Monthly Archives: February 2012

B26K Counter Invader and Spetsnaz

As my contribution to the Guild’s year long build I have just finished a B26K Counter Invader, from the Italieri 1/72 kit. It was a ’60s update of the WW2 design to meet the needs of counter insurgency in Vietnam.

I’ve also finished a couple of batches of modern Russian Spetsnaz from Under Fire miniatures. As they wear the larger size helmet to distinguishing them from the army they’ll be good for any special operations troops be Army Spetsnaz, MVD, OMON.

One of the reasons I like painting modern Russian is the wide variety of camouflage uniforms in use. I normally peruse this site: http://www.kamouflage.net/ and pick the one I like the look of. These two batches are in ‘Ten’ and ‘Partizan’.

Air War Gaming Plans.

Monday night is one of my regular game nights, and tonight’s was particularly productive. Firstly Brian, Evan and I ran through a couple of turns of the board game Attack (http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/6752/attack) with a view to having a proper, hopefully 4 player, crack at it in a weeks time.

After the quick run through the 3 of us brainstormed some ideas for future games. We have decided to run a SF campaign tying together GZGs Stargrunt and Full Thrust. This means getting a few more 20mm figures and a set of ships for me. Your collected 20mm historicals will fill in as human forces at different tech levels: medieval, black powder, 20th century etc….

In the week Evan sent me the final modifications to his Air War combat system, I intend to adapt it to the post WW2 era. We started playing Air War games with the introductory sets that are put out by Tumbling Dice (http://www.tumblingdiceuk.com/)(http://freespace.virgin.net/candc.russell/default.html), over time these sets have been rewritten so that the only thing that remains is the movement table. I’m a big fan of the rules, and the modifications, as they are fast playing and can cope with a fair few numbers of planes on the board at once. Also as they are not hex based, unlike many other sets, we’ve not had to shell out for a hex map. My plan is to work out stats for the Korean conflict as well as rules for missiles. This should let us play Vietnam and Falklands games as well as any others. In the slightly longer term I’d like to modify the rules further to do a dedicated helicopter air to ground set.

Sticking with the Air War theme… I’ve developed an interest in the obscure ‘Alto Cenepa War’ fought between Ecuador and Peru in 1995. My plan is to develop the short conflict into a board- cum- miniatures game. I may well pick up some more 1/600 aircraft the next show I’m at….

Cheers,

Pete.

Fresh off the paintbench….

Here are a few things I’ve finished recently.

First up 2 Ready to Roll Aerosans:

A 4 man Special Forces team from Elhiem based on the classic Predator film:

A section of 8 Cold War British infantry, also by Elhiem:

Finally, a batch of SAS for NWE, Battlefield Miniatures with a trooper drinking a cuppa from Sgt. Mess;

Cheers,

Pete.

Innovations in Wargaming- review.

I recently picked up a copy of ‘Innovations in Wargaming Vol. 1’, edited by John Curry. The book is subtitled ‘Developments in professional and hobby wargames’ which got me wondering how many ‘professionals’ would buy it….

Anyway the book covers the kind of game that moves away from either a traditional toy soldier set up or else adds to the interest by upping the scale- the chapter on ‘hall games’ would be the most recognizable to most hobby gamers. Basically the example given is a large multiplayer game against an umpire controlled opponent.

The majority of the games covered are committee games. These fall somewhere between a planning session and a role playing game. 5 such versions are featured. It is a style of gaming I’ve slowly been planning myself so the hints and tips I read will be very useful, along with the excellent opening chapter on designing wargames rules.

Also included is a rather nice example of a naval Kriegsspiel set in the Napoleonic era. Sadly not an area of history I’m particularly au fait with otherwise I’d run it myself; however the ideas in it would be easily transferable to any other time you’d care to mention.

The book delivered pretty much what I hoped it would. I’ve been wanting to add an extra level to my regular Monday night games; a kind of mini game before the table top toy soldier game. My SWAT raid was an early attempt at this, so now with a few more ideas I’ll try some more things out.

My only complaint about the book is in the ordering of the chapters. Having read it in the order each chapter is presented I felt that the first half of Paddy Griffiths’ text should have been incorporated into the main body of the text rather than being left as an appendix, possibly after Bob Cordery’s Designing Wargames Rules…?

The book is available here: http://www.wargaming.co/

Cheers,

Pete.

Convoy Action.

A fortnight ago I went over to Evan’s house on the other side of town for a game (and a really nice Chilli Con carne it has to be said).

Evan has for the past few year developing a set of convoy action rules, ostensibly for a Med island hopping game our group has been planning, however the idea and rules he has come up with have evolved into a full formed game in it’s own right.

Using 1/3000th ships and 1/600th aircraft you can game an an air attack on the convoy, with the convoy able to have it’s own air cover too. Movement is regulated by a marked cloth using a variable scale to deal with the large distances involved. As the attacking aircraft move through the boxes they are engaged by the different weapon systems carried by the convoy. The attacking player has to plan his route carefully and correspondingly the convoy commander has to allocate his AA assets where he think the likely attack will come from.

In the game I had control of the convoy consisting of 1 aircraft carrier, 2 freighters, 1 oil tanker, 1 AA cruiser and 4 destroyers. Evan attacked with a motley collection of Italian and German aircraft; high level bombers, strafers, torpedo bombers and dive bombers. A bit of everything basically to try out as much of the rules as possible.

I lost one ship sunk, 1 dead in the water and 2 damaged, taking about half of the attacking aircraft out of the sky.

Here are a few pics of the game, the island (also by Evan is the ultimate goal of the convoy and backdrop to the planned campaign).

Cheers,

Pete.

Update….

Still having PC trouble- can’t comment on other people’s blogs… something to do with cookies but I’m stumped. I tried using a different blogging software with a view to winding up this blog however I’ve no decided to keep it going and using it as my main posting site. This might mean when I comment on your blog it might be from my other account or this one; yes it’s incredibly annoying….

Anyway on to more important things. Been painting lots and having a few games. A nice convoy action game (AAR to follow) and a quick but very fun air war game this evening (sorry no pics).
Also got a new book this morning: ‘Innovations in Wargaming’ http://www.wargaming.co/books/innovations/homepage.htm I’ll do a full review once I’ve read it.

Cheers,

Pete.

SWAT game scenario.

DEA SWAT raid

Here is the full briefing I used to run the SWAT game. If you fancy running it yourself but haven’t got a suitable warehouse model handy you can do as I did and use the one from Fabled Environments. I got mine through Wargames Vault:

http://www.wargamevault.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=3118&products_id=3689&it=1

If anyone does a similar game themselves let me know, I’d be interested to see your take on it.

SWAT game.

Last year I was involved in a RPG campaign run by my mate Brian (Brush Wars http://brushwars.wordpress.com/); we played secret agents in a game called Conspiracy X (think X files style investigations with an over arching conspiracy). During the course of our investigation we had to plan a raid on a group of hackers/ survivalists. I really enjoyed that part of the game, it harked back to the fun I had with the first Rainbow Six PC game back in the day…

… So I decided to try to incorporate some of these ideas into my table top games. Around the same time a number of factors combined to put all of necessary parts into place. A true crime book gave me the idea for the scenario, through Wargames Vault( http://www.wargamevault.com/) I found modern building plans that you can print out including a small warehouse that would be ideal as a target building for the raid and are group got into the family of rules put out by Two Hour Wargames (http://www.twohourwargames.com/)which are ideal for low level skirmishes.

Brian and Evan were happy to take the role of the SWAT planners- I gave them 200 points to buy both intelligence and assets for the raid. The more they spent on finding out about their targets the easier it would be but they would have less points to buy assets to play with. Given that in my experience wargamers rarely agree on anything it was with much amusement I watched the pair of them try to formulate a plan. If people are interested let me know and I’ll up load the full scenario.

The game was played out in 20mm using the reaction tables from 2HW’s All things Zombie. The figures came from a variety of manufactures: Liberation, Elhiem, Caesar plastic and old GW Dark Future figures. The helicopter and cars are all assorted diecasts.

I’ll admit that using a paper printout for the warehouse does sacrifice a fair bit in terms of visual aesthetics it did make it very easy to game on.

The game went really well- the flash bangs used by the SWAT teams really made it easy for them and reduced their casualties. 2 cops took rounds but their body armour protected them. 2 Bikers were killed and the rest of the gang and drug manufactures were easily arrested. The basic premise of the game worked well and it’ll be something I’ll expand on.