More Battle of Hoth figures

At Christmas, I ran across a discounted copy of the Battle of Hoth and picked it up for the extra figures and so that I could play the giant-sized scenario (that requires two sets). I spent one of the cold snap in January painting these guys up.

Having painted this set once, I was able to knock out a duplicate a lot faster.

To help me keep the sets straight, I went with a plain white base instead of the light blue base I did on the first set.

I found some AT-ST minis that are roughly in scale with the AT-ATs and will paint those up shortly to add a unit type for the Imperials. I am hopeful that the success of this game will mean future release for, say, the Battle of Endor.

 Up next: Probably some 15mm sci-fi terrain.

FoL: Robin Hood

Back in January, Bruce hosted Richard and me in a Fistful of Lead Robin Hood game. Bruce's terrain has reached pretty epic proportions and we spent some time admiring his handiwork (the buildings are also finished and furnished inside...).

The basics of the game are that the Sheriff has discovered the blacksmith is in league with Robin Hood and, thus, the Sheriff has decided to run the smithy down (requires lighting three fires--the red game tokens). Robin Hood must prevent this. 

 

I had the Sheriff and three mounted men at arms and our plan was to make for the smithy and get it cooking. Unfortunately, Little John was defending it along with one archer. The rest of the hoods were coming to their aid.

On my left, Richard commanded 6 shoot7 and stabby foot guys who would block Robin Hood and his band of Merry Property Thieves.

 

Richard's troops did a bang-up job. Not so much my guys as we could neither lay a glove on Little John nor get the thatch and wood to kindle. Truly terrible rolling.

Richard tangled with Robin Hood in front of the church.

And laid him low! That was the turning point for the Team Sheriff and now it was a foot-race between Richard breaking the Merry Men's morale and Little John causing the sheriff to flee.

Richard even had the time to send a stabby guy up to deal with the annoying sniper!

Below, we see pretty close to the end game: the Merry Men are decidedly un-merry but Little John had KO'ed the Sheriff and is methodically beating the hell out of the rest of my guys (a complete slaughter).

Too late to matter, I finally got some hot dice and pasted Little John a good one (or two). The Sheriff must have been sold some defective flint and tinder or something because nothing would bleeding burn for me.

And this was Richard winning the game for the forces of capital... errr... evil... errr... whatever. The Merry Men fled to steal the rightful property of the rich another day and the Sheriff's forces (presumably) burned the smithy.

A very fun game and a visual delight to play out.

Last of the mechs!

I finally finished off the three large mechs that I have had sitting on a painting tray for almost a year.

There is nothing really fancy here, just some basic three-tone schemes that match the other units in the army. Below are the various units types I can now choose from. More exciting is that I can now move onto all of the terrain that they came with!

Up next: Some more 25mm and 15mm Star Wars, I hope!

Star Wars Risk (really)

Last fall, I bought a copy of the 2015 game Star Wars Risk entirely because it had a tonne of tiny space ships. I was just going to cage them for painting and toss the game but I read the rules first and it is actually pretty decent (and good for a Risk variant) so I added a few more minis and have been running a few games.

The game board is shaped like Darth Vader's tie-fighter silhouette, has three play spaces (left, right and centre), and lets you fight out the Battle Endor. Action is card driven, which lends a bit of interest and fog of war. Basically, the Space Vietcong have to destroy the Death Star before the Space Americans/Nazis wipe out the Rebel fleet.

The central area sees fighters contest for control of space around the fully operational Death Star while they wait for the ground forces to fight it out and lower the shields (I added minis for the larger ships and the DS). This shot is at the end of a game where the forces are pretty severely depleted and the Empire has managed to wipe out the Rebel fleet before the Death Star was destroyed. In each of the five games I've played, the game came down to the wire so it is well balanced and I don't see any killer strategies you could employ..

The ground game (above) sees the Rebel commandos move closer to the shield generators, slowed but not stopped by the Empire. The game comes with cardboard counters but I had some 15mm troops that I painted and added for colour. The tension here is how many cards does the Empire waste to slow the Rebels? Once the shields are down, the Death Star is very vulnerable.

On the other side of the board is a throne-room duel between Luke, Vader and the Emperor. Again, cardboard counters were replaced with some extra 25mm WEG metals from the 1980s. This duel is very much a sideshow and is less integrated into game play than the shield generator track. It has some nice colour (do you redeem Vader or just kill him--depends on your cards and your planning).

Overall, for a game that is designed for 10-year-olds (and requires no reading to play), it was a hoot. You can easily learn the game and play twice in an hour if you are an experienced gamer. I wouldn't want to play this very often but, as something to have around to haul out and play with non-gamers who like Star Wars, this was way better than expected.