Games that Define us

We're in the midst of a heatwave in the UK, and I always struggle to paint when its hot. So no project updates for you today. However, a meme that is doing the rounds, which I picked up on at Frontline Gamer, the games that define us as wargamers. Here are mine:

Advanced Hero Quest

I don't recall my early gaming career well, but I believe it all comes back to this. My Dad bought it to play with my brother, who is five years my senior. From this small seed my brother and I's interest in the hobby grew. Each of us has felt our enthusiasm wax and wanes as circumstances dictate, but it's always been one of our joint interests.

EDIT: Battlemasters
As Gharak rightly points out, this was where I first got into gaming. An MB game either licensed from or heavily inspired by GW, this got played loads. Ahhh, the memories!
Battlemasters

Warhammer 40K
Like many people, for years GW was all of the hobby I knew. Everything revolved around local GW store and the friendships made there.
The mainstay was Warhammer 40K, second and then third edition. After an initial flirtation with Eldar, I played lots of Imperial Guard, the pinnacle being my entirely converted Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Guard army. I dabbled with Space Wolves and Chaos Marines too. But Imperial Guard were my favourites and in hindsight I wonder whether Guard players have a predisposition to move towards historical games.
Of course, I also played the whole range of 'Specialist Games', most of which I could be much more tempted to return to these days than 40K itself. Blood Bowl is a great board game, Necromunda was a classic, Man O'War was ace.

Warhammer Fantasy Battle

I always preferred 40K, but also had a WFB force of...Empire! Humm, not hugely different the Guard, really. I preferred 40K because my brother always destroyed me at WFB, fielding a beard-tastic savage Orc and forest goblin force. Sorry bro, but that was mean, my poor 'umies' didn't stand a chance.

Confrontation
Leaving my home town and local GW for Uni, I had little time for wargaming (between working, studying and socialising, not necessarily in that order). My one visit to the official Student Union wargames club put me right off. Unfriendly people, all playing the same old 40K, albeit released from the GW store requirements for painted armies. Blergh.
But I still gamed a little with my brother, visited the town centre gaming shop and eventually found a second, Patriot Comics. Mostly a comic, RPG and CCG store, it had just started stocking Rackham's Confrontation game. I was blown away, the miniatures were stunning. I got very into the game, mostly playing the oft-overlooked Orcs - I wonder if my Brother whupping me had an influence here? I had a lot of fun converting a Roman-themed force of Orcs and was active in the fledgling UK community, the UKCORD.
It all ended badly - Rackham's baffling decision to overhaul Conf as totally new game, except being big battle using pre-painted plastics (which bombed), coupled with my move away from the city on graduation killed off my love affair with Conf. I've still got many of my miniatures, beautifully painted but packed away. Just in case anyone fancies a game of 2nd Ed...

Infinity

As Conf tailed off, I started buying into Infinity. Similarly beautiful miniatures, similarly eye-wateringly expensive. The game was different, tactically intruiging and the reaction system actually worked. All was well with the world and my wallet cried out for mercy. But the abovementioned move, power creep of the new releases and bitty release of new rules put me off. I recall getting crushed by the new Combined Army shortly after release, realising they had everything I could put on the table, just far better. I found the system was encouraging me to throw increasingly cheesy forces into the board. After my brother deployed six Yu Jing with missile launchers, I replied by deploying just one model, the rest being hidden deployed or droptroopers. These days, I still drool over some of the new releases, but I don't own the up to date rules or any particular desire to play the game.

Board games
Mostly the increasingly popular Euro-games. Again, I can blame my brother for this one as he introduced my family to Settlers of Catan at Christmas. Since then I've bought, or played, most of the best-known Euro games, either with the family, the missus, old friends or new. These days, I get more game time with board games than miniatures games and have amassed a decent collection.

.45 Adventure (Pulp)

Worth noting though I wouldn't really call it a wargame, more an RPG with miniatures. I never really got into RPGs in my youth, though I dabbled on occasion at DnD or WHFRP, and at Uni a home-brew cyberpunk-esque game we called 'Darkworld'. But my brother's love of Indiana Jones and other cheese got us into Pulp gaming with miniatures. We find it a lot of fun to play and a lot of fun to paint as well as design, if time-consuming. I'm lucky that he carries most of that burden!

Perry plastics

Ok, not quite a game, but a milestone worth noting, as the proliferation of good quality plastic historical miniatures has been a key factor in my jumping into historicals. This has been the mainstay of my hobby activity in recent years.

The Future?
Well, a raft of projects on the go, including a scale shift to 15mm and back to SciFi. Then who knows, as I really am a gaming magpie (oooh, shiney!), especially considering the number of projects which have passed my painting table which don't even come close to making this list...

Giveaways galore at Frontline Gamer

Frontline Gamer is in the middle of a series of giveaways as he hits new follower targets. Not only that, he's very insightful hobby blogger, if occasionally controversial. So his blog is well worth checking out on it'd own merits:

Frontline Gamer

Broadside show, Kent

The organisers of Broadside are trying to get word out after a problem their advertising. I'm happy to do my bit.

So, if you're free on Sunday 10 June in the Kent area, head to Broadside 2012. I'm hoping to head over from London, so may see you there!

And the winner is...

...Red! Thanks all for your votes - find a snap of squads one and two below.

I decided to tone the visor back a bit and keep the pure red highlight around the top edge of the visor. As Curt suggested, I added a white flash too. I'm not entirely convinced it looks that realistic, but I like the effect. I may finish it with a gloss varnish on the visor, but they need their matt spray first.

Presents arrived from Khurasan today, yay, more to assemble!

Gruntz AAR and review

As Samulus describes, we played through a game of Gruntz the other night with my fledgling New Vedith Defence Force troops facing Samulus' robotic Autosentia. We threw together some stats for what we had as best we could and played around 100 points. I had two NV infantry squads with support weapons, a platoon command base (Mal standing in) and two IFVs which had fortunately arrived from Antenociti that morning.

The battlefield from the NV perspective. Terrain was cobbled together from what I had already, except the alien jungles I knocked together during the week from some plastic fish tank plants that Gharak gave me years back.

We were a but short on suitable counters, so used red gems for waxed (wounded) troops, blue for suppressed, White dice for a command 'push' order which grands a bonus action or for vehicle damage and a small green dice for prone which gave combat bonuses.

An NV IFV's laser and missile weapons take their toll on the Autosentia assault troops.

The IFVs spectacularly fail to bring their weapons to bear on the Autosentia mech, whose Gatling gun decimates an NV squad. The Mech was a bit overpowered for its size, something for us to tweak.

Autosentia light infantry combine fire and damage an IFV, which was helpfully laser-painted by the nearby drones. But NV infantry push forward and gun down the light robots. I conceded shortly afterwards, although close it was a rules taster rather than a competitive game and we wanted some time to discuss our thoughts.

So, what did we think? I'll start with some pros:
-really nicely presented and well-written rulebook for a bargain download price of £6. We struggled to find some specific rules (such as what flamers do), but overall a solid product
-interesting mechanics which seem to mostly work right. Although I wouldn't personally agree with all design decisions, such as the lack of a rate of fire, Samulus and I both felt it was a very good base which we could tweak to our taste
-easy to use unit-builder with a points system. We were happy to use it as a guide and bend the rules if needed. And having not played before, some of our first efforts were a little bit skewed - the mech too powerful and IFVs seemed pretty tough.

Cons? Happy to report there isn't much that we felt we couldn't tweak to suit with our own house rules. Something I'm increasingly happy to do, as I have developed pretty specific tastes in rulesets. These were the things we thought could be improved:
-command system. While we used the alternative activation rules and there is a small command element in the way you can use your command base, i think this could be deepened. I've already an idea for how to develop this further. Also, the need for a command base didn't really fit with Samulus's robot force.
-I can see the mathematic appeal of a 2D6-based combat system but it became a bit ungainly with our 8-man squads as we only had 5 different pairs of dice. We will try 4-man fireteams next, breaking out special weapons as attachments.
-the range of modifiers meant shooting became a bit maths-y, adding 2D6 plus stat, plus or minus modifiers, with a target number that could also vary from modifiers. We really needed a decent reference table and for personal taste I might streamline some of the modifiers.
-Gruntz sure died quick, even in cover. If we use smaller fireteams, I'm toying with the idea that cover and prone status should grant Gruntz an extra wound rather than a to hit modifier, from small arms fire at least. I don't think this will break the core system so we'll try it out and let you know how it works.
-Some oddities like equipping combat knife being optional, but free. I'd have thought all but the worst rabble would 'count as' having a ccw, be it knife, gauntleted fist or rifle-butt!

As I say, these opinions can pretty much all be easily fixed with house rules. I would definitely recommend people looking fir a ruleset to check out Gruntz.

Also, the author of Gruntz was kind enough to comment on Samulus' blog with his response so in the interest of balance, please see here. It is great to see that Robin is open to constructive feedback and I'm pleased to see that at least some of the points are already being tweaked for future editions.

Have a nice weekend, bloggers!

Cast your votes please!

Not the French Presidential elections. Not to help Greece elect a government. Not even for the winner of Britain's got Talent. No, this is the vote you've all been waiting for.

I'm undecided on how to paint the helmet visors on my GZG infantry. So I'm throwing the question to our hobby community. Which of these do you prefer - red or jade? It could go either way. Nail-biting, eh?

And with flash:

Assuming I keep the rest of the grey/blue colour scheme, if you have any other suggestions for good colours, I'm all ears!

Cheers,
Phil

SciFi project: first finished minis

I finished these 15mm Ground Zero Games UNSC infantry over the past couple of weeks. I've a whole platoon of them to do, but thankfully they are pretty quick to paint.

They are magnetically based onto steel FOW-size bases which I ordered from here:
http://www.freewebs.com/pwsltd/steelbases.htm

Highly recommend them, steel bases have a nice weight to them, he is happy to make custom sizes and delivered quickly. 

I haven't got the photography right at this scale as they've come out a bit bright, especially the blue, which is somewhat less lurid in real life (Vallejo magic blue). I'm not set on the red visors, though they are a standout feature. Might try a different colour on batch two. They really need a coat of matt varnish, but I'm all out. 

And this infamous smuggler captain and his first mate were among the freebies GZG were giving out at Salute.

Samulus of 'Life vs Gaming' and I are planning to test some rulesets out later in the week, I'll let you know how we get on.