Boom Boom Boom Boom

A quick little post for a quick little painting job! I'm back on the Flames of War at the moment, the Firestorm: Lorraine campaign that we've been running having lured us back in after a few quiet weeks. 

As I had a bit of advance notice that I'd be playing a game, I decided that it was time to paint the artillery I've had lying around since I got it cheap during the messy collapse of Maelstrom Games.

All guns repeat!

Here we go - 4 105mm light howitzers. I fielded these, plus my 75mm pack howitzers and some 155mm guns (proxied with anti-tank guns I'm afraid) as Firestorm troops in the game and was thus able to take full advantage of the US rules for Time on Target and Hit 'Em With Everything You've Got. This blunted Kieron's attacks nicely and gave me the means to cover my own advance, but I have to say that artillery isn't hugely powerful in Flames of War so it's a nice to have element rather than something essential for me.

Anyway, the models themselves - I cobbled together the command, staff team and observers from spare models, including some useful guys with binoculars that are actually intended as half-track passengers. I made a makeshift table for the staff team by stacking up oil drums and boxes from leftover stowage. Works out quite nicely if I do say so myself!

You wait ages for a game...

... and then three come along at once! Well, close enough that I only write a single blog post about them, anyway. My spare time at home has been taken up with non-wargames related "real world" things lately, so I don't have much to report on the painting front, but I have been able to play some diverse games over the last couple of weeks.

First up, my first match in the South Yorkshire Dice Devils' Blood Bowl league, against Rich's lizardmen team, Ichi Bo Lox. This gave me a chance to run out my goblins, the Squig Fuelled Stabbers, again. By playing enthusiastically, and with judicious application of secret weapons, I was able to inflict some casualties and went into the second half at 1-1.

Damn! The first Lizardman touchdown

Huzzah! A glorious equaliser!

Some midfield violence. It looked like I could get the ball away for a while, until...

Blast! The winner for the scaly ones!

Unfortunately, exuberance and lucky dice weren't quite enough in the second half. Despite being able to keep some fights going for several turns, eventually the better quality of Rich's players began to tell, and he was able to score a scrappy second touchdown and take the lead. I ran out of time trying to force my way upfield with a huge mob of goblins and occasionally the ball, but I managed to get out of the first game without any goblin fatalities, which is always a plus!


Then, JP invited me to come and help run some demo games of Flames of War at the Dice Devils... which turned into demoing Saga instead. Saga is a very easy game to demo, and we had a few enjoyable games over the space of the evening. JP turned out to be unable to lose to newbies though - slaying his opponent's warlord with a single fatigued berserker (I think the fatal phrase was "I only have four dice and need sixes, so you'll be fine...").


Finally, this weekend I had an evening of X-Wing with Kieron. In an unusual (almost unprecedented, in fact) move, we played through the scenarios in the rulebook, rather than just lining up 100 point squadrons and having at it. Each game was a pretty close run thing, but overall I ended up down 3 games to 1. I think that may be down to the design of the scenarios with the forces from the basic set, so I'd like to try them again with 100 point squadrons and see if I can manage any better.

Not sure what was happening here, but I'm sure it was exciting

So that's been my hobby life recently. At some point I hope I can get enough free time in a row to paint some models, you never know your luck...

Hello New People!

Ah, come in, come in! Don't worry, there are plenty of seats still left at the back. You'll have to excuse the mess, it's the cleaner's day off...

Yes, my blog has gained several new followers over the last couple of days thanks to a nice post on the site of Andy the Blog Pimp. As a result, I feel that my current level of posting is entirely insufficient! So, let's have another post. It's only a quick one I'm afraid, but here's a look at what I've been painting in the last few days.

First up, I'm still finishing off this cavalry unit for my Impetus 15mm Romans:

Charge!

Like most of my Romans, I've put these on a partially built up base, using foamcore to create levels and then covering that with filler, gravel and sand for texture.

If you're especially eagle eyed, you might notice that the rider at the back has been repositioned. That's thanks to Pete the cyber bully pointing out that it looked weird as it was facing the other way, which caused me to look at it again, decide he was right, and change its facing before I finished the base. This constitutes written proof that someone did once agree with Pete, so that's newsworthy on its own.

While basing the Romans I found myself sat at my desk with nothing to do as various stages of the base had to dry, so I needed something else to work on. I opted for some zombies!

The one in the middle is called Dave.

These are Wargames Factory modern zombies. To be honest, they're not brilliant models. The detail isn't very well defined, and it was quite difficult to come up with different poses as one arm on each torso is sculpted in place. However, they were pretty good value for money, and with zombies you do want a horde!

I've started to (finally) paint these as I've been in a zombie frame of mind for a while - went and saw the (frankly disappointing given the brilliant book it's based on) World War Z movie, and the Walking Dead has just restarted on TV. I've also been working on zombie rules for my own skirmish game, Flashbang. I'm hoping to get a multiplayer zombie-based game of that going fairly soon, so I need to get cracking on the zombies!

I did find these fairly quick to paint - basically I gave them a base coat, one layer of highlights, and then slathered them in ink. A messy look actually works quite nicely with the undead, or at least that's my excuse. The one model here that did take longer is the soldier in fatigues. He's my first attempt at painting Multicam, and I think I'll be trying a couple more attempts at that before I finally get brave enough to tackle my Empress models. I think Multicam is worth a blog post by itself, so look out for that.

Pete put up an interesting post recently where he showcased all of his painted models. I like that idea and intend to do the same myself, as soon as I can make the time. Hopefully I can have that as my next post soon, watch this space!

I am still here!

I realise there hasn't been much going on here of late. Sorry about that! Unusually, it isn't so much that I just haven't been blogging, but more that I haven't had a lot to talk about. Recently, the weather has been nice and I've been toiling in the garden rather than picking up a paintbrush. This would be more impressive if the garden didn't still look like a demonstration of what the world will look like ten years after humanity has been wiped out, but never mind.

Eventually, the pressure built up too much, and I eventually did something. And here it is!

Actual models being painted!

It's a cavalry unit for Impetus! As you can see, I'm at the basing stage. This photo was taken while the filler was still drying, so I need to add some sand and gravel and then paint it. Also, because I've left the models so long before basing them, I need to touch up some areas that have got chipped while I've kept moving them out of the way and saying "I must base those" to myself.

Finally, here's an action shot for you:

Those four skirmishers are in some trouble now...

That's a block of my Romans in the process of coming down a hill to massacre Pete's Carthaginians last night. To be fair, Pete has played Impetus twice, and is still learning how it all works. It was a win though!

Empress Miniatures Kickstarter

Brace yourselves, I'm going to try to convince everyone reading this that they should immediately back a Kickstarter project...

It's at least theoretically possible that someone remembers that I spoke to one of the guys on the Empress Miniatures stand at Vapnartak earlier this year, and he told me that they were planning to expand their modern combat range to cover a fictional conflict between the US and China.

This is now being run as a project on Kickstarter, called Devil Dogs and Dragons.

So far the models on offer are two flavours of US Marines (in helmets or boonie hats, depending on whether you want them to be dressed for the tropics or not) and the Chinese People's Liberation Army. That's three sets of 20 models each, covering 12 different riflemen poses plus support weapons and command. There's also the standard free model for all backers above £5, and extra freebies at the higher levels.

Ooh, shiny - the title from the Kickstarter page

The stretch goals also look good. The first, Navy SEAL frogmen, has already been reached and the second, PLA special forces, isn't far off. A full Australian set follows on from that.

I've pledged to this, as the models look great, as do the Empress models that I already have. I'm especially keen on having a small unit of Navy SEAL frogmen! Since I already have a few US infantry I've opted for the full PLA set plus a couple of US extras. These will (it's going to happen, it really is) be used for Flashbang (my own rules) plus I'm going to take a look at Force on Force as that seems to be the standard for modern warfare rules now.

USMC Command - a picture from the Kickstarter page

As I've said before, the quality of the Empress Miniatures sculpts is really high, and they take great pains to get the equipment looking accurate and to have very natural poses (apparently each model is based on a photo of a real soldier).

PLA fighting - a picture from the Kickstarter page

So I'd encourage everyone to pledge for this, if only to unlock more stretch goals! Go on, you know you want to...

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/535186969/empress-miniatures-devil-dogs-and-dragons-28mm-fig

Regaining some Impetus

Since the untimely demise of the Wargamers Free Company club nights, my games haven't been played in a club setting. This has worked out quite well for playing against Pete and Kieron (in fact I've roughly doubled the number of games I play, which I certainly didn't expect), but did mean that I missed out on playing some of the other former WFC members.

I finally managed to change both of those last night with a game of Impetus with JP at the South Yorkshire Dice Devils, a fairly new club that JP has played at a few times.

Impetus is a game that I've been "playing" for years, but I've never been able to play it regularly. Partly I think it became a bit of a victim of its own success for us - it covers everything from ancients to medieval to renaissance in a single set of rules, but that causes people to all get the armies they're most interested in, which cover a range of periods.

This means that I've never really internalised the rules as I have for Flames of War, for example, but I'm hoping we can change that now as both Pete and Kieron have acquired armies that work for the period of the 2nd Punic War, matching my Republican Romans. I took Pete through a demo game this week which led nicely to last night's live-fire exercise with JP's ancient Britons.

As there was only a 4'x4' table left at the club when we arrived, we both cut our armies down to 300 points. I was using the updated Punic War Romans list from Extra Impetus 4, and had everything in a single command, which I deployed first.

I made a mistake here - I didn't notice that only the area on my left was wide enough for JP to set up his traditional massive block of infantry, which pushed his cavalry and chariots to the other side. Once he deployed I saw my error - my anti-cavalry triarii were on the wrong side of the battlefield.

My plan was basically to sit and wait for the British to attack me, reasoning that their poor discipline might cause them to become disordered as they got close and allow me to attack them while they were out of formation. Since my triarii were in the wrong place, though, I tried to redeploy them to the other flank. Triarii have the highest discipline class in the game and can in theory move 6 times in a turn. However, both units failed every discipline test they had to make, and only succeeded in turning their flank to the enemy and becoming disordered.

I sent my skirmishers and light cavalry off to throw javelins at the oncoming chariots - there seemed to be little point in a shoot out between the skirmishers.
 

The triarii continued to flounder, preventing the legionaries behind them from moving up, and coming under lots of fire from the British skirmishers.

The light cavalry had much more success, wiping out an enemy cavalry unit that charged them in the flank and causing some damage with javelins. They were then able to retreat behind the lake when charged by the surviving British cavalry and kept shooting at them from there.

The medium cavalry turned to face the British chariots, who were all now disordered.

The surging British infantry scattered my skirmishers, and the beleagured triarii just had time to turn to face the enemy before they were charged.

On the flank, the Roman and British cavalry exchanged charges to no real effect, and the Roman light cavalry moved to intercept a breakaway unit from the British line. They had to evade some charges from them, but were able to tie up this unit for the rest of the battle.

Following some semblance of the original plan, the block of hastati and principes waited until the triarii eventually succumbed to their enemy's superior numbers before charging home. The Britons had taken some casualties to get this far, but were still able to swamp the Romans as they had more units.

However, with the new army list, the Romans can use large units (just like the Britons), and this eventually allowed the better quality troops to win out. The Romans were reliably scoring hits (even as they took hits themselves) and with some lucky rolling, eventually killed the British general, causing his command to rout, and take the smaller cavalry command with it! The Romans had won the day. Despite their general's attempts to use clever manuevers, it was simply the ability of the legions to dish out more punishment than their enemies that carried them through.

I still have more to learn with Impetus, but this was the first game where I really felt like I stood a chance with this army, thanks to the subtle changes in the new list. In future though, I need to remember to look at the ground better when I deploy, and if I must move units to the other flank, to do that behind my line instead of in front of it!

The Dice Devils seem to be a nice friendly club, if a bit heavily focused on GW-style games at the moment. I expect I'll be down there from time to time, but at the moment at least I'd like to keep up the home games as much as possible - those games seem to be better planned and just flow more easily than the pick up games I seem to get on a club night.

Board Game Review - Level Seven [Escape]

Recently my gaming has taken a slightly different direction, and I've been playing board games on a semi-regular basis with Pete and Wes. Wes isn't a wargamer (although it can only be a matter of time), so this is a nice way to get him involved in some games. The other advantage of board games over wargames is that it's much easier to pick up a new game and play it, so we've been able to get through a few of them and I've had a go at some new things.

All of which is a build up to saying that I'm planning to write some short reviews for the games we play and post them here. If nothing else, I'm hoping this will encourage me to think about what aspects of a game work well and not so well, which is good to bear in mind when I'm working on my own rule-writing efforts.

So, without further ado, let's have a look at the first game we've been playing, Level Seven [Escape] from Privateer Press.

The Setup

Each player plays the part of a prisoner who wakes up in a secret government facility with no memory of how they got there. They must escape, defeating or outwitting armed guards and alien creatures in the process, before the facility is locked down and they are sealed inside permanently.

Stuff in the Box

This game comes in a reasonably hefty box, with plenty of the map tiles and cards to allow for a pretty good random experience each time you play. The pieces themselves are all pretty good quality, in particular the artwork on the map tiles is really nice and really gives the right flavour for a dingy underground base.

The playing pieces for the players and enemies are cardboard flats instead of models, but again the art is nice - if I had a complaint about them it would be that they are all quite similar so occasionally they got mixed up, but that wasn't too much of a problem.

You also get eight special dice, which are quite nice, and it's good to have a decent number of them.

The Mechanics

The way the game works put me in mind of a tabletop roleplaying game without a GM. Each player starts off with a standard character sheet, which is personalised with randomly selected skill cards. Each character has stats which govern how fast they can move, and how strong, resilient and intelligent they are.

Each player also has a fear and threat scale. Fear can increase and decrease during the game, and as it changes it alters the character's other stats. Having the highest level of fear makes a character the first target of any aliens that are nearby. Threat can also increase, and having the highest threat makes a character the first target of the guards.

The final stat is the character's resilience - how close they are to death. There's a nice little system here. Each turn, you are dealt as many cards as your current resilience level. You can spend these to increase your other stats or create some other effects in the game, but the cards are also used as a health scale. When you are attacked you can lose cards, and if you drop to zero you lose resilience. So, there's a trade-off: do you keep your cards to be better able to withstand attacks, or spend them to gain other bonuses?

When exploring the facility, players draw new tiles and place them on the table to form a map of the base. This means that the layout will change each time you play and creates the risk of getting trapped in a dead end or having to go through dangerous areas. Some of the tiles trigger events that the character must survive, or provide useful items such as weapons.

The enemies move and attack following set rules, and are triggered by events when exploring. This means that generating the map and controlling the enemies is all done by the players, which removes the need for a GM. Characters can either attack or outwit enemies to get past them.

I quite liked the "roleplay-light" way that this all worked together. As each character has different skills we found that during the scenarios (more on those in a minute) one player would normally be best placed to do some key task, so the others were exploring to find out where that character needed to go. The events meant that you could never feel entirely safe, but were relatively safe if you stayed in areas you'd already explored.

There are also more minor rules to cover some more unusual situations, but this was were we started to have some trouble. The rules work pretty well, but are presented in the rulebook in such a way that you struggle to find a particular rule when you need it. There is a list of icons that appear in the game and what they mean at the back of the book, but for some reason this doesn't cover all of them! This meant that we were often flicking back and forth in the rulebook to try to figure out what was supposed to happen, and even after doing that we sometimes had to just agree a solution ourselves. For a boardgame that seemed a little odd.

The Scenarios

Level Seven [Escape] is played out over seven scenarios, each of which represents a different level of the facility that you have to pass through in order to escape.

They are clearly intended to be played through in order, which is what we did after playing the first scenario twice to figure out some of the rules. Having ordered scenarios in this way allows the game to introduce new concepts as you go along.

Some of these are pretty cool - without giving too much away, one of the scenarios in particular pushes characters apart and forces them to explore quickly in order to make it to the next level. We had a lot of fun with that one. Having a series of scenarios also gives you a sensible start and end point for playing the game, and provides some variety as you play, which is nice.

Unfortunately though, some weird things start to happen with some scenarios. A few of them require you to find the exit and a key to use it, which are on different tiles. However, once you've found them both, you generally won't keep triggering new events, which means the enemies won't activate and you end the scenario by pretty much just moving to the end (possibly having to dodge a couple of bad guys on the way).

Also, the difficulty level of the scenarios didn't seem to make a lot of sense. In particular, we found the last scenario to be almost laughably easy - the big baddy will show up and cause lots of damage if your fear level goes up too often, but it's quite simple to avoid having that happen. Now there are a lot of random things that happen, so we could have just been lucky, but this really felt like someone had come up with the idea for a big final boss but hadn't playtested it much so hadn't realised that you could easily avoid him.

The same problem with the rules applied to the scenarios too - we often found ourselves having to carefully re-read the rules of the scenarios as we went along because they weren't written very clearly.

One last thing on scenarios. On one hand, there are seven different ways to play which means you have a bit more variety for replay value. On the other, once you've escaped from the facility you do feel like you've finished the game, so it'll be interesting to see whether we ever come back to tackle it again.

Conclusion

We did have fun playing this game, and it has an interesting concept and some nice mechanics to it. It's unfortunate then that some of the scenarios didn't really seem up to snuff from our playthrough and problems with the layout of the rules meant that we kept having to come out of the game to try to work out how to resolve things. There is an errata available, but for a board game that doesn't seem quite right to me - I'd hope to not have to be checking for rules changes online. I also wonder how much replay value we'll get from what was a fairly pricey box. Overall it feels like a good core game that needs some more polish to really finish it off.

I notice that Privateer have put the rules up on their website which is nice, and also that an expansion pack called Lockdown is on the way. I'll be interested to see if that adds anything new to the game and whether Privateer take the opportunity to clear up the rules and maybe include some reference cards in the box.