We gotta get right back to where we started from

Thanks to everyone for your messages of support.  The last month or so has been a deeply painful time, made bearable only by the fantastic support I've gotten from friends, many of whom have been mentioned on this blog in the past.  Crazy Eddy, Marvin the ARVN, the irrepressible Ms Kay Dee (the crafting goddess who makes sure I don't look rubbish at Steampunk do's), Rick (who isn't even a wargamer, yet regularly pesters me for blog updates here) and of course mi hermano fantastico Jonesy.  All of them together have kept me from going under completely.  And add to that the kind words I found in the comments to the last post... well I consider myself a very lucky man to be surround by such fine people, both near and far.  Thank-you, thank-you, thank-you.

So this week I've only just started to come out of the funk I've been in, feeling the first inklings of enthusiasm for doing things... when last night I found myself struck by genuine inspiration and enthusiasm for wargaming projects I might like to try.

Which sounds great....

...except said bombshell of enthusiasm exploded at about 2am in the morning.  After that I spent the rest of the small hours reading various wargaming blogs, scanning forums and generally riding a mounting wave of inspiration that made any hope of sleep impossible.  In the end I got up at 5am for breakfast after no sleep, hoping to ride out the day and try to reset the body clock tonight.  You might note the timestamp of this post and deduce exactly how successful that idea was... (I actually fell asleep eating lunch, throwing the body clock completely out of wack)

Anyway, this burst of enthusiasm was triggered by reading up on Bob Cordery's recent work (and by recent I mean last six months - yeah I've been out of the wargaming loop for that long!) on the Portable Wargame.  Now I'd tried the PW using 19thC 15mm on Heroscape terrain and found it gave a great game.  But since then the game has been developed to include a "Modern" variant.

Now here is one point where the honourable Brother Cordery and I have a difference of opinion.... modern to me means Cold War & later... guided missiles and jet fighters and helicopters, oh my. Bob's "Modern" game on the other hand seems definitely pitched at the first half of the 20th century, from the World Wars up to Korea and maybe a little later in 3rd world theaters?

(Of course technically, historians count the Modern Era as anything from the time of Queen Elizabeth onwards, but I suspect that's a little too broad for any single wargame ruleset to handle.)

So it looked like PW:M would not really work with my hodge-podge collection of ultramodern micro-armour without some serious tweaking.  That's when the idea hit me.  One of the periods that I'd been skirting around in the last couple of years has been the "1938 Very British Civil War".  For the uninitiated, it's a popular alternate history based on Edward refusing to abdicate over the Wallis Simpson affair, with Mosely's blackshirts coming to power and triggering a chaotic multi-faction civil war with some parallels to the Spanish Civil War, but fought with a classically British stiff upper lip.

I'd been entranced by the VBCW setting and bought all the published material for it, but ultimately decided against getting invested in it, since the gameplay is pretty much identical to what we get in our Victorian Science Fiction games - small unit skirmishes backed up by mechanized fighting vehicles of varying utility and reliability, with cavalry generally riding around looking splendid but ineffectually getting shot to pieces.  So I couldn't justify spending money to effectively duplicate the same game experience with different uniforms.

But last night it occurred to me..... 1938 - a Very Portable Civil War.  The match seems perfect.  PW:M covers all the necessary troop types and has a level of abstraction that means you wouldn't be too bogged down in minor differences between one Heath Robinsonesque vehicle and another.  The slightly formalised gridded battlefield works well for a conflict where fighting stops when the clock strikes four (afternoon tea, old boy!)

Tucked away somewhere I've got a fair quantity of 15mm WWI figures, some painted but most unpainted.  Mix in some VSF\colonials that I won't now be using for GASLIGHT,  all I'd need then would be a few appropriate vehicles - PW:M is vague about the unit scale, but I get the impression it's somewhere around the 1 element = 1 platoon or possibly company level.  Canonically vehicles should be relatively thin on the ground, restricted mainly to softskin vehicles for transport and a few armoured cars with the occasional poorly armed tank in support.

In theory, this game would make a great little project to get me back into the hobby and could be put together relatively easily with a very minimal outlay

In reality, this is one of those wonderful ideas that is probably going to go nowhere.  Money at the moment is very tight and there would be a bit of work needed to build the armies, painting and basing etc, instead of actually sitting down to play with some of the figures and terrain I've got "ready to go".  But I think, if we're honest, most of us have at some stage had that Great Idea that we spend hours and hours enthusing about and maybe even get as far as buying the figures and priming before...... nothing.  It's as much a part of our hobby as arcane dice rituals and painting eyebows on our figures - i.e. completely irrelevant to the game itself.

Well what will I be doing then?

I've started attending what I've previously unkindly dubbed the "Old Fart's Gaming Night" at Jonesy's. (I'm pleased to report that I am in fact the youngest semi-regular attendee)  Although the focus is usually on "lighter" board or card games (Ticket To Ride, Small World, Pandemic) next week we will be playing Chaos on Chronos, a pulp SF skirmish wargame.  And as I start to put my house in order (literally) getting the Man Cave back to a usable state will be a priority.  Once I can get into the room, and get stuff off the shelves easily, it'll be a lot easier to get a game going or assess the viability of a possible project.

Who knows.  A Very Portable Civil War might happen yet.

Another Portable Wargame game

I've just finished playing another solitaire wargame using Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame rules and Heroscape hex terrain. The scenario was based on number 19 - River Assault from CS Grant's "Scenarios for Wargames". This time I filled my entire coffee table with Heroscape hexes, which looked great but was, I think, a little too large for the PW forces involved (24 hexes wide with only 17 units on the largest side) plus I wound up spending longer setting up the terrain than I did actually fighting the battle. The forces were thrown together from the 15mm nineteenth century collection, with an Anglo-Egyptian force facing off against those dastardly Russkies again. Perhaps this was a clash in a particularly fertile area of northern Olistan?

I won't give a full battle report, as most of it was pretty much a grindhouse as the main Russian Assault tried to cross the river under the shelter of the two wooded areas. The British moved out their one unit of cavalry and one unit of infantry from the town and brought in the Highlander Reserve from the farm on the right in order to try to meet the crossing on the river bank. They enjoyed considerable success initially, wiping out the cavalry who led the first wave across the water (the scenario rules stated that there were only enough boats for three units to cross at any given time), but eventually the weight of numbers and supporting fire took its toll on the Anglo-Egyptians.

Meanwhile on the other flank, the two sides traded artillery and rifle fire fairly ineffectually throughout most of the game, neither side getting more than pins until the last couple of turns of the game. By that time the main assault had managed to secure a tenuous foothold on the riverbank with one surviving member of the second wave of infantry, which was soon re-inforced by the third wave which crossed largely unopposed. The British had a number of reinforcements that they were due to receive at random intervals throughout the game, which started arriving in penny packets after turn 8, at which point the Russians had secured their bridgehead and combined with a lousy series of activation dice rolls were too little too late to turn the tide. By the end of the game on Turn 13, the Russians had five units safely across the river, with two more about to cross more or less unopposed directly into the town itself.

Despite being something of a grind, it was still an exciting game and the result was in doubt right up until the end. I'm still sold on the Portable Wargame & Heroscape as my solo-gaming platform of choice.

I've had a couple of thoughts as a result of this game. Firstly, I need to scale down the terrain and/or work out a quicker way to approximate the layout from the scenarios. It took far too long to setup, and because the armies were so small for the area of terrain, there was a lot of pre-contact manoeuvring that took far to long to play out, although it was mitigated by the fact that I deployed the troops according to the scenario rather than the "two hexes in" recommended by the PW rules.

Secondly, Bob's mentioned on his blog today that one of the questions that came up from his COW playtests was what to do about multiple Pin results on a single unit. His thought was to allow them, and to require multiple activation points to unpin. My gut feeling is that Pinned should be a binary state - you're either pinned or you're not, and the marker is just there to indicate this. Otherwise I can see it leading to two undesirable scenarios.

1) Instead of spreading fire across the enemy forces, a "canny" player unrealistically concentrates all his fire on a single unit, racking up multiple Pins over a couple of rounds. This makes the affected unit almost impossible to unpin, even several rounds after they are no longer under fire. It's a highly cheesy/beardy and entirely unrealistic tactic, and reminds me of a Games Workshop epic-scale battle I once saw played, where on a given turn every single unit on one player's side fired at the same very high value and high powered unit on the other.

2) Even without such deliberate gamesmanship, a bad series of Activation dice could see a unit accrue multiple pin results from a single enemy over the course of several turns. Again, that unit becomes almost impossible to recover, even after the enemy is long gone.

Since the Napoleonic portable Portable Wargame is primarily a solitaire project, I forsee it developing as a fork of Bob's original rules, using his system as a core but reflecting my own biases and ideas, as well as any period specific tweaks needed for Napoleonic warfare. I'd also really like to see if the system can be tweaked to give an ultra-modern operational level game, with maybe two 1/300 vehicles representing a company.

I'm sure Bob, standing as he is on the shoulders of Morchauser, won't mind.

In other news I received an order from Ramshackle games today. To try them out I ordered the Iron Grumbler APC, with a view to converting it to something a little more steampunky. First off, the parcel arrived incredibly well packed. Not only were the pieces protected by the usual bubble-wrap, in a padded envelope, but the pieces were also split between two disposable plastic tubs, exactly the sort of thing you might use to save leftovers for reheating later. One was sadly broken in transit (though rather the tub than the resin) but the other one will prove handy, which is a bonus. Secondly, for only £9 this thing is frikkin huge, dwarfing the more expensive Ironclad steam tanks.

The downside is that this has to be one of the roughest resin-cast vehicles I have ever seen. Part of that is forgivable, since it's part of a post-apocalyptic range and supposed to have been cobbled together from scrap. But even allowing for a fairly chunky, orky build, there are some places where you really need to have a clean cast, and in this case the problem area is the track treads. There's a lot of very thick, chunky flash clogging up both track units I received, and it's going to require a lot of trimming and sanding to get them to a usable state.

I think I'm going to have to give Ramshackle another try, this time with one of the more polished looking vehicles like the much more steampunky Brass Coffin.

Plus I've just discovered they produce a figure called "Isembard Kickass Brunel". It Shall Be Mine! Huzzah!

I has wargamed. Huzzah!

After a week of hard slogging at the painting table on the 28mm VSFs I decided it was time for a break. So this morning I dug out the Heroscape terrain I bought last week, printed off a copy of Mr Robert Cordery's "Portable Wargame" rules, picked up Programmed Wargames Scenarios by CS Grant and turned to Scenario #1 Hill Defence. In true Cordeguayan fashion, the forces were hastily cobbled together from whatever boxes of 15mm I had to hand, so in the end a Red force of 19th Century/WWI Russians faced off against a Blue force manned by WWI French with some British Colonial Lancers on loan. Grant's book offers the gamer a choice from several different forces for each scenario, but rather than mess about too much with the troops I just took the first option for each side. This gave Red a force heavy in Cavalry, but Blue had two guns, which I decided to take as machine guns.

Being the first time I'd used the Heroscape hexes in anger, I spent a little time experimenting. I worked out that the largest tiles in the set fit together to form a rectangle, and eight of these rectangles (which was all the large green tiles I had) created a 16x18 play area that nicely filled about 2/3 of my coffee table. After a bit of experimenting I then got the hang of replacing some of the large tiles with combinations of smaller ones to allow wooded areas of different colours. The sand tiles make fine woods, with a couple of small trees scattered about for visual effect. Roads were simple enough to do with masking tape and I could have easily used the Heroscape pieces to create a river across this size terrain but this scenario didn't call for it. Finally, I had absolutely no buildings appropriate to western Europe, so a colonial hut had to stand in. (I have already hit Amazon to order a "town in a bag" which I think is perfect for this level of game.)

I decided to take on the attack as Red, so the forces were laid out according to the charts in the book.

With Blue having those MGs on the flanks, I decided to try a big cavalry attack on my left to try to sweep that gun away. A single cavalry unit was left on the right to demonstrate and draw the attention of the Blue cavalry if need be. As it happened, the Blue tactics rolled from the book indicated that they would hold their position and not deploy their reserve under any circumstances.

So for the first couple of turns, the Field Gun kept up a constant barrage of the enemy infantry on the edge of the village. Shells went long, peppering the built up area behind them, to no real effect. The two flanking cavalry units proceded forwards as planned, moving swiftly up the road. Since the enemy cavalry didn't seem to be responding I decided to take a chance with my right cavalry and found they could make it into close combat with the MG without having to endure a round of fire first. The cavalry charged home, at a slight disadvantage due to the slope, but both sides dice came out a 6 - no result. The cavalry were forced to recoil a hex away leaving them vulnerable in the open. On the left flank, the large cavalry brigade were unable to make contact, and so spread out along the road parallel to the Blue lines, ready to charge the MG in the following round.

On Blue's activation, the MGs were able to wreak havoc on the exposed cavalry. The lone Red cavalry unit on the right was cut down, while one of the units on the left also fell. Blue took the opportunity to move one of the infantry units in the town forwards to the T-junction bringing it into range of the cavalry for the following round.

The following round came and the Red gun finally scored a hit, pinning the infantry on the edge of the town. But when the initiative came around, Blue was set to activate first. Another volley of fire took out a second cavalry unit in the brigade leaving only one left. When the activation switched to Red, I decided to try to charge in anyway. This time rather than heading straight up the hill I wheeled and climbed the hill further to the left before swinging back around to hit the MG on the flank. The rest of the activations were spent starting the Infantry on the slow trek forwards.

Rolling for the close combat, I got the exact opposite result to the first combat. Both cavalry and machine gun tore eachother apart. This was the only time a Red unit made it onto the ridgeline, which technically should have triggered a Programmed Response, but since the triggering unit had been instantly destroyed, I decided it didn't count as "in force" since that flank was now completely unthreatened.

With all the Red cavalry gone it was down to the infantry to make the slow slog towards the blue lines. Had Blue gone for Field Guns instead of MGs the infantry wouldn't have had a chance, but they were able to stay out of range of the remaining MG and would only have to endure a couple of turns of rifle fire from the defenders in the centre. Meanwhile the red Field Gun rolled forwards a hex in order to bring the remaining MG into range. It maintained a steady but completely ineffectual barrage for the rest of the game.

After several turns slogging (which passed very quickly, since Blue was effectively unable to act, being out of range) the Red Infantry came within rifle range of the defenders. Over the last two hexes of movement, Blue's volleys took a heavy toll, destroying two of the five attacking units and pinning a third. Finally the two surviving units went in on the left of the village.

Although the assaults were successful in breaking the defending units, one of the attacking units was also destroyed. At this point, with only two infantry units and a Field Gun left, facing an well dug-in opponent in the village with secure flanks, I decided as Red commander that the mission had failed and withdrew in shame.

Looking back, I think the force balancing in Grant's book must assume that Cavalry will be more effective in raw combat power than infantry, whereas in The Portable Wargame that's not the case, Cavalry and Infantry have the same Close Combat power plus Infantry have the advantage of attacking at range. Cavalry's only advantage is its speed. I think you could double the number of cavalry units in the army lists and be more balanced. Alternatively, picking a different army list for the attacker could have made a big difference. Instead of 5 infantry, 4 cavalry and 1 gun I could have had 8 infantry, 2 cavalry and 2 guns, which I think would have had a much better crack at the defence.

It was after setting up the Heroscape terrain and setting out the figures that something clicked almost audibly. I won't call it a lightbulb moment, since that implies some original idea on my part whereas all I'm doing is copying Bob Cordery (who in turn is standing on the shoulders of Morschauser) But there was a sudden and tangible realisation that here was something new with a lot of potential. This style of game, element-based small scale figures on a map-like hexed terrain, seems to be exactly what I want for "coffee table" gaming. The relatively small number of figures makes an experimental delve into other periods quite a reasonable proposition.

The Portable Wargame rules remind me so much of DBA in how they play, while using completely different game mechanics. Indeed I'm getting the same buzz right now from PW that I did from DBA the very first time I played it all those years ago, with the realisation that you could play something that felt like a large battle in a 2ft square terrain in only an hour.

While I was playing, I received a parcel containing another nearly-full set of Heroscape, so I think I could now expand the 16x18 terrain I used for this battle to cover the whole of the coffee table, and still have enough tiles for plenty of hills or a sizeable water feature. So I'm afraid to say this looks like the end for my advocacy of individually based 15mm figures. Once the current 28mm VSF project is completed I can see myself rebasing the 15mm Colonials/ Late 19th, Early 20th Century collection for Heroscape and The Portable Wargame.