Last year I bought a copy of Thunderbolt Apache Leader. This year I played it.
I played OGRE with a friend's set of the Designer's Edition, the famously huge Kickstarter project from 2012.
I spent a quiet day yesterday.
Someone was lamenting the lack of current hovertruck miniatures in Ogre, now that SJGames is producing the iconic shapes again, so I thought I'd make one.
After a long break while I was busy doing other things, I've returned to Harpoon. I really need to rewrite the support software from scratch, but it just about holds up.
It's been a while since I posted about wargaming; I haven't been doing much of it lately. But today is the first International Naval Wargames Day and I thought I'd mention it.
Since this show was only a few miles from where I live, I thought I'd drop in. Wycombe Warband, the club where I usually play, weren't putting anything on, but there were many of the usual dealers and some interesting demo games with emphasis on participation.
Jon, one of the organisers of Wycombe Warband, lives locally, and I had a couple of games against him. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
(Merry Christmas to all my readers.)
On a dreary November day I visited Warfare, a two-day show in Reading that's filling the gap left by Colours having moved to Newbury. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Another scenario from South Atlantic War, the Black Buck One raid on the airfield at Port Stanley.
X-Wing at Wycombe Warband, after another long gap. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
A new wargaming show in Peterborough, organised by a friend. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
I've started playing through the South Atlantic War scenario book for Harpoon (and for Combined Arms for land actions, which I'm ignoring). This is the first naval scenario in it: the Argentine submarine Santa Fe (formerly the Balao-class USS Catfish) tries to escape from South Georgia.
The latest Harpoon PBEM game was a return to the old standard scenario, to get a new player up to speed.
The latest Harpoon PBEM game used a scenario from the Harpoon Naval Review 2009, written by Gorka L. Martínez Mezo: Moroccan fundamentalists attack the Spanish outposts at Ceuta and Melilla, and the Spanish try to get convoys across the western Mediterranean to evacuate civilians and bring in troops.
The Naval Wargames Show was on last weekend in Gosport. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
There's a certain mentality in games (particularly wargames, but others too) which seems to be associated with tournament play.
Dynamic Mongoose is an ongoing series of naval exercises in anti-submarine warfare, taking place off the coast of Norway. This year's exercise was rather more multinational than recent years' have been, perhaps inspired by recent reports of possibly-Russian submarines inside other nations' territorial waters. The most blatant sign that it is being taken seriously is that it happened in May rather than the usual February in the North Sea. (Still cold, but rather less horrible.)
This one took a while, largely because I've been busy with a writing project that's stuck its tentacles into all my space time.
More X-Wing at Wycombe Warband, first time I'd made it for a while. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Back to basics with this introductory scenario, which we completed in a little over three weeks. This time things went very differently…
Salute is the UK's biggest wargaming show of the year. I didn't buy anything this year, but still had a good time. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
This scenario took a while, because two Blue players in a row became unresponsive and had to be replaced. But we got there in the end.
This scenario is set in 1975; it deals with a British carrier group, heading home across the Atlantic at the outbreak of war, attacked by Soviet submarine and air forces. Total play time has been nearly two months, my goodness.
Yesterday I took part in my first X-Wing tournament. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
More X-Wing at Wycombe Warband. With images; cc-by-sa on everything.
Yesterday I played some more X-Wing at Wycombe Warband.
I haven't had time to go along to Wycombe Warband since last month, but I was there last night playing Zombicide.
As an introduction for new players, I ran this variant scenario: it's Gulf Escort Deja Vu, but with a British Type 23 (Somerset) and Lynx rather than the Canadian Halifax and CH-124A attempting to get the tanker past the Iranian missile boats. Total real time was two weeks.
Yesterday was the weekly meeting of Wycombe Warband, at the NFTS in Beaconsfield; I went along to play some more X-Wing.
I'm still taking advantage of my employer's leave year ending in January, so Ashley came over to play some X-Wing.
"Modern" (i.e. post-WWII) naval warfare is surprisingly underserved by the wargaming community. There's Harpoon, of course, which I know and love, but it's a bit heavy on detail for many people. Shipwreck!, written by Martin Bourne and published in 1999 by Vandering Publications, is the "other" game, and it takes a much lighter approach.
Since some of the players had requested a game with submarines in it, I used this scenario out of the book. In 1997, three Russian surface ships violate Polish coastal waters in a show of force; a German Type 206 submarine tries to sink them. Total playing time was six days.
Having had some interest after I posted the second AAR, I thought I'd run a game for new players to get the hang of the way I do things before I set up another complex scenario. But the new players didn't apply, so I ran this one with two old hands instead. Total real time was two weeks, including a break over Thanksgiving as one of the players is American.
This third game went a lot faster than the last, taking about twelve days of real time to run.
I managed to get some players together for another Harpoon game, again played by email; it took nearly two months all told, though we did have several breaks of a day or two along the way. Here's the after-action report, as before plotted onto Tactical Pilotage Charts.
Sighting conditions in Harpoon are typically set by the scenario author. This means there's little guidance to the designer. Particularly if the scenario spans a large area, it might take several game hours to resolve, and it would be good to know how conditions change over time.
It was a warm night… the moon was full (actually it was just past new)… one of the Reading Boardgames Social guys was selling off his X-Wing collection… (With images.)
Star Wars X-Wing is clearly designed to be a gateway game, encouraging players to buy lots of expansions. As I'm probably going to do. But before then, how well does it do at being playable out of the box?
After I'd written the software, I had to try it out; I had one experienced player and one newcomer to Harpoon (though he knows the real-world technologies and tactics), and we played by email over about a week. Here's the after-action report.
Sometimes my interests intersect. I've been working on a way to plot markers and objects onto real-world charts.
So that's my fantasy Royal Navy. Who's it going to fight? Practically anybody.
People have all sorts of objections to wargaming with particular periods, wars, or types of unit.
Yesterday I played my third game of Chain of Command, and while I was still beaten I did a bit better than last time. Still fun. Be warned, this is a very image-heavy post; each image links to the original high-resolution version. cc-by-sa applies to all images.
Carriers and submarines are dealt with. What about the rest of the Navy?
So Queen Elizabeth, Duke of Edinburgh and let's say Eagle are built during the early 1970s. That's the easy bit. What aircraft do they carry?
Many designers of fantasy fleets like to come up with all sorts of plausible-sounding technological developments. I'm mostly going to borrow ideas which historically worked for the Americans, and transfer them to the British with appropriate modifications.
I'll come back to what the British are up to, but the historical enemy has to be considered.
Salute is the UK's biggest wargaming show of the year. For me this one was frustrating in some ways, rewarding in others.
I often come up with alternate histories. The usual way of doing this is to change some historical detail and then speculate about what might have gone differently. In this case, I have a specific goal in mind, so I'm trying various divergences to try to get to the state I want.
Lots of wargames, particularly those simulating space combat, have some sort of acceleration value for their units: you were going at speed 5, you accelerate by 5, you're now going at speed 10, so you move 10 units this turn.
This is wrong.
For convenience, wargamers tend to split history into periods with broadly similar weapons and tactics.
There seem to be two basic approaches to command in wargames: do you get to move every unit as you'd like to, or are you restricted in what you can do?
Last Sunday I visited Overlord, a one-day wargames show in Abingdon.
This is the scenario I mentioned when reviewing Fire on the Waters: Force Z plus Hood vs the Japanese invasion fleet. I played it with Mongoose's Victory at Sea, but this version is generic; it should work with any WWII naval/air game.
I'm a recent convert to Too Fat Lardies (in spite of one of their regular contributors being a chap I knew at school), so the only game of theirs I've played so far is Chain of Command. I am hugely impressed with it; at a glance it seems very random, but as I played it I came to realise that I was having to make the same hard decisions as a commander on the scene.
Anyway, since that is the only Lard system I play (doubtless this will change), most of the Christmas Special isn't directly useful to me. So what is? (Ignoring "it might be useful later" or "ooh, that's interesting", at least for now...)
I've been looking around for a WWII naval combat system that felt right to me, and I think I've found it.
I've been interested for some time in campaign systems, by which I mean ways of linking together individual tactical games to create some sort of larger narrative.
At the Sharp End is the campaign supplement for the excellent Chain of Command platoon-level wargame.
Tin Soldier is my answer to the problems I see in BattleTech.
Why didn't I just write house rules? Well, I started to, but the game is such a blunt instrument that it's hard to have subtle effects.
I saw this at The Battletech State forwarded from a sarna.net blog post, and thought I'd join in. "What are your five favourite 'Mechs from the original 3025 Technical Readout?"
I've written a set of rules that replace BattleTech. Why would I do such a foolhardy thing? Here I'm planning to write a bit about what's wrong with BattleTech.
Yesterday I played my second game of Chain of Command, and got reasonably thoroughly thrashed. But it was still a very enjoyable experience. (Always a sign of a good wargame, that.) Be warned, this is a fairly image-heavy post.