Strength & Honour

This week's game was a catch up with my friend Andrew and a chance to let him try Strength and Honour with my 10mm paper Romans and Germans.

It's been a while since I'd played these but I remembered that I need to cut down the forces on the table... it's always tempting to get everything out but it slowed us down too much last time.  For this game the Romans had 2 Legions and 2 Auxilia and a single unit of cavalry.  The Germans had 6 warbands, some of which were upgraded to Elite or Stubborn which I hoped would help.

There wasn't a lot of subtlety to this game.  The Germans charged forward with the right flank leading the way and pulling ahead of the other warbands.  The Romans decided to sit tight and let the warbands come to them, especially as one of the legions had the advantage of a hill to sit on.  The warbands have the advantage of gaining a bonus for charging and for rear support, which was largely cancelled by the Romans being uphill and there followed a tight tussle with legions and warbands being pushed back and forth... gradually the Setback cards were beginning to mount on the German side.  The Romans were proving a bit too robust and able to hold off the charges. 

Once enough cards have been acquired (without knowing the values on them) each player can call "Homunculus Est" and ask for the total to be counted.  If it has reached the army breakpoint then the game is over or the army may become fatigued (calling it at the wrong time can be a bad thing for the challenging player though).  Andrew was becoming very tempted to call, but decided to go for one more round of combat.  A wise move as my Elite Bodyguard was charged in the flank by the Roman cavalry  and then driven back by the stalwart legion on the hill, and more seriously, my Commander was badly injured and had to leave the field resulting in a Disaster card which added even more points to my tally.  Sure enough the Germans decided that they'd had enough, leaving the Romans a little battered but very definitely in command of the field.

S&H is quite abstracted... units don't become weakened by combat but become disordered or rout and the effect of combat is felt at an army level rather than by individual units.  For me this feels right when each unit is a massive warband or a Legion but I think Andrew found it a little too abstracted. 

I have my recent order of cavalry to build my Parthian/Sassanid army in 2mm which should give quite a different experience I think.

Strength and Honour: take 2

 Earlier in November we tried our first game of Strength and Honour (details here) and the verdict was very positive.  Because it was our 1st game it all took a while to get going and we didn't get too far into it, so we had another attempt this week with slightly reduced forces and less faffing about as we were a bit more familiar with the rules....

This time the Romans were facing off against some Germanic tribes (I've just finished watching 'Barbarians' on Netflix... recommended!).  We quickly worked through the set up and deployment and found that the vast German forests had disappeared, leaving a largely open battlefield with only a marsh and a couple of hills to break it up.

As we had fewer units this time deployment was a bit easier, especially for the Romans.  As units deploy off of the previously deployed one it can be easy to get in a bit of a muddle... the marsh hindered my German Warbands but as they can be supported from the rear I was able to add in the last of my Warbands at the back.  The Romans dont get this rear support bonus so needed to think more carefully about where to go (but there were fewer of them so not such a challenge).  

I'm still not sure I've fully grasped the rules on deploying skirmishers... these can be deployed as a unit or attached to other formed troops.  We think we needed to deploy the skirmishers on table 1st and then allocate them so this meant they could only be attached to the rear units but we may have got this wrong and I need to re-read the rules on this

The rules reward what feel like appropriate tactics... charging enthusiastically for the Warbands and a steady controlled advance for the Romans.  I decided there was nothing to be gained by hanging back so my Germanic hordes headed straight for the Roman lines.  

The Romans were a bit more cautious, trying keep their lines intact and both sides had units forced back and began to gather Setback cards.  The Romans had a single cavalry unit and I really ought to have paid more attention to it as it successfully wheeled and charged onto the flank of kne of the warbands, driving it back across the rear of the German lines.

Crunch...the cavalry charge into the flank of the rear Warband

The tussling continued on both sides and we did eventually run out of time again but much closer to a conclusion.  Based purely on Setback cards the Germans were slightly ahead but my warbands were now lacking their rear support and were pinned down by the Legions.  It seems you can only initiate an attack if you can equal your opponents combat factor (so no possibility of a brave but doomed charge) and the Romans were in a very strong position and unless I was very lucky would have been able to crush the warbands if we'd played on a for another turn or 2.

Very impressed with these rules... I'll need to add some more Romans as it would be good to see how a Civil War game plays out.

Roman in the Gloamin'

(Apologies for the terrible pun in the title... I blame Tradgardland)

 So, after much snipping and gluing, my Romans and Ancient Britons finally faced off for an inaugural game of Strength and Honour this week.

The squares on the mat looked ok (as long as you didn't look too closely) and we decided to go for the full effect and stick to paper terrain as well.  To be fair we didn't get far enough in to reach a conclusion so this is very much my initial impressions.

The game is designed for 2mm figures although it can be stretched to larger ones without difficulty, and we were using 10mm giants.  It took us a while as, despite careful pre-reading of the rules and watching a playthrough in YouTube, there was still a bit of flicking back and forth to check things.  I think we'd be a lot quicker next time round.

Once we'd sorted the terrain (generally open... partly because I'd forgotten to bring hills) with a village and a wood being the only features) we began deploying.  This is the first interesting feature of the game.  Units have to deploy adjacent to the most recently placed unit (imagine them all gradually marching on from a long column) and manoeuvring isn't easy in S&H so getting your deployment right is tricky but important.  You can place units elsewhere on the table but at the cost of a valuable Strategy Point.

Each player has a number of points to use to aid Combat, Defence, Movement etc...these let you re-roll dice, remove bad stuff etc.  As you'd expect the Romans have more of these than the Britons.  Roman troops are also significantly better quality but the Britons get a lot more points to play with.

This was more of an issue for the Romans than the Britons (who get rear support while Romans don't) so Anthony had to spend a lot of time trying to reorganise his lines once we started.  I actually quite like this... I've always felt Ancient games shouldn't allow too much fancy manoeuvring and shuffling about as the command and control wasn't sophisticated enough to allow this.

The battle opened with the Roman cavalry charging at the flying column of British Light Cavalry and Chariots on my right flank (I'd used a point to reposition them off to one side in the hope that might be able to turn a flank).  It quickly became obvious that my Light Cavalry was very outclassed by the superior Roman horse but they managed to hold on for a turn which allowed me to bring up supporting units and even the odds.  This tussle went on for the rest of the game.

The British flying column of cavalry and chariots

In the centre the Roman Auxilia unit had advanced bravely and looked like a sitting duck for my Warbands but I failed a Manoeuvre roll and play passed back to Romans (failing certain tests for movement etc or a bad combat result is classed as a Reversal of Fortune and play switches).  This meant the Roman Legions could march up in the centre, with some difficult manoeuvres, and support them. A series of clashes in the centre then saw a Warband pushed back but the Auxilia forced to turn away and Retire.

When bad stuff like this happens the loser takes a Setback or a Disaster card without looking at them...each card has a value ranging from 0-3 for setbacks and up to 7 for Disasters.  The opposing player can challenge and ask for the values to be counted which, if it has reached a high enough score, can lead to the army becoming fatigued or routing.  Of course if you challenge and the score isn't high enough then the challenger has to take their own card so timing this is important 

So we'd both taken a number of cards... Anthony, being a wily Roman, had used some of his points to cancel these.  Even so, the game was finely balanced... and then we ran out of time...

We'd been quite slow to get going, faffing about with the terrain placement and working our way through how deployment works, so it wasn't surprising that we wouldn't reach a conclusion  So what's the verdict...?

Based on this I liked the rules.  Plusses for me were the importance of deployment and manoeuvring, the hidden Setback cards and the back and forth of combat.  The Minuses were, I think, mainly down to us being slow and having to check the rules a lot.  The rules do have a decent index though which is always a good thing (and is often missing from rules).  Combat was less bloody than I expected (again this may also be a good thing) and it felt like it was going to take us a long time to get to a resolution but I think this may have been my fault in being too ambitious for a first game and having too much on the table.  It's always tempting to get all the toys out when fewer would have been better for a first attempt.  Next time we'll cut it down a bit and see how it goes.

 Overall though a big thumbs up (or summitatibus manuum) for the rules.  The paper armies looked the part too... en masse and in this scale they look really effective.

Romans and Britons

 My 10mm paper Romans and Britons/Gauls are due to get their first proper outing next week so I've finally had to bite the bullet and try and mark out a grid on my game cloth.  We're giving Strength and Honour a try and this uses a grid system... for 10mm figures it suggests 100mm squares.  I've been putting this off for weeks as I've been really worried about it all going badly wrong and my squares ending up very wonky.

To be fair some of these squares are more square than others, but overall I'm pleased with the effect and it was  a relatively painless process.  Thank goodness for a new pair of varifocal glasses which made life a lot easier although now I feel old!

I couldn't resist popping some of the 10mm figures on the table along with some of the terrain (also in paper).  I started these back in July and I certainly couldn't have got two armies onto the table in that time, or at the very low cost.

Strength &Honour camps

 I've been busy prepping Roman and Gallic armies for an inaugural game of Strength and Honour in a couple of weeks time.  I've decided to go with 10mm armies using the excellent Paperboys armies by Peter Dennis.  This means the dining room is awash with little snipped-off bits of paper and heady with the fumes of UHU glue.

I've really enjoyed making these and find an hour or so of snipping and sticking can pass quickly (unless that's just the glue fumes!), aided by listening to an audiobook.  

I've never really listened to audiobooks, usually listening to music when I paint but have recently discovered that they're great (as are podcasts... I know I'm way behind the curve here!!).  Our local library has a great selection available to download so I've worked my way through the BBC versions of Lord of the Rings and Neverwhere... the latter is especially good and well worth looking out for.

I still need to add some more units to the armies and, more scarily, I need to mark out a grid on my game cloth which is making me very nervous!

S&H requires each side to have a camp or baggage so I've made up a Roman marching camp and a Gallic camp from the set and I'm pretty impressed by them...

Once the completed armies are ready to go I'll post some pictures of the forces.

What have I been up to?

This week saw another game of Blood Red Skies which ended in a win for the RAF... we'd each lost a plane (out of 4 a side) but BRS emphasises morale wins with planes likely to break off and head for home when the hits start to mount up.  The more I've played BRS, the more impressed I've been by the way they manage morale and the importance of manouvreability as much as shooting.

I've also been busy prepping my 10mm paper Roman/British armies for a forthcoming trial game of Strength and Honour.  So far I have a decent amount of legions and warbands (as well as some chariots, skirmishers and cavalry for thr Brits) but I need to add some Auxiliaries, skirmishers and cavalry for the Romans

The Romans

...and the Britons

Chariots

I also need to mark a grid on my game mat which I must admit I'm a bit nervous about!

I was out and about for work last week (a bit of a novelty these days) and popped into a branch of Game in Worthing.  I recently discovered that Game have diversified a bit from videogames (I guess these are generally downloaded these days) and stock quite a lot of boardgames and sundry geeky stuff.  I picked up a copy of Colt Express for the very reasonable price of £9.99.  It's a  very light Cowboy themed game where you have to rob passengers on a train  and, of course, other players and get away with the most loot.  Looks like good fun for family game nights.

10 mm Paper Armies

 I mentioned in my last post about having discovered the Paperboys range of 10mm armies.  I've since been busy sticking and snipping and have put together some Legions and a large unit of Gauls as well as some Gallic cavalry.

They're really quick to cut out and assemble and I've found if I have the units glued back to back and ready to cut, then I can do the odd one in a spare minute when I've taken a break from work or I'm waiting on the kettle boiling... very therapeutic.  

They look great en masse and give a good impression of a sizeable unit.  Now I'm off to read up on Strength and Honour which are the rules I'm tempted by for these (although Hail Caesar would also work well)

More paper soldiers

 ...and a new scale!

Well, having managed to avoid Covid for the last 2 years we've all managed to catch it when  it isn't trendy anymore!  My son was working alongside a colleague who happened to mention her husband had Covid!  Sure enough he caught it a few days later and my wife and I then went down with it a couple of days after that.  So far it's been like a very nasty cold/flu... the worst thing is that we all have it at the same time so there isn't anyone feeling slightly better who can look after the others.

 It doesn't leave much energy for painting or gaming (and I certainly can't go along to my regular gaming friends at the moment!) but I've been indulging in some therapeutic cutting and sticking.

I was looking at the Paperboys website and came across their 10mm range.  I was intrigued by these and printed off one of the free sample ACW sheets.

I've posted before about the paper soldiers and have played a few games with my Jacobites.

I've also posted about the 54mm toy soldier version.  

With hindsight I think the 54mm figures work less well and I haven't pursued these beyond making up a few figures.  The 28mm Jacobites work well though but I think 10mm definitely looks much more impressive

So I've splashed out the princely sum of £12 on the Romans and Gauls pack which includes just about every figure I should need as well as  Roman marching camp and a Gaul camp.

First impressions are good and the small scale should give a great mass effect.  The new Strength and Honour rules are aimed at this level and look very tempting.  It's even got me thinking about their ACW range...

No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century...

 "No one would have believed, in the last years of the 19th century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds of space. No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely, they drew their plans against us..."

I've always loved the Jeff Wayne version of War of the Worlds, and the original book.  Less so the recent BBC tv adaptation, and let's not talk about the Tom Cruise film.  I saw the stage version of the Jeff Wayne musical back in 2014 at the O2 which quite a spectacle.

My 54mm Little Wars project continues with an attempt at building one of the Martian Tripods that come with the Paperboys book.  Many mistakes were made... many fingers spread glue on things that shouldn't have been glued... several pieces were glued on upside down... a lot of patience was lost...

The first thing you realise when building these is that 54mm is big!  I know that's kind of obvious but I hadn't really thought about just how big the tripods are.  To illustrate this the figure underneath the tripod is a 54mm figure so you can get a sense of the height.

The models are designed to represent the descriptions in the book and look really good... very evocative of the period...

The building process is relatively straightforward.  The body rests on a central support...

Each leg is built up from 3 sections: the end of each one slides into the next.  Getting the shape is a bit fiddly but the book suggests using a knitting needle (or in my case a skewer) as a shaper when rolling the paper.  Somehow I ended up with a tripod with one leg shorter than the others!

The main body is made up of 2 sections which are then glued together...

...and the roof is then shaped and stuck on...

The machine then has some tentacle-like grabbers 

Even though the upper body is quite light I was worried about whether the legs could support it so these were reinforced with bamboo skewers.  As I was building it I realised that the biggest problem with the tripod was going to be storage so I haven't permanently attached the legs.  For the photos they were blutacked on which meant it was all a bit precarious and shoogly!  The legs gave way several times as I was taking the photos,  Ideally they would need to be permanently glued on but where on earth would I keep the giant model!!?

I also realised that I'm very impatient when it comes to building things like this.  It obviously takes time for the glue to dry and I kept being tempted to try and move onto the next stage too quickly, spreading PVA and Prittstick glue around everywhere like a stroppy 5 year-old in nursery!

So that's another itch scratched.   I was pleased to have built it but I don't think I'll be building anymore as they are just too big and unwieldy, although the thought of several of these facing down a massed 54mm army is quite tempting but I think I'd definitely need a much, much bigger table and a lot more patience!!!  This has reminded me that after seeing the stage version of WotW back in 2014 I had a notion to do this in 6mm which is a much more practical idea.  My 6mm redcoated Zulu Wars British could just about pass muster (if you ignore the helmets) and it would all take up a lot less space... one to add to the "to-do someday list" I think.

Paper Little Wars

Some time ago (good grief...it was almost 3 years!) I was tempted at Salute by a demo game using the Paperboys paper armies designed by Peter Dennis and  published by Helion Publishing.  I  bought and built 2 Jacobite armies and (unlike some projects) they actually made it onto the table for some excellent games (they can be found HERE).  Round about the same time I'd painted up a load of 54mm Northwest Frontier figures (and again, managed to get several games in with them...links HERE).  I thought I'd scratched the paper soldier and 54mm itch and hadn't felt the urge to develop these any further.  You can see where this is going...

Late last year I was looking online and came across the Paperboys 'Little Wars' book.  Now I'm not really a fan of the toy soldier look and have no great nostalgia for these kind of rules...my introduction to wargames rules was with WRG 6th Edition... but these had an instant appeal and for some reason I was quite tempted... the figures have a real charm about them.  Then I discovered that the book includes model Martian Tripods for a War of the Worlds game and that was that!  My wife kindly bought me a set for xmas and I have started on a major cutting and sticking project.

The book contains 2 armies... Red (British) and Blue (French).  There are a good range of troops included ranging from infantry, highlanders, light and heavy cavalry, Zouaves, Algerians and artillery crews.  These are to man the large elastic band powered cannon that you can build with the rules and use to knock over your opponents figures!

Mr Wells and co. hard at play

I've started on the French and I'm very pleased with how they look

Now I need to give some thought on how to use them on the tabletop.  I love the look of 54mm figures but unless you have a very large table some compromises are needed to make them fit without the table being overcrowded.  I'm not particularly interested in using the Little Wars rules included with the book, although they make an interesting read.  The Sword and the Flame rules often get suggested for this scale and period but having played a couple of games a few years ago I'm not a fan.  I'm thinking that either The Men Who Would be Kings or Rebels and Patriots from Osprey would work well... TMWWBKs has an option to reduce units to half size for large scale which works well and I can't see why this wouldn't also work for R&P.

In terms of actual games there are a few options.  The Paperboys website has a download available for purchase for an equivalent Prussian army and that immediately opens up the potential for a Franco-Prussian War game.  The FPW is a period I find fascinating... partly because of the clash of technologies and tactics... but also because it was a war that I, rather embarrassingly,  knew nothing about it for quite some time.  I suspect it's one that has passed lots of non-wargamer/history nerds by, certainly in the UK.  I have had 2 6mm FPW armies for many years so shifting to the other end of the scale could be fun.

The Prussian army also opens up the option of a Battle of Dorking scenario with the beastly Hun battling redcoated British troops just down the road from me in Surrey.  And then of course there are the tripods....