I hate you, Sarissa Precision... I hate you with the fire of a thousand burning suns.
Why? Because just when I decide it's time to be extra careful with my money, you unveil THIS!!!
This is Sarissa's new "Gaslamp Alley" range of buildings, designed specifically for Victoriana / Steampunk games. Like their other ranges, it's modular so you can vary the number of floors, mix different window styles etc. It will also include an industrial pump house and a selection of gantries and walkways (like their sci-fi range)
For more eye-candy, look here and scroll down past the new Japanese range. Sarissa say they'll have the first samples at Salute this weekend, but I expect they'll sell out fast.
Needless to say... I do want. :-)
Sarissa Precision's existing buildings were used extensively in the demos and photos for Empire Of The Dead, Westwind's steampunk horror game. While I resisted the temptation when the rules first came out, I was snared by their recent Kickstarter campaign for a supplement called "Requiem", I pledged at a level that got me a PDF copy of the rulebook, one of the boxed miniature sets, a selection of 18 figures from the new ranges plus all the stretch goal figures (of which there were about a dozen)
Reading through the rules PDF last night, it seems to be your standard warband skirmish game in the vein of Mordheim, (in fact the basic mechanics reminded me a great deal of the old GW Warhammer mechanics, streamlined and adapted from D6s to D10s) or Song Of Blades & Heroes. Like most glossy games these days the rules are tied tightly to the game world and figure range. In EOTD you can choose from just four different faction types - Holy Order, Gentleman's Club, Vampires or Werewolves, and specific figures from Westwind are given statblocks and points costs, but there's no obvious formula for calculating points values. This makes it harder to step outside the box and use the rules in a non EOTD setting. Not impossible, just harder.
The Kickstarter edition of the PDF includes statblocks and points costs for the new sets of figures, including the new Police faction, but you're still limited to using the figures Westwind list, or reskinned proxies. Personally I much prefer games to offer a broader framework, allowing players to indulge their creativity to the fullest. GASLIGHT is a perfect example of this, though many criticise it for being too open-ended. I'll certainly be giving EOTD a go at some point, and if it plays as well as it looks, we might have a go at reverse engineering the points system.
Back on the subject of laser-cut MDF buildings, with the Man Cave now once again fully operational, I was rooting through some Piles Of Stuff (TM) looking for something to work on when I found a box of unassembled Warbases buildings that I'd bought early last year. Four packs of terraced houses, two tenement blocks and perhaps most importantly, cut-out window inserts for the latter + a spare set for the currently half-finished tenement that's been sat on the shelf for the last two years. As I recall these weren't too difficult to assemble, and will make a good project to get back into the swing of things.
Who knows, maybe they'll be enough to satisfy the craving for laser-cut MDF, so that I won't need to embezzle the grocery shopping budget to buy the Gaslamp Alley buildings.
I'm pleased to report that I have FINALLY gotten the 6x5 table setup in the back room, and this last Sunday actually managed to play an ACTUAL WARGAME. You know, with dice. And toy soldiers. And little model trees and houses on a green cloth.
Mi Hermano Semanal Jonesy came around and after some faffing around considering trying a new set of rules, we eventually settled on a simple game of Flying Lead using my VSF/Steampunk figures. Jonesy took a selection from the Pulp Heroes list, while I mixed up the Criminals and Mafia lists for my Evil League Of Evil.
I can't give you a blow by blow account of the battle, but I can tell you that a Mafia Hitman at 150 points out of a force of 400 is well worth it. My "Miss Moran" (one of the GASLIGHT Victoria Hawkes models with a tricked out rifle) started by killing the do-gooders' leader with a max range sniping shot, causing his faithful oriental sidekick to flee the battlefield. After a couple of rounds where she struggled to get a clear shot, she found her mark twice more, prompting the demoralised do-gooders to rout. She scored all of my kills, as the rest of my force were all armed with pistols and outranged by the opposition who had a couple of rifles.
The other games we were looking at playing were Blasters and Bulkheads and Chaos on Chronos, both similar warband-type skirmish games. But while there might be nothing wrong with them for playing in their own specific settings, for a generic pick-up game with different figures, Flying Lead was far easier to get up and running with. The army lists cover WWII, Modern military, Criminal, Pulp and a couple of near-SF options, enough variety to make it easy to pick something suitable for any sort of firearms skirmish. I had to fudge a couple of things in the lists, like replacing machine pistols with heavy calibre pistols, but was otherwise able to play straight from the book. If I was planning this game in advance, I could use the Squad Builder from the Ganesha Games web page to work out exact points values, the same for any Vehicles or even custom built Weapons I might need.
On contemplation, while there's nothing particularly wrong with the GoalSystem rules as used in Blasters & Bulkheads, Chaos in X etc, I think I still vastly prefer the Ganesha Games system based on Song of Blades & Heroes and used in Flying Lead. As long as you're willing to accept that the activation mechanic means you can't guarantee every figure/unit will act every turn, it feels like a much more interesting/uncertain game.
Anyway, now I have the table setup (semi-)permanently, I'm hoping to get a lot more gaming done in the coming months.
After an hour or so of insomnia-driven cleaning & clearing, I once again see the floor of the Man-Cave.
It is a fetching shade of salmon.
That is all I have to report.
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What? Look, some days are just slow news days. You want me to make up some filler-story about a skateboarding duck? Deal with it, OK?
*sigh* Oh OK maybe there is a little more to talk about. Last year saw the birth of a new gamer-friendly channel on YouTube called Geek & Sundry. One of the runaway hits on there was a series called Tabletop, hosted by Wil Wheaton (former child actor, annoying Star Trek brat and re-invented 21st century geek icon). Each week Wheaton and his guests (usually actors or writers from TV shows that he and/or co-creator Felicia Day had appeared in, or other YouTube video "stars") sit down and play a game on camera. Usually these were fairly lightweight board or card games (Ticket To Ride, Castle Panic, Chez Geek), on two occasions they branched out and did roleplaying games (the indie darling "FIASCO" and the "Dragon Age RPG" based on the hit computer games) but never really did anything recognisable as a war game (although "Small World" a fantasy world conquest game was probably the closest)
Now I'm not really a massive fan of casual board games, but as lightweight social events they're OK as an excuse to roll dice with friends. Watching Tabletop has introduced me to a couple of games that I've really enjoyed playing (espcially "Pandemic", in which the players co-operate to try to save the world from virulent diseases), and game industry analysts have observed what's been called the "Tabletop Effect", in which sales of games featured in the show experience a significant spike in sales shortly afterwards.
So to celebrate the show's success (and as a marketing gimmick to generate hype, of course) co-creator Felicia Day has announced March 30th to be "Tabletop Day", in which gamers are encouraged to make an event of sitting down to play games, streaming them to the internet. I'm going to try to arrange something for that day - possibly dusting off my copy of "War! In the Age of Imperialism" a massive 19th century "Axis & Allies" type game which I got a few years ago but have never gotten around to playing.
More on that when we firm up the plans. In the meantime I'm planning on getting a couple of wargames tables setup in the back room, getting some figures and terrain on them and getting a god-damned wargame played, by hook or by crook. Nothing fancy, just get figures on the table and the dice rolling. At the end of the day that's all it takes to break a wargaming drought.
Despite all evidence to the contrary, I generally try not to talk too much about "real life" non-wargaming stuff on this blog, or about other sorts of games. But today I'm going to make (yet another) exception.
This last Sunday I was invited to a belated Christmas dinner with my dear friends Rick & Ruth and their three boys. You may remember last year I visited them to help their eldest son get started figure painting and wargaming. (Sadly since that time he has "discovered girls" and lost interest in this and pretty much everything else, as boys his age tend to do.) Not only was it a full Xmas dinner, but they went all out with decorations and seasonal music. After the food we settled down for an afternoon of serious playing with the two youngest (the eldest slinking off to hang out with his mates) There may have been a little bit of Scalextric played, but I think that was more for the benefit of Rick and myself than the young 'uns (we wuz too poor to afford Scalextric when I were a lad.) and of course a selection of "early learning centre" type games suitable for the boys.
One of these games really stood out for me as being rather splendid fun, with a bit more potential for subtle play than a 3 and a 6 yr old could muster. "Tutan Loot 'em" is a pattern matching card game with an Egyptian theme. Each player gets a hidden hand of four cards, and four cards are placed face up in a pool in the centre. In their turn, a player has to try to match a card in their hand with one in the pool, both cards being placed face up in that player's treasure pile. Alternatively, if they can match the top card on another player's treasure pile, they can loot it, adding the whole pile to their own. If they can't do either of these things, they have to play a card from their hand into the pool.
This very simple game has a lot of potential for subtlety. If you have a pair in your hand, playing one of them into the pool lays a trap for the next player who matches it, since you can then loot their treasure. Keeping a key card as late in the game as possible means you can snatch the treasure and victory away from another player right at the end of the game. It's not Bridge, but it's a good fun filler game if you've got 10 mins to fill.
I was so impressed with the game than when I got home I ordered a copy for myself (£7.50 from Amazon.co.uk) and took it along to the Old Farts gaming night last night. After the main game was finished (Chaos on Chronos, more of which later) I tempted the Old Farts into giving Tutan Loot 'em a go, and after a couple of highly back-stabbing games of back-and-forth looting, it got the Seal of Approval. So there you go... a game made for 3-6 year old kids that entertained a table with an average age of about 48-50. (Mental age...? I cannot comment!)
The evening's main game, as I said, was a test run of Chaos on Chronos, a warband skirmish game nominally written for pulp sci-fi (though the scenario we played was more in the "use a bunch of random figures" genre). I'm not honestly a massive fan of this style of game, since they always seem to devolve into random slugfests, but the Chaos on Chronos rules, part of the Goalsystem series, worked well enough. The basic rules mechanic is: roll number of attack dice, count successes, roll number of defence dice, each success subtracts one successful attack, excess is applied as damage. Some special abilities or equipment allow players to reroll failed dice. Simple enough, with only the occasional buckets o' dice moment (I managed to pitch one massive attack with my leader hitting 12 dice with 2 rerolls, which was sadly bounced by some stupendously lucky defensive rolls). I think I still prefer Ganesha Games' "Song of..." series of rules for this sort of game, including "Flying Lead" for modern & SF skirmishes, but there's not much between the two systems overall.
Now, after putting the task off for far too long... to the Man Cave! (cue '60s Batman music)
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.
On January 3rd 2012, at about 10:30am, my father died peacefully at home.
Shortly after my last post here, his condition noticeably deteriorated, which put any thoughts of wargaming, however small scale, right out the window. We managed to get a referral to the Macmillan Cancer Support team who were able to mobilise all the nursing support that we needed so desperately, and suddenly we were getting more nurses visiting in a day than we'd seen in the previous year.
As Christmas approached it became clear that we were no longer treating Dad to get better, but to make his final days as comfortable as possible. He became too weak to walk any distance safely, but too confused to remember that fact, needing 24hr care and attention (on the plus side, as a result my Christmas day was 96 hours long)
He ate a little Christmas dinner, then a little Boxing day dinner. The days ticked around and the cough that had weakened him so much and we'd thought was beaten, started to return. On New Year's Eve a GP, against the judgement and wishes of myself and the nurses caring for him, decided Dad needed to go into hospital to investigate the cough. Once at the hospital, the doctors quickly ruled that there was nothing for them to treat and agreed to a Rapid Discharge to get Dad home as quickly as possible.
He came home on New Years Day, unconscious on a stretcher. We sat through the night, "watching" his favourite TV program on DVD together (an old show called "Out of Town", all about country life). A couple of times he opened his eyes and showed signs of awareness, but was unable to speak.
When the district nurses arrived, I stepped out of the room to let them change the medications in his syringe driver. As they worked on him, one moment he was breathing, the next he wasn't. It was as peaceful as anyone could hope for.
Now... I try not to put too much non-wargaming detail in this blog. I know other bloggers who put in a lot of tangential stuff about their life that only marginally affects gaming (usually by disrupting it!) I could have just put "My Dad's died, the funeral's tomorrow, I'll not be wargaming or blogging till things have calmed down a bit." But I wanted to make one, very non-wargaming point.
Dad was, in the end, put on "the Pathway", which received quite a bit of bad press here in the UK a couple of months ago. Now many people feel strongly against this, and any sort of "management" of someone's death. Some feel it treads dangerously close to euthanasia, while others cynically use the issue to score political points by invoking "death board" strawmen.
Bollocks to all that.
Last year my mother died with no planned end-of-life care. She died alone in hospital because we had no support to take care of her at home. Having seen both a managed and an unmanaged end-of-life, I know which one I want when my time comes.
***
As for wargaming, expect to see a resurgence in the coming spring. The next month or so is going to see the world turned upside down, as having been focussed 100% on caring for Dad I need to get back out into the real world, get a job and get a real life once again. But with a whole house to myself now, there'll be room once again for a wargames table to go up somewhere, and that lead and resin mountain in the man cave will provide a much needed distraction.
Thanks to everyone for your support over the last year. Stay subscribed - I'll be back before you know it with some slightly lighter-hearted wargaming nonsense.
(A big gold star for anyone who recognizes which "song" the "lyric" in the title post comes from. There might be a clue in the next two paragraphs...)
So thanks and congratulations to Amera Plastic Mouldings for becoming the 50th follower of this blog. Long term followers might remember I built their church and "Ministry Building" kits earlier in the year. Vacuum formed plastic terrain doesn't seem to get as much consideration in wargames circles as it ought to, perhaps because people think of vac-formed packaging and expect it to be equally flimsy. But the Amera buildings are extremely rugged and sturdy, yet lightweight and give incredible value for money. They really deserve a whole lot more love than they're getting. When I was working on them, I was looking online for pictures of them completed and painted, but every Google search I tried kept bringing up either their store page or the Axis Of Naughtiness! I highly recommend their stuff.
So strange as it may seem, after being stuck on 49 followers for such a long time, hitting 5-0 has rekindled a little bit of interest in wargaming for me. Maybe it's just a bit of guilt, as mi hermano concienzuda Jonesy said to me the other day, that I really ought to get back to doing regular updates of this blog. Whatever it is, I'm feeling... if not inspired as such, let's just say mildly interested in getting back to rolling dice and pushing toy soldiers around a table.
Here's the situation. The man-cave is currently piled up to the door with assorted junk from my flat, bundled into crates to be sorted out when I've had more time to settle back in to living with my father. This makes getting to most of the terrain and figures I have there a somewhat difficult, if not outright dangerous task. I currently have nowhere to setup a full-size wargame, or even a mid-size one (4'x4') and so I'm back, ironically right to where I was when this blog started, limited to a game that could fit on a modestly sized coffee table. I have a limited selection of figures painted and "table ready", namely the 28mm VSF collection, assorted 15mm 19th Century Colonialm the old 25mm fantasy/medieval stuff and a few other bits and bobs. I also right now don't want to commit to a big programme of painting and preparation, so all that unpainted lead, plastic and resin will, for now, remain unpainted. And yet, in recent years, I've developed an aversion to using unpainted figures, since I've found I feel the visual aesthetics of the game has become important to me (which is ironic considering my favoured "daub 'n' dip" painting technique).
Oh and I'm broke, so no hitting eBay for new ready-painted armies as a quick fix!
I think I'm going to have to launch an expedition into the man-cave to extract a small selection of figures and terrain that can be stored somewhere more accessible. Maybe just enough to do some small skirmishes.
If you don't hear from me after this weekend, send in a search party. I'll probably be trapped under a pile of collapsed crates full of polystyrene hills.
I've had a couple of people asking about updates to the blog. The other day Mi Hermano Recordatorio Jonesy pointed out that it was a full month since I'd posted anything. Then a few minutes ago I realised that he'd said that to me a month ago.
So what's happened since then?
Well I can't really explain it. We had a great game at the Big Birthday Bash, with Jonesy, CrazyEddy, OtherChris (Not to be confused with OtherOtherChris) and the chaps from MAWS who joined us. I have a small selection of photos on my tablet which I must get around to posting sometime. Really it was a cracking day, and thanks to everyone involved for playing.
But then, after that... for some reason something snapped and I lost all enthusiasm for gaming. I honestly can't say what happened exactly or why - just the figures on the painting desk and the wargames rules on the shelf.. none of them seemed to hold any appeal. It could have been related to personal circumstances at the time - I've mentioned before about my father's ill health and how I've moved in to take care of him. That process has escalated over the last couple of months, to the point where I'm now settled in his... now our house.. with no room presently to put up the full-size folding tables anywhere. Dad's health has also, just this last week, taken a turn for the worse to the point where for the forseeable future I can't really leave him on his own for any significant period of time, which precludes Sunday visits to MAWS even if I wanted to.
I've just checked my Google Reader blog list, which is dominated by wargames & RPG blogs. Only 350 unread posts. Oops. This may take some time to catch up on what's been happening in the wargaming blogosphere! I haven't even visited The Miniatures Page, the Lead Adventure Forums or checked up on the state of the Very British Civil War. I just... really can't explain why not.
So what have I been doing instead of gaming? Well a few weeks ago I was able to get away to the Asylum Steampunk Weekend at Lincoln, which was of course quite splendid. Lots of parading around in pseudo-Victorian gear, doing not much in particular and having far too much tea and cake.
On top of that, I have recently discovered a new passion in Flight Simulation. It's a fascinating meta-hobby, which just like wargaming can cover a multitude of different aspects, disciplines and sub-genres. Both are, at the end of the day, forms of Advanced Let's Pretend. In wargaming we research our armies, model, paint, convert them, make terrain and even once in a blue moon actually play a game. In flight-simming, we can research, aircraft, airline schedules, destinations, tinker excessively with PC software and hardware configurations, build physical simulated cockpits if budget and space allow, and even occasionally actually sim a flight. In wargaming we can play ancients, horse and musket, modern, sci-fi, fantasy (and all the refined sub-periods and genres of these). In flight-simming we can fly low-and-slow general aviation hopping from one grass strip to another, fly the big tubeliners to sunnier climes following checklists and procedures, fly reckless aerobatics violating as many FAA/ICAO regulations as we possibly can, or wax nostalgic in a historic bird like the DC3 or Spitfire. You can also choose between flying in exotic, faraway places, or get a different thrill flying in your local area (with the inevitable "I can see our house from here!" moments).
I've been approaching the flight-simming with much the same spirit as I do wargaming - not deathly serious but with the aim of getting the most positive experience out of it. As I say, the two hobbies have a lot in common - they're both dominated by the same demographic - middle aged to older males, with a few young whippersnappers. They're both plagued by periodic discussions about whether the hobby is "dying" or not. But I have to say after frequenting the major flight sim online forums as a newbie for the past couple of months, they are nowhere near as friendly and welcoming as wargamers. Jonesy pointed out that it may be down to the fact that flight-simming is fundamentally a solitaire activity (though not exclusively so, in this internet enabled age), whereas wargaming is, by it's nature, fundamentally a social activity.
Anyway, after gabbing incessantly for two long paragraphs on the subject, I won't be talking about flight-simming on this blog any more (unless there is some sort of significant flightsim/wargame crossover) but if you're interested you can follow my flight-simming activities on my new blog The Couch Aviator, which I've been writing mainly as a way of sorting through my own thoughts on the subject. I highly recommend it as another string to the "Advanced Let's Pretend" bow. Although I have spent a lot more than I could afforda little more than perhaps I should have a certain undisclosed sum on getting my flight-sim setup up to par, I've since learned that I could quite possibly have put together a very respectable setup using my old computer and a combination of older software (MS Flight Sim 2004) and freeware add-ons for less than £40 (and that includes a £30 joystick!)
So back on the wargaming side... what's next?
Honestly I'm not sure.
I need some sort of kick up the behind to inspire me to get things moving again. Circumstances dictate that any wargames I can manage will once again be limited to the coffee table (possibly augmented with the old 4ft square board on top) I've got piles of unpainted lead and plastic, plus a modest selection of painted stuff (VSF/Steampunk, Street Violence and the old 25mm fantasy stuff, mainly) and I'm committed to not spending any more money in the short term. After the Asylum weekend I resurrected the idea of organising a Little Wars-esque game for next year, using 54mm plastic figures and a set of fast-play rules like Bob Cordery's Portable Wargame, scaled up. But I can't afford to bankroll the whole thing and would need to get other people on-board and enthused enough to put the required time and money into the project.
One idea that is kinda giving me a slight flicker of interest. My good friend MarvinTheARVN (not his real name) is currently serving at Her Majesty's Pleasure.... no let me rephrase that... he's currently posted to foreign climes In The Service of Her Majesty. Before he left we had a conversation about the sort of wargame he'd like to play - an ultra-modern army/operation level game using hexed terrain to avoid the need for fussy measuring. We'd been playing a lot of Wargame: European Escalation online - the closest I've seen a computer game get to ultra-modern micro-armour wargaming - and although it went some way to scratching that itch it was still far more a game than recreation with any degree of accuracy.
I must admit I find the idea rather appealing, and with a modest collection of 1/300 micro-armour combined with the Heroscape hexed terrain tiles, I feel I should be 2/3 of the way there. But although I'm quite familiar with the methods and equipment of modern warfighting at the small-unit level, I don't have a clue how to scale things up to the operational level in way that would be satisfactory for someone who does it in real life. Any recommendations, thoughts or suggestions would be greatly appreciated - it would be nice to welcome a friend home from "forn parts" with a prototype of his ideal game waiting on the tabletop.
Till next time, which I hope will be a lot sooner than the last update...
Yr Humble Correspondant
Dr Vesuvius
(Though there are some who call me.... "Chris")
(PS one of the side effects of my little "post titles from song lyrics" gag is that I often find myself hitting YouTube to refresh my memory of the song a post title came from. Now I most recently heard this post's lyric as part of "Chap Hop History" from Mr B The Gentleman Rhymer, when he totally rocked the Empire Ball at the Asylum (bizarrely he wasn't headlining, I kinda felt sorry for the band who followed him when three quarters of the audience left after his set). But of course the lyric originally came from "Mama said knock you out" by LL Cool J. Watching the original music video to that song, my tiny brain broke trying to connect 1991's skinny, gold chained rap-puppy with the walking brick wall playing a Navy SEAL in NCIS Los Angeles in 2012. Funny what the years can do.)
Well tomorrow is the day of the Big Birthday Bash 2012. Though technically it's not my birthday for a few days. And I don't think it's going to be particularly big this time as several of our regular players are going to be no-shows (selfish people who think "I'm being deployed with my unit in Kenya for six months." is a good enough excuse to miss a game of toy soldiers. Pah!)
But "Medium sized Closest Sunday Before Convivial" doesn't quite have the same ring to it, does it?
Since I am stressed up to the eyeballs with "real life" stuff at the moment, and the man cave is currently in a state of utter chaos, I've decided not to run the fairly complex "Battle of Weston super-Mare" scenario that I put together in this blog for the last time we tried to put on a big GASLIGHT game, or use the city terrain. Instead I've grabbed a basic selection of KRMulticases with a variety of figures and vehicles, six crates of generic terrain and a big green sheet. Fingers crossed it's going to be an easy-going, fun day for everyone involved.
I'm not dead, I'm just resting after a particularly long squark. Beautiful plumage!
Rampant Monty Python quotes aside, there's been little or no miniatures gaming activity in the past couple of weeks, primarily down to Real World (tm) taking priority. Nothing drastic, just a combination of my father starting a new series of treatments and me being right in the middle of moving back in with him.
And no, this isn't going to turn into a computer gaming blog. Though I did spend a couple of days lost in the world of Oolite (and if like me you're in the age group that was playing home computer games on the Beeb, Spectrum or C-64 back in the day, then you'll understand why it left me grinning like a loon). And I have started looking at the "proper" flight simulation crowd and pondering the fun to be had there (did you know there's a worldwide network of simulated air traffic controllers... real people who flight simmers can connect to and get simulated ATC directions? And every year they run a "Cross the Pond" event where they simulate flights from one side of the Atlantic to the other with 100% ? IN REAL TIME? That's eight or nine hours in the simulated cockpit. Think of that next time you think your tabletop game is dragging on!)
But no, normal service will be resumed shortly. We have a big GASLIGHT game scheduled in a couple of weeks, and I've managed to accumulate quite a backlog of resin and lead that really does need sorting out as soon as possible.
As I've said before, I try to keep the focus of this blog squarely on miniatures gaming of some sort and don't really talk about the other activities that come under the gaming banner, like roleplaying, boardgames or computer games. You won't, for example, be hearing my opinions of the Mass Effect 3 Red/Green/Blue endings here.
However for the last week or so I've been wrapped up in a game that's a worthy exception to that rule. The Artemis Spaceship Bridge Simulator is... well basically it's the best game of pretend-spaceman you're ever likely to come across. Players each take the role of a bridge officer on a spaceship, one runs the Helm station, another the Weapons station, others control Engineering, Science and Communications. Each player has their own PC configured to run their own bridge station, and all are networked together to form a whole bridge. The Captain doesn't directly control a station, he just sits back and co-ordinates the action, giving orders, requesting information etc.
The game itself is very simple - veterans might recognise it as fundamentally an implementation of the very old Star Trek games from the early days of mainframe and microcomputers, just in real time and infinitely better graphics. There are starbases to defend, aliens of various races to encounter and fight, space monsters, black holes and asteroid belts. But what really brings the game alive is the human interplay and co-operation between the bridge officers that's required. The crew needs to co-operate as a team to maximise effectiveness or carry out some of the more elaborate tactics. How the players interact is where the magic happens.
This is not us. We're not quite so pretty.
So yesterday we had our first almost-full bridge crew get together. By a stroke of luck we'd just had our front room freshly redecorated and therefore completely empty of furniture, so for the day it was temporarily transformed into the bridge of the Artemis, with a 40" wall-mounted TV acting as the Main Screen, two tables placed in front of it in a V shape for the bridge stations and a Captain's Chair at the point of the V. We were, perhaps, the first ship in starfleet equipped with chintz curtains, but otherwise the layout was suitably bridge-like.
The chaps arrived around 11ish and after a short briefing on the various bridge station controls, the four cadets (including Mi Hermano Midshipman Jonesy) we launched into the first simulated mission. Throughout the afternoon, we each rotated through the four bridge stations (there were five of us, so we doubled up Science and Comms) trying each of them, plus a turn in the Big Chair.
Comms has to handle all the signal traffic between Artemis and all the other ships & stations in the game. Although at first glance it seems like a fairly dull and unexciting job, at times there can be a vast amount of signals and the Comms officer needs to filter out what to report to the Captain and when. More importantly they need to speak up at the right time. On a couple of occasions (as captain) I had an inexperienced Comms officer report a mundane request for supplies, right while we were in the middle of a battle with an enemy ship. It's a very subtle station.
Science, which we doubled up Comms with, has the best sensor display available. They can identify enemy ships at long range, pick out weaknesses in their defences, and can both zoom in to see great detail or zoom out to see the big picture. The Science officer would often be the only player who could see certain enemies and had to verbally give us intercept directions.
Helm is fairly straighforward - you steer the ship. Obviously in combat you're trying to keep the best position in terms of range and weapons arc, Occasionally the ship needs to take the fastest route from A to B, even if that's through the middle of an asteroid field. The helmsman is always busy, especially during complex tactics like bombing runs or counter-missile defence.
Weapons too is a fairly busy station. Although the standard firing system is fairly automatic - lock your weapons on a target and they'll always hit - there's still plenty of subtlety possible. Defence against missile or fighter attacks requires some quick and accurate mouse-clicking to select the best targets, and there's the advanced option of targeting specific ship systems like weapons or drives in order to cripple rather than destroy.
Engineering is perhaps the subtlest and most fascinating of the stations. Half of the job is directing damage control parties to repair damaged ship systems, although these can often be left to work autonomously. The real work is in juggling the power distribution to various ship systems in order to improve effectiveness. Shunt extra power to the weapons and they'll cycle faster, giving you more shots on target. Extra power to shields and they'll recover from damage faster. More power to the manoeuvre system and your thousand-ton starship is out-turning fighters. But in the words of a certain faux-Scotsman "the engines cannae take it", and overcharging your systems like this causes them to overheat - this can be mitigated slightly by shunting coolant to overheating systems but the ship has only a limited supply. A good Engineering officer should almost be invisible to the rest of the crew, but be keeping an eye on what's happening in the game and shunting power to and from needed systems as the situation changes.
Let's go through an example of a complex tactic - the bombing run, and how the stations have to work together. Your ship carries a number of very destructive mines which can affect ships in an area effect, but these are deployed out the back of the ship and remain stationary once armed. Artemis encounters a large fleet of enemy ships, say a dozen or so vessels including Dreadnoughts and Battleships in close formation, far too tough to attack and destroy individually, so the Captain calls for a Bombing Run. The Weapons officer immediately starts loading mines loaded into the ship's torpedo tubes, and the Engineering officer temporarily boosts power to the Torpedo system to make them load faster. Meanwhile the Science officer is scanning the enemy ships and picks out the largest and most dangerous enemy, or alternatively works out the densest part of the enemy formation, while the Helmsman brings the ship about and lines up for the run. Once Weapons calls that the mines are loaded, Engineering pulls power from the Torpedoes and instead boosts power to the Forward Shields (as we're going to be charging head first into a mass of enemy ships, we'll certainly be taking some fire on the way in). The bombing run commences - Helm heads straight into the enemy formation at Warp speed, while Science watches the range indicator on his detailed sensor view. When he calls that we're in the right position, usually just past the centre of the enemy formation, he calls the shot. Helm drops out of warp in response, and at the same instant, Weapons drops the mines. The next instant, Helm re-engages the warp drive to get us out of the mines' blast radius before they're triggered, while Science officer watches his sensor view to report how many ships are destroyed and which survivors are most vulnerable for a follow-up attack.
So after five hours of learning the ropes at a moderate difficulty level we took a break for a barbecue, then came back an hour or so later and started to push the difficulty level up to see how well we could handle things. We ran one mission at Level 10, but that created so many ships that it overloaded the poor Science station's PC with its "eagle-eye" view of the whole sector. so we dialled it back to 9 for the rest of the night. For the finale we ran through a series of scripted missions including the three-part "Trials of Deneb", which were progressively harder "gauntlets" to be run. In the final mission, we'd managed to take out four major battlefleets and all the "elite" enemy ships (who had special abilities like cloaking devices or super-manoeuverability) except one. We'd lost three of the four starbases in the sector and were limping back the lone survivor, low on energy and out of torpedoes. We ran out of energy just as the starbase came into sight on the main screen, along with the remaining elite enemy, which turned to attack us. We were almost dead in space, forward shields failing, no warp drive to escape and just two mines left. The engineer shunted the last micro-ergs of power from every other system to our impulse engines getting us moving forward at a near crawl, unable even to turn right or left. We passed the enemy and dropped the mines in the slowest bombing run in the history of space warfare. The resulting blast flattened our rear shields and caused major systems damage, but it sent that alien bastard straight to the Black Fleet and we survived... just. It was a highly satisfying end to a fantastic games day.
(More accurately, it was one AM the following morning. Which should tell you just how into the game we were.)
Playing Artemis was different from any other game experience I've tried. Most other co-operative games, whether boardgame or computer game, see the players operating as individuals contributing towards a common goal. They may have differing abilities, but player A can go-off and do one thing while player B is free to head in a different direction and do something else. In Artemis, the players are each contributing to the function of a single individual, the ship. Weapons can only fire at an enemy that the Helmsman moves into range with. We only learn that we need to go to rescue DS4 if Comms relays the distress message (or Science spots it on their long range sensors). It drives the players towards teamwork like no other game.
And if you're liking the sound of all this, there's two other things that'll really bake your noodle. Firstly, up to six people make up a bridge crew for a single ship, but the software can support up to SIX ships running from the same server, operating in a shared simulation. And secondly, the game is capable of operating over the internet. While this means you could have a bridge crew in Marshall, Missouri co-operating with an engineer sitting in the UK (a real example) you would lose a little of the social element of being in the same room together (and being able to throw things at the Weapons Officer when they forget to raise shields in combat, for example). But how about two or more ships with bridge crews gathered in different locations, with perhaps the Comms officers in contact using a VOIP program like Skype? That's certainly possible.
Yesterday I christened the new man cave by settling down to paint the first squad of the Paradiso National Army.
I went for a super-simple paint scheme - spray primed with Army Painter Desert Yellow, faces and hands picked out in various shades of brown, guns black with just enough grey drybrush to pick out some detail, and any packs, holsters or slings etc painted a golden yellow that was just enough different from the primer to be noticeable with a second look. Everything else was left as primed and I relied entirely on the Quickshade to pick out all the detailing and distinguish belts, boots & buttons. The whole squad (plus two command figures) only took a couple of hours from primed to Quickshade.
Given the speed of the painting (and my notorious fumble-fingeredness) I'm happy with the way these have come out. Unlike my Victorian figures I probably will give them a blast of matt varnish/anti-shine spray as the glossy "toy soldier" look doesn't work as well with modern figures, to my eye at least.
You'll notice that I said I painted the faces and hands various shades of brown. I honestly hemmed and hawed over that choice for some time. On a Carribean island like Paradiso, the vast majority of the population should be black or hispanic, with a minority descended from indigenous tribes. But honestly I was a little reluctant to reflect that in the figure painting.
For one thing, I've got a good selection of caucasian fleshes that work well with the Army Painter Quickshade system and was worried that the browns I had wouldn't work convincingly as skin. That concern was misplaced - I used a light brown labelled "Taupe" for the lightest skin and Burnt Umber for the darkest and mixed a range in-between. The Quickshade was still able to work its magic.
The other issue was that I didn't want to lock down these figures to this single project. I want to be able to use these figures for as many modern-day/near future settings as possible. For these soldiers though, they're most likely to pull double duty as soldiers from one of the other Imagi-Nations I have rattling around the backburner - one African (in true AK47/Bongolesian style) and one pseudo middle-eastern. The other role they might be called on to play would be as The Army in a Zombie Apocalypse game Assuming like most such games, our Zed game will take place in America, an all-ethnic minority platoon is probably more accurate than an all-white one would be. So I decided to take the plunge, and I'm glad I did.
The civilians are going to be a slightly different matter. The figures I have put aside as "Rebel Forces" will probably get the same treatment as the army. The rest of the civilian "Street Violence" figures will probably get a more "conventional" wargame ethnic mix i.e. predominently caucasian, though I'll make a conscious effort to include a little more variation than I might otherwise do.
Yes I know, for some of us this might seem a silly thing to worry about, smacking a little of the old "Political correctness gone mad!" chiche. But for other people I know this is a real hot-button topic, how seemingly inconsequential examples like this all add up to both reflect and indeed shape racial prejudices. Personally I have no such stake in that particular issue - for me it's simply a matter of balancing aesthetics, verisimilitude and practicality, no different from the question of what colour to paint my zombie skin (I'm leaning towards green right now)
Anyhoo, I now have a painted squad, enough for one side of an interesting Flying Lead game. Moving away from the hardware of the game, I've been thinking a little more about how Paradiso is organised and the factions available. These soldiers, as I mentioned, will be representing the Paradiso National Army. They will make up the bulk of Paradiso's armed forces. Later, there will also be a smaller, lighter armed Internal Security force, under the control of the Interior Minister. This would give plenty of scope for some "Junta" style factional infighting.
The forces of opposition will include (1) a communist-backed rebel group, based up in the mountains (2) the forces of a criminal cartel, which can fortunately use the same figures as the rebels and (3) a belligerent neighboring country - details to be determined.
Add in a civilian police force, assorted petty criminal gangs, Private Military Contractors protecting the interests of a huge western corporation and.. hey just for fun let's throw a cult in there as well.
Anyway, we have our first army squad, next up will be a similar sized group of rebels for them to face off against.
