More Lockdown gaming & painting

I'm into week 2 of furlough now.   For non-UK people this means I am effectively taking paid time off...employers can claim 80% of furloughed staff's salaries from the government.  Luckily my employer is making up the remaining 20% so it's not too bad.  My day is largely filled with dog walking and then odd jobs that I've managed to avoid for months (or years), or baking... I've discovered I'm quite good at following a recipe!

Of course there's the odd bit of painting to fill in the hours...another 24 foot knights for my Wars of the Roses army completed and I have added flags and banners to some of the figures as well.  I realised after taking this that the Flemish flag was actually on upside down so I've fixed this now!!

The flags are a mix of the ones that come with the boxed sets from Perry and some very nice flags from Pete's Flags.

I've now painted all the Wars of the Roses figures I already had so have jsut picked up another box of Perry European Mercenaries to flesh out my Flemish Crossbowmen and Burgundian Handgunners.  I think they might be joined by some Scots Spearmen as well.


I've also been trying out some online gaming.  I've had a look at Tabletop Simulator but, despite being given a 1:1 tutorial find this very confusing.  To be fair I've adopted my usual approach of just randomly clicking on things to find out what they do rather than looking at the various tutorials that are available!  Maybe I should do that before I dismiss it completely..

I've also had a look at Vassal and managed a game of Lock'n'Load Tactical which worked pretty well once we'd worked out what we were doing.  A better option though is the digital version of LnL which is available on Steam. This is a squad level game very like Advanced Squad Leader... I played ASL many years ago at uni and it seemed to have an almost religious level of following among the gamers I met who played it..this combined with a huge ring-binder full of rules was enough to put off for years.  Lock'n'Load is a similar but simpler system and now has a computer version as well as the Vassal game.  I'd already played the boardgame version of LnL so the rules largely made sense and the computer handles all the line of sight and visibility queries that can crop up in a game.

So far they have released a starter set with 4 scenarios which is very reasonably priced and are now releasing new modules for different settings...so far there are Normandy and Vietnam modules with Russia and the Falklands due for release soon.

This is a screenshot from one of the games we have played online which sadly marked the point where the US defence of Vierville fell apart.  The US squad in the top centre of the screen somehow held off several German squads but was surrounded and unable to stop their victory.  Games tend to have a tight turn limit which means you have to commit to attacking and makes for a really fun game.

Now they have improved the online play options it's been a good way to still get a bit of gaming in against a real opponent.  The game is still in early release so there are odd glitches that crop up...our game this evening froze just as my opponent called in an artillery strike on my pluck Vietcong defenders ( a lucky break for me!).  What was impressive was that within less than hour of submitting a bug report about the freezing, the game developers had replied personally and fixed the glitch!

If you enjoy online gaming have a look at the game here... https://store.steampowered.com/app/1149940/Lock_n_Load_Tactical_Digital/