Mandarin's Manor

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July 30, 2007

Historicon '07

Note: I have not uploaded my pictures yet. Those will be coming this coming weekend…

Setting the Scene
The stars have aligned this year which allows me my 3rd ever East Coast convention trip: Wife is off overseas with the girlfriends, and I have airline miles to burn. So I took up Freddy’s offer as a roommate at the Host in Lancaster. Historicon, Here I come!

I have been good lately with my resolutions. I sold off a bunch of unplayed boardgames which financed my small foray into 1/48 Tamiya figures and a few Walmat 1/48 Pz IV tanks. Other than that I am content with all the “active” projects that I have (i.e. 25mm Ancients, 12mm WW2, 25mm Colonials, and some 15mm Flames of War on the side). I have a very small want list when arriving at Historicon (mainly rules) with no prospect of accidentally starting major projects. Life is good (and safe).

Some Major Goals
Being that I am currently in a ww2 mood, one of my mood is to sign up and try out as many different WW2 rules out there as I can find during the con. To that end I think I did pretty well.

My first game is to check out the “Disposable Heros” set of WW2 skirmish rules (those 1/48 Tamiya figures aren’t gonna play themselves you know..) I signed up with the North Lancaster gaming club (where the author of the rules hangs out) table in the main Distelfink ballroom. They have a set table in the room which they kept for the entire 4 days, on which they played all the Disposable Heros period variants they have.
The game I personally sit on is based on the Price of Glory rule book which covers the WW1 and RCW period. The mechanics are almost identical to the DH original that I felt I got a pretty good overview of the rules.
The philosophy emphasized by the DH school simplicity. All dierolls are on a D10 with a few modifiers. Roll under to hit, roll under again to kill. If a unit receives fire it must roll D10 < morale to pass. If fails then receives pin marker(s). Officer can roll vs morale to remove pin markers. Turn sequence is alternating sides, when one side moves each command (player) on that side activates a single unit. One can put unit into overwatch mode thus to give defensive fire during opponents move.
Vehicle fire is slightly more involved, in that when vehicle fires it needs to first “acquire” target before a hit can be attempted. Once hit one must roll penetration vs armor in order to have a possibility of hitting something interesting (i..e tracks, killing crew, disabling weapons, etc.)
Melee is VERY bloody. When two groups meet in melee (and none of them runs away, voluntarily or involuntarily), melee happens to the death (i.e. keep rolling for kills until one side standing). It makes for a fast game.
All these mechanisms are not new, they are all concepts we have seen a hundred times before. Yet the rules are appealing in that “old school” feel. Mechanism are very clean and seems complete (i.e. most facets of the period and all the support weapons seems to be covered). So while it won’t win the innovation award, it appeals on the simple, fast, and easy to setup criteria. On those basis it could might well become the default ww2 skrimish rules in the Soong household.
As an aside, I did a quick scan to compare the number of ww2 skirmish games based on rulesets. DH (and its siblings) are by far the most numerous in this years Historicon roster of games. This might be due to the local connection, but it could well be a trend to come. (for those interested, after DH there are a handful of Battleground game, maybe one or two Arc of Fire game, followed by lot of homebrew sets. There are no Rapid Fire! In sight)

The Flames of War Phenom
I did not put FoW into the skirmish category in my survey above. If I were to compare ONE most played ruleset in the entire Hcon I would say FoW would be the winner (with DBA/M and Warrior a close second due to the tournament games). They have their own room (a new area of the hotel since my last visit) where all the tournament games as well as none tourney setups are located.
One immediate difference between the FoW tournament scene and other more familiar Ancient section lies in the quality of the terrain. Whereas in the Ancient area there are full of army blankets, green felts, or even bare table, in the FoW room there are stunning setups of Stalingrad factory, North Afrika escarpments, and one awesome looking Arnhem Bridgehead table used in a scenario game (when I took the picture the SS Assault into the town has just been halted by the Red Devil and the bridge is littered with wrecks). If this is the FoW tourney scene then it’s already many step above in the presentation area. Throughout the week there is also a large Burma scenario and a big Kasserine game which all have nice terrains. The only downside is that tournaments always ensures that one comes out with some squirrelly matchups. The stunning Stalingrad factory table had a Brit vs Russian game going on when I was there, sigh…
The same FoW craze is still going strong on the showfloor and in the fleamarket. There are plenty of well painted FoW armies all over the place. 15mm continues to be the dominate scale in WW2 in the convention (BTW, for our British readers: there are exactly ONE games in 20mm throughout the 4 days, and I was looking pretty hard. There are many 15mm games using all rule sets, mainly 25mm for skirmish, and some microarmor game here and there. There are even a handful of games using 1/32 scale large figs, but no HO scale on the game table other than the one Pacific Island assault game in the showroom.)

Poor Bloody Infantry
The Peter Pig guys are doing short 1 hr demo throughout the show on their WW2 ruleset. An excellent venue for me to get an idea of the rules. Previous attempt to read through PBI 2 failed the comprehension test, so I figure that with a new edition of the rules and a chance to play with the designer himself warrants a 2nd chance for these rules.
In contrast to Disposable Heros (rearranging familiar bits into a well made comprehensive whole), PBI is the opposite (a lot of none familiar concept with novel presentations). As in many Peter Pig games, it’s a tactical game that contains a lot of operational and strategic elements that acts as a “pre-game” which affects what game you’ll be playing. This is one element of the rules that attracted me although in our short demo we did not get a chance to go through that. Instead we just concentrated on the meat & potato of onboard move/fire.
The game is played on a 8x8 square grid. Units are platoons and each platoon consisits of about 9 bases of Infantry. Being a grid based game exact base size aren’t that important, so I can see sucking in some local FoW players to try the game with their existing armies.
The turns are IGO-UGO, and when one person gets to go he rolls to activate a square (roll 1D6 > distance to the target square and it activates). After it activates then it gets a D6 worth of pips. One can then spend the pips on a variety of activities such as movment & fire. Thus if I have 6 pips I can move 4 pips (4 squares in the open), and then shoot with 2 pips.
For shooting each pips would give 1D6 for a rifle stand (double for MG stands). So if my 3 rifle stands spends 2 pips firing, then I roll 6xD6, looking for a “6” for potential kills.
As a bit of design elegance which speeds up play, all modifiers is applied to the subsequent saving throw so that the initial roll to hit is never encumbered with charts and modifiers. Once a hit is scored a variety of reason could then modify the saving throw. We all found out the hardway that to kill a target hiding in cover requires a HUGE amount of dice rolling (6 on D6 to hit, and anything but a 1 on the saving throw will save the target). There is also rules for suppression but for the sake of simplicity we didn’t get to use that.
There are also rules for fire backs, opportunity fire, close combat, rally. All in all it’s simple, clean, and requires thinking ahead (in almost a boardgame-y kinda way). I was happy with the demo that right afterwards I went to the dealers area and bought the rules. For me the pluses are:
1. Simple game that could be played in an evening
2. Innovative pregame that results in interesting situation (probably could be stolen for some linked scenario campaign in a pain-free way).
3. Low level of troop count required so can get into it easily.
4. Could use any basing scheme so easier to entire local FoW players to give it a try.

Some potential negatives are:
1. Pregame setup might generate some degenerate setup that’s not so interesting to game.
2. High wristage for dice rolling (a typical fire action involves rolling to hit, rolling to save, roll if defender fire back, if so roll to hit, roll to kill).

I Ain’t Been Shot Mum
I bought the 1st edition of the game 3 years ago (and all the expansions) on the strength of its accolade on the net. I couldn’t make it through the reading since it’s in that loosy-goosy English styles of rules writing that I find incomprehensible (though I am not a rules lawyer when I play, I always think about the edge cases when I read through rules, and IABSM 1st edition gave me a headache).
The failing must be me, not the rules, so a convention setting is the perfect place to me to find out (in a less painful way) to find out what the rules was all about.
To keep a long story short, a convention setting with a total of 7 players is not the best showcase for these rules. The turn sequence pride itself on injecting chaos into a game (which normally is a good thing), but IASBM has a very sequenced model so that when your card comes up, a SINGLE player gets to move ALL his units while the rest of the players stand around and watch. In a club game or 1on1 this is probably fine but in a convention game this is NOT the kind of game that does well (since most games I play/host have at least 6 players, it means IASBM is not for me either).
There are some basics which are kinda cool: A unit gets 4 “dice” a turn that it can use it for actions. He can use 2 dice for movement (roll 2D6 and move that amount of pips in inches), and then fire with the other 2 dice (roll 2D6 on the combat chart, and more dice on the chart usually means more decisive results). I can see trying this again in a small group setting, but probably not a set which will see much action in the Soong house.

Other WW2
There is a 2 day extravaganza of Assault on Tobruk using the new Command Decision IV rules, run by Frank Chadwick the author himself. I am always wary of participating in these 30 player experience during a con setting so I did not signup, but dud loiter around to see how the rules work.
After 2 days of sporadic observations, I am still in the dark about the core mechanisms. All I know is that it involves giving orders to units (there are many order cubes/chits litering the battlefield), and rolling dice against charts with tables on them. Giving that the rules are ~$50 a pop and about at least ½ inches thick, I decided that this is not really my thing so I striked that one off my purchase list.
Many supposedly high profile WW2 rules never made an appearance (no Blitzkrieg Commander, no GHQ Microarmor, no Rapid Fire). There is an entire rom devoted to Mein Panzer but it’s kinda out of the way so I did not check it out. Then again there are games that was completely unexpected but was popular. One was the number of 1/32 games that proliferated thoughout the 3 days. This mostly due to the availability of the prepainted 21 Century Toys on the market. They are tempting, but ultimately they are just a little too big for me…

Col. Glantz Lecture
Although I have been a history nut all my life, I’ve never got into what I call the “hardcore” info side of thing. By that I mean things like OB, troop movement, etc. I know people who get a kick out of studying troop placement, digging up obscure OB, etc. I just never got interested in all that, instead more into the “story” aspect of history.
When I heard that Col. David Glantz (WW2 Eastern Front expert) is giving a lecture, I am kinda ambivalent about going. On the one hand I know he’s done some great work in studying the Russian archive to dig up hitherto unknown material, but I’ve suspected (based on reviews of his work) that his stuff tend toward the “hardcore” side of things, and his lecture might be boring as a result.

Boy was I completely wrong!

He is a very dynamic speaker, clear and to the point, presenting hardcore info in easy to digest form. There are also Interesting tidbits and anecdotes throughout so there’s never a dull moment. The topic of the talk is “Fall Blau”, and he covers the initial drive on to S’grad and ends with the Soviet breakthrough. It is part of his Forgotten Battle series (apparently a lot of the initial battles are little documented).
The talk is fascinating because on the projector is detailed maps showing troop locations in 2 day increment(!) One can really see what’s where, who’s doing what, and more importantly, why things happened the way they did. I imaging that if I were to read these on paper (w/o the maps) it’ll be dry indeed, but the annotated maps made everything clear to me.
Col. Glantz mentioned as an aside that publishers hate to publish maps, and many of his previous work all suffered for it (not because the maps aren’t available, he always turns in tons of the stuff but publisher only publish a fraction of them). Aa result he’s now selling a lot of the maps himself, and anyone interested can use the maps to follow the action in the books.
His enthusiasm for the material is truly contagious, one can’t help but get caught up in the gigantic struggle that he’s describing. The lecture overran the schedule by about an hour and it’s past midnight because we call it quits. This lecture is probably the highlight of my Hcon experience, so if you have any interest in WW2 and will be at a convention where Col. Glantz will be giving this talk (I think he’ll be at Origin this year), do yourself a favor and go to the lecture.

Napoleonic Field of Battle (or the fastest rout I have ever experienced)
Being that the people I regularly game with are in the PIQUET inner circle, every convention will see at least one big game with the PK crowd (usually a Nappy game using some amazingly painted figures). This time we are using the (relatively) newly released Field of Battle supplement in the PK extended family. It is more streamlined and eliminated a lot of the complaints leveled against traditional PK (impetus swing has largely been eliminated, and the actual mechanics of moving and firing are also more elegant).
This game sees the French vs an Allied contingent of Russians, Wurttembergers, Bavarians, and Austrians[?] It’s a line them up and have at it affair. Ken & I shared control the Bavarians and the overall commander is Peter (who also ran the Wurttembergers).
What follows is got to be the fastest rout in the Nappy game I have ever witnessed. The French basically aimed their strike force right at the Wurttembergers, and just concentrated the attack in one sector. Although we did not suffer impetus swing, our card turn is abysmal. Coupled by the generous French movement roll (during a movement card, a dieroll against the quality of the moving troops dictates the movement allowance. If rolled well a cav unit can move up to 3 move segment (~36”) which translates to a grand charge that caught the defender off guard). In this case it happened, and the Wuettembergers quickly capitulated and left a big hole for Ken and I to plug.
Ken’s infantry formed square which staved off [temporarily] the French cavalry while I readied my cavalry for a death and glory charge to stem the tide. Before that can happen the Allied side lost all the morale chips and the army lost its will and retreated away. The entire game lasted only about 2 hours. Even though we lost we had a good time, and what happened could be rationalized into a proper historical framework. I will try to run a FoB game using my 15mm Nappy figures one of these days (although I’ll need some house rules since I have single stand figures based for Grand Armee).

Final Thought
I have been pretty good this time, not walking away with brand new armies when the show is over. There were moments of weakness after some of the better games I played in (i.e. I was think about Copplestone Back of Beyond after the Price of Glory game, and then again after witnessing Pat’s excellent paintjob and the terrain in the Field of Battle game, I ALMOST started to plan a 25mm Nappy army using Perry 1815 French), but in each instance the voice of reason rescued me from the madness. I’ve onlu bought 2 prepainted 1/144 Hummel to complete a missing unit of mine, plus a single pack of Perry Sudan figure (Dervish mounted commander). The rest are rules (PBI and Disposable Heros). Pocketbook has been preserved and life is good.

Posted by msoong at July 30, 2007 09:40 PM

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