen. That made this spring and summer quite a season for gaming conventions, between Huzzah, Historicon, and Gencon. Both of my sons were able to arrange their schedules to be part of this, so we descended on Indianapolis with a crew of five.

I last made it to GenCon (with my brother) in 1980. That was in a different world. The product releases that year included d10s and the 1st printing of the AD&D Deities and Demigods book, and the AD&D tournament modules were the Slavelords series. There were, perhaps, 5000 attendees. This year there were 50,000, so it was a dozen or more times bigger than Historicon, my recent benchmark for what I consider to be a "large" convention.

I really didn't know what to expect, so my pre-convention planning attempted to cover a range of reasonable contingencies. I had worked on the Portable Fantasy Game which I carried along, and I brought some roleplaying stuff for pickup gaming, travel edition Carcassonne, and travel edition Settlers of Catan. I did some research on people's experiences from previous years, so I was fairly confident that this was going to be more than was necessary.

We arrived in Indianapolis on Wednesday night, to find that the airport had put out the welcome mat for us, literally:

My brother hosted us on Wednesday night, and we headed to the convention center on Thursday morning intending to arrive around 10:00. This turned out to be a little optimistic, as the convention on top of daily commuter traffic made parking difficult. We turned out to be a long walk from the convention center, so anything wanted needed to be carried; there was no going back to the car for additional supplies. I paid the extra fee to have my badge delivered in advance, which turned out to be an excellent decision, as my brother was in line at Will Call for a long time to collect his.

I had a game scheduled for 2:00, so that gave me some time to duck into the exhibition hall. I had prepared for that in advance, and had the map with the locations of some exhibitors I particularly wished to see. This was mostly companies whose Kickstarters I had supported, so that kept me busy until it was time for my first game.

My first game was a Fate game. For those who don't follow rpgs, Fate is published by Evil Hat Productions, who had a wildly successful Kickstarter for the publication of the 4th edition (aka Fate Core) back in late 2012. I have been playing in an online game for much of the year, and I wanted to see what a game looked at live at the table. The game was very interesting; Fate is an adaptable tool kit, and the GM was using it to run a game involving both characters and units in an urban uprising game. I am going to steal some of the ideas soon, so that was a success.

We got the whole crew together for dinner, which was nice, and my younger son had us all playing Fluxx until the food was delivered.

My first event on Friday was in the afternoon, when I had the opportunity to sit in on a live recording session for "Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff", one of my favorite weekly gaming podcasts. After that I scurried across the convention space to meet one of the other players in my online game for some pickup roleplaying offered by Games on Demand. We were in the last group assigned, so we ended up in an unusual little narrative game about being a labor clone in some dystopic(?) future. That was different, and definitely outside my usual comfort zone. I have been reading about indie rpgs for quite a while, so it was interesting to see something as far removed from original Dungeons & Dragons as can be.

My sons were signed up for some Diplomacy.  Here's Norman:

Four of the five of us were signed up for a modern-era National Security Decision Making game on Friday night. Norman and William have both done this before. The NSDM used to be a regular offering at Cold Wars. The topics vary, but the whole thing is based on freeform rpgs used by the US government for insight into high-level political/military matters. We had about 80 players for this one, which was divided into cells representing India, Pakistan, China, and Indonesia. I was representing the Indian steel industry, for example, with a goal of influencing my Indian politics to support my objective to open factories outside India and increase government spending on the steel industry. I used to do political LARPs for fun, so this was something I was comfortable with, except for the part where it was running until almost midnight and I was fading...

My one scheduled event on Saturday was a tank battle game, for which the whole crew had enlisted.

Once we were through with that, we had one more group dinner, and then grabbed an empty table for a pickup fantasy miniatures game, using the Portable Fantasy Game set (and the Song of Blades and Heroes rules) I'd brought along. One of my brother's clearest recollections of the 1980 Gencon was of passing a group of guys doing a pickup fantasy miniatures game on a table in a random hallway, who looked like they were having more fun than anyone else we'd seen that weekend. Therefore, I wanted to provide him with a similar opportunity this time.

Youth and skill vs. old age and treachery... Joe and my brother go up against my sons.

The human cavalry made their first PFG appearance in this game, here riding down some of William's hapless goblins.

On Sunday, the kids and I made a final sweep of the exhibition hall and then headed back over to Games on Demand for another roleplaying experience. I ended up taking the fifth (and final) seat in a session of Lady Blackbird, a game often mentioned on rpg.net as an example of a tight minimalist design. This was a lot of fun, and I was left with an urge to spend some additional time with roleplaying games in the near future.

In addition to the scheduled events, we spent a fair amount of time in the exhibition hall over the weekend. In addition to visiting with my open Kickstarters, I spent some time digging through various used (old) game dealers, and came home with a few miscellaneous things that I used to own...We also used the auction/consignment area as a convenient rest point. I had a bidder number, but didn't actually use it. I did buy a couple of classic Traveller items for later use.  In general, I was keeping the buying down because I didn't leave a lot of surplus space in my baggage for new purchases.

My main lessons learned from the convention were:

Don't schedule events closer than two hours apart. You could need almost that much time to buy food and walk from one end of the space to the other, especially if the first game should run a little over.

Comfortable shoes are an absolute must. I wore my hiking boots with appropriate socks, so I made it through the weekend without crippling ankle pain. I've been wearing a pedometer as part of a work fitness challenge. The first three days at Gencon all topped my previous record, and were about double whet I'd usually consider a good exercise day.

There's plenty to do, so not having scheduled events won't be a problem in having fun. However, additional preplanning would have enhanced the experience.

I'll leave it at that for now, in the interest of actually getting this report posted.