Abaddon hope all ye who enter here...

Apologies... that's a terrible pun...

A different game this week courtesy of my friend Anthony and one of never heard of before...Abaddon by Richard Borg.

Borg, of course, needs no introduction... Battle Cry, Memoir 44, Battle of Britain, Commands & Colours, Battlelore and many more classics all came from him (incidentally I recently discovered my 1st ed. set of Battlelore in the loft... I was sure I'd sold it years ago!!)  Boardgamegeek lists 136 games and expansions (including the classic Bob the Builder Build it and Win It card game!!) that he's had a hand in.  Anthony and I were both of the view that the format of most of Memoir44/C&C etc is an ideal structure, especially for quick evening games that are tactically reasonably challenging, but which are simple enough to pick up.

This weeks game, Abaddon is a kind of grimdark/battletechy version of Memoir 44... sort of.  I'd never heard of it, and it certainly doesn't seem to have taken off in the way that some of the other Borg games have.  Each player has a force of Mechs, ranging from lighter Recon mechs, to big stompy ones, as well as some infantry.  The models are fine and the bases conveniently have stats printed on the for movement, dice type and armour as well as slots which hold damage counters.

Like Memoir 44 etc, the game uses special dice with symbols on them... unlike the other Borg games however, these aren't used for damage but are rolled to see who activates each turn.  There are also cards but, again, their role is slightly different to the usual order cards.  These are Weapon System cards which are needed to attack/defend or to give special attacks etc.  These need to be carefully managed though as they aren't automatically replenished.  You can opt not to use them but and just rely on armour instead.

We played the easiest intro scenario and straight away I took a gamble on using one of my precious cards... in this case a rather deadly Doomsday Bolt which, while it requires a 'Command' result to come up on the dice and then only has a 1 in 6 chance of success, immediately destroyed one of Anthony's mechs!!  We then had a couple of turns of manoeuvre before I was able to combine fire onto another enemy mech (I think they are referred to as Links in the game) and destroyed it.  To be fair my card hand was pretty good and definitely gave me more options than Anthony's

It's a nice game and its curious that it didn't take off.  We're planning to try one of the more advanced scenarios at some point so it'll be interesting to see what that adds to the game.

Gamma Wolves

 

So I have a couple of projects on the go now... the 54mm Paper Soldiers and the 28mm Arthurian figures.  Both have slowed a bit, mainly because work is incredibly busy.  Obviously the last thing I need is to be distracted by something new and shiny that comes along and screams "look at me!!!  You know you want to play me!"  And of course you know what's coming next....

I'm at that age where in have a hankering for games I played in my youth.... as most of my wargaming was with WRG rules, thankfully I have little urge to go back there (although 6th edition weren't a bad set of rules, were they?).  Usually this Proustian nostalgia takes the form of role-playing games or boardgames and, thanks to reading an article online I had a bit of a moment recalling games of Battletech, something I haven't played in 30-odd years.  

It's always a bit of a gamble revisiting games like this...or indeed other old memories.  I'm still scarred by a return trip to a childhood seaside favourite haunt in Ayrshire which was a very, run-down disappointment a few years ago!  Similarly Starfleet Battles wasn't the game I remembered when I was tempted by it a  few years ago.

I only played a couple of Battletech games...this must have been sometime in the mid-80s.  But I remember them fondly and had been beginning down the slippery slope of just having a look on eBay.  Obviously not to buy anything you understand.  Just having a look.  I had a suspicion it would be quite clunky, like a lot of 80s games seem today.  But while I was looking into the world of big stompy robots I came across Gamma Wolves, a relatively new set of rules from Osprey 

These sounded like a simpler, more accessible game so, after a bit of delving into reviews and Facebook groups I picked up a copy of the rules.  The good thing about Osprey rules is that they are pretty affordable so even if they aren't what I'm after I don't feel like I've had to sell a kidney to buy them.  Gamma Wolves come in a hard back format, similar in style to Gaslands.  In fact there's a lot about them which felt like Gaslands... not in terms of actual mechanics but in the style of the rules and the writing.

The setting is a post-apocalyptic world with roaming bands of mechs traveling around, fighting it out for assorted reasons, or gathering in neutral zones for resupply and competition fighting.  Like Gaslands party of the fun is in designing your own Mech (or Frame as they call them in GW), adding in your own choice of weapons and systems.

Movement and combat seems pretty straightforward and its all d6 based...no fancy dice (unlike Gaslands).  Frames acquire reactor stress if they try to do too much and may temporarily shut down and similarly pilots may also acquire stress which affects their ability to fight and manoeuvre.  Frames are initially deployed as blinds until they are spotted or they do something which causes them to power up their reactor (eg firing).  Like Gaslands there are a selection of Factions (or Arcologies) which mechs fight for and these influence the style of Frame, weapons and abilities you can deploy.  As you'd expect there is a campaign system and various scenarios included.

I haven't played them yet so this is all based on a read through but hopefully we'll get something on the tale soon.

So now I'd got the rules I obviously needed some robots to stomp around with.  I've had a look at various posts on the 2 main Facebook groups and become even more confused.  One of the good things about rules like these is that players are encouraged to make use of whatever models they have in their collection and this means that there are all sorts of mechs in all sorts of scales being used.  The rules do suggest some standard base sizes to differentiate between size of Frames but even these can vary depending on what you have handy.  I'm no expert on the whole Stompy robot genre and there are lots of different styles of mechs being used... from the Battletech style robots I remember, to a whole world of Japanese mechs and even Games Workshop models repurposed as robot mechs.  These models come in all sorts of scales and at all sorts of prices... many of them are eye-wateringly expensive (even by GW standards) !!

I wanted something cheap to let me try the rules out and came across some figures from a company called Joy Toy (which sounds like a budget range from Anne Summers!).  These are based in China and offer a ridiculously cheap set of mechs...about £8 including shipping from China. They arrived within a couple of weeks and came in an oddly shaped box

Inside were 12 clip together Mech models.  To be fair these aren't the greatest models in the world but they look pretty good and, for the price, can't be sniffed at.

From the discussion online, the models are...erm...heavily inspired by... kits from other ranges including AT-43, Dust and Games Workshop.  I'm not familiar with the first 2 but the mech below clearly has a lot of love for the GW Dreadnought models....

The box claims these are 1/35 scale... they clearly aren't although I knew this before I bought them,  I reckon these are somewhere between 1/72 and 1/100 scale.  I also suspect that there is more than one Joy Toy company... one producing the more expensive detailed models and one knocking these out.  The models themselves aren't bad... a bit lacking in detail and the arms and legs need gluing rather than just clipping together as some of the fit isn't great.  They also don't take paint well... my 1st attempt at base coating them failed as the paint just wouldn't take: I guess there must be some kind of coating on them which will need to be scrubbed clean.  

There's a bit of an ethical debate here about whether it's ok to buy cheap, knock-off models.  My excuse is that these are just a small selection to try out the rules... if I like them then I'll look at better (and more legit) models.  So the next steps are a test game and some quick painting of the models...