Horizon Wars Game 3

I don't know what started it, but a couple of weeks ago I felt the urge to get back into sci-fi micro/mecha gaming. I already have a low-tech Dropzone Commander Resistance force and a Heavy Gear Caprice force with 4-legged mechs, but I felt the need to own a "conventional" force with tanks, APCs, and infantry, and also a force of "traditional", 2-legged, guns-for-arms mechs.

Needless to say, several purchases were made, and I dusted off my copy of Horizon Wars, re-familiarised myself with the rules, and played a short game with FG after our Sludge game on Monday.

Despite having a better grasp of the rules this time round, we still found the bookkeeping onerous. This was made worse by the (unrelated) fact that I had chosen to mark my models using decals of 2mm tall numbers on the edge of their bases, and between the time when I made that decision to now my eyesight has deteriorated, making it a chore to see which model was which unit on the roster. 

After the game FG and I took stock and looked for other options for the rules. We found Heavy Gear Blitz and Battletech Alpha Strike too crunchy, while simpler rules like Epic required too many models, and are too tied to a background to fit what we were looking for. That's not to say that I do not harbour the dreams of one day fielding an Imperial Knight army with a few titans...

Eventually we had the idea of looking at CAV: Strike Operations ('strike' and 'blitz' are probably to sci-fi rules titles what 'eagle' and 'empire' are to Napoleonic rules titles) - we have been planning to order some terrain pieces from Talon Games, but somehow we had never taken a look at the CAV rules.

I downloaded their quick-start rules, and so far they seem to hit the sweet spot. In many ways it is like Horizon Wars: each element has two actions per activation, and performance degrades with damage, only the degradation is programmed/fixed, so you don't actually have to decide which stat to reduce, or keep track of which unit has which stat reduced.

I ordered a copy of the rules (they are not available in electronic form, sadly), and with shipping the way it is these days, the book, various sci-fi models and terrain should arrive in the mail over the next few weeks, and keep me busy for the rest of the year. If things go as planned, you should be seeing more sci-fi content on this blog next year.

Sludge Fox #3 - The Black Mingo

Crown forces defend their position

Game 3 once again saw the Crown forces on the defensive. I purchased an artillery piece as a support under the rules we use for the campaign.

The Rebel forces attack

FG had one Rebel Line Infantry unit exchange fire with my main body across the river, while the skirmishers and shock troops tried to outflank me on my right. I sent one unit of Line Infantry to intercept them - the resulting melee saw both units destroyed and left a huge pile of Gore tokens on the ground.

FG then sent another Line Infantry unit down the road, but my cannon managed to cause some casualties before it blew itself up on a misfire. The battle came down to an exchange of musket fire between the two sides, until at last the Rebels gave up and left.

Survivors of the onslaught

It was a Pyrrhic victory for the Crown forces, as they have lost more than two-thirds of their forces.

Sludge Fox #2 - Blue Savannah

Crown forces defend a roadblock

Game 2 of our Sludge Fox campaign saw my Crown forces defending a small farmstead against a Rebel force. I had my line infantry defend a barricade across a road, while my skirmishers deployed in the woods on either side, waiting for the Rebels to come down the road.

Rebel forces approach

FG had the Rebel skirmishers outflank the Crown position on the right, while the main body took their time to clear my skirmishers out of the woods, before the line infantry marched down the road to deliver a devastating volley against my position.

The Crown forces quickly lost their appetite for the fight, and abandoned their position.

This was a rather one-sided battle, as the Rebels took their time and waited for the right moment to launch their assault (Unstoppable Momentum). At the same time my dice were so poor that I failed to inflict even one hit on the Rebel forces. At the end I found myself pulling my forces back from all the Gore tokens to avoid having to make Nerve Tests at poor odds.

Finally, here is a shot of the roadside shrine which I built that FG painted for me.

Sludge Fox #1 - Skirmish at Kingstree

Crown forces form a defence line as the rebel forces approach.

With our forces completed and a test game under our belt, FG and I decided to play a Sludge campaign. To provide a framework for our campaign, I googled around for pre-made campaigns for the black powder period in the skirmish scale, and realised that Too Fat Lardies' Sharp Practice campaigns fit the bill. Specifically, we had the idea that our two forces represent the royal forces (represented by my cleaner-looking figures) and the forces of a rebel noble (represented by FG's sludgier figures). After looking through the various campaign, we decided to play the Swamp Fox campaign, renaming it our Sludge Fox campaign.

We kicked the campaign off with Scenario 2 from the campaign book, since we do not yet have a two-storey building required for Scenario 1. The scenario saw my malaria-ridden crown forces conducting a fighting retreat against pursuing rebels.

Rebel jaegers flank the crown position through the sludge.

We played with small forces and without magic, aiming chiefly to get all the rules right for our first game, which I think we managed to do. Even though there were only 3 units and 2 commander figures on each side, it was an interesting game as the scenario set-up gave both players a few options to achieve their victory conditons.

Major John Harrison is captured, and Holbein is slain.

I sent one unit on a headlong march for the table edge, while another unit and the skirmishers tried to delay the rebels with shooting. This went well for a few turns as I managed to roll higher on the Initiative rolls. However, as the game went on the greater volume of fire from the rebels started to tell, and on the last two turns I lost the Initiative rolls, and my commander was overwhelmed and gave up, while the officer who stayed behind to try to fend off the rebel skirmishers was killed fighting alone.

It was a fun game, and we plan to continue the rest of the campaign. We will still need to decide on how to translate the forces in the campaign book to Sludge units, including incorporating magic and artillery, but so far it looks workable.

Battle of Edgcote

The Royalists face their rivals

FG and I played a game of Never Mind the Billhooks on Monday. I picked the Edgcote scenario from Peter Pig's Bloody Barons (1st edition) because it features only two Battles per side (to start with anyway). I did not stick to the order of battle strictly, but tried to preserve the salient points of the battle (from what I could learn on some googling). The Royalists are outnumbered, have fewer archers, but start on high ground, and they have some Welsh pikes. The Rebels have more troops, more archers, and I decided to believe that they have cavalry, because it would make the game more interesting.

What was also interesting was the fact that FG played William Herbert in the WOTR campaign we played many years ago, and had painted command bases for him, which we used for this battle. However, I let him command the Lancastrians so I could take the "defenders", which I thought would be a more passive role and allow me to focus on the rules. Nevertheless, we did get some rules wrong here and there.

William Herbert rallies the troops

The game played pretty much like a standard medieval wargame with buckets of dice (more dice as I have larger units than the in the official rules), and I think FG did not fully appreciate the manoeuvre phase of the game or his advantage in archers.

The Event Cards added a nice touch, and I think are a good way of adding the uncertainty in WOTR battles that come from treachery or just plain blundering in a two-player game.

The Royalist arrows fall short

I do think the game will be even more fun with two or more players each side, and with each player having their own secret victory condition, like they do in some co-operative boardgames.

Welsh pikes see off the Rebel cavalry

I hope to play the game with more players again, once the lockdown lifts.

A Tale of Sludge and Turnip

The two armies face off across a blasted field

FG and I played our first games of Sludge and Turnip28 last week. The two games have overlapping aesthetics, and feature roughly the same types of troops in around the same numbers, so it was natural to try both out.

Foot knights clash

We tried Sludge first, and as this was our first outing we got many of the rules wrong. I find the combat resolution a little too crunchy, but I love guessing ranges and rolling for bounce for the artillery. I am not too sure about the gore tokens, but I suppose once I learn more about my leaders and support characters I will appreciate the mechanic more.

Troops defend the redoubt

We then tried Turnip28, which I thought was going to be a simpler game. There was a bit of book-keeping with the Panic tokens, and we found that units fled too readily. I thought I was going to appreciate the black-powder smoke mechanic, but there were too few units in the game for it to be meaningful. We did play it without all the cult special rules, since none of the cults appealed to us, so perhaps the full game experience is different. I do feel that Turnip28 has the basics of a fun horse-and-musket skirmish game, but its retreat mechanic is obviously tied to its fluff and will need to be modified for a less comical game.

A group shot

This last photo shows (almost) all the figures which I painted for this project. It wasn't a lot of investment in time for me, since most of my existing WOTR/fantasy figures can be used in the game.

We will most likely give Sludge another go, and perhaps play one of the Sharp Practice campaigns if we can get the hang of the rules. I may also want to give Then Men Who Would be Kings rules a try, and see if we can represent some of the fluff with those rules.

Wayside Shrine for Sludge

Building the tower has whet my appetite for scratch-building terrain, and so I was looking around for some other little project to do, and came upon the idea of building a wayside shrine as a scatter terrain piece or an objective.

A quick search on google taught me that wayside shrines are a thing in many cultures, and even within each culture they come in a dizzying array of shapes and sizes. For a while I was seized with choice paralysis and could not decide on a design.

Then I remembered the Castlecraft sprues I have lying around, and decided to make one based on them instead of coming up with a design first and then making the parts for it.

The eventual model is what you see above. The walls are made from the Castlecraft parts, with a plastic grille glued on the inside of the windows. The base is a 40mm square base glued to a 40mm x 60mm MDF base, and the steps are made from Renedra bases cut to size.

I made a roof with PVC foam card and another Renedra base, and then made the shingles with cardboard. Some gaps in the Castlecraft pieces are also covered with the PVC foam cards.

I will be handing the model to FG to paint, along with the Warlord ruined cottages I built for him, so stay tuned for the painted version on his blog soon.

Scratch Built Tower for Sludge

One of the terrain pieces I have been wanting to make for the Sludge project was a tower. Not necessarily a utilitarian piece of terrain, but something to put in the background - I think including verticality to a wargames table adds a lot to the look. I have put off the project on the basis that it was not really a necessity (is anything really a necessity in a hobby?), but the lockdown left me with a little more time than I usually have...

As it so happens I used up this bottle of handwash, and wouldn't you know it the size is just about right.

I cut off the top part of the bottle where the screw threads are, and made a conical roof for the tower with a piece of cardboard. I made a base for the tower with 3mm PVC foam board, which gives it rigidity and is not prone to warping. I glued small rectangles of 1mm PVC foam card along the walls to mark the windows.

I made a gable entrance for the tower using 1mm PVC foam card. The door comes from a CastleCraft kit - it is more 22mm than 28mm, but works well enough. I added a metal ring from a jewellery piece as the door ring.

The finial on the roof is the end of a ballpoint pen (that's to FG for the tip) and the end of a banner pole from the Oathmark Undead kit. I added shingles cut from cardboard to the roofs using double-sided tape, and sealed them with a coat of PVA glue.

I applied a coat of Modge Podge to the tower and base, and when that has dried, I glued sand and gravel to the base.

I sprayed the whole piece with a brown primer, and when that has dried I sprayed a layer of flat white paint in a zenithal fashion, leaving some brown at the bottom of the tower and in the recesses.

I then painted the base brown and dry-brushed it with some grey mixed into the brown, and then applied some weathering powder to the base of the tower. I applied some light wash to the body of the tower to show some streaking.

The joint between the entrance and the wall was rough on one side, so I hid it with some vines.

The finial was painted to look rusted. For the windows I just peeled off the PVC foam card pieces I applied earlier, and painted the space black.

I applied more tufts than I had expected to to hide the bits where there was too much brown paint on the tower.

This was a fun and quick build, not accounting for the drying times. The construction is pretty crude, but I think the door and the finial give it the details that make it look more refined.

WWG Barbed Wire Defensive Positions

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I wanted to get some wire obstacle sections for my Trench Hammer games. After some searching, I decided to get some World War Gaming resin pieces from an eBay store. These are made of a really nice resin, and come with barbed wire in the concertina form, which I though looked too modern for a sci-fi WW1 aesthetic. Instead, I chose to use the Army Painter razor wire and deploy them in a low entanglement fashion.

The paintjob was simple: I spray the pieces with a brown primer, then with beige. The posts were painted in brown - the woodgrain you see are actually from the brush strokes. 

I got a total of nine pieces, which I hope will be sufficient for my needs. Here you can see the height of the wire relative to a 28mm figure.

Deepnight Revelation #7

Captain’s Log – T103

Fabrication of the necessary parts for the repair of the drive have begun. As the Mission Command team have decided against a complete shut-down of the ship, repairs will take a minimum of three weeks.

Syndic Feisler continues to refuse our request for shore leave on the Dwadaella homeworld, on the account that the permission was not the Haix’s to grant. While I agree with Mr Johnson that that also means permission is not theirs to deny, it would not be diplomatic to press the issue.

Syndic Feisler did offer an alternative: a forest moon orbiting the local gas giant called Wildwood, where the Haix maintain a logging camp and a furniture factory. I have asked Mr Stamper to lead a team to investigate the moon to see if it will be suitable.

Captain’s Log – T108

Mr Stamper’s team has returned to Tradeport, but sadly, with one crew fewer. Trooper Velok had died in the line of duty while on Wildwood. His death will no doubt cause a further deterioration in the morale of the crew.

According to Mr Stamper’s report, the team arrived at Entolere, the Haix base on Wildwood, to learn that contact with the logging camp has been lost three weeks prior. The loggers have been reporting sightings of unfamiliar creatures in the woods for several months by then, and then three months before the team’s arrival loggers started disappearing one by one. Most of the loggers then returned to Entolere, but some 20 remained by the time contact was lost.

A team of armed men were sent to investigate, traveling by the railway that led to the camp, but two miles away from the camp they found the tracks blocked by fallen trees, and when the men dismounted to clear the trees they were attacked by “moving trees”. The apprentice engineer was the only survivor of the attack.

The terrain being unsuitable for the landing of the scoutship, Mr Stamper secured the use of the train and the services of the apprentice engineer Stevin. The team traveled as far as the location of the fallen trees, where they discovered that the trees had been deliberately uprooted and used to block the tracks. It being impractical to remove the fallen trees, the team decided to carry on on foot, while Mr Stamper, unable to cross the rough terrain due to his old leg injury, returned to Entolere on the train.

The team arrived at the logging camp to find it in disarray. The hab-blocks had been torn into, and there were blood splatter and blaster marks which suggested that there was a skirmish, but there were no bodies found. A wide trail led from the campsite to the east, while drag marks on the trail suggested that the bodies of the loggers and any survivors had been taken away by the attackers.

The team followed the trail, and after a hour’s travel they lost communications link with Mr Stamper, likely on account of the thick forest canopy. Corpsman Wootue reported a sense of unease from the way the leaves of the plants “looked wrong”. Shortly afterwards the team was attacked by spines ejected from what appeared to be seed pods that grew on certain vines that grew on the trees. Several of the team members were wounded, and Trooper Velok lost his life during this attack, depsite Corpsman Wootue’s efforts to revive him. On Sergeant Ahab’s recommendation, his body was cremated using the

flamethrower the team carried, in accordance to Rakashan customs. Examination of the spines showed that they resembled those found on the bodies of the Haix which we found in the wrecked ship earlier.

Continue on the trail, the team arrived at a large clearing covered by ferns. In the middle of the clearing was a large mount, some 100 yards across and 30 yards high. At the top of the mound was a clump of vegetation, and at its base was what appeared to be a cave opening, and the trail led to that opening.

As the team started to cross the clearing towards the mound, humanoid forms rose from the ground and began to attack them by shooting spines at them from their appendages. At the same time, screams could be heard issuing from the cave opening.

The team fought their way towards the cave, but in the chaos of battle Stevin and Corpsman Wootue became separated from the rest of the team, and fell back into the woods – they would be recovered the next day at the railway.

The team were able to neutralise many of the creatures with blaster fire and flamethrower, but more kept rising from the vegetation. Sergeant Ahab led the team into the cave. Inside, they learned that the “cave” appeared to be organic in nature, with its interior separated into many corridors and chambers by wooden walls. Following the screams, the team came into a larger chamber, where there were confronted by another one of the creatures, this one larger than the rest. The team destroyed this larger creature by surrounding it and attacking it with the flamethrower and grenades. In the chambers beyond, they found some of the loggers from the camp – it seemed that when the team arrived, the creatures began killing the loggers they had held prisoners. Several of the loggers had been killed in the initial attack on their camp, while others had been taken by the creatures and killed in a gruesome fashion, in what the survivors described as “dissection”.

Unable to exit the cave via the opening due to the large number of creatures on the outside, the team began to explore the “cave”. In one end of the complex, they found Jump and manoeuvre Drives of an unknown origin, seemingly integrated into the material of the cave. The team surmised that the “cave” was in fact some form of a ship with both organic and mechanical components.

Exploring further, they came into a large domed chamber which they believed was the middle of the mound. Petty Officer Jet Black had the idea that the vines and creatures that attacked them and the loggers were some form of alien plant life, which were controlled by some form of plant “super-mind” which was represented by the clump of vines which was atop the mound. Based on this theory, the team blew out the top of the dome with grenades, which collapsed and caused the vines to fall to the ground below.

Examining the vines, they found a globular structure, pale-yellow in colour, which was integrated into the root system of the vines. The team severed the globe from the vines, and set the vines alight. The hole in the dome also allowed Mr Goldfone to re-establish communications with Mr Stamper, who was able to evacuated the team via winching. The team then destroyed the mound and the creatures surrounding it with an improvised air-fuel explosive.

The globe is currently being studied by the Science department, but it is clear that Wildwood is not a suitable venue for our shore leave. The globe and the alien plant life have a connection with the wrecked Haix ship which we found; hopefully our analysis of the globe will give us more information on whatever attacked the ship, which will give us some leverage in our further negotiations with the Haix.

Prepping and Running the Game

This scenario was runned pretty much 'as is', except that I moved Wildwood from a planet in another system to a moon in the local system.

The frequent lockdowns had disrupted our gaming schedule, and also dulled my GMing instincts. I tried to compensate by putting more prep time into this session, but I still missed out a couple of things I had planned to incorporate into the session to make it more interesting.

We are in another lockdown again, so there will be no RPG for four weeks. This will give me more time to work on wargaming, so look out for more posts in the future.

Scratch-built Machine Gun Emplacement

While I already have several sci-fi/post-apocalyptic rubble-barricades in my collection, all the sections are too high compared to the height of the heavy machine guns I have painted, so I decided to scratch-build a machine gun emplacement.

For the base I used 1mm PVC foam board. I cut our a C-shaped section sized to the bases of the machine gun teams. For the main component of the barricade I used cork sheets. I lay down a first layer using hot glue, and then glued some bits from various plastic kits I have left over to represent the debris the soldiers would have used to reinforce the strcture. I put the longer pieces in the centre of the piece, on the basis that this was probably the first part of the emplacement the soldier laid down, and they would want to define this part first.

I then built up the sides with more pieces of cork.

Then I covered the base with my usual mix of sand and gravel.

To seal everything in place, and more importantly to give a non-porous surface to the cork pieces, I covered everything with Modge Podge.

Once the Modge Podge has dried completely, it was a simple matter of painting the whole thing black, then grey, and then picking out the various debris items and painting them in their colours. Next, I did some rust effect and weathering on the debris. I then applied a black wash, followed by a brown wash, before finally applying some weathering powder.

I think I managed to match the colour and weathering to the pieces I bought off ebay.

Paper Medieval Tent from Codex Manesse

One of the fun bits about Never Mind the Billhook is this rule about Morale tokens: each army has a number of Morale tokens, and every time you suffer a reversal you have to surrender one of them - when you run out of tokens to surrender, you lose the battle. To keep your opponent from knowing how many tokens you have remaining, the author recommends you hide them inside a miniature tent.

Now I have three 15mm DBX- style camps from the purchases I made on ebay, but these - as many 15mm tents made for wargaming are - are solid tents with no place to keep the tokens. I decided a quick way of making "hollow" medieval tents was with paper or cardstock terrain, and found this one on googling.

The template is in pdf, and comes in layers, so there are different patterns of the scallops, and you can choose to have the flaps up or down. The template seems to fit 28mm figures, but I scaled mine down by 50%, which works well for 15mm.

More importantly, at 50% the template fits just nice around these extra sturdy cardboard tubes which I have been saving up - gluing the template around a sturdy core makes things a lot easier, and also means you can just print on paper instead of cardstock. The template gives a slightly tapering tent, while the tube is straight; this isn't an issue in 15mm since it is easy to compensate by squishing the paper a little, but in 28mm you may want to find a suitable core first - like maybe a small yoghurt tub - and then scale the template to the exact size that will wrap nicely around your chosen core.

Anyway, it was a simple job of gluing the template onto the tube, then cutting the opening for the flaps.

For the roof I simply taped the edges together without bothering with the flaps.

You don't want to tape all the way to the edge, since the edge will need to be cut and folded down, as you will see later.

I chose a 60mm round MDF base as the base for the tent, and assembled the components with white glue.

I then snipped the edges of the roof and folded the tabs down, as you can see in the photo above.

Finally, I painted the base to match my battle mat.

This was a quick and easy project, and I am now thinking of ways to make functional terrain pieces for my other games.

Machination Studio Maxim Gun Galloper with Imperium Immortalis crew

I got the Machination Studio Maxim Gun Galloper a couple of years ago with the intent of using it for my Warzone figures. As I have already painted a Tehnolog T-Rex for the Imperial faction, I wanted to paint the Galloper for the Bauhaus faction.

The original model is 1/35 in scale, so I had to do some work on the 'cockpit'. I cut away the Maxim Gun mount, and added a platform made from Tehnolog bits, and added a ladder made from some plastic mesh I had.

The torso of the crew is from an Imperium Immortalis heavy weapon crew figure, but I decided to give it the head of a cavalry trooper on the account that the walker would probably be under the cavalry arm of the army rather than the artillery arm. The arms come from a trimmed down Mad Robot Miniature crew figure, and the weapon is the Grenade Launcher from Imperium Immortalis, which happens to fit right into the slot in the gun-shield.

I bought some Army Painter barbed wire from a store earlier this week, and so I decided to add some scenic element to the base and depict the walker stepping on and neutralising some wire obstacle.

The gun-shield has a large surface area, but thankfully there was already some texture on the piece. I did some chipping work on the gun-shield and other surfaces, but at this scale they are not really visible at tabletop distance and to my aging eyes.

I did heavier weathering on the muffler, and applied weathering powder to the 'hooves'.

The legs on the walker are not really square, as you can see from this rear view, but somehow the crew platform is level.

While I was assembling the model I wondered how the driver was supposed to see where is is going and what he was shooting at, and when I was painting the weapon I found the answer: he had some sort of a viewscreen which gave him readings taken from a camera/sensor on the front of the weapon, which you can see in the front view of the walker. I imagine the role of the walker as a trench-buster: the elevated position of the weapon allowed it to lob grenades into the trenches in a sort of semi-indirect fire.

This will likely be the last model I paint for the whole project; next up will be some wire entanglement sections.

Sludge Infantry Unit and Jaegers

I completed the last of the three units of Line Infantry for the Sludge project.

As with the other units, I added some scenic items on the base, in this case some fence sections I had in my bits box. I plan to use space on the command base for Stress tokens/die.

I also painted up the remaining figures as Jaegers. I'm not sure how important they are in the game, but it is good to have the option to field some skirmishers.