Galleys and Galleons in spaaaaace! Catch the pigeon

Yeah it’s the follow up to my previous Trek post so I won’t stretch your patience, feel free to click away now to something that’s more your bag. Man.

I started to write a blow by blow account of the catch the pigeon mission but realised early on that an account showing what’s possible with the rules is probably more interesting than the ins and outs of each die roll.

The game modelled an encounter between two vessels, one from the Romulan Star Empire (boo hiss) and one from the United Federation of Planets (yay for the good guys). Both ships are on different randomly generated missions and both are broadly comparable in capability. The Romulan ship is a Carrion class cruiser the IRW Varak and the Federation vessel is the Constitution class USS Eisenhower. The Ike is a bit faster than the Varak but the Varak is a bit easier to manoeuvre. Although they are both of a similar size they have differing load outs and specific capabilities.

The Varak is on patrol looking for Federation vessels near the neutral zone and has standing orders to scan any Federation vessels they encounter for new technology. 

The Eisenhower has been chasing a stolen shuttle with a Romulan agent who has some top secret plans on board. The shuttle has been damaged during its escape but has just managed to limp into an asteroid field on the border of the neutral zone. 

To win the Romulan player must obtain four elements of intelligence information from the Federation vessel but for extra points can deny the Eisenhower the ability to complete its own mission. The Eisenhower needs to catch the spy and recover the shuttle while potentially frustrating the Romulan’s objective.

The game lasted an hour and took about 13 turns. 

Anywhoo… here’s what happened.

The game area. Eisenhower on the right, Varak on the left and the shuttle (a teeny tiny counter) in the centre of the asteroid field.

 

The Romulan player procured the maximum number of capability enhancing burn cards while the federation player spent more on vessel load out. The cards are purchased but drawn randomly. He ended up with a pretty good haul as it turned out. 

The Eisenhower paid for a burn card and drew this « mutiny » card but more on this later. Neither vessel comes onto the board with its shields up and the Federation also suffers from faction specific characteristics that limit their early game options. They may never fire first, they may not raise shields unless confronted with one of five hostile actions and worse they automatically lose ten victory points if they don’t attempt to hail at least one possible adversary before the fireworks start. It’s tough being the galactic good guys. 

The Romulan player decides to screw around with the Federation player rather than prioritise his own mission. Having won the initiative but being slower than the Eisenhower he plays his extra speed burn card and gains another hex towards the shuttlecraft. Maybe he can scoop it up and get it off board, denying the Eisenhower any chance of completing its mission?  Each side rolls dice to generate up to 3 action points. Action points are spent to perform…errr…actions, unsurprisingly. The more complex the action the more expensive it is. There are never enough action points to go around, and a lot of the game is spent agonising over what to do with the number of points you’ve actually got, rather than what you’d like or need to do.

No shooting has occurred up to this point and the Captain of the Eisenhower decides to hail the Romulan ship in order to avoid losing ten of his potential victory points. It costs him a precious action and it doesn’t go well. In a dice off the Romulan Captain beats the Federation captain, gaining valuable intelligence that’s unwittingly revealed in the exchange. This counts as one of the four levels of intel he needs to obtain to complete his mission. The only plus side to the encounter for the Eisenhower is that the Romulan’s aggressive rhetoric presents an obvious threat, allowing them to raise their shields.

The Varak swings around and only has to enter the shuttlecraft’s hex to scoop it up, but the Eisenhower threads it’s way between the asteroids and attempts to drag it out of the Varak’s path with a tractor beam. Yeah, when I say tractor beam I mean a wooden barbecue skewer painted light blue. Lol. The asteroids move randomly each turn by the way, and bumping into one is not recommended. 

Somewhere around this point the Romulan player found he didn’t have enough action points to use his sensors to scan the Eisenhower for further intel, but he did have enough points to try hailing the Federation vessel and taunting them a bit. Another die roll off between the two captains saw the Romulan win again and gain a further level of intel from the exchange. The Ike’s captain should learn to keep his big yap shut! Players are only allowed two hailing exchanges between opposing vessels.

With the Federation vessel about to drag the shuttle out of the way the Varak’s captain plays his second burn card which is a « secret weapon ». I’ve not specified what the weapon actually is but its effects bypass all of the usual defence options and badly damage four of the Eisenhower’s critical systems.

The Romulan specifies which systems are to be marked as damaged. He chooses the bridge, weapons and targeting, the hanger bay and the shield generators. Ouch. If any of these areas are hit again they are destroyed and may not be repaired in game. Since they are only damaged they can’t be used for now but they can be repaired - which of course costs precious action points. The loss of shields puts the Eisenhower at a serious disadvantage in combat, while the damage to the bridge and targeting prevents the further functioning of the tractor beam. With that said, even if the tractor beam was working the shuttle couldn’t be brought into the now badly damaged hanger bay.

The gloves are finally off and the Eisenhower is now cleared to fight back, except, with the damage it’s just received it’s not able to. The captain decides his first priority is to get the shields back on line and spends two of his three action points getting them working again. 

One of the oddities in my rules is that movement, once a ship is under way, costs no action points, but changing its heading does (though different types of vessel have limitations on how many heading changes they can make in a turn). It’s a bit like skating on ice. You keep whizzing along unless you make an effort to change your velocity or vector. The Eisenhower swings wide around the Varak’s stern as further hurried repairs are undertaken and the weapon systems come back on line.

The Romulan player launches a boarding party by using his « surprise » burn card. Despite the card  increasing the combat potential of the Romulan marines the Eisenhower’s security red shirts quickly despatch them before any damage can be wrought. If boarding parties manage to get a foothold they remain onboard their target and can attack every time the parent vessel activates.

Suspecting that the Varak will pick up the shuttle, the Eisenhower tries to cut off their escape route as engineers manage to fix the bridge systems by shining a salt shaker with a blinking light on over a bunch of fluorescent tubes. With bridge and weapon systems now fully functional they can engage the enemy at last. 

The Varak does indeed scoop up the shuttlecraft and uses its remaining action points to launch a salvo of plasma torpedos from its aft mounted torpedo bay. The salvo moves two hexes straight away but after this their seeker heads will move them towards the nearest target. They remain in game for three turns before they expire or explode and no further torpedos may be launched from the parent vessel while they remain in play. The Eisenhower is equipped with a comprehensive electronic counter measures system (ECM) and could attempt to steer the torpedoes in a different direction but it’s costly in action points and not guaranteed to be successful. 

Rather than pay for a costly and possibly ineffective attempt to override the Romulan torpedoes, the Eisenhower uses another of its attributes, namely it’s point defence short range gattling phasers. 50% of the passing enemy ordnance is destroyed as the Federation ship launches its own photon torpedoes in a counter strike. 

With the photon torpedos closing in fast the Varak uses all it’s action points to cloak. The model is replaced by three question mark counters. From here on in the Romulan player can choose to reappear in a hex containing one of these counters each of which moves as though it were the ship itself. The cloaking ship breaks the target lock of the Eisenhowers torpedoes which will now continue in a straight line off the board. Meanwhile back at the ranch the remaining 50% of the Romulan’s Plasma torpedoes circle round and close in on the tail of the Eisenhower.

Whammo! The remaining plasma torpedo strikes the Ike’s aft shields. On the bridge everyone lurches from one side to another and sparks erupt from consoles, lol. The question marks denoting the Varak’s potential location begin to spread out. 

Blast weapon combat is dealt with differently to beam weapon exchanges, in that there is a much greater chance of serious hull damage. The Eisenhower suffers damage to its engines and one of the white dice used to roll for action points is changed to red - denoting hull damage as well. If you use a red dice to roll for action points and you don’t roll high enough, a whole new range of bad things happen - so there’s a risk v reward thing going on from here on in. If a vessel gets three red dice it is crippled. Hull damage can be repaired in game like system damage, but not fully. There will always be one red dice in play.

The Varak sneaks past the Eisenhower heading for its own board edge. If it can just get in a scan with its sensors it can complete its four levels of intel collection and get the hell out of Dodge. Unfortunately cloaking a ship costs a lot of action points and remaining cloaked costs almost as much. Unable to roll up enough action points the cloak drops and the Varak model is put back on the board in place of one of the question mark counters. In the turn that a vessel de cloaks it has no shields. The Eisenhower launches a second photon torpedo strike from its aft launchers.  

The photon torpedoes strike home, killing and injuring a significant proportion of the crew, causing major hull damage (red dice) and damaging the comms system. 

Which was when the Federation player dropped his single burn card. It can only be used on a vessel with hull damage so there’d been no chance of playing it till now. With only a few un injured crew remaining and major hull damage the Romulan captain rolls for mutiny and fails with three dice - causing the remaining crew to surrender. 

So the Eisenhower takes control of the Varak, seizing the shuttle craft and spy that’d been previously taken on board her. With 50 points for completing their mission, extra points for the damage caused to the Varak and no deductions for failing to communicate prior to hostilities it’s a very convincing (if not very lucky) last minute win for the good guys. Huzzah. 

This was my third proper battle with the rules and they worked splendidly, if I do say so myself. It’s gratifying to bring something to a conclusion that’s been gestating for so long. I’ve a couple more models to paint up and a campaign to organise but otherwise I can consider this an itch well and truly scratched.

If you’ve stuck with the post this far I admire your fortitude! Rest assured you’ve made an old man very happy, which is hopefully reward enough in this crazy mixed up world. 

Toodleooh.

The Final Front Ear

It’s been busy busy here at maison Broom just lately; I’ve played more games in the last two months than in the last two years - and finally got to meet, albeit over a computer screen, some of the great gamers I’ve corresponded with since I’ve been blogging. I have to say it knocks solo gaming into a cocked hat.

On the subject of cocked hats (watch out - sweet segue coming up) a close personal friend of the blog recently sent me a brand new copy of C&C Tricorne they claimed they had no need for, which was very generous of them indeed. Recalling how much I enjoy C&C in general I’ve decided to rebase my growing AWI forces to fit this rule set and my hexon hexes. It’s taken me over 40 years to settle on a figure scale that suits me and the last ten to realise I prefer simple rules and hexes or squares over open terrain and measuring. Doh. Fast learner eh!

Anywhoo… On the subject of finally getting my gaming sh*t together, I’ve also commenced play testing a Star Trek ship to ship combat rule set that’s been on my mental back burner and endlessly tinkered with since 2005 or thereabouts. 

Dad joke alert. The final front ear.

My wants were simple. No ticking off damage boxes, multiple ways to win, NO power management, no buckets of dice, no complicated tables, limited table clutter, customisable ships, use of tactics, no measuring, no turning arcs or game aid appliances, ships crews to be as important as the ships themselves and a dash of added burn card unpredictability. 

The Trek combat we see on screen does not of course follow realistic physics, and aspects of it are more like naval battles in the ocean. It was this ocean / naval connection that led me inevitably to a fantastic game system that I realised I’d been playing for a while and which I could easily co opt. I’m referring of course to Galleys and Galleons. I dropped the designer of G&G a line in 2017 to ensure he had no issues with me dicking about with it…and here we are six years later still in the testing stage. Lol.

In this post I’ll document the set up for a quick game of what I can only call « Galleys and Galleons….In Spaaaace. » and in the next one how the game itself went down…err…man. 

My setting for this whole shebang is the alternate so called Nu Trek of the 2009 JJ Abrams reboot, for the simple reason that I like the ships…and anyway Stew’s already got TNG totally locked down. Lol.

First off I drew a mission card for each of the protagonists, this gives a points limit that restricts how many or what type of vessels can be deployed. The Federation drew a catch the pigeon mission in which a stolen shuttlecraft and a hostage VIP need to be rescued from an asteroid field. The Romulan player (also me on this occasion) drew an I Spy mission where they have to scan an opposing vessel four times to pick up important intel.

The Federation player has this vessel:

The USS Eisenhower NCC-1890 (Constitution Class). The red bands on the base denote the hex sides through which it may fire its energy beam weapons.

And the Romulan player has this vessel:

The I.R.W. Varak (Corvid Class) Warbird.

All ships came from Nashstarshipyards at Shapeways and all the counters were from good old Warbases.

Both players randomly drew a one use burn card that can be deployed at any time in the game. Usually you’d keep these secret until deciding to play them, but this is show and tell time.

Each ship has a data card showing it’s points cost it’s quality and combat rating (as per G&G) and a set of icons denoting its major systems. Systems in various combinations are needed to operate the items listed under the special rules section. 

Each ship has three white dice and three red dice (which denote hull damage) though only three represent the vessel at any one time. White dice get replaced with red dice when the ship gets damaged. Three of these are rolled against a vessels Q (quality) rating every turn to see how many actions the vessel may perform. The green plastic ? Markers replace the vessel on the board when it cloaks, and the two teardrop acid green markers are plasma torpedo’s which after launch track their targets across the board for three turns - unlike energy beam combat which is instantaneous.

Not that any one is wondering, but those systems that are common to most vessels are bridge, weapons (all), crew, warp core (or equivalent energy producing doohickey), propulsion (warp and impulse), sensors, comms, hanger bay and shield generators. In addition to these the Varak has a cloak and the Eisenhower a large cargo bay. At the bottom of the card the movement potential of each vessel is listed. The Varak is slower but can turn more than the Eisenhower, while the Federation ship is faster overall.

There. Clear as mud. 

Think that lot was bad? I’m going to bore the arse off you with the next post. Lol. Feel free to skip it if its not your bag daddyo - 

I’ll be back to proper historical wargaming soon enough.

Toodleooh.

And a bottle of rum…

Bugger me an actual game rather than me whining on about how crap I feel. 

I know right.

In my previous post I pitted three bold Captains against each other in a bid to prove who was the bestest pirate in the Indian Ocean. The winner would be whoever came back first from Danger Island with the largest share of buried treasure.

Here are the ships that will be headed to glory or disgrace:

The Mardy Mare whose Captain Black Taff Llewelyn has a fearsome all female crew.

The good ship Spatchcock with its Captain Handsome Jack and his Bosun (who is also his mom) Big Nell.

The Cutty Wren Captained by the insomniac ornithophobe - Richard Tully.

Our game starts as the three ships arrive at Danger Island from conveniently different directions.

Danger Island. The Cutty Wren is in the foreground, the Mardy Mare the top right and the Spatchcock is unhelpfully out of shot on the left. The red arrow indicates the wind direction. Board area is roughly 3ft square, the ships are Peter Pig 1:450 and the tiles and islands are Hexon. Rules are Galleys and Galleons - converted to hexes.

Setting the scene:

Big Nell was not in a great mood. Her son Neville, Captain of the Spatchcock, had got all caught up in some hare brained hunt for gold, and the crew, sensing impending danger, had seemingly now gone off their vittals. Snatching up a tray of week old macaroons and a large plum duff the doughty Bosun made her way up the companion way to the deck with a view to tossing the whole lot overboard.

On the Cutty Wren, Tully’s crew watched anxiously as their Captain took pot shots at a following albatross. “Sail ho!” Cried the look out, just in time to throw off his aim. Tully cursed the occupants of the crows nest and gave up shooting to focus his perspective glass on the horizon. A twin masted brigantine struggling against the wind was ploughing through the swell towards their shared destination…Danger Island!

Brigantine on the horizon. Ship ho!

Broad reaching, several leagues to Starboard, the Mardy Mare sliced like an arrow through the sea. The ship was going fast. Far too fast! Désirée the first mate had the con and it was obvious from the set of her shoulders that she was in a right strop over something Black Taff Llewelyn had said or done earlier, (though he was buggered if he knew what it was exactly). Downcast he watched Danger Island draw closer…we’ll he hoped it was Danger Island anyway. Truth was he’d become lost shortly after leaving port but he’d be damned if he was going to ask any of the vessels they’d passed for directions.

The game:

Turn 1. The Spatchcock fires at the Cutty Wren but the range is long and the shots go wide.

Turn 2. Coming about just in front of the Island the Cutty Wren fires back at the Spatchcock and Tully grunts in satisfaction as his shot strikes home in a vital area. (The Cutty Wren rolled a six which gave them a hit on the hull plus an extra roll on the critical damage table. Given its importance to the Spatchcock’s crew we’ll assume it was the galley that’s been destroyed! Thank goodness Big Nell had gone up on deck eh). Meanwhile, in the lea of the secondary islet the Mardy Mare does a handbrake turn lowers sails and drops anchor in the shallows just off the beach. The vessels shallow draught means there is little chance of grounding and Black Taff, with a sigh of relief, gets to keep his no claims bonus for another day.

Turn 3. The Spatchcock needs it’s full action allowance this turn to attempt to repair some of the damage it had suffered. Water had begun pouring in through a hole in the hull caused by the Cutty Wren’s cannon but disaster is averted when Big Nell plugs the leak with her unwanted plum duff (ooh err missus).  Unaware of the damage he’d caused Tully coasts over the shallows drops anchor and sends a search party ashore to look for the treasure. Still unhelpfully out of camera shot the Mardy Mare’s crew take an age to do their hair and get their make up on before going ashore to search. 

Turn 4. The Cutty Wren search party are first ashore but the snaking dotted line on their vellum treasure map leads to an X in the centre of a cannibal village. After ten minutes all that is left of them are their buckets and spades on the beach. (They had three search attempts this turn needing a 5 or 6 to discover some loot. A roll of 1 means they fall prey to head hunting cannibals. In a freak set of die rolls the first search parties from the other two ships all suffer the same fate this turn and no one finds any treasure).

Turn 5. A second search party sent from the Spatchcock deploys a number of party size sherry trifles to keep the cannibals at bay (true fact - cannibals hate trifle) and as a reward for this cunning stratagem they stumble across a massive chest full of doubloons and such like. Bingo. Hurriedly they head back to the ship. All the Spatchcock crew have to do now is raise anchor and sail off board. Discovering nothing but abandoned buckets and spades and a large collection of (strangely familiar) shrunken heads, the new shore party from the Cutty Wren give up and head back to the beach assailed by shouts of triumph from the Spatchcock crew just around the coast. When they get back to their jolly boat empty handed they find Tully has abandoned them - having sailed off to seize the prize now being loaded onboard the nearby brigantine. The Mardy Mare’s second all girl shore party decides to actually throw a party - on the beach. After consuming way above the legal limit of Babycham the hitherto hostile natives end up showing the girls where the second smaller treasure is buried. Making the international hand signal for “call me” the giggling laydeez re embark with the goods.

Turn 7. The Spatchcock’s brigantine sails mean she makes slow progress in turning to escape with her prize, since the wind has unhelpfully changed direction. The Cutty Wren races up the channel between the two islets with Tully using his brutal trait to get extra action points and a cheeky shot at the retreating vessel. The shot hits but the damage is insufficient to slow his opponent down (we assume the plum duff held!). Meanwhile with no one to impede their progress the Mardy Mare sets off in the opposite direction. With the smaller of the two available treasure troves Black Taff will not be able to win - but coming second will be good enough.

Turn 8. Desperate times mean desperate measures. The Spatchcock limps towards the board edge hindered again by a capricious wind. Tully on the Cutty Wren uses his brutal trait a second time, executing some of his crew for increased efficiency and another damage dice. The extra action points he gets for this allows his speedy pinace to close on the Spatchcock and throw grappling irons aboard. Sadly all of Tully’s brutality would be to no avail. As his desperate men readied themselves to leap across and seize the treasure through force of arms they were met by a hail of stale macaroons that bought the defenders just enough time to cut themselves free and slip away. 

So there we have it. The bestest pirate in the Indian Ocean is officially Handsome Jack, second is Black Taff Llewelyn and last and definitely least is Richard Tully.

Altogether now… (Don’t forget to slap your thigh and twirl your moustache). Huzzah!

Conclusions:

Galleys and Galleons delivered another fun game - and could have seen the win stolen by Tully at the very last minute. In actual fact I used the wrong tactics for the Cutty Wren, she had deadly close range falconettes and better boarding modifiers than the others. In hindsight the pinace would have been better served keeping close to one of the other ships and pouncing on them when they’d found something.

Hey ho.

Toodle ooh for now.

 

Yarrr!

Right ho then, the Wiglaf dark age painting is continuing at my normal glacial pace, ensuring that the two armies will finally be ready when the figure manufacturer in question is no longer in business or the period has been done to death by everyone else. In the interim I’ve decided to resurrect my old East Indies pirate ships for a quick game.

The fluff.

Let’s pop into a very seedy dive in Nanorabas, Indonesia,  where three “gentlemen of the coast” are having a rum fuelled argument about who is the bestest pirate. Unsurprisingly things have become a little bit heated.

To save the “discussion” turning into a hostelry wrecking brawl, the worried tavern keeper suggests the three of them take part in a competition to sort it out.

After a bit of yarring and waving of grog filled tankards the three of them agree. I mean...what could possibly go wrong?

The terms of the competition are simple. The Captain who comes back from Danger Island with the most loot will have “bestest captain on the high seas” bragging rights for 1 whole year.

Allow me to introduce you to them. 

First up is...

Black Taff Llewelyn, aka, the man they couldn’t hang. An unlikely coupling of a beautiful African Nubian princess and a tailors apprentice from Neath (who ran away to sea to avoid some unpleasantness over a shipment of lace - if you need to know) which produced young Taff. He turned out a little different to his pa, (who was 5ft 2 inches tall with a receding chin and a cod eye) ...as you can see.

Taff is Captain of the Mardy Mare and his all female crew are feared throughout the Indian Ocean. Legend has it that they once laid alongside a potential prize and nagged its crew into submission, without a shot being fired.

Sitting opposite to him is an old friend from 1642andallthat.blogspot.com Captain Richard Tully now of the Cutty Wren. Tully has a wooden arm, terrible insomnia and a morbid fear of seagulls. A nasty piece of work, he is greatly feared by his crew, who’d turn on him in a flash if it wasn’t for his four permanently primed pistols and the fact that he never seems to sleep.

Now then who else, ah yes...

Handsome Jack of the good ship Spatchcock.

Obviously, no one calls him Handsome Jack apart from his mother, who also happens to be the ships Bosun. His real name is Neville by the way...

The crew are used to slim pickings on the loot front since Neville’s mom isn’t keen on things that might put her lad in harms way, but there’s always plenty of grub on board which serves to keep the lads happy.

Here are the requisite ship data cards I’ve made to use alongside the Galleys and Galleons rules - converted to hexes. Once printed out I usually fold them in half and laminate them. 

Danger island is actually two small rocky outcrops, the hexes around them being counted as shallows. Once a boarding party has put ashore they may roll 1D6, needing 6, then 5 or 6 and so on until treasure is discovered. Once located the value of the treasure is determined by a further roll. Treasure falls into two categories and is either, “a night on the town and your bus fare home” or “a kings ransom”. There is one large treasure and one small treasure available in total. 

Oh yes, did I mention that the island is infested by cannibals? If a crew searching for treasure rolls a 1 then they’ve been added to the menu.

Since my iPads running out of juice, I’ll post the game itself in a day or so, when I’ve found another 50p to put in the leccy.

Toodle ooh

Fiddly diddly naval nonsense

Yep, things are progressing on the teeny tiny front, so I thought I’d post a few photos of where I’ve got to. 

Before I get into the ECW stuff I thought I’d show the miniature medieval cog wars ships I’ve started on. This has been a slow burn project in the pipe line for over a year but seeing as how I’m currently determined to destroy my eyesight I thought I’d better get a few painted before I need an electron microscope. At the rate I’m going I’ll be using grains of rice as units next. Lol.

Anywhoo…

The cogs are of different types as you can see and some are still unfinished. The large cog (or possibly round ship?) is from Outpost games, the dinky red fore and aft castle vessel (medium cog) is from Ral Partha and the poor quality casting of a northern or Baltic cog is from Navwar. All are 1:1200 scale but if you need a size comparison the pointing chap in the background is 18mm high. There are a number of galleys on the way from Outpost which the French used a lot for raiding in the channel. I suspect I’ll be using Mr Manley’s Lords of the Sea rules with them, or possibly Galleys and Galleons.

I’m about half way through the ECW unit production now, having set myself the slightly ambitious project of creating enough units to cover massive battles like Marston Moor. 

Twilight of The Divine Right specifies different sized regiments (amongst other things) and since I want to show a units size directly it’s meant there can be no one size fits all compromises. Hey ho, still enjoying doing them. I’d have liked to have shown some scenery but there’s been a total cock up on the game mat front and as a consequence I’ve not started any as yet. Anyway here’s a few piccies to whet your whistle.

First up are two baggage camps plus a few wagons from the baggage train, sorry, trayne:

Next up is 50% of the foote units I require - the rest are WIP but nearing completion.  There are three groups here. On the right are what TOTDR defines as regular sized regiments, left foreground are small regiments and behind them… large sized regiments.

Dragoon’s were completed early on. Here we have regular and small dragoon regiments in both mounted and dismounted state. Yes I did paint the horse handlers at the back!

Horse - these are small and regular sized regiments, with stands for the two opposing army commanders and subordinate generals.

Lastly we have the gun line and their marrowbone dog treat / fig roll gabions. I’ve banked some earth up around their positions to hide the square edge of the casting since last time. I don’t think it would’ve taken a gun crew and the attendant drivers, wagon chaps etc long to have thrown up a bit of an earthen wall, and they’d look okay in siege games too I think.

Still to come are a shed load of horse (20 units) 6 musket only units of various sizes, then there’s commanded shotte and a few regimental guns as well.

The picture quality is as usual pretty poor and the lighting abysmal…both fairly important things to get right when your trying to show 2mm figures, so apologies. Take my word for it, they look okay. 

Actually when you get up really close you can pick out things like sashes and weapons on the castings which is a shame because even if you painted them in you’d lose all that detail and spoil the overall effect when seen from a distance.

Anyway…best get on painting I suppose. They’re not going to finish themselves!

TTFN

I blame Norm

Norm’s recent informative article on the Sword & Spear ruleset made me wonder if my current lukewarm feelings towards it could be because I’m basically a jerk who never gave the set a proper chance? 

They’d arrived here at Broom Towers in amongst a whole lot of other hobby stuff and apart from a quick whisk through, (which left me a bit doubtful about some of the mechanisms) they’d been put on the shelf of doom…to gather dust…forever.

Anywhoo it nagged at me a bit so on the strength of Norm’s endorsement I decided to dig them out for another look, but it was while I was passing the army storage cupboard - on the way to get them, that I heard a definite low level muttering in old English. 

I quickly gathered that the Anglo Saxons were unhappy about their lack of recent activity and this was not being helped by the taunts of the Vikings in an adjacent box. The poor buggers were of course the last units to be used in battle on my old blog and they, like the old blog, have hardly been thought of since. 

They were mostly painted and based during a very lean financial patch in France and it shows. The cost of getting materials sent from the UK was almost as much as the cost of the product itself back then, so when I ran out of flock I resorted to an innovative sort of paint and grit porridge by way of a replacement. 

Yeah it was nasty. 

They’ve needed rebasing ever since, but given that re basing occupies a position lower even than painting horses in my world view it wasn’t going to be a priority. 

Vikings on the razzle. 

Anyway, I digress. I couldn’t find the ruddy Sword & Spear rules of course, (I suspect the Broom Towers poltergeist may have had a hand in this), so I went on the Sword & Spear forum website to check out a few play throughs…and there I found… “Warband” an earlier work by the self same author. It covers dark age warfare on hexed terrain and is card driven, making it very solo friendly. 

I’d previously tried to convert Dux Bellorum to hexes but the conversion and various fudges to resolve turn sequence disadvantages saw it abandoned as just too much trouble. 

I’ll do another post on Warband when I get a game in, but for now I’d describe it as the illegitimate love child of C&C and SAGA (without the silly bits).

The down sides to it are the 60 activation cards required per player (now done) and the need for figures to be separately based (very old skool) - which I’m doing in between other projects. 

Note - Given my skin allergy to some brands of flock I wanted to originally title this post “flocking hell” but I suspect the more dignified members of my readership may have found this a tad  too vulgar for their refined tastes.

15mm Peter Pig chaps now individually rebased and “pointed” on the underside.

I’m pretty sure the effort involved in all this Warband kerfuffle will be worth it, but I’ve definitely committed myself to yet another project when I’ve already got a plateful to be getting on with. Of course none of this increased work load would have occurred if I hadn’t dropped in at Battlefields and Warriors - so I’m definitely blaming Norm for all that followed.

You see it wasn’t the only time I went off piste that day, and prompted by Norms article and my discovery of Warband I visited the Old Glory UK site to look for some more 15mm dark age figures…and bought this…

The 20cm long resin Hull of the Santa Anna 

Yeah it’s a ship.

Definitely not dark age in any way.

I’d wanted to do naval gaming in a pre Napoleonic setting for a while and had previously purchased all manner of early Tudor vessels with a view to doing the 1512 conflict with France and Scotland. Sadly the only ships I could find on the interweb in this period were all way too small for my liking and eventually the project stalled. 

As you can see the Old Glory ones don’t suffer from this issue and might be best described as ruddy massive, but the bonus is they come with pre moulded metal ratlines that will finish the model off nicely. The picture shows the Santa Anna, a Spanish Carrack, next to a Peter Pig 1:450 ship (of comparable volume in real life). To save you getting your scale rulers out, the big ones 20 something centimetres long!

So, do you see what you’ve done Norm…do ya?! If I hadn’t read your article I wouldn’t have visited the Sword & Spears forum, wouldn’t have discovered Warband, wouldn’t have spent hours covered in flock and wouldn’t have ended up buying a ruddy big expensive ship…talk about the blooming butterfly effect. 

Okay jokes over. We all know Norm should actually be knighted for services to gaming and that it’s my own weak will that’s really the culprit here. I hope his lawyers will accept my postal order (its in the post) for any damages accruing from such a cheap attempt at an eye catching blog post title. Lol. 

As a bye the bye here’s a few project progress photos to document everything else I’ve been labouring over in the last two weeks.

On the VSF front we have these jolly Jack tars manning a Gatling.

Ahoy there mateys. Fighting 15’s Gatling and crew. 

Followed by these chaps from the Royal Artillery with a 12lb breach loading cannon - which I reckon will rattle the huns dentures a bit.

Royal artillery wallahs getting ready to rumble.

Then we have a young artillery officer demonstrating the (totally scratch built) heliograph he’ll be using to call down fire from the big guns off board. Not sure how well he can see what he’s doing through his breath preserver, but better safe than sorry eh! Peter Pig do a heliograph…but it’s 15mm and looks really small next to these 18mm boys. It should be manned by a crew of three, but the other two lads are off getting a brew going.

Dot dot dash…erm…oh bugger.

Next up is Captain Bailey-Paget giving a Martian the coup de grace with his Webley. Stirring stuff eh! That’ll show those Martian Johnies!

Take that you swine! Click…click…Oh damn it’s jammed.

Unfortunately some of the buggers have developed the ability to fight back.

“Gak, gak, gak” as I believe the Martians say.

I’ve only 40 Victorian civilians and eight British lancers left to paint now before I can can get on with a bit of gaming, so it’s nose to the grind stone again.

Oh yeah there’s these boys too…

The 18mm Sergeant on the left most base gives an idea of the tripods size.

TTFN