Paint table update: Aerial Ships

A while ago I acquired Skygalleons of Mars and Anthony and I enjoyed a game pitting British aerial steamships against German rivals over Mars.  This sent both of us off down a steampunky/Wellsian rabbit hole looking at the whole Aeronef setting.

Easily tempted, I ordered a couple of the very reasonably priced Flotilla packs from Brigade Models and a set of Osprey's Castles in the Sky rules.  It's clear the Scots stereotype isn't far from the surface as this was a nice cheap starter set of figures and rules.  One of the things I really like about Osprey's 'Blue Book' rules is that they are very affordable and if they don't work out, I don't feel like I've lost a fortune in trying them out.

First up is the British Flotilla consisting of a Destroyer, 4 Destroyers and 4 Corvettes...

Last night my wife passed by as I was fixing them to the flying bases.  "Why are they mounted on stands?"... "Oh, that's because they're flying ships".  She gave a little sigh, rolled her eyes and muttered "Of course they are..."  Sometimes I forget how weird this hobby can be to everyone else!

Paint table update: Teeny Tiny Terrain

I've had a little break from Epic ECW painting and added a couple of towns and a Roman Marching Camp to my terrain for Strength and Honour.  Sadly these arrived too late for my recent S&H game.

These come from Baccus' Teeny Tiny Terrain range and are ideal for 2mm scale games like Strength & Honour.  Although they're...erm... teeny tiny...they'd make good villages and towns for 6mm games and would be ideal in an aerial game.

Arnhem and my Mum

 It doesn't have quite the same clout as 'Adolf Hitler: my part in his downfall' by Spike Milligan, but what's the connection between one of WW2's great 'glorious' defeats and my mum?

My mum, Jessie, sadly passed away a couple of weeks ago.  She had a long career as PA to the director of a large Glasgow department store (where I had my first part-time job in the Gents department... 'I'm free!').  But early in her secretarial career in the 1950s she worked for various clients, one of whom was Major-General Roy Urquhart, former commander of the 1st Airborne Division during the Arnhem campaign.

After leaving the army in 1955 he worked in engineering and the steel industry in Glasgow and wrote his account of Operation Market Garden.  My mum's job was to collate, order and type up the manuscript of his book.  I've read various books on Arnhem but never this one, so it seemed appropriate to acquire a copy as a memory of my mum's slightly tenuous connection to the Dutch battlefield.

Strength &Honour: Battle of the Cilician Gates

This week my 2mm Roman and Parthian armies finally made their debut on the table in a game of Strength and Honour.  It's been a while since Anthony and I had played this (previously using my paper 10mm Romans and Celts).  Since there was an appropriate scenario in the book I decided that would be perfect.  It's also has fairly small forces so ideal for an evening game, we set of for 39 BCE and the Battle of the Cilician Gates.

A quick recap... S&H is a great set if rules from.Mark Backhouse and the TFL imprint Reissweitz Press.  It's specifically designed for games from around 106BCE to 200CE.  It uses a grid based mat and, as units are pushed back or worse, they accumulate Setback cards, or Disaster Cards which, unsurprisingly are a bit worse.  These have a value beginning at 0 and are drawn unseen.  At any point in the game your opponent can call 'Homunculus Est' and cards are revealed.  If they exceed the army break point then the game is over: if it is over half (but below the BP) then the army becomes fatigued.  They're a great set of rules for this period and make for a really quick but challenging game.

The battle pitched a combined Parthian and Roman rebel army against a smaller force which Mark Anthony had despatched to put a stop to the rebels rampaging across Asia Minor.

The Romans begin deployed on a hill with 2 Veteran Legions, some skirmishers and a cavalry unit.  The larger Parthians have their own, less experienced, Legions as well as Cataphracts and Parthian Light Horse, giving them a definite advantage in manoeuvrability and speed.

 Typically, my game opened with my Light cavalry refusing to advance after failing a Manoeuvre test and switching play to the Romans.  My opponent Anthony (not Mark Anthony, just Anthony) made a break from the historical battle and launched his troops down the slope of the hill, losing the uphill advantage but sensibly closing the distance and limiting my space to manoeuvre.

On my right flank the Light Horse got into a tussle with the Roman foot skirmishers, exchanging bow and sling fire.  This lasted all game and although both sides were able to push each other back at points, neither were able to exploit any advantage.

In the centre the Cataphracts charged the Roman cavalry and the Legions clashed.  There were several turns of back and forth with some spectacular saving throws from Anthony.  This, combined with the experience of the Roman Legions began to turn the tide in their favour.  My Setback cards were beginning to mount and I was expecting to have to declare them at any minute but Anthony sensibly bided his time until one of the rebel Legions were driven back off-table meaning I had to draw a Disaster card.  Sure enough, the Romans called Homunculus Est and I had to tot up the points.  

Somehow I was a couple of points shy of breaking.  It did mean I survived and was able to reduce my Setback points total significantly, but it also meant my army became 'Fatigued' meaning it was far less likely to move.  My camp lay undefended and open to plunder and the army was now fatigued so at that point we called it a night.

Great fun and a game that could have gone either way (with better luck, dice throwing and tactics!).  It also gave me a chance to get my 2mm Antonine Miniatures armies on the table and I'm very pleased with the mass effect.

Mythic Commander #2

A very long overdue game with my friend Andrew this week (actually it was more a bit of gaming and a lot of catching up!) and I dug out Mythic Commander, the boardgame produced by Modiphius.  I last played this almost a year ago so I was a bit rusty on the rules, despite some frantic re-reading over the weekend.  Luckily the rules are pretty straightforward and quick to pick up and, even more luckily, Andrew had also acquired a copy and read them more thoroughly than I had!

A quick recap (there's more info in the link above)... it's a grid based fantasy wargame using top down counters with a real sandbox approach so you can flavour the armies to suit just about any setting.  It would also work really well for historical ancient/medieval games.

In order to make it a speedy game we ditched some of the units and played with cut-down forces.  The first things we learned were that cavalry is great for making pretty devastating flank attacks, but is very brittle as we each lost a light cavalry unit in the opening turns.  The other big point is that ranged fire is pretty deadly, especially from proper archer units as opposed to smaller skirmish units like raiders and rangers... Andrew had a couple of archer units which caused devastation to a couple of my infantry bases.

There are 6 schools of magic and we each picked one without giving it too much thought. Each spell can be played once per game.  My 'Death' Mage annoyed Andrew intensely by immediately summoning up a fresh (or maybe not so fresh) unit of dead warriors who then charged across the battlefield, hitting one of Andrew's units in the rear and wiping it out and then tying up his mage in a tussle.that lasted for the remainder of the game.

By the end of the evening my army was getting pretty depleted and my Hero Commader was almost certainly about to go down in a hail of arrows so we called it a night.

It's an excellent game and one that I'm really surprised hasn't had more attention, especially from Modiphius themselves who seemed to launch it very quietly and then haven't really promoted it much as far as I can see.  We're now thinking of trying it with my 2mm Romans and Parthians or Andrew's lovely 2mm fantasy figures.

Sky Galleons of Mars

Cast your mind back to 1988...

The Olympics have just taken place, but these were held in Seoul, not Paris.  In the cinema we were treated to classics like Beetlejuice, My Neighbour Totoro and Big (none of which I've ever actually seen).  TV saw the launch of delights such as Count Duckula, Whose Line is it Anyway and Red Dwarf.  In the news the despicable Section 28 was introduced and Edwina Currie crashed the UK egg market (proving that useless Tories weren't confined to the most recent batch)

And in a slightly grotty flat in SW London, 2 young Scottish flatmates splashed their hard earned cash on a new boardgame... Sky Galleons of Mars. (No idea what we paid for it... I suspect more than we could afford... but according to an advert in Dragon magazine from 1988 it cost $24).

Sadly when we went our separate ways a year or so later the game went with my friend John and is now either lost or living with him in Australia, and I never got a chance to play it again... until now...

eBay decided that I really needed to see this copy was up for sale (by a local charity) and I snapped it up for a bargain price.  They had said in the ad that they weren't sure if it was complete and sure enough, it was missing a pretty key component... the rules!  But all the other bits were there including the ship models and the 2 lovely maps.  The original rules, combined with the Cloudships and Gunboats expansion which attempt to bridge the gap between the game and the RPG version Space 1889, are available as a pretty cheap pdf form Wargames Vault so all was good.

So after a pause of 36 years I managed to get the game on the tableagainst my friend Anthony... how did it play?  Pretty well.  We skipped the 1st couple of introductory scenarios (possibly  mistake... I'd worried that the game would be over too quickly but it's actually quite hard to sink (?... maybe not the right term for a flying ship) the ships quickly and I think we'd have been fine. 

In scenario #3 the Prussians are intercepting an unarmed merchant ship carrying a defecting diplomat...unfortunately for the Prussians the British have sent along a couple of gunboats for his protection.  The Merchant ship is simply an objective... the Prussians have to board it for a turn and then sail off the table.  Handily it will come to a halt if it receives any hits so I didn't have to chase it around the table.

The 2 British gunboats closed to short range pretty quickly and although most of their guns weren't able to cause a lot of damage to the better armoured Prussian Cruiser, they were causing a lot of hits in the crew and I was in danger of running out of deckhands to swab the deck.  This was a problem because I needed to have enough Marines left to board the Merchant ship and to fend off any British boarding attempts.  The British had few other options though apart from gunning down the crew or hoping for a critical hit... even these aren't too devastating.  There didn't seem to be what Anthony described as the 'Hood Option' which is a relief as you don't want to lose a ship on an unlucky dice throw.  After several turns we'd reached the end of the evening... the Prussians were alongside the Merchant ship with the Marines on standby although repeatedly failing to grapple it.  The British cruisers were looking on, firing onto the deck of the cruiser and hoping I'd run out of Marines.  I think with a couple more turns I'd have grabbed the disloyal diplomat and made it off the table.

The rules themselves hold up pretty well.  It's a fairly straightforward turn sequence... the side with initiative (usually determined by a dice throw) moves and then both sides can fire.  Shooting is allowed in either players phase but each gun can only fire once.  Ships operate at a range of altitudes and hull damage gradually reduces this until you reach ground level.  Hits are either on hull, crew, guns or cause a critical but, as mentioned, these are annoying rather than devastating. We never got to boarding but each player has to commit x number of troops to forming a boarding party which means they aren't available for other actions... confusingly the dice mechanics for boarding are different to the format for everything else which threw me a bit.

As we were only on scenario 3 we missed a large chunk of the rules.  The rules are reasonably well played out although there was a bit of flicking back and forth to check details, although this was probably due to my bad memory more than anything else.

They definitely fulfilled that nostalgia itch and I'll play them again.  It'd be interesting to see how Martian kites compare with the Earth steam powered ships.  It's also inspired me to revisit the whole Aeronef genre.  I'd bought and painted a couple of small fleets years ago but then decided I'd never use them and they went off to eBay, but I can see myself repeating the while thing again!

Some Dark Age inspiration

I picked up a copy of Martin Hackett's 'As Told in the Great Hall', which looks like a great resource for Dark Age wargames from the end of the Roman era through to Hastings.

There are rules included, although at first glance they seem to be quite old school.wih lots of tables and modifiers although I haven't had a chance to properly read through yet.  Might inspire me to dig out my Romano-British and Saxons.

There's been another lull in gaming over the last of months due to work, holidays and family health but I had a great return to the table top care of Eric the Shed who hosted an epic Greek/Macedonian battle...

and then a couple of weeks later an excellent game of Ankh.  Looking forward to getting a new acquisition on the table later this week.