Star Wars Game Tokens

I'm not exactly sure where these four figures came from. I think maybe Star Wars Trivial Pursuit? Anyhow, they are 28mm. Not great sculpts (Luke is very 2-D and Han looks nothing like Harrison Ford) but not terrible. 

Vader aways gives me fits because all black is tricky to paint. I went with washes this time and some manual highlights using silver paint. I'm not sure this is better than layering up with a brown or blue hue.

These don't fit my collection but they will find a new home shortly.

Up next: More Crimea.

28mm British Crimean Dragoons

And back to the Crimean War, I knocked off the a small number of British Dragoons from foundry. Holy hell, are cavalry a lot of painting.

Up next: Some Star Wars game pieces.

Heroscape tiles

Awhile back, I got a pretty good deal on some heroscape interlocking terrain tiles. I've looked at these a couple of times over the years and thought they might be an easy way to add some vertical terrain to my skirmish games. They might also work as a playing surface for micro-tanks (like the 3mm pico armour below). The problem, of course, is that they are in cartoonish colours.

After some hand wringing, I decided I would just spray all of the pieces a single colour (rustoleum camo sage), which matched my gaming mat and also meant that touch-ups would be easy. In a rare feat, I managed to spray everything using only one can of paint! I then used some French blue on the recessed "water" tiles. So far, adhesion has been good and I haven't see any real paint rubbing off.

For a "nothing" project (10 minutes and 2 cans of spray), I'd call this a success. I'm hopeful to adapt Xenos Rampant to superheroes this fall and will use the hills to create some elevation challenges in an outdoors scenario. They are too small for use with Rommel (need bigger hexes) but I have 4" hex terrain for that so no worries.

Xenos Rampant Tiny Trek

Over the past few months, Bruce and I have been fine-tuning Xenos Rampant to give a good fleet-level spaceship game. The link above gives you the basic rules. A few weeks back, we played a three-player, 50-point ST:DS9 Federation versus Klingon.

The Klingons had to attack and destroy a space station with two separate commands. The Federation had to defend the station and had a relief force in addition to the station itself (which we played as a single command). 

he unit stats and orbat are all at the bottom of this post. The hexes on the mat have no game meaning. The Klingons come on from the right side in the picture above. The Federation relief force comes on from an adjacent edge (as shown above), which creates an interesting tactical situation.

I've played the scenario twice and it is very tight. Bruce and Nathan drew the two Klingon commands and their strategy was to rush the big ships at the station while using the smaller Klingon ships to tie up the relief force. An alternative strategy is to beat the hell out of the relief force and then go after the station. We passed a pewter Sisko back and forth to track who had initiative ("who has the Sisko?").

The battle basically had three components In the middle, the USSs Janet Jackson, Tiffany, and Robin Sparkles tangled with the KSSs Megadeath, Motley Crue, and Queensryche. This was mostly a drawn. The Robin Sparkles got beat up pretty bad but the Motley Crue and Queeenryche were run off.

On the left, the KSS Scorpion focused its attack on Deep Space 3 (oddly, I have no pictures). Eventually, the Scorpion was able to cause enough damage that the Space Station started failing courage checks. Thus led to run-away systems failures, and it eventually bit it just a turn before the Federation was likely to break the Klingons

Meanwhile, on the right, the USSs Debbie Gibbon and Alanis closed with the KSSs Iron Maiden, Slayer, and Korn. The Korn was eventually able to slip past and attack the Federation heavies from behind but the Slayer and Iron Maiden got the crap beat out of them in close combat.

Overall a fun game and the rules adaptation seems to work fine. We experimented with allowing ships to slip up to 45 degrees off centre for free in this game. That worked fine and (or but, depending on your tastes) it made movement very fluid (versus only straight forward flight with a penalty for turning). Meh, either way was fine.

The Klingons had three fighter units and the Federation space stations had five fighters. I had to proxy in some vipers and raiders (hoots of derision) since I haven't based the ST:DS9 fighter tokens.