Here's the Ruckus in Osgiliath

For the March session we played a game of Here's the Ruckus. I bought a copy of the rules last year, read through them, and decided that they were a little bit too finicky for me, and set it aside. Fast forward to this year, when I bought and played Midgard, and then decided that I wanted to play with my other LOTR figures, but I didn't have quite enough for a game of Midgard... So I picked up Ruckus again, and re-read them. This time round, I manage to get the game, and very soon I wrote a scenario for our first game.

The scenario is set in Middle Earth, and based on the movie version of the story, when Faramir brought Frodo, Sam, and Gollum to Osgiliath. In our scenario, the party was attacked by orcs, and while the men of Gondor were able to drive the orcs off, the three hobbits manage to slip away in the chaos of battle, and hid themselves in the ruins. Rallying his men, Faramir set after them, even as another party of orcs closed in on the same quarries.

The hobbits start off as hidden counters on the middle of the table, while the two sides come on from the edges and must move a character onto the counter to reveal who was found there. The side that finds Frodo and leaves the table with him wins the game. I placed the four counters on the second level of the ruined buildings, thus forcing both sides to have to make Climb moves to reach them.

Both sides made a cautious move towards the centre of the board, moving from cover to cover, until at last the leaders of both sides met in the centre in a mighty fight.

It was the orcs who found Frodo, and immediately they started moving him towards their exit edge. Having sent a section of their troops to secure their own exit edge, the men of Gondor found themselves in the wrong place to stop this.

Boromir would not have failed...

As usual I didn't get all the rules right, but we had a lot of fun. The rules themselves are pretty standard for skirmish games, but the rules for Gambit Movement: Sprinting, Leaping, Climbing, Crossing River, etc. add an element of unpredictability that skirmish games at this scale require. That also means that scenario design is important.

I am excited enough about the rules to want to build a custom terrain piece for a game featuring my Rohirrim force. Stay tuned.

Another Bus get the Rust

A few weeks ago Adrian ran a game of Mutant Year Zero: Zone Wars game for us. In preparation for the session I watched the video by Free League. I was impressed by the terrain of the board they used for the demo, particularly by the abandoned bus, and decided to make something similar.

For Zone Wars, I needed a larger model, in 28mm scale. I managed to find a plastic toy of an appropriate scale.

The toy was taken apart, and I removed the soft rubber rear-view mirrors, the window panes, the tyres, and the electronics and wind-up mechanism. I then spray-primed the model with a red-brown primer, and then sponged it all over with orange and dark brown paint to create a rust effect. As I wasn't sure how much weathering I would be doing at this point, I created the effect all over the model.

I then covered the model with salt for the salt-chipping process. Unfortunately the high humidity meant that the effect wasn't exactly how I hoped it would turn out.

Once the salt has dried (as much as it would) I sprayed he model with yellow paint, and when that had dried I brushed off the salt. At this point the model still looked a bit off, and I decided to add a black stripe across the sides. As this would be a terrain piece rather than a playing piece, I left the interior in primer brown, and just picked out the lights.

The result is shown above, alongside the two other school bus models I already owned in smaller scales: a 10mm scale one from the Dropzone Commander range, and a 20mm scale one which I made using a diecast metal toy, with bits from the Northstar Gasalands conversion bits to make it look like the smaller one.