Mandarin's Manor

May 01, 2008

Metal Storm WWII Review

Like many hobby related forums, TMP has its share of "controversies" that seems to flair up on a regular basis. Normally you can count on someone (either a innocent noob or a troll, it doesn't matter) to come out with "GW, evil empire or not? discuss" before 100+ posts flames away by the usual suspects.

In the last few years a popular surrogate which is taking a kicking is Flames of War. There's always detractors about how the rules are the spawns of the devil, and promoters will laude it as the rules set the saved historical gaming. It is in one of these long exchanged I first heard about Metal Storm WW2 (MSWW2) rules.

The author is squarely on the FoW detractor camp. He touted it as a more historical set of rules which promotes real live tactics better than the 40k-ized world of FoW. The rules are based on Metal Storm Modern which is a distant offspring of Peter Pigs' AK-47 which garnered a lot of positive word of mouth. Given that I now have matching armies of FoW which can be readily used for MSWW2, and that the rules are available in PDF format for ~ $16 US, I sprang for a copy.

The rules are definitely in the old school of "by wargamers, for wargamers". It's got very rudimentary graphics and no game concept illustrations at all (pictures are eye candy variety). It's not going to compete against FoW in getting the new converts, but will be (maybe?) acceptable for old farts like me who are used to "a good set of rules wrapped in not so good physical packaging".

FORCE ORGANIZATION
The scale of the game is the same as FoW: Each player command around a company strength force, with maneuver element being a platoon, and combat is conducted between individual stands (each being a squard or section for infantry, or an individual vehicle). interactions of the stands reminded me of DBx school of rules (with more explanation later). There are no army lists to tell you what's in a force so newbies will be lost. The formula for calculating point cost for a unit is given but a lot of "interpretation" needs to happen on the part of the gamers so definitely not for someone who's new to the period.

Treatment of hardware is very "broadbrush" and impressionistic, for example all armor defense are characterized into a few categories with some examples given (i.e. a Tiger has a D10 for armor, a Sherman a D8) . If you have some exotic vehicle you need to make your own mind up on where it fits into the continuum. If you are the type of treadheads who cares about the armor difference between a long barreled PzIII and a early short barreled version, you will be disappointed. The author cares more about troops quality than hardware.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
The author stated that the rules emphasis is on troop quality more so than hardware, so your quality decides how well you shoot, how much penalty you take due to hardship, and how long you will stick around the battlefield when bad things starts to happen. Hardware might give you a modifier of somekind but is definitely not the deciding factor. I am not going to go into the "historicity" of this decision, but from a pure gameplay point of view it simplified on a lot of nuts and bolts consideration of playing a ww2 game like FoW (where number of machine guns on a tank and their rate of fire is important), and one can get into a game much quicker, and think about the game probably more appropriate of the intended scale (after all if you are a company commander, you think about "sending in your heavy armor reserve", you don't worry about whether your tank can maximize number of machine gun tubes firing this turn).

TURN SEQUENCE
Turn sequence is what I call The Sword and the Flame sequence, where you use a deck of regular cards, and when you flip one color, side A get to move one unit of its choosing, and if another color, side B gets to move a unit of his choosing. Cards are not tied to a particular unit so planning is a little less restrictive.

Once a unit is activated he gets to do either one or two actions depending on what it is. Very straightforward and clean. Movement is also very Sword and Flame like: roll a number of dice and move that amount of distance in inches, modified by quality and terrain.

One change is that a unit can be in overwatch mode for the turn (decided before the cards are shuffled). In this case a overwatch unit may fire BETWEEN card draws (instead of the more obvious "you get to fire anytime during an opponent's move") I am still trying to puzzle this out to see if I like this, since theoretically speaking if you can't see a enemy unit in the end of a card draw, you can't fire at it, and on the next card draw he can activate and then hit you on close combat before you can shoot back even if you are on overwatch. In out test game we used overwatch fire sparingly but didn't seem to make a big difference.

COMBAT
Combat reminded me of a combination of Piquet and DBA. Any attack (regardless of fire, melee, vs inf or armor) always rolls two dice, defender always rolls one die. if attacker beat the defender on both, it's dead. If only beat it on one, then it's gone to ground (pinned, or for armor vehicle it's "threatened"). Very straight forward and clean.

Modifiers and quality comes into play through the quality of the dice you throw. So if you have an 88 firing? you'll get some big dice (D12 & D12), and if you have something crappy maybe you only get D4 & D6. The same principle applies to the defense (see my example earlier on tank types). Any modifiers (there are only a handful so easily remembered after a few turns) are applied as dies up or die down (a la Piquet). This may cause some strangeness for those who's not used to handling different die types (i.e. D8 with a -1 modifier becomes a D6) . This is definitely a broadbrush threatment akin to DBA combat results, but it "feels" right for the level of game the author intended. Of course every die regardless of type has a "1" on it, and a bad roll could mean that your King Tiger gets taken out by a anti tank rifle. But if the explanation of (it's a critical hit that happened to went into the vision slit) causes you problem, this might not be the rules for you.

Gone to Ground is more likely than killed outright, and this means the stand is pinned (can not move or fire, can still melee with a negative modifier). one can either spend action during an activation to remove GTG status, or it'll get reduced by one level at end of turn. It's possible then to inflict multiple GTG result to keep troops down which is a pretty historical tactic.

MORALE
The game doesn't use a tradition morale test, but instead uses a Mission Resolve (purportedly from AK-47, though not having played it I am not sure). The theory being that on a modern battlefield adverse events causes cumulative stress (i.e. losing stands, seeing friendly unit dying, etc.), once stress builds up to a certain level the unit will just quit the field. In game terms this means that unit are called upon to make Mission Resolve tests on certain events. If they misses nothing happens, but on the third miss they are just GONE (we call it the three strikes rule). This means there are some record keeping, but it's not onerous. I think it works, but will need to reflect upon it a bit more to see if this is superior to the more traditional "roll to pass or you are pinned/shaken/routed followed by rallying" mechanism.

OMISSIONS
There's a very explicit omission stated by the author: based on his research there are very few instance of infantry close assaulting tanks without AT weapon (in the rules that means weapon with explicit AT capability like ATR or bazooka, there are no stats for molotov cocktail or improv weapons), so in the design close assault vs vehicle (and conversely vehicle overrunning infantry) is simply forbidden. In our game we have no situation where things might be weird, but I can see in a city fight for instance the tank can just rumble forth into infantry infested narrow streets (assuming that inf have no ATG hiding about) without any worries. I don't have enough historical data to see if this is realistic or not, but since every other set of rules in gaming history have rules to support infantry passing a morale check and then jump on tank to assault it with bare fists I thought I'd mention this (and if this really is a problem, the rules structure are flexible enough that to bolt on a rule of your own devise would not be hard).

CONCLUSION
We both enjoyed the game, and will play again. It is definitely a "high level" of game then the rifle counting of FoW. Some pluses and minus

+ fast moving, can do a largish game much quicker than FoW or other alternatives.
+ Historical tactics works.
+ works well with FoW forces out there.
+ Exact basing not important.
? Lack of close combat vs tank might create weird situations (did not surface in our playtest).
? Overwatch fire did not work as expected, not sure if it works or not.
- If you want detailed differences between troop types and tank specs, this ain't gonna float your boat.
- If you want nationality differences you ain't gonna get it here (one country's "Veteran" behaves very much like another countries' "veteran".

Posted by msoong at 04:16 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 30, 2008

Ancient Update

The recent release of Field of Glory (FoG) has kicked the local gaming scene into an Ancient mood. In addition to a playtest of FoG (see last blog entry), Chris and I have also played a game of Armati II (same Romans vs Carthaginians setup) which I'll have an AAR/Review up shortly. Now I have bought a 15mm Xyston Pyrrhic army from Brookhurst (they are having a Xyston sale), and Chris bought a Corvus Belli Carthaginian army . We'll both be busy with these guys and in the mean time we'll be doing any playing with counters.

A brief note re 15mm: I got out of that scene a while back (sold all my 15mm Italian War, Han Chinese, etc.) mainly for lack of good rules and the fact that the 15mm figures just don't look that good. That has changed with Xyston, since they have the modern 25mm quality, carefully shrunken to a 15mm (more like 18mm) frame. They look great painted up using my block paint/magic dip painting style. Some pictures will be up shortly after my move is complete.

Another reason I went with 15mm is that the local scene for Ancients is almost exclusively 15mm (many are jazzed by FoG and are dusting up their old Ancient army, or building new ones, the local store even started carring Xyston inventory). I am forseeing 2008 as the year of the Ancients*

One problem with 15mm is that other than Xyston, not many others comes close to that standard (the new comer Splintered Light Miniatures comes close). I will probably go gaga if anyone ever comes out with Xyston quality figs for the Crusades period.

*I am also catching the ww2 bug, see next post....

Posted by msoong at 02:07 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

February 29, 2008

Field of Glory AAR [Updated]

Once in a great while a set of rules becomes the "hot property" of the moment. A while back Warmachine came along and captured the hearts and minds of many disaffected Warhammer players in providing a deeper game. Then there's Flames of War which became the first set of historical rules to received a lot of people who used to play only scifi and fantasy. Now we have Field of Glory [FOG] who's trying to be the "gateway" game for Ancients.

FOG is published by Osprey books who's known to put out attractive and concise books on military history subjects. The first thing one would notice about FoG is its physical quality: It comes in a nicely printed hardback book, with nice thick quality pages and full color treatment (in fact it's better quality paper than their Osprey books). There are pages full of illustrations cribbed from their books, pictures of miniatures (somewhat uneven in quality), and some VERY nice full color diagrams which explains the various rules situations. If you are the type that gets seduced by eye candy in rules, FoG can't be beat.

Among miniature periods Ancient is kinda unique (or notorious) in that it's often thought of as A) tournament minded (in that players will min/max their armies in order to win, therefore end up with very unhistorical tactics in order to exploit the rules), B) Ahistorical matchup (Aztecs vs Mongols could be typical ancient matchups in a tournament). Rules set often falls into the "tournament mindset" (most of the mainstream rules such as WRG, DBx, and to a lesser extend WAB and rules like Tactica, Armati). By tournament mindset I mean that rules are often written to prevent rule lawyering, and to ensure that any conceivable matchups can be handled by the rules (i.e in real life an English longbow have probably never encountered a Meso -American obsidian blade, but there must be a forum post somewhere clarifying what the interaction will be).

FoG attempts to be tournament friendly and yet be "historically accurate". It claims to achieve that by eliminating "cheese" and to provide rules that encourages historical behavior of the troops. It also claimed to be more "playable" and easier to understand than its predecessors (the DBx family, since the author Richard Bodley Scott was a co-author of DBx. It all sounded like lofty goals, and combined with eye candy, I decided to bite (I actually joined the Playtest Team.

DESCRIPTION OF THE RULES
My first impression upon reading through the rules is that they try to be "more historical" than WRG/DBx, and yet is trying to make sure that the rules doesn't become a tool of the rules lawyers. Whether it's tournament rules lawyering free or not will take time (those guys need time to find all the cheese), but the rules seems to reward historical bahavior of the troops.

The was touted to be "simple" and "newbie friendly". On that front I think it's less successful. If the author wants to compare favorably with rules like Flames of War in drawing in people who have never played historicals before, then I think he did not do a good job. While easy to read for anyone who has to decipher Barkerese, if you are used to a more "conversational" style of rules like GW or FoW, its pages of DRM will likely cause some confusion.

MECHANICS
It's a IGO-UGO system, with a traditional move, shoot, melee setup. SOme of the exceptions to that:
1) Some of the phases are simultaneous, mainly the shooting phase (both players shoot during both player's bound), and the Joint Action Phase (where both side gets to handle routers, rally, and move commanders).
2) There's an IMPACT phase. In this phase the acting player declares all charges, and carries them out. Any melee resulting from the charge is resolved then and there, before shooting or other melee (more on this later).
3) There's a Interception Charge, where none phasing player may preempt a charge if the a charging unit is charging into a "Zone of Influence" of a unit capable of interception. This gives some thought for the player to think about holding a reserve and things like covering one's flank.

IMPACT VS MELEE
The rules try to emphasize the difference between a charge combat (i.e. where great benefit are given to troops types like impact foot (Romans, Gauls) and knights), and melee combat (if both side survives a charge, then qualities such as staying power, overlap, weight of numbers begin to matter more). It's a good model to strive for and one gets a distinct flavor thinking about the difference between the 2 styles of combat. In our first playthrough though I found that combat is very attritional, in that usually there are no quick kill/routs, and one have to work on lowering the morale of the enemy through multiple turns (one has to get an enemy from steady to disrupted, then if they fail cohesion check again they go to Fragmented, then the last stage is broken/rout).

In my mind the charge type of combat should have a possibility of having the loser of a charge gets carried away by the victorious charger, and if both side made that, then it goes into a slow grudge match of attritional warfare. Instead although mathematically targets are more likely to lose cohesion check if they paint more stuff, we found that you get similar results (just with a different batch of modifiers). Ideally the charge combat should be much more dicey (no pun intended) affair then a grindout melee.

Combat is a clever combination of "list of modifiers a la WRG", and the WAB's handful of dice approach. Basically both side goes down the charge to figure out what their Point of Adventage count is (then that result will modify what kinda of "to hit" on handful of dice will be). For example if no one has an advantage we both need 4's on a D6 to score a hit. If I have one up on POA then I need 4's to hit you, but you need a 5's or more to hit me.

Quality of the troops are expressed as re rolls. So if you are superior in quality, you get to re-roll any 1's on a D6. I think it's a simple way to handle different troop quality.

MISSILE FIRE
Rolling for missile hit is the same process as that of melee (A good thing). Shooting is definitely de-emphasized. One need to inflict at least 1 hit for every 3 figures in the target in order to cause a cohesion check. Thus one need large body of shooters with lots of dice in order to even get a chance to do some damage. Not sure if this is realistic (at least when it comes to medieval time when missiles plays a larger role IMO), but for the Ancient period is probably spot on.

CONCLUSION
There are many positives about the rules
+ Awesome physical presentation.
+ Easier to read than the competition (WRG, DBx, Warrior).
+ Clear and concise on the most part.
+ Award historical tactics.
+ Simplified army list/army building encourages historical armies, not min/max super troops.
+ A clever bland of "list of DRM" and "Bucket of dice" systems of combat
+ Distinction between impact and melee combat
+ Likely to generate interest in reviving the ancient scene whether you like the rules or not.

Some negatives:
- Still NOT an "easy" set of rules
- Not really newbie friendly as advertised
- Need lots of troops to have a quality game ("Lots" defined as DBM/WRG sized)
- There are still some geometry involved (though probably less abusive than DBx).
- Game time could be long (could just be us learning the rules, will certain revise upon further playing).

Some neutral observations:
* One of the rule's stated goal is to have rules written to discourage rule lawyering and cheese. Jury is still out on that one.
* In effective missiles might unrealistically penalize "shooty" armies like the English HYW or Mongols. (no prove, will play with my Mongols to see how it works).

Posted by msoong at 01:02 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 01, 2007

Another Cool Service Discovered at Historicon

A service I didn't know existed, but something I've always wished for: A customer map making service! Go check out DSRGAMES For a reasonable fee, They can either print out some fancy map you have onto a giant plotter map, or for a few quid more you can give them what you want and they can use their design skill to print you a professional looking wargame map (always wanted that customer ASL monster scenario that you've researched on for the last 10 years? Here's your chance.

The blog also contains a lot of behind the scene entries which is fascinating...

Posted by msoong at 10:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 31, 2007

The Prefect Period

While I was at Historicon, the thought of starting a new period has crossed my mind more than once. Being an engineer type, I tried to put down some "objective" (as if that's gonna be easy) criteria on how to go about this decision. Here it goes:

1. In 25/28mm or larger- I can no longer comfortably see in that scale anymore. So other than completing troops in 12/15mm that I already have, anything brand new which I start have to be a larger scale.

2. Something small-ish- i.e. My dream of re-starting on my 25mm Napoleonics again should be squashed quickly.

3. Interesting Troops types- Should have foot troops, cavalry (that means pre-ww2), Artillery, and preferably some form of mechanical conveyance. The last requirement pretty much limited the choices to the Inter-war years.

Taken the conclusion of "some conflict set in the inter war years", one can list the more interesting wars which happened and see what we have:

a. Poncho Villa/Mexican revolution (One can use Mexicans that can easily be used in Western games and Maximillian games, there are US troops, armor cars, etc.)
b. Rif War (FFL, Riffian Bandits, Abd El Krim, Armor cars, planes)
c. WW1 Middle East- Beduin tribesmen, camels, primitive tanks/armor cars, British, turks, German advisors. Omar Sharif & Anthony Quinn. Can extend to various British desert campaign against the natives.
d. North West Frontier- I can reuse my Afghan figures w/o change. Need new WW1 era or inter war era Brits & Indians. Armor Cars.
e. Back of Beyond (not really a historical period but rather a genre defined by a figure line)- this covers Russian Civil War, Chinese Warlord conflicts, and the cross section of both of these plus one can have Western Interventionist Expeditionary forces which means you can pretty mush have games using anyone (US, Chinese Warlord, Brit, French , Russians (white & Red) along with whacky things like Czechs & Poles. archeologists and dinosaurs are also accepted.

After looking at this, one sees that d & e are closely linked, and can easily be grouped into one.

Now back to high level requirements:

4. Availability of nice figures.

At this point the choices are clear: Back of Beyond [BoB](with figures from Copplestone & Brigade) should give me a wide range of actions. So IF I am to start on new projects (not saying that I am, being the budget conscious miser that I am), I'll start to build my Bob armies....

Posted by msoong at 02:31 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

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 09:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 15, 2007

Ambush Blitz! AAR

I have been looking for a fast play set of Non-skirmish oriented WW2 rules for a long time now. Something with more meat than Memoir '44, and less complicated than Command Decision and Spearhead (Flames of War is kinda in between scale and I am deliberately leaving it out here). Our little band tried Blitzkrieg Commander and was not too impressed. I decided to put on a a game Ambush Blitz! for our (somewhat) frequent summer Wednesday night game.

Now this is NOT a well known set of rules in these part of the world. I heard about it through a mention in TMP which tout it as "fast play WW2 using a hex grid". Further inquiry showed that it is supported through the 1/144 Yahoo group, and the author expressly designed the rules to be used with 1/144 (close to 10/12mm scale) figures. Since I have my massive horde of 1/144 armor force AND I am looking for a fast play set of rules, I decide to take the plunge and order the rules.

PHYSICAL PRESENTATION
For 10 Euro (about $13 with the current exchange rate), you get a surprisingly well made set of rules. It is printed on full color glossy stock. You get 44 pages worth of rules, 10 scenarios, and tables and charts. You can pay more for the CD which gives you a scenario builder tool but I did not get that.
While the physical presentation is superb, the rules writing is another matter. The author is Portuguese I believe and the rules are written in English, while everything is there (more on that later) and the rules are pretty complete, it makes for an awkward reading. For example offboard artillery/indirect fire is called "Curved fire" in the rules. Now while that does not effect the game play in anyway, suitable choice of terms (and proof read from a native English speaker) will do wonder for a 2nd printing.

I did mention earlier that the rules are very complete. The organization is pretty good, and while some rules are scattered all over (i.e. there is a handy reference sheet, but a list of saving throw circumstances are not present. Instead one has to hunt through the rules to locate each and everyone in different places). A bit annoying, but tolerable.

RULES MECHANICS
If I have to describe the rules with one word, I would use the word "subtle". One get a lot of WW2 tactics and effects (at least how I interpret them) with minimal amount of rules. If you like a lot of chrome and national characteristics, this set of rules is NOT for you.

Each turn each HQ unit (the key action driver of the game) rolls a initiative die, and then the HQ will then take their turn in the order rolled. (i.e. Ge commander A rolls a 6, Ru commander rolls a 4, and Ge Commander B rolls a one, the play order if GeA, Ru, Ge B)
The the HQ's turn is up (an Activation Phase) the player activates units by rolling a command dieroll. Usually you have to roll a D6 and beat the distance in hexes between the HQ and the unit in question, so if your unit is three hexes away, you need to roll a 3 or higher on a D6 in order to active it to do something, else it is DONE for the turn. If a HQ blows his roll then he is done for the turn UNLESS he has "rerolls" left. (Normal HQ has 1 reroll per turn, better quality troops will have more). The mechanics is somewhat similar to Warmaster/Blitzkrieg Commander but with less extreme results (since you cannot push the same unit more than once, and the reroll gives you some buffer in recovering from disaster. The feel of chaos is definitely there (might not appeal to the perfect plan type of player).

Units are platoons, usually represented by 3 stands. Units normally moves 1~2 hexes a turn, but can "march" move which gains more distance but then the unit is "spent" (called "idle" in the rules) and can not do stuff next turn. Stacking is normally 1 unit a hex, but a non-infantry unit can stack with an infantry unit (also HQ can stack with one other unit).

When a unit is activated it can fire, move+fire, march (gain extra distance), assault, or get put into Overwatch mode so it can fire SNAP-FIRE during opponent's activation.

All fire (including assult which is just firing at 1 hex range) is performed the same way: A unit rules a number of D6 depending on troop type and number of stands remaining, then hit on certain number (usually 5~6). Normally there are no saving throws other than unit in dig in position or HQ getting fired at. Otherwise a hit = 1 stand removed. Quite decisive (which we all liked. We thought that the hits system in Blitzkrieg Commander is too attritional and too slow moving. Here unit evaporates if exposed to effective enemy fire for too long.

Normally a hit result in the death of a stand, one exception is if armor is hit. Armor unit must face a hex face, and then it has a frontal armor value (front 3 hexes) and rear armor value (the rest). If a hit from a weapon that has a penetration number hits a armored target, then an addition D20 is rolled, and by default a 10 or less will result in a kill, and that number is modified by the difference between the penetration num and the armor num (e.g. if I have a PN value of 10 and you have a armor val of 4, then I kill on 14 or less on a D20). Pretty simple really.

One other aspect I really liked is how "attachments" (like support weapons and transports are treated). In games like Flames of War one has to build ALL THE TRANSPORTS that's used for a unit (where most of the time it's sent to the rear so it's not on the map anyway). In Ambush Blitz transports are used as "markers". So if an infantry unit of three bases is a mechanized infantry, one add a halftrack stand to indicate that it can move faster and has a limited armor save against small armes fire. It is not a "stand" which can be used to take casualties. I like this quite a bit (since I hate painting trucks) so one can only have a handful of transport models in order to play the game.
Support Weapons are slightly different in that they really ARE a separate stand when attached to an infantry unit. So if a HMG is attached to an inf platoon than that platoon now fires like a 4 stand unit. Pretty straight forward.

GAME PLAY
I choose one of the smaller scenario from the book (one set in Barbarossa, where the Germans need to attack and occupy Russian held objectives). Germans have overwhelming number, but Ru have infantry in ambush, plus on turn three the dreaded KV-1 (the heaviest Ge tanks are PzII) makes its appearance. I didn't have to worry about indirect fire or things like fortifications and such, just Infantry, support weapons (only a few), and tanks. A good learning scenario for us where none of the players have tried the rules before.

I was game mastering full time in order to ensure an enjoyable experience for the other 5 players (2 on Ge side and 3 on the Ru side. Since there are really only one Ru command in the game, it's ran by a committee).

It took me about 30 min to explain the rules to a point when people are ready to push troops. Concepts are easy to grasp: position your HQ so you can maximize your activation, how to have support fire into enemy position before you advance, how to setup snap-fire (defensive fire) in the face of incoming enemy, etc. Everything flows smoothly and the rules are clean.

IMPRESSION
I like a lot of the little touches (subtle effects): there's a ZOC that affects enemy drill roll, and upon entering an enemy ZOC you are committing to an assault, which means you have to pass a drill roll in order to initiate the combat. The management of ZOC and defensive fire is what set this apart from simpler fare such as Memoir'44.
We played about 8 turns in 2 1/2 hours of play (and this involves frequent rules lookup for some of the more unusual stuff like ambush and air to ground attack). We all agreed that once we are more familiar with the rules it can move much faster (or players can command more troops, people are already talking about Kursk...)

The author made a big deal about this game is designed specifically for 1/144. But since it's based on a hex grid, one can really use whatever scale you want (prob works fine for 1/285 or 15mm). Might look funny having a 25mm tank having a max shooting distance of 6 hexes, but it does not really affect play.

One thing you will NOT get is quirky national characteristics which happens in many WW2 rules. An infantry squad is an infantry squad, and the only difference between a Russian one and a German one in our scenario is that the Ru have a crappier inherent anti-tank value of 0 instead of the German with a value of 1. The only other difference is in the armor and penetration value of the tanks/guns. One area the rule does allow for some differentiation is the HQ quality (better commands can have more command rerolls), but that did not apply in the scenario we played.

FINAL THOUGHT
What sold me on these rules is that:
1. Playing on a hex grid speed up large games since one doesn't have to waste time checking distances. This may not appeal to everyone but for large games hex is fine by me.
2. I like transport models used as markers only.
3. I like the D6 based quick combat mechanism.
4. I like the simple command and control & inclusion of defensive fire.

Most of the other players all commented that they liked this better than Blitzkrieg Commander. Two of us are FoW players as well and in my mind that is more of a mass-skirmish game, thus at a lower scale than AB! and not really a competitor, but for larger games (or multiplayer games) I would choose AB over FoW in a heartbeat. So until some other rules come along (I am fickle that way), this could be the one for large scale WW2 games...

Some potential negatives (depending on who you are), is that this is set higher than a skirmish game, so not for tread heads.

Posted by msoong at 01:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

January 30, 2007

My Favorite [Best?] Miniature Line Ever

I am in the mood for some kinda top 10 list, so here's my pick on the best miniature lines (past and present). It's all IMO of course so take it with a grain of salt...

These are in no particular order..

1. Wood Elves from Thunderbolt Mountain: Tom Meier is one talented sculptor, his stuff is so life-like (and free from the usual bulge of lead miniatures) that one is hard pressed to believe that these mini-masterpieces are only 30mm and not some 54mm kit. They are also surprisingly cheap when purchased in bulk (hmm, that's why I have a wood elf army that I am not sure what to do with). There are downside of course in that they are very hard to paint properly (so I left them to the professionals). Tom also have a very informative blog on his sculpting process. I hope more artist will do this...

2. 25mm Colonials from Ral Partha: Since I am on a Tom Meier kick, might as well list his other line. This is the range that got me into colonial gaming (and thus a life time of obsession). Back in 1984[?] not only was it the best sculpted figures around, they are also super cheap (10 figures for $4.00 whereas most other historicals are running around 90 cents ea.) They are a little static nowadays but the anatomy still holds up.

3. 28mm Darkest Africa from Foundry. Mark Copplestone is probably my other favorite miniature sculptor, and his style couldn't be more different from Mr. Meier. Whereas Meier's figures are super realistic, Copplestone figures have a caricature quality to it, yet they aren't as grotesque as GW figures so for me they strike a fine balance. The DA range is such a large collection of figures and characters, one can't help but come up with background for some of the more colorful figures. His current range is Back of Beyond which shares the same quality as his DA range. Many of Copplestone's earlier figures (fantasy, ancients) have been re-released by Companion Miniatures.

4. 25mm Foundry Macedonians- Sorry to say I don't know who the sculptor is, but I would place this as the best Ancient line EVER. The figures are nicely designed, realistically proportioned, and yet still relatively easy to paint. Foundry seems to went downhill soon after that came out and that is a shame.

5. 15mm AB Napoleonic line- These are hard to get here in the US and cost an arm and a leg, but when you look at the pictures it's hard to imaging that these are ONLY 15mm. If I can afford it I would do my Nappy army in these babies, or if I'd go 25mm for that period I will go...

6. 25mm Perry Napoleonics- I was a fan of the Perry brothers back in their Foundry days, but had issues with some casts (mainly their cavalry figures which seems to suffer from a short crotch syndrome. Since they strike out on their own label they went from strength to strength (Their Samurai, Saracen, and Sudan range are all supreme and any of these ranges can easily find a spot on this list). I think they hit their peak with their latest 1815 French Napoleonics. Some of the vignette are so lifelike that you just had to paint some up. (There are even delusions about doing a Waterloo project in 25mm in time for the bicentennial but the thought was quickly suppressed from the mind).

Honorable Mention: GW LOTR Range: The reason this did not score as high is because it's not a really single range by a single sculptor, and therefore suffered from some NOT AS GOOD figures. If you just single out the cream of the crop though they can easily find a spot here (since many of them are Perry cast that is not surprising..) Now GW pricing is still something I can't accept (and a reason I didn't get into the game), but since price/quality ratio is not really an issue on this list I left that factor out.

Posted by msoong at 01:06 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

August 10, 2006

Blitzkrieg Commander AAR

I have been searching for a scenario for my WW2 "playoff" for a while now. I finally decided on a German Assault on the Village of Ponyri sscenario set during the Kursk offensive when I saw this in the latest issue of Wargames Journal (a very nice mag btw, I much prefer it over Wargames Illustrated). With the scenario chosen, I decided to first give Blitzkrieg Commander (BKC) a spin.

Instead of the usual rules review of explaining the rules system in detail, I've broken the review into sections which are criteria that I deem important. In no particular order, here it goes:

Prep Work

When it comes to miniature games, I spend probably 75% of all games played as game master. Sometimes I get to push troops and sometime I don't, and since I get a kick out of design scenarios, putting out models/terrains, as well as setting up games with incomplete information for the players to blunder into (another word, I enjoy playing god), I am ok not pushing troops around.
This also means that percentage wise, I spend a lot more time putting together a game, looking for scenario, typing up unit label etc. So I am very sensitive about how much "prep work" is required for a specific ruleset.
The worst example is probably Piquet, where for every game you put on you have to build a card deck, roll up unit stats, and if you are playing the game properly (which I never do), you have to roll up various "deployment" options as well. All in all, a lot of work, and a main reason I am hesitant to put on PK game no matter the merit of the game system itself.
For BKC prep work is quite minimal. Unit stats are very general (i.e. you an look it up at the back of the rules), and there aren't much else that NEEDS to be done (I did label the HQ units since they have to be able to be identified easily). I also used Army Builder to print out a abbreviated unit roster so only the relevant stats are available and doesn't overwhelm the players.
Bottomline: Little prep work, GM friendly.

Scale

The game does not have a strict scale of one stand = X man, but rather a fuzzy "one stand could be anything from a single vehicle/squad to a platoon". The game does not deal with armor penetration angle, types of shells used, etc. So it's clearly not a "detailed tactical" treatment of the war.
Yet the game is also not "high level" enough where you don't have to think about frontage, armor, types of shell etc. It does have a highly abstracted tactical flavor though (i.e. it's easier to hit a unit's flank, and it's easier to kill through a unit's armor from the flank, and some units are marked to have HE shell only so they can not damage hard targets, things like that). Issues of supply is not dealt with at all so all of you who like to play quartermaster general will be disappointed.
Bottomline: A abstracted feel where you have to think about things like facing, but not too hard.

Flow of the Game

Some game just flows better than others. This is a playability metric that's highly subjective and hard to describe. To have some analogy in place, a game with a simple Move/Fire/Melee would have a good flow, whereas a game with 25 different sub phases would have an awkward flow. This is not strictly synonymous with complexity since a system can have a simple flow, but highly complex combat resolution.

BKC's flow is relatively straight forward, but is somewhat unconventional. It has a simple command phase followed by close combat (I am ignoring scheduled phase and Initiative phase for now). The meat of the BKC system is in the Command Phase.

Command Phase is inspired by the command phase from GW's Warmaster. In essence you roll dice to "push" a group of units to perform actions. You can perform multiple actions if you keep pushing the troops (making the die roll). The die roll gets harder as you push your units to do more (a simple simulation of unit fatigue). One can voluntarily stop pushing, in which case the HQ can then order someother unit. If you "bust" the command dieroll though, then the HQ is done, and that unit is done for the turn.

I liked this system when I played warmaster (enough that I adapted it for my Warmaster Colonial rules), so in theory it should work here. The problem we had last night is that the scenario I picked is an assault setup where the Germans starts offboard and have to move onto the table, and for the first two turns the Germans have busted their dieroll on the first try, so the all important Infantry assault group did not get to move AT ALL until turn three!

Many will say that this is realistic (rationale being that the German's got their command mesed up so the attacked is delayed), and a good and simple way to simulate battlefield chaos. The fact of the matter is though that it's just not fun when you can't do ANYTHING for two turns in an 8 turn game. I am still of two mind about this. I appreciated the simple way of simulating battlefield friction w/o too much rules, but if someone gets "command hosed" (especially since all of us players have busy lives, and are spending precious game time trying out new rules), I can see that as not a pleasant experience (meaning the rules probably won't see much play, which I'd considered a failure).
Bottomline: Borderline. Simple and realistic results vs. potential player hosage resulting in one sided games.

Mechanics

Combat is analogous to Warmaster: Every unit type have a attack factor indicating the number of dice to roll in an attack (An Elephant has a factor of 5), the to hit number is a function of target location, so a target in the open gets hit on 4-6, thereas someone in a bunker is only hit on a 6.
Every unit type also have a HIT stat, which indiates how many hits it can sustain before it croaks. One key thing is that hits that's not enough to kill it may cause supression (it the attacker passes the to hit number again). double suppression causes a unit to fall back.
That's pretty much it, and the same process applies to range fire, as well as artillery barrage or airstrikes. It's pretty simple to remember or implement.

There are complaints that there's too much doe rolling: So you roll a handfull of dice to see if you hit, then if you have SAVES (mostly armor) you roll for saves. Then if there are still hits then check if there aren't enough hits accumulated this turn to kill it outright (hits reset at the end of your turn), you roll all hits again to see if you cause suppression. Now repeat for every unit that wishes to fire (remember that if you successfully push a unit it can fire many times in a turn).

The rules as written does not have any op fire, but we did play with the optional rules that allows the defender to op fire, with a chance of suppressing itself (the effect of supression is that the unit loses a turn where it can't do anything. So in this context it means that a unit is firing in the opponent's turn and therefore loses its own upcoming turn. The concept itself is pretty elegant, but it does involve another "I just took a shot and am I supressed?" die roll.

Bottomline: as a ruleset advertised as "fast play", this gets to be a bit too much die rolling. At this scale I much prefer a one set of dieroll determins the outcome.. (perhaps roll to hit, roll to save, and if you have > X hit you are automatically supressed, and if you have Y hits a turn you are dead).

Other feedback

Two of the players thought that there's a "panzerblitz" syndrome, where troops darts from cover to cover, and if it ever ventures out into the open, it gets hit and killed. This might be true to a degree but I am not yet convinced that it is necessarily a bad thing (if a Su-76 sticks his head out in front of an Elephant, chances are that it will die, it's as simple as that).

I personally think that an assault on a fixed position is probably not the best situation for a new rules run through. I'll have to dig up a more maneuver oriented scenario for the next game. In the meantime I have many good things to say about BKC, but the "too much die roll" issue will probabably doom it from being a contender for my ww2 rules of choice. The search for the holy grail continues...

Posted by msoong at 07:36 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 10, 2006

Flames of War 2nd Edition

I have written about Flames of War a few times in this blog. It's now the defacto standard in ww2 gaming (at least in this corner of the world), and is the only historical game that really caught on. I know quite a bit of WH40k players who's now playing FOW instead.

There are many nay sayer re FOW as well, and the criticism are generally the same one leved against GW: The rules are simplistic, they are "dumbed down" for the masses, they have no command control rules, they are just a dicefest, etc. All the charges are all true, but they are also irrelevant IMO. FOW is a great gateway game that gets people (many of whom are previous fantasy gamers who wouldn't take a second look at historical stuff) playing historical game. The rules might be simple, but they do reward historical tactics. Rules and figures are well packaged so that people can get started without having to become an expert in WW2 TO&E.

In fact many old grognard in the club have converted. Long time Empire players are seen discussing the point cost justification of an Italian trench gun. Yes discussion might have more of a tournament slant where value/point cost becomes paramount, but the fact that people are now pushing lead instead of NOT pushing lead is IMO a good thing.

Another kudo for BattleFront (manufacturer of FOW) is how they went about releasing their 2nd edition rules. From my memory, every company that releases rules (be it the Evil Empire of Games Workshop, all the way to WRG of the historical folks), when a new edition comes out, your old stuff (usually just the rules, but sometimes rules changes are radical enough that entire army gets ditched because it's no longer effective) gets tossed out, and you get the pleasure of repaying full price for the rules and army list all over again.

This latest FOW 2nd edition release is a real class act and should be a lesson for all rules producer. I bring in my old first edition book into a retail store, they put a sticker on it, then hand me a 2nd edition book. That's it, no questions asked and no $$$ changes hand!

The army list upgrade is a bit more complicated, but still better than industry average. Instead of the normal rules upgrade where massive changes in rules usually cause some major overhaul in army list. In this case the changes are pretty minor, limiting it to price adjustment and small changes elsewhere (removal of the ronson rule makes Sherman much more competitive value-wise). You do have to pay for the new army lists ("source books"), but all the changes will be released as a free PDF download sometime in the future so the new books aren't strictly necessary.

When I first heard about the 2nd edition rules I though that great, it'll be some cheapo black and white staple together thing. Instead we are getting a full color, >130 pages worth of high quality stuff (albeit in a digest size so the print is a bit small). This "mini-me" rule book is complete, and is devoid of most fluff so it's actually preferred over the standard 2nd edition rulebook that'll be coming out within the month.

A quick glance through the 2nd edition rulebook shows that there are no major changes. Only some changes involving close assult, air strike, and clarification in hit assignment. All the changes either simplifies the rules, or just a clarification of existing stuff. A right direction IMO (not the disastrous path taken from SL to ASL)...

Now that I am reasonably enthused about these rules right now, I think the first of my WW2 rules playoff will use it. I have a few candidate for scenarios already and will finalize that soon.

Posted by msoong at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

May 18, 2006

What to keep and what to sell?

It's that time in a miniature gamer's life to figure out what to get rid of (mainly for fund raising reason to buy more toys). I went back to my "taking Stock" blog entry and see what I have:

Active: These are periods that I am currently buying, building troops for-
# 28mm Darkest Africa. STATUS: Very complete. A very colorful period and a line of figures that could be my all time favorite. I am not actively doing much with them but an annual convention game of Big Trouble in Big Africa means I'll definitely keep these around.

# 10mm WW2 (for Flames of War and Blitzkrieg Commander)- STATUS: Since the WW2 bakeoff is about to start this is my "active project". A keeper.

# 15mm Napoleonics (For Grande Armee. I have a "large enough" French , Russian, and British army. Have another unpainted Prussian army sitting in a box) STATUS: Definitely a keeper since having a bunch of horse and musket armies around to play is a basic requirement for subsistence living. keeper.

# 25mm Colonial Russians (In Central Asia) STATUS: Done and we've actually played with them. Since any colonial period armies that's complete and I can actually put games on means they are keepers.

# 28mm Zulu War (A Rorke's Drift skirmish game) STATUS: Gone. Got rid of all my BlackTree Zulus and my Rorke's drift building. But that fund was spent long ago to finance my new Fantasy habit I'll have to look for funding elsewhere.

# 25mm Early Ottoman Turks - STATUS: My very first wargaming army and one where I painted almost all the figure. Definite keeper.

# 25mm Carthaginians (to fight my buddy Jeff's Romans) STATUS: THE BIG DEBATE. Since Jeff and I do not have THAT much invested in ancient other than this army, and we did not paint them ourselves, this is currently high on the redundancy list for fund raising...

There are other active period that got started which wasn't even on the list last time:

# 25mm Fantasy- Tom Meier's elves pushed me over the edge, and broke my "historical only" policy. So now I have a huge Non-GW compliant wood elve army and a growing orc army. Haven't had a game yet as the figure bases aren't terrained yet. Keeper.

# ? scale B5 Spaceships - Once you break the historical only rule where do you stop? I painted all of these so likelyhood of getting rid of them is low, and our low intensity ongoing campaign means that it'll get occasional outing. Keeper.

Inactive: These are periods that I have a lot stuff, but just haven't gamed in recently. A closer look will be made in this category for fundraising:

# 25mm Colonial (this includes about 300 Ral Partha Zulus, about 200 Dervishes, about 500 Afghans, and 400 Boxers. Oh yeah, and their counterpart in the enemy camp...) STATUS: Colonials hold a special place in the Mandarin Manor, so keepers by default. Although there are selected ranges (i.e. crappy Maori Wars figure and old minifig Boxer Reb figures that could be chopped. Due to their age and quality not likely to fetch any good $$$ though...)

# 15mm Renaissance (Italian War) STATUS: Likely candidate. A fun period that I just don't get a chance to do much. Plus it's the kind of period where a smaller scale like 10mm definitely looks better. (The funny thing is that I have sold this army before, then later bought it back. Let's hope that whatever decision I make this time sticks...)

# 15mm Dark Ages (mainly Central Asian steppe nomads) STATUS: borderline. My hand painted Tang Chinese probably gets a stay of execution, but a big collection of it's turkish and arab enemies are just sitting there gathering dust. Need to think hard on what to do about them...

# 15mm Han Chinese (An impulse buy, can be used to fight the steppe nomads). STATUS: Candidate for elimination, since its a period I never really gamed much in and did not paint myself. Probably keep the small Ch'in army which I painted and sell the rest.

# 20mm WW2 (old ww2 scale that I probably should get out of, but don't want to part with all those tanks I built by hand)

# 28mm WW2. STATUS: CHopping block. Got rid of my tanks already. now just waiting to sell my unpainted infantry figs (have tried on Bartertown but to no avail).

# 25mm Mongols (my first army) - STATUS: Keeper.

# 25mm Samurai (A small Samurai army that I can field against my Mongols). STATUS: Chopping block. Anyone want a professionally painted and mounted (DBM) Old Glory samurai army?

# 25mm Medieval (bunch of unpainted Foundry medievals that might see action when I get my Nicopolis project started.) STATUS: Keeper, since late medieval in 25mm is something I've committed to with my Turks and Mongols. Plus they can always fight orcs in my fantasy world.

# 25mm LOTR figures (Bought a bunch of plastic Gamesworkshop figs from eBay, but now I can't find any use for. Will probably go on to the sales pile. STATUS: The orcs I am keeping. Plastic Gondorians less so.

# 15mm WW2 Japanese. STATUS: This one wasn't on the list last time. A moment of weakness and sales magic from an unnamed friend means I ended up with a 3rd scale in ww2 (20mm, 28mm, 10mm). Professionally painted by some famous painter (he did many of the FoW models photoed in the rules). A definite goner, and since the expected Fow pacific release might never happen, I should get rid of it ASAP.

# 25mm Napoleonics (Foundry). STATUS: Had it all along but forgot to make the list last time. bunch of Foundry French and Russians back when they have reasonable deals to be had. Too small to do anything useful with other than skirmish games. Besides one lone Russian unit none of them are painted. Goner...

# 25mm Assyrians (Old Glory). STATUS: Had it all along but never made the list. I bought these in a giant sale so spend hardly peanuts. Great figures (probably best OG has ever done), and if I were ever to go into Biblical period I want to do it in 25mm. Keeper for now.

Conclusiuon
Definite goners are 25mm Cartheginians, 25mm Samurai, some 25mm LOTR plastics, 28mm WW2, and 25mm Napoleonics, & 15mm WW2 Japanese. Next step, figure out a fund raising plan (i.e. Bartertown).

Posted by msoong at 12:19 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 17, 2006

WW2 Miniature Playoff

I've been collecting 1/144 prepainted plastic tanks for about three years now. With other purchases designed to fill in missing pieces (i.e. infantry, guns, truck: things that the Japanese model maker just aren't all that interested in. Most of the missing stuff are the excellent Minifig N scale figures) I now have enough to "do some cool stuff".

I have been using these figures to play Flames of War for the last year and a half. It's a fun "old style" game that's very Warhammer 40k-esque. It has the typical Games Workshop style of rules (i.e. roll to hit, roll to save, roll to damage. Buckets of D6 everywhere, and not too much command and control to speak of). Now don't get me wrong, tt's enjoyable to push tanks around and roll the dice and all that, but deep down inside my search for the elusive "perfect rules" persists.

I have always been a rules collector. With the recent interest in WW2 in the figure gaming market I have acquired the follow sets in addition to Flames of War. Many of them looks interesting, so now that my forces are almost done (all figures based and ground colored, all it needs is some base flocking), I plan to do a rules "play off" - select a "typical scenario", then play the same scenario using the different sets of rules to compare and contrast them. Of course I'll have a writeup here. The end result should also see me finally "settle" on a set of rules.

In no particualar order, the rules I wanted to try are:

Blitzkrieg Commander - (Quick start version of the rules free to download here). Probably the best of the lot in terms of physical presentation, and also the set I hold the most promise to be "the one". The book is printed in full color glossy paper, with some nice terrains and 10/12mm figures. The rules are well written (albeit written by wargamer for wargamer, so it's a less "chatty" style than typical WH rule or FOW) and there's very little in terms of errata and ambiguity. The author give very good support in terms of scenario downloads, answering questions, and providing tools on his website (there's even a computerized scenario builder where we can enter year, and force type desired, and it give you balanced forces for a desired scenario).

The command rule is based on the Warmaster command roll concept, where a commander can push his forces to do stuff as long as he make the dieroll, but the harder you push them the more difficult it gets. The basics are simple to understand, and it gives historical results. Thinking about it some it think it models 20th century warfare probably better than the original ancient/medival/fantasy roots. Definitely one to try first.

Axis and Allies Miniatures - Wotc want to cash in on the WIzkid led collectable miniature game fad, so they came out with D&D mini and Star Wars mini (both moderate hits I think. The local hobby shop has a SW mini night everytime I visit, which is more than any other non-GW minigame I've seen played in public). Now they think there's a untapped historical market waiting to be exploited. Then came A&A Miniature game (AAM).

I've commented on the quality (or the lack thereof) of the figures which is the main reason I decided NOT to collect the figures. In short they are ugly/distorted things, with bad paintjob compare to the excellent World Tank Museum stuff. Worst of all, the figures do not seem to be of the same scale against each other, so some tanks are 12mm, some are 15mm, and the figure is large 15mm. It's a big mess.

Luckily, the rules can be downloaded online, and all the unit stats and special unit "traits" can also be found on the Geek (seems like all modern mass market mini games are "traits" based now, where you get the basic rules as paid for, and then the unit card will give you traits/(rule breakers) that individualize the said unit. Having gone through the rules, they seem ok, if a little basic. It can be a step up for the Memoir '44 crowd and simpler than others in this list. Given that I've already made a 4" hex map grid and matching terrain tiles for my home made Command and Color Napoleonics game, it'll be easy to use the same setup to give this one a try...

Fields of Honor: WW2- Shane Lacey of Great White games have always produced some well thought out stuff that's off the beaten path. His miniature/RPG hydrid system: Savage Worlds is a system that I liked, and will do some RPG-lite/miniature game one of these days. Shane is also a historical mini gamer who came out with the original Field of Honor rules for the 19th century (Which I have played of course, being the editor of Savage and Soldier means any colonial rules set gets an airing at the Soong house). He also produced a AMerican War of Independence Mini/boardgame that never really caught on. Now that WW2 seems to be the hot period, out comes the WW2 version (available as a PDF download for a reasonable price).

The system is extremely simple (prob just a little more details than the Axis & Allies minis game). The command control mechanism is card based, where each higher formation has a card, and a turn of the card means that formation gets to move/combat. Unit thus activated can "hold" their turn until later, and can thus interrupt during another player's turn.

I've only flipped through the rules, and it looks like a simple and fun set. I've already spotted a lot of rules ambiguity such as details on movement (there's one paragraph on movement, and no mention on the details: Do you move straight forward and then pivot around the corners to turn? Or do you just move disregarding facing? Being someone around the block means that I can easily interpret the rule in any of 10 different conventions of simply "moving a unit". The whole "hold and interrupt" concept can also use some clarification/example (i.e. what happens when both of us have hold units, and I interrupt one of your move? Can you in turn interrupt my interrupt move? Not clear). A list of Questions to the author is forth coming...

Division Commander - This is another PDF purchase that looks promising. It's a bit different from all the rules mentioned above (which are all tactical in scale) is that this is a much higher scaled game. You run one of many "divisions" and each unit is a battalion I think. It also use a "draw a card from the deck and specified unit gets to do stuff" method of command and control. There's also activation dieroll to simulate frictions of continuous operation. This could be my ticket if I ever have the urge to try Gamer's OCS for some reason...

Next task, flock the bases, and then pick out a scenario...

Posted by msoong at 10:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

December 03, 2005

Bicentennial Austerlitz Refight AAR

This is the decade when all the cool Napoleonic battles (starting with Austerlitz, I am not a big fan of Marengo) will have their bicentennial celebration. Since I have enough Russians and French to do the battle, I've decided to give this a shot using Sam Mustafa's Fast-Play Grande Armee (the rules are available in the "news" section).

My first order of business is to find some troops that's going to be used for Austrians. At first I am content to just use my Spanish troop to proxy for the small amount of Austrians that I need (they are all white coats, plaus they were both Hapsburgs at one time so no problem right?), but Jeff alerted me to some nicely painted Austrians on eBay, So I quickly snatched them and Jeff helped me rebase them while I was away on vacation (thanks Jeff). At the end of the day I still don't have Austrian cavalry or artillery, so I'll have to settle for Russian Cav/art as proxies.

All the pictures from the game can be seen here.

Our group regularly plays the original Grande Armee rules, which everyone liked except the "rubber band rallying rules" that we all deemed just a little too flexible (i.e. a routed unit can rally at the end of a turn, and pop up back at the commander's command radius). The new Fast-play rules took that away so it's a much more brutal game (rallying is still possible, but is VERY hard to do. One has to pull his forces back to 20" away from the closest enemy, and they can only rally 1 SP per Impulse). Keeping a reserve becomes essential to avoid disaster which we all thought is a better way to go.

One other big area of change is the command rule, which is streamlined and has a much more "euro" feel. Basically each commander will roll 2D6 everyturn, and compare the result against a chart (adding or subtracting any "personality modifier", so Murat gets a +2, whereas Bernadotte gets a -1), one needs a 7-9 to stay in countrol. Too high and the whole formation must attack, and lower score means it holds and can't doing anything, or even run away from the enemy. The CinC can improve the odds by sending the commander in question up to 2 extra dice, so the commander can then roll up to 4 dice, and then pick the best 2 to make his score (shades of Can't Stop).

Finally, the whole combat modifier and skirmish combat also got streamlined. The whole system is still a work in progress, but we feel (and many players on the Grand Armee Yahoo group concurs that the rules as it stands is already pretty solid. So we are ready to go!

The Russian (Bob, Freddy, and Milton) plan is to hold tight on the right flank (since we are outnumbered there), and then up the Advance guard and march them laterally behind the Pratzen height to serve as a central reserve, and then planning a strike down the French center.

On impulse one of turn one, the French lost control of both Murat's cavalry and the Imperial Guard(!) Both formations got an mandated attack order so off they went, straight into Lup on the south western tip of the Pratzen Height. Before we can blink both Liechtenstein and Bagratian are in full retreat, pretty soon Constantine's Imperial guard all the only line holding the Russian right (with about 4" clearance to the back of the board with no room to retreat).

Our plan of having Buxhowden's advanced guard coming to the rescue can still work (definitely against the odds), but that depends on 1) Buxhowden rolling good enough on the command dice so it doesn't get delayed, and 2) Miloravich can hold off Soult's attack long enough for him to come to the rescue. Alas, Buxhowden sat on his hands for an entire impulse while Miloravich's command melted under Soult's attack (Chris rolling 5 hits out of 6 dieroll is a main contributor to his success). Before Davout can even engage the battle is pretty much over (the Russian casaulty passed the break mark, which triggers a morale check, and we failed).

The entire game took about 3 turns and about 3 hours (and that's with a lot of rules checking). It is VERY fast-play indeed. We feel that the flow of the game is pretty historic (only exception in my mind is that how likely is it for Napoleon to lose control of both the cavalry reserve AND the Imperial Guard on turn one/impulse one? Clearly a game thing...)

Since we now have to explain to the Tsar why we lost, we can offer up some other extraneous circumstances (excuses)...

1) The OB we are using is based on the original Grande Armee scenario. In that setup the Russians have about 183 SP (strength points) to the French's 219 SP (about 84% of the French strangth). In converting to the Fast Play rules (which have a different way to figure out the Strangth Points, it's now 143 SP to French 214 SP (now down to 67% of French strangth). Clealy we were robbed!

2) One of Allie's chief strangth is its artillery park, and under the new Fast play rules artillery (expecially 12 lb. guns) have its effectiveness toned down. Another strike against us.

I do want to try this one again, probably using the original SP calculation, and maybe use some other game balance options to make this a closer contest...

Posted by msoong at 10:29 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack

November 05, 2004

Friedland game pictures now available

I've posted pictures from my Friedland game online here. (I've also integrated the links to individual pictures into the AAR).

Posted by msoong at 09:08 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 31, 2004

Grande Armee After Action Report (Friedland)

Our group has tried the Fuentes D'onoro scenario that came with the Grande Armee ruleset about three times already, and there's enough interest in the rules for us to continue, so I've decided that it's high time that we make use of the Russians that I've been working on for the last year. Friedland is to be our next clash.

The thinking is that Friedland is a large enough battle that the strength of the rules should show through (IMO it's the command control of large body of troops that's what set the rules apart). Initial setup pictures here. and here.

We had seven players orginally to try the scenario, but on the day of the event, three of the seven turned out to be no shows (ranging from car breakdown to simple flakiness), so it's a 2 on 2 contest.

The hostility commenced at around 11:30AM. Ix and my self took the Russians (I've sensibly used the "play balance" option rule of upgraded Benningsen from POOR to AVERAGE), Jeff and Chris took on as the French. My battle plan is for the Russians to refuse the left flank, and then attack with the right & center. I am also commiting the guard at the first oppertunity (hopefully gets to crush the French center before the Imperial Guard shows up).

Not all went acording to plan. The refusal of the left flank is accompanied by a frenzied attack by Ney (he 's not under control, and because he's aggressive, he rolled a "Attack" posture for the impulse. That means every unit in his force will attempt to charge any visible enemy if possible). The French attack chewed through the Russians in no time (having the Alle River on their back is very unfortunate, since any fallback into impassable terrain causes additional SP loss). A French grand battery that was formed in front of the Russian left wing did not make things any easier.

The hardly went better. Ix had some horrible dieroll, and pretty soon the Russian right was involved in some mixed up melees, with the Russians coming out the worst.

The Russian guard was committed, but due to its slow speed (the slow infantry of the Russians means that while French infantry moves 6+1D6 inches an impulse, the Russians moves only 4"+1D6). It took them a while to march up the road from the Town of Friedland to reach the French line. Pretty soon the Russians assembled about 5x 12lb Arty pieces (not an Official Grande Battery since the Russians have no such capability, but a powerful gun park neverthless.) The guns made mince meat of the French center in no time.

The Battle then degenerated into a Frech attack on the right in an attempt to destroy the Russian Left that was pinned against the Alle, and a Russian attack on the Center and right that was making headways (Ix's doing better by then). The battle now hinges on the French reinforcement dieroll (he's got two chances to get either Victor's I Corps or the Imperial Guards into the game). Jeff failed both rolls, and we called the game at that point. All three turns took us to about 5:00PM (we had a lunch break).

I liked to rules ok, since it gives the flavor of grand tactical level decisions (i.e. painful choices like where to commit scarce command points to activate forces), and that's a level of command that I enjoyed.

On the downside thought there are some fiddly board positions which caused some frantic rules flipping (mainly concerning troops contacting the enemy, and the placements of the stands). In principle I dislike games where attacking stands "spoin" to level up with the defenders, since it invariably creats more problems than it solves. In this case we run into issues of what happens when the attacking stand spoins to line up with a defender but there's no room to put the stand? (the rules says in that case don't bother moving the stand and just make do). Other weird situation involves the 6" rule that a unit can only charge the closest unit in front of it if it's within 6", but we found cases where there are more than one unit that qualify, and depending on which target was picked, it creates weird "spoin" related issues. All the interaction of the stands (the spoining, and 6" rules, etc.) are all very DBA-ish in its feel, and that is NOT a good thing in my book.

All in all, I liked the grand tactical aspects of the rules (handling of Command points, Command and control rules), and I have some reservation about the low level tactical aspects (i.e. spoining of stands as they close, and weird situation relating to the 6" rules). Since the dislikes are something I can stomach, this will remain the grand tactical rules of choice until something better (and does not require rebasing...) comes along.

P.S. Sam Mustafa, the author of Grande Armee, has just released a set of even higher level rules in the MWAN (where each 3" x 3" stand represent a division). The system still looks DBA-ish, but it's got enough interesting concept to warrent a try. It's also ideal for resolving campaign battles...

Posted by msoong at 11:52 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

October 20, 2004

Dissect miniature rules (Part I)

Some of you might know that I've been working on a computer program called Little Cyber Wars (available for download here) in the last year. It is a computer program/utility that allows people to play a miniature game (any miniature game) live over the internet.

The initial release is going to be freeware, but ultimately I am thinking of implementing "rules modules" that'll actually enforce popular miniature rules (the current iteration just provides a table top, figures, and a set of useful tools that allows you to play a miniature game, but does not actually enforce any particular set of rules on the players).

While designing a framework to fit all this, it got me thinking about how to implement different aspects of a miniature game (i.e. activation, movement, fire, etc.) and I am looking for "universal truth" so I can have one framework that can work with all (or nearly all) miniatures rules out there. Part I here details all the activation rules that different systems utilize.

DIFFERENT ACTIVATION SYSTEMS
1) IGOUGO
The old standby, usually that means one side gets to move ALL their troops, then the other side gets to move ALL theirs. There might be variants as to how the order of who goes first is decided (in the most traditional sense it's side A then B. But can be spiced up by some kind of randomizer so there's a possibility of a flip-flop).
(POPULAR RULES: Warhammer Fantasy/Ancient).

2) IGOUGO WITH LIMITED ACTIVATION
In this system the order is still IGOUGO, but during each player's turn, he can only activate a limited number of unit(s). e.g. Side A go, he activates unit X, then side B go, he activates unit Y. (there's variant as to whether the same unit can keep activating in the same "turn")
(POPULAR RULES: All Wizkid clix games, D&D Miniature system, Agyptus)

3) IGOUGO WITH RANDOMIZED LIMITED ACTIVATION
Sequence is still IGOUGO, but when it's your turn to go, you roll a die to decide how many units can activate. A long winded way to describe the DBx "pip" system (i.e the most well known example, where a person rolls a D6, and that's the number of elements that can move that turn).
(POPULAR RULES: DBx)

4) IGOUGO WITH RANDOMIZED EFFECTS
In the pips system you don't know how many units can move, but if they do get to move then they behave predictably. In this system all units gets to activate, but each unit must roll on a chart to see HOW it'll activate (maybe fully, maybe with limits on its actions, or maybe it'll run away like a coward...)
(POPULAR RULES: Fire and Fury, Battle for Empires, 40k Epic)

5) RANDOMIZED ACTIVATION BY CARDS
There's no fixed IGOUGO, instead draw a card/chit, and the result tells you which side gets to activate something. (further breakdown could be a card either indicates just a side, or might specify a specific unit as to further limit the choices of the commander).
(POPULAR RULES: The Sword and the Flame, Confrontation).

6) RANDOMIZED ACTIVATION BY DICE
Some kinda die roll is involved (usually a roll off between the two players), resulting only one player getting the chance to activate a number of units). This is a very chaotic method compares to most systems listed above since it's quite possible for a player to fail on ALL of his die rolls, resulting in him not able to move anything at all.
(POPULAR RULES: Soldiers Companion)

7) IGOUGO WITH HELD CARD PLAY
It's IGOUGO, but during a player's turn he must then play a card from his hand (given him more control), and the card tells him what to do.
(POPULAR RULES: Battle Cry).

These are some of the most elemental activation mechanisms I can find. There are other systems which are a combination of two or more of the above (i.e. PIQUET is a randomized die roll system combined with a card deck that randomizes the turn phase). And I bet if you put your mind to it, you can come up with some weird combo also!

Send in others if you know of a miniature activation system that does not fall under one of the ones listed...

Posted by msoong at 05:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 24, 2004

Kursk AAR (Flames of War)

For our 2nd outing of Flames of War, I decided on a game modeled on the battle of Kursk (Since my forces are tank heavy, AND they are Eastern Front exclusively, seems like a logical choice). I eschewed all infantry and had a Tank only force for both side. The point total is set at 2,500.

The Germans have a small force of PzIII, PzIV, PzV, and a single Elephant (a very expensive unit that), vs a Soviet force of 3x T-34 companies and a unit of SU-152, and a unit of KV-1. The scenario chosen is the Meeting Engagement scenario downloaded from the FoW website.

The game moved at a fast clip, with the T-34's darting about at 32" a turn. The Soviets decided to charge in the T-24's toward their objective and engage in close range combat against the Pz-III. Recognizing that PzIII vs T-34 is a losing proposition, I (playing the Nazis this time) wisely retreated out of the way (thankfully the T-34s can not do a double move and fire due to their two man turrets). The German right-flank is in jeopardy as the Commies closed in on their objective.

The next tuen the Germans rolled lucky on the reinforcement dieroll, and have their Pz-IV reinforcement come in right where the T-34s are. Some close range gun play ensued, with most of the Pz-IV and most of the T-34 mutually destroyed.

Meanwhile the PzIII who escaped the T-34 decided to advance to capture the objective on Russian left, and the PzV are cleaning up the Rusian right. Coupled with the lack of ability for the Russians to bring on Reinforcement, the Germans won the day after the Commies failed their battalion morale.

The 2nd game confirmed my observation from the first game that it's much harder to play the Russains well (as they manuever in front of the deadly Ge tanks with armor that can't be penetrated by Ru guns from their frontal armor. Ru will have to do some serious hide and seek manuever just to have a fighting chance, and if one if playing wiuth the new Stalingrad rules, the new Sov rules hampers their tank forces even more. I'll have to try out the Ru forces again to see if the balance of power is broken...

Posted by msoong at 04:13 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

September 06, 2004

Big Trouble in Africa (The Convention game)

The actual con game is the first time I played with a full complement of 12 players (many of the NPC characters that was handled by the GM is now a full faction, such as Pygmies and the Masais, there'a also new characters such as Flashman).

The game had the longest waiting list for the 7:00PM time slot for whatever that' worth, I feel bad to have to turn away players, but it actually worked out since the Stanley player had to leave early, and his spot was taken over by Ron Vaugh (an old Savage and Soldier contributor).

One factor that I've added has never been playtested, and that's the Flashman faction. Flashman is playing as an individual (not a full faction with forces). Old Flashy in in disguise as a Baluchi mercenary (don't ask). He is in danger of being recognized by various factions if they are too close, and he's going after the treasure on the hill that Emin pasha was heading for. He's also a lucky bastard, having 3 re-rolls so he can get out of any unfortunate combat results.

As it turned out, old Flashy needed all the luck he can get, since ge was constantly rolling 6's (a bad thing in these rules), first he fell down the mountain while attempting to run, and then taking 2 serious wounds as he's getting shot at by Stanley's askaris. At the end he barely got away with his skin intact (ready for another scenario/episode).

This game tuned out very differently: It's the first game w/o an assault on the fort, so there was relative tranquility in the middle of the board. The animals took out the Hauptman Heinz with one bite (Heinz rolled a 6 on the wound table and died). There are other sporadic skirmishes between the slavers and the Zanzibaris (the slavers made the mistake of sending their "diversionary force" toward the Masai village, and Masai don't take kindly to slavers approaching their village). Teddy roosevelt bagged a few big game animal, but lost his Mother in law to the Masai (she got hypnotized by the Masai witch doctor while trying to convert them to Chrisianity), and had to rescue the first lady (barely) from the jaws of a croc in he great swamp.

All in all, the game was finished in about 3 1/2 hours, and everyone had a good time. The rules has been smoothed out after two playtest and I was able to run it w/o too much trouble (that includes having to come up with rules on the spot, such as two hunters wrestling wi th croc rule while trying to rescue the first lady)... Now I'll have to come up with a sequal for another time, another con...

Posted by msoong at 09:57 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Big Trouble in Africa (Second Playtest)

The second playtest was held at the monthly miniature convention at Scenario Gameshop in Fremont, CA. This time I had about 8 people show up to play.

Because of the number of people, there are more added interactions: such as:

1) The whole Emin Pasha and his treasure hunt got played up more, as he battled the ancient "Guardian of the Arc" tribe in order to gain access. Of course the treasure is located on top of a mountain, and Emin happens to be afraid of heights (re his unfortunate defenestration episode), so that makes for some interesting game moments (i.e. "Emin, Roll against your STUNT rating or else you fall off the cliff...)

2) The Battle between Simba and Cpt Heinz becomes a duel of the epics, since the stats made it so that it's hard for either character to kill off each other. I decided that for the convention game I would weaken these "super characters" (Tarzan is another one) some so the game does not become too unbalanced.

3) The animals made it off the board (their victory objective) WAY too fast. So for the final game I made them travel double the distance so there's more "game" for the animal players.

Posted by msoong at 08:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Big Trouble in Africa (Playtest)

I decided to run the Darkest Africa game at least twice before I run the official game at the convention: The first game is just to verify that the mechanics of the rules actually works, and the second game will focus on play balance.

The first game had a pretty small turn out, so there are only about 4 player characters, while the GM controls the rest. The game moves along in a brisk pace: The turn sequence is card driven (one of the options given in the rules), where are are two cards for each faction, and the entire deck is shuffled together. The GM draws 3 cards at any given time (so multiple players can be moving at the same time to speed up play). That part worked pretty well.

In addition to having every faction (player) having their own secret objectives, I've added other twists to the plot (more at home in a RPG game than a typical miniature game) by having NPC's having their own age