15mm FIW gaming

Over the summer, we played a couple of FIW games using both Muskets and Tomahawks and Rebels and Patriots. Bruce then took the activation system of M&T (which involves card play) and grafted it onto the movement, combat, and morale mechanics of R&P.

The game saw a mixed group of Brits (on the right) having to get some wagons off the left side of the board. Opposing them were some French troops plus some locals.

The British regulars and grenadiers entered the open field, hoping to put a pasting on the French regulars, On the flanks, the British provincials and irregulars worked to keep the French local allies occupied.

Eventually, the French regulars began to be driven back by casualties and we called it for the British. The card play from M&T to determine activation was much better than the activation rolls from R&P because there was more back and further and some hard choices to make about what to activate and in what order.

By contrast, the combat, movement and morale mechanics from R&P were much simpler and played much faster (almost no modifiers) than the more traditional tabletop mechanics from M&T. Overall, we thought it gave a pretty nice game with lots of hard decisions at the command level and a fairly straight-forward game on the tabke top.

Up next: Some more 20mm partisans.

More bunkers

This is the second batch of bunkers that I got from Scott last year. These had been primed but otherwise were untouched. Based on the undercuts, I think these are 3-D prints.

These are roughly 20mm scale and could work for 15mm or 25mm or even 28mm in a pinch. Here I have them set with some old 25mm West End Games Star Wars figures (which happened to be at hand).

The roofs lift off and they have rudimentary interiors. I just did a grey spray, dry brush, wash, dull coat and then some scenic texturing to match my stuff.

In addition to the two large bunkers, there are four smaller ones plus a giant gas tank. These are slightly bigger than the bunkers from last week (compare below) but are close enough that they'd work together. 

I'd say I have enough here to put together an Imperial or Cylon outpost for a game of Fistful of Lead, which might be my next project. In terms of painting, I have some long-waiting fantasy to get finished up.

15mm bunkers

This week, I completed some minor finishing work on some 15mm bunkers I bought from Scott last year.

These came well painted and based and looked like they were fresh off the drop ship. I added some dry brushing and a dirty wash to make them a bit grittier and then redid some of the basing finishes to match my collection.

The roof-mounted stuff (gun, dish, antenna) lift off and swap out. The solar panels on top are a nice touch (shhh, don't tell Danielle) and the two barricades are lovely pieces.

Up next: Probably the remainder of the 15mm terrain, including a bunch of bunkers that are unpainted. I have also run to the end of my last bottle of Future floor wax (which they apparently discontinued in 2022?) and am now experimenting with a replacement. Pray for me!

15mm tanks and 25mm Star Wars

A bit of a mixed lot today.  First up are some 15mm storage tanks. These were part of a job lot that I bought from Scott. They came painted and I just added a bit of grit and some highlights.

The good news is that they work for anything from 15mm to 28mm, which is super useful.

Dave printed some 25mm taun-taun riders for me a while back from some files I bought. He scaled these to 25mm scale so they fit in with the Battle of Hoth figures I have plus my old West End Games Star Wars guys.

 

My goal here was to give the rebels another unit type in the board game to match the AT-STs I added for the Imperials. I'll probably play these as the analog to the Empire's probe droids.

They are maybe a touch too big (my fault--I should have asked for 20mm prints) but the sliding scale of Battle of Hoth figures is so elastic that it isn't a big deal. The prints turned out super well.

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

Random Star Wars painting

This week is a bit of a grab bag. First up are some game pieces from the game Star Wars Rebellion (these are from an expansion, I think).

Dead simple painting and they will work with 15mm (and smaller) sci-fi troops.

I also painted up some AT-STs from the same bag. Again, dead simple paint jobs.

These guys I will be using to add a new unit type for the Empire in the Battle of Hoth game with its sliding scale miniatures.

Up next: Some actual 15mm sci-fi terrain, I think.

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.

15mm mechas

At some point last year, I bought some 15mm sci-fi figures off of Scott. One of the three armies still needed some painting and I have been chipping away at it since, mostly daunted by not having much experience painting mechs.

I finally decided to suck it up and just do the 12 smaller mechs. There were six with some kind of blast weapon (above) and six with what looked more like gatling guns (below).

Overall, they turned out fine (or, at least good enough for me!). I then tried to make the bases a bit more uniform in terms of colours and posed them with some of the wolf/dog infantry and the battledroids with which I supplemented them.

I still have three large mechs to paint (not sure if they should be done as a unit or done with individual paint jobs). Then I can turn my attention to the huge amount of terrain with which they came.

Forest terrain for smaller scales

Most of my gaming is on hexes these days and I needed some indicators for forested areas that were suitable for 3mm to 15mm figures. I looked at some commercial options but didn't want to pay the high price so I decided to just make some using stuff I mostly had laying around.

I cut some floor tiles into hexagons and then bisected them. I wanted a mixed of conifers and deciduous. The conifers are made from wavy pipe cleaners (in eye-searing Christmas green) that I glued to the base.

I then spray primed it black and hit it with some matt sage green. This dulled the pipe cleaners (mostly!) and matched the base to the rest of my terrain.

I then filled in the spaces with train foliage.

The result, seen from above and three feet away, looks fine and is hazy enough it can work in multiple scales. I didn't want to haul out a hex mat so I just pulled a single hex to photo-illustrate the finished effect. The hex can be fully filled with trees.

If there are units, they mostly fit with half of the hex open. A green felt hex laid underneath would allow removal of all the trees but still have the space marked as forest. So now I'm off to look through the bins for some dark green felt.

I have a small number of hex bases left that I didn't turn into forest. I'l; have to have a look through the rule book to see if there are other kinds of terrain I need to model.

Random painting

I have a pile of random figures on my paint table and this week I finished a few batches.

First up were five 28mm zombies that Chen gave me. These look better in person--the lighting is washing out the highlights on them.

I also bought some Star Wars Risk Clone Wars figures to see what the size was like (20mm maybe). The clone troopers aren't useful but the battle droids will supplement my 15mm army, which includes some other Star Wars droids plus some dog-like humanoid troopers and a bunch of mechs (also on the painting table).

In addition to the mechs, I have a bunch of fantasy figures and some terrain on the painting table.

15mm Battle Droids

Back in the summer, I bought some 15mm sci-fi armies off of Scott. Two of the three were fully painted and the third was half done. I was tooling around flea-bay and noticed some Star Wars battle droids that would fit in with the half-painted, mech-heavy army.

I had purchased some of these figures before, hoping they would fit in with my 25mm WEG Star Wars figures, but they were too small so I donated them to Bruce's collection.

But now that I have some 15mm of my own, I ordered a second batch of 38 (for $13 bucks?). These seem to be the "disease blocks" from a Star Wars reskinning of Pandemic, about the same size as the cultists from the Cthulhu reskin I have.

They fit in reasonably well with the 15mm infantry Scott painted. They are a bit taller because of the integral base, but whatever. Maybe the droids are taller? I tried to match the basic dun colour pallet he used but without the fancy brushwork he did.

Overall, they create a nice little force of expendables to supplement the infantry I have. Now I just need to get on with painting up the two types of mechs to finish the army.

Dragon's Rampant

A few weeks back, Bruce and I dug out some fantasy armies to give Dragons Rampant a go. It has been a while since we've played this game. I used some old 15mm figures from the first edition of Battlelore. Bruce used some 28mm lizards he got from Kevin Barrett's estate.

We each worked out 36-point armies. First up were some dwarves versus the lizards. Most of the game went down on the right flank, with Bruce's war beasts charging some dwarven foot. Neither of us could get the left flank to move much.

Eventually the giant lizard bit it but he took down a couple of dwarves unit. An enormous dinosaur came up the middle and I could not get my heavy shooters going worth beans.

Then the left flank came alive. My giant bear (which I also think was a gift from Kevin years) munched a bunch of lizards but eventually ran itself down.

I thought I had Bruce on the ropes at one point but he retreated just out of range for the kill. 

And then Bruce put it away on the left flank.

The game took about 45 minutes so we switched side and I pitted some medieval Arthurians against a second lizard army of five very high-pointed unit. Bruce initially creamed two of my units but subsequently got shoot and charged to pieces.

 

Overall, a fun game with almost nothing to look up and I don't think we used the QRS after the first turn, just some unit stat lists. Happy that the lovely figures Kevin painted got bloodied.

Some gaming updates

So last fall, Bruce suggested we pool a list of games we wanted to play again and then work our way through them. There are about 20 games on the list with the sequence being randomly generated.

First up was Struggle for Europe, a reskinning of Lincoln (which I don't think we've played) by Worthington Games. This game focuses on WW2 in Europe and offers one of the best games at this scale that I have played. There are relatively few counters, only 30-some areas, with point-to-point movement and the game uses cards to drive play. There are three decks (representing the three phases of the war), the game ends when one player has exhausted all of their cards (which creates major opportunity costs plus creates a tactical "attrition" option for players), and you win by controlling key locations. 

The strategy for the Germans is to either win early or try to hold on and preclude an allied victory before the cards runs out. I think this is the third time we've played this and every game is a nail biter. This one ended up in a German victory just as the US was invading France (some luck in the desert and at Leningrad tipped it--otherwise, Germany was spent). 

Next up was Sam Mustafa's Longstreet. Other than the Union won, I don't recall much of the details of this ACW skirmish. This is another card-driven game at the brigade level. A few years ago, we played through the full campaign system (which sees the cards and armies change over the course of the war). This is a good game to be the defender in!

Then we played Sam Mustafa's Nimitz. We've done a couple of WW2 games of this but Bruce had bought some pre-Dreadnaught minis so we refought a break-out action in the Philippines between the US and German fleets (I think). Overall, this is a pretty solid game. Sometimes the amount of effort to resolve shooting seemed tedious but, if that were streamlined, there wouldn't be much left.

We then played the same scenario using the 1980s rules Fire When Ready on a hex grid. It was a messier game (no formations required) with preplotting and (I think) simultaneous movement. Not a bad game. Nimitz feels more modern in terms of gaming conventions and mechanics, though. I think the scenarios split one win for each side.

We continued with the naval theme using Mustafa's Halsey rules (basically a map game) of a British convoy run through the Mediterranean during WW2. This is a very solid game and was, I thought, much more interesting than Nimitz in terms of the decisions (I tend to prefer high-level games, I think). 

Once the fleets come to grips, the game has a small battle board mechanic. In the end, the Germans won on points (I could not roll worth crap that night). Overall, pretty fun and the use of blinds created enough fog of war on a shared board to make decisions tough.

We wrapped up the autumn gaming with Taskforce, a cold-war naval game with double blind movement set in North Atlantic. We played duelling convoy runs with surface and submarines (no fixed wing air to simplify the rules a bit). The author is better known for the Victory Games 6th/7th/2nd Fleet series that came out about 10 years later.

There is a bit of fiddly searching (such is double blind without an umpire) but that got easier after a couple of turns. Once there is contact, you switch to a battle board to resolve air, missile, torpedo and gunnery attacks, which is kind of cool. I don't recall who won (it was close). 

There were some interesting battles: a Soviet convoy getting stalked and repeatedly attacked by NATO frigates using guns (having used their SSMs to take out the escorts) and a NATO convoy being stalked and repeatedly attack by Soviet subs and surface ships. This created quite a lot of tension.

For a 45-year-old game, this was surprisingly good and the multi-step battle board gave an interesting feel. Your SSMs, for example, come in, face area AA, then jamming, then close AA, then they strike (or not...). You can decide how many missile from each volley drop at pickets and how many continue into the main fleet (which means being subjected to a second set of defences).