Getting A Few Games In

While it might all seem to have been about the challenge in the dark winter months, as we emerge into spring I have managed a few games in recently. First AdeD of Wyvern ran a group of us through some games of Dead Man's Hand one club night, which seems to be the go to ruleset for wild west gaming. I dug out my small group of painted lawmen (on the bevelled bases) and faced BobC's outlaws across three scenarios. It was a wee while back, so I'll skip the AAR and commentary and just show you the goodies...


With an upstanding citizen down, Not-The-Man-With-No-Name fires wildly at the mexican in pajamas

My Depudee heads off in pursuit of a ner'do'well

A Lawman using bystanders as cover - not sporting but otherwise he'd have been toast from those Mexicans!

Bustling street shot - Bob supplied plenty of civilians to witness the carnage

Scenario three ends with a gunfight outside the dressmaker's, of all places. 

There was a lot to enjoy about Dead Man's Hand - it has good production values and I enjoyed the variety and flavour that were added by the dual activation/action cards. I liked that it isn't IGO-UGO with the card-driven initiative, though it was a bit faffy moving the little cards around all of the time. But, I wasn't convinced that the scenarios were balanced as the lawmen seemed to struggle and thought some of the mechanics, like the 'quick draw' card for initiative were gimmicky. Also, with a campaign system to be added soon, I was surprised at the size of the starter gangs - I'm not sure the card-driven initiative will scale upwards much as gangs grow without becoming tiresome. Still, as an occasional pick up game it is entirely playable and has much more flavour and 'story' written in to it compared to say Legends of the Old West. Happily, I've already got a handful of lawmen painted so should be able to throw down games every now and then. But I'm surprised to report that IO'm not particualrly tempted to rush out and bu the ruleset and play loads of games. Given how many people enjoy it, perhaps I have very high thresholds these days!



A couple of weeks later and I was back at Wyvern for a quite lovely Starship Troopers game hosted by Stu of Dust, Tears and Dice. Stu wants to run an SST campaign that lets players drop in and out while keeping the campaign running - perfect for a fortnightly club like Wyvern. Each time, the players will take Mobile Infantry squads and Stu will steamroller them with hordes of bugs. The best MI commander over the campaign gets Though he was clearly going easy on us for Game 1. Out mission - converge on a suspected bugs nest and collapse it with our heavy support. Stu's writeup is here.

Move out. My squad nicknamed 'Lucky Devils' and supporting Chickenhawk make steady time down from the landing zone

Ambush! AdeD's squad are surprised by first contact.

Things start getting hairy for Paul and Ade's squads either side of mine as bugs start swarming

The Fleet's view of the engagement - MI firepower starts to tell

Fire in the hole! *Pssssht* Bug hole down

Tanker bug!

Yes, that's my squad that he's bearing down on.

At which point, Acting Skymarshal AdeD got a lot of abuse for not bothering to invest in any Fleet support assets for this engagement.


Paul's squad, Baldwin's B*stards take casualties to scything claws and swooping fliers. Even the vid-corder crew are taking hits!

After two rounds with no initiative, the tanker final succumbs to my infantry and Chickenhawk. 

It went down to my last missile though - after which it would have had the chance to char-grill the lot of them!

*Geronimo - bug nest down, repeat bug nest down*

With the last throw of the dice, I complete our objective - moments before being overrun by the swarm that just forced Paul's squad to withdraw. 

Between the bug holes, tanker bug and a handful of trooper bugs, I staked a fair claim towards the rank of Skymarshal. Stu had dreadful luck on activations - I got two whole rounds of firing at the Tanker before it could have activated. Just enough to take it down. Just. 

A really fun game very ably hosted by Stu. The minis and terrain are all his and rather excellent the game looked too. The rules were Chain Reaction - entirely serviceable and fun to play though they do commit that cardinal sin (in my view) of changing the roll to succeed from roll high to roll low!

I also managed a game of Chain of Command, ably hosted by Bob from Wyvern. British against Germans and I took something of a pasting from my reluctance to withdraw an exposed unit exacerbated by some poor command dice rolls at inopportune times. I didn't really take any photos except this one - to the left my beleaguered, pinned section about to be gunned down by the Germans flooding from a building. My section to the right is attempting to get into position to assist, hampered by a lack of windows in the right places.

The buildings are the new laser cut wood prepainted ones from Crescent Root Studio in the US and are very nice, sizable pieces and seem well-designed. I liked that they are nicely weathered from the box, come textured and apparently dissemble to 'flat pack' again.

Thanks to all who have hosted me these recent weeks - I look forward to more games of each and to returning the favour once the Sudan collection is ready for an outing (more on that later...)

Challenge entries five and six: the KRRC, Commandos and Pulp

Entry numbers five and six were both small, the result of finally getting around to watching Danish series 'The Killing' (with its mighty fineSarah Lund jumpers). Although quite excellent, it eats into painting time as it is subtitled, so requires my full attention. I went off piste by making up some woods and rough ground, which set me back. 

Here's a firing line of King's Royal Rifle Corps for my dalliance with Colonial Sudan. I think I'm in a 'grey phase' at the moment, it certainly seems to be a feature of most of my entries. I had issues with them, I ended up re-doing the grey as it didn't match my first batch. It still isn't right but is closer, the chap on the left of the second photo was part of batch one, you can see that he already had grubby trousers whereas the rest are clean as a whistle (for now!). Perry sculpts - what else?

Next up, the first of the Blackwater Gulch characters, this one 'The Norwegian', I'm reliably informed he is an homage to the TV show 'Hell on Wheels'. Heaven knows what use I'll find for him other than BWG, perhaps a slightly unbalanced hitman with a penchant for antique firearms and bullwhips in a Pulp game? The flash of white among a head of very black hair is inspired by a chap I know.

Why so serious?

And a daring female adventurer for Pulp, ready to take on the world. A cracking Artizan sculpt. The blue comes out very pale in the photos, the second image is closest the the actual colour. 

Clearly a lady that won't need rescuing

Entry number six was just four models that I turned around in a few days: Artizan Designs British Commandos. One last pack I had in stock, I've 20 or so done but mostly wanted the mortar and PIAT finished. They will come in handy, offering some punch in games of Operation Squad. I drilled out the PIAT and added a wire to the radioman (since dubbed Mr Hendrix), both if which came out really well.

With these, I'm sitting at 195 points, barely over a third to my 550 target. In a week we'll be two-thirds of the way through the challenge. Eek!

What have we got here...?!

I received sizeable package today. But it was too early for my post-Christmas miniature orders to have arrived. What could it be?

I excitedly busted open the package...

Hummm...

Aha! My Blackwater Gulch kickstarter! I mentioned it back in March, so it was one of those expected-at-some-point packages. Eight heroic 28mm miniatures and some bonus sheriff dice (doesn't every gamer love special dice?), it seemed like a reasonable shout to me and is the only kickstarter I've taken the plunge at so at. The sculpts look like they'll paint up well, they can go on the assembly pile and may feature as a Challenge entry.

Short review and painting: Sarissa Precision Adobe Cantina

For the Secret Project, I bought a couple of the Sarissa Pecision Old West adobe line. I figured they were useful for a whole host of different games. The centrepiece was this two-story cantina. These are the bits out of the packet: basically, lots of precision-cut wood and a small instruction sheet.

I made two initial choices: to paint it unassembled (which is rare for me) and to leave the wooden boards the colour they were. So I started by dong a quick dry assembly to figure out how it went together before spraying everything that wasn't to be wood lightly with white spray primer. I split the walls into two batches to paint. Stage one was to pick out the brickwork in watered Vallejo 'Earth'. I used different consistency of paint and brushed it on lightly to give a varied texture. This avoided me doing any highlighting, but I may go back and dry brush some lighter shades on to reduce the contrast between the two colours. Stage two was to use watered down Vallejo 'Buff' on the lower portions of the walls and going up where walls would adjoin each other and other shaded areas (like around the beams). Here we are at stage two of the first batch:

Moving on, the walls got three highlights with 'Buff' mixed with white, up to a just off-white at the very tops. At all stages, I kept the paint quite thin to speed up the painting.  

Assembly now. I started off with superglue - don't bother! White glue works much better. The pieces all fit very snugly together. In fact, they can take a bit of jiggling and force to get them into the slots. I was a bit worried about breaking the thin pieces, but didn't so they much be quite sturdy. Getting them to fit in the right order is sometimes tricky, so test each piece before gluing.

Part assembled, I used elastic bands to hold the walls in while the glue dried. Probably not necessary, but a bit of a precaution.

And here we are assembled from the back and front. Quite an impressive building for its size. It also came with a ladder for roof access and I cut the doors out and mounted them on balsa-wood to make them openable. The kit was £18, a very reasonable price I thought!

I left off some of the window shutters of mine, but may add them later. You may notice that the second floor doesn't sit right from the back. For some reason the 'pins' holding the second floor on res on the beams rather than in the slots. So while everything else out of what was a pretty complex kit fit perfectly, these didn't. I emailed Sarissa these pics and they couldn't explain it either - apparently other kits in stock were fine and apparently I'm told I hadn't fudged the assembly either! Perhaps they were just being nice. Sarissa sent me another kit by way of apology - so full marks for customer service. In fact, service was impeccable, my order was dispatched very quickly and questions were answered promptly. With the price and custome service, I wouldn't hesitate to use Sarissa again, even among the booming laser-cut terrain market. Rather than leaving the unsightly gap, I fixed the issue with my kit by just clipping off the tags and filling in the slots with discarded tags. This worked fine and those particular noggins didn't seem important structurally - the rest of the structure, particularly the internal walls holds the second floor on.

The Projects

It's time for a list. After considering my Salute purchases (as well as the pre-Salute purchases and post-Salute purchases), I thought it fitting to document my current hobby projects and predict where they're going this year.

I'll start with a Pie chart. Unfortunately it doesn't illustrate anything except that I'm balancing limited hobby time across a number of projects. But I do like pie charts (and it adds a splash of colour to what could have been a long rambling post).

1). 28mm Napoleonics
Definitely in a consolidation phase. After two years I've a fair amount painted up and while I do have plenty more minis and terrain to paint up I intend to take a break from the most of it. I will get the Colours sorted on all of my painted units before setting it aside completely. I think next year Gharak and I will come back to gaming Napoleonics and I'll be enthused to pick up the brushes again.

2). 28mm Vikings for Saga
Six point force painted, one point left to finish. In an ideal world I'd buy one more unit of Bondi as an eighth point for maximum flexibility. But I can always add that later, for now I'm content that it is mostly finished and is something I might actually get a game of every now and then with people who aren't Gharak.

3). 28mm Pulp
This will rumble on (especially as Gharak and I are mid-adventure). After my early 2012 drive we've plenty of encounters to play with perhaps just the odd extra miniature required. As a varied project means it is great to drop Pulp figures into a separate painting project to mix things up a little. It also doesn't need much buying for it at the moment. Happily it will get gamed again this year: we need at least one more session this summer to get our heroes out of their current pickle!

4). 10mm WWII British
Was finished (!) as a platoon plus support, then I picked up a few more bits at Salute but they should be quick to paint up. I'm in a bit of a quandary with rules, but those purchases should give me a small Blitzkrieg Commander-sized force. At some point I'll buy BKC and twist Gharak's arm into a game or two or grab a game in my local area.

5). New project 1: 28mm Greek Mythology
Gharak is in the driving seat for this one, creating a complete skirmish game with fluff, rules and sometime down the road it's own miniature range. Ambitious as always, my brother. The game will be a skirmish scale with suitably heroic combat, set in an alternate world taking its inspiration from Greek Mythology. And my role? A mix of advisor, rules collaborator, playtester, painter and who knows what else! We're working on test forces for each faction, so I've the start of a Minoan force on my paint table, Minotaur and all.

6). New project 2: 15mm SciFi
While I didn't really need a new scale (or a new project right now!), I've been tempted to dabble in 15mm SciFi by Samulus. I've an order in with Ground Zero Games for a platoon of infantry and I'll grab my pick of cool vehicles and air support to face his Autosentia. Ive set on a colour scheme and written some fluff for my faction, which was a fun way to spend an hour. Again, not set on any rules as yet, but 15mm seems popular for SciFi, so I've no doubt we'll find something fun.

7). Resurrected project: 28mm Wild West
One on the horizon, after backing Blackwater Gulch with 20 of my hard-earned pounds. Resurrected because a few years back Gharak and I bought a bunch of cowboys and Legends of the Old West. Gharak built some terrain and I got some erm...half-built. We played a few games and set it aside. Once BG is released in the autumn I'll paint some cowboys and finish my terrain.

In summary, seven projects, four of them current. Eep, plenty to be getting on with...