Stairs

A few weeks back, I posted my first effort at adding some stairs to my Mageknight dungeon tiles. I decided I could likely do better than these spirals so I pulled out some extra trap tiles to form the basis of stair case. I cut and layered on some floor tile and then did a quick paint job to approximate the pattern on the tiles.

Overall, this is okay. The stairs are playable (Dr Doom was MIA for about 10 years and recently discovered cowering in a box of PolyPocket dolls so also got some paint this week) and they match well enough. A bit more attention to the painting likely would have improved matters.

Here you can see the stairs snapped on with some other tiles. I think the other tiles could stand a wash to make them less chalky. And below I have clipped in the less success stair tiles (both an up and a down set).

Since I have lots of trap tiles, I might well do three more sets of stairs over the next bit. As builds go, this was dead simple.

Some 28mm terrain

I noticed I was a bit short on interior terrain when I laid out the Joker's lair awhile back. Specifically, I had no beds and few tables. After looking online and humming and hawing, I ordered a tavern pack of 3-D printed terrain.

It came with a pretty decent selection of beds, tables, chairs, and fireplaces. Being mostly wood, it was also very quick to paint up.

For $35, I though it was a pretty good deal. The only real defect is the horizontal seam on the end of the foot boards. While these have a real D&D vibe, I think they could work pretty much for any time period. The wrinkles on the bed look a bit less terraced in person than they do in these pictures.

The non-bed items were pretty good, with six pub-style tables, three end tables, and a bunch of other furniture.

There were no assembly instructions and I ended up gluing the shelves from the writing hutch to the top of the fireplaces before I figured out where they were supposed to go. Oh well.

These three end-tables with books on them also turned out well given how little effort they took.

 

Overall, a fun project that only took a couple of hours and really helped round out my indoor terrain.

Last of the Crimean!

And I've finally reached the end of the 28mm Crimean armies. Whew!

There were five command figures for the Russian dragoons plus four more troopers.

So many horses.... But the command figures were quite nice.

Up next: Who knows? Maybe some 28mm furniture?

Russian Dragoons

Second-last post on this Crimean project with a group of Russian dragoons. 

These are 28mm Foundry sculpts. Nice enough detail. There were just a lot of them!

Up next: More dragoons!

Hawkins Ford

Bruce popped over for a game this week. I was keen to get my War of 1812 plastics out for a spin so I dusted off Rebels and Patriots (part of the Osprey Rampant series). It looks like we'd last played these rules in 2019 with the Battles of Pork Rind and Baby Duck Ridge. I decided to play Hawkins Ford, which is a bit of a cheesie race scenario as the British defend a key river crossing against a superior American force.

The Americans had three line units, two half-sized skirmishers, a light cannon, some dragoons, and a leader. They started in the top left (by the white dice) and needs to capture Hawkins Ford (mid-board on the right. 

The British had two units of militia dug into hard cover by the ford plus two units of line and one of Indian allies that started bottom left (by the red dice). The river was impassable except to the Indians and the dismounted dragoons. Points-wise, this was 3-2 for the Americans.

Bruce advanced the Americans up the road, swinging his line units towards the river's edge and his cavalry and skirmishers to the other flank. This was the reverse of the approach I'd taken in my playtest but didn't seem make a big difference in the end.

The British managed to advance their line units towards the ford to reinforce it but kept crapping out on command rolls for everyone else. Based on our 2019 experiences, we amended the rules such that a failed unit activation caused initiative to switch (more in keeping with the rest of the Rampant series). The game was to end when turns plus 1d6 =16.

The Americans formed up into close order to assault. I missed getting a picture of the dragoons approaching and getting absolutely murdered by a lucky British fire. Meanwhile, command blunders stymied the British. Eventually, I got the Indians moving towards the flanks of the formed up Americans.

A nasty fire-fire and set of charges sea-sawed at the ford. Bruce had terrible combat rolls. Meanwhile, the Indians plowed into the rear of the American advance, with devastating effect.

One unit of American line was routed by the Indians while a second was damaged by fire and forced to retreat. This was enough for Bruce to call off the attack. A couple of thoughts. First, having initiative switching on failed command rolls made the game more interesting (because the sequence of activations now was a more consequential decision) but still not super interesting.

Second, having played Xenos Rampant, really what the game needs is to bolt-on the newer Xenos mechanics to create more differentiated units and more interesting choices and caused units to fight more like they did historically. So I think that's what I'm going to work on next. It should be a pretty easy adaptation. That also streamlines the kind of clunky morale tracking, I think.

Hussar Lancers

 Just a quick update today with these six Russian Hussar Lancers from Foundry's 28mm Crimea range.

There were just six of the guys and three were a command unit. Happy to be done them. Just a few Dragoons left to go!

Up next: Some of the Dragoons, I think. Maybe also some terrain. Thinking about taking break from posting for the summer to concentrate on kayaking and gardening. We'll see what happens.

Mixed bag of painting

I finished a random assortment of things today. When I was using my Mageknight dungeon tiles recently, I realized I had no stairs. I had two idea to deal with this. The first was to take some of the "trap" tiles that had a centre cut out and use them to make spiral stair cases. This is one with the centre piece pulled out, a wedge of the piece cut as a step and the rest of descending steps painted in. This looks better in person than in this picture. I did two of these.

I also did the reverse to build stairs going up, basically taking centre pieces and cutting them to give the impression of stairs. Not playable in any way but a reasonable enough representation. The other approach is straight stairs that sit on tiles. I'll start these this week. 

I got this random sci-fi guy in a job lot. I had no idea what to do with him. His gun looked suitably impractical that he could stand in a Mr. Freeze in my super hero games.

Craig also kindly mailed me a couple of Heroclix figures over the holiday. On the left is Ra's alh Ghul' daughter (but will do as a generic gunslinger). On the right is the Ventriloquist from the campy 1960s/70s Bat comics but who could be a very dark villain if you wanted.

Up next: Some Russian Crimean Hussar Lancers are almost done.