From the Shed: Chipping away at my Winter War project.

I’ve done a few more bits for my Winter War game project which I thought I’d share.

First up a Finnish 20mm zAnti Tank Rifle. A big powerful gun- there was only a single example in use during the Winter War.

Some prone Soviets, armed with a mix of rifles and light machine guns.

A Soviet sniper pair.

Finally a couple of Maxim medium machine gun teams (although technically speaking they wear the later M1940 helmet- I didn’t have any of the early ones spare to do head swaps on them.).

Cheers,

Pete.

From the Shed: 28mm Modern Russians for Zona Alfa.

I’ve just finished off some more 28mm modern figures to use in my Zona Alfa games. They are from Spectrehttps://www.spectreminiatures.com/ miniatures or from an ebay seller.

I’ve painted some of them in the Partisan camo pattern to match some earlier figures that I’ve done so them look like a cohesive military team on the table top. The figure with the grenade launcher is a white metal casting, the rest are 3d prints.

The non camo figures in Black will be used as urban terrorists, whilst the figure in the EOD suit with a belt fed PKM is a great representation of the PC game trope.

Now to get them in a game…

Cheers,

Pete.

Game Report: Galactic Dawn megagame.

Last weekend I took the train up to York for another Pennine megagame. This one was Ken Hay’s  Galactic Dawn – a classic space opera with warming empires much in the style of traveller and Star Wars. I was down as control (checking my records upon my return home I found it was my 20^th game that I had controlled) for one of the factions: the Imperia.  

The team were pretty switched on about what they wanted to achieve so attacked the game with lots of enthusiasm. Each team had a premier of some description, an admiral who took charge of combat at the map as well as a number of ‘envoys’. The envoys could perform everything from espionage and guerrilla warfare to diplomacy and statecraft. I think that these players had the busiest game bouncing around from player to player negotiating, doing deals and planning devious tricks.

 Compared to some control jobs my role was very rules- lite. I didn’t have much mechanical to do rather keep a track of any issues that affected my team, and what other teams were doing to mine. This was all relayed through the main plot control umpire. As we were an experienced team Ken more or less allowed us to run the game as we saw fit, free- kriegsspiel style. Given that latitude was nice and it help to work through the endless multi-layered plots we had going on. 

The Imperia team were heavily taxed by the dominant Argathi faction, rather punitively really, although I suspect that that was just a ruse to justify a war against them. The Imperia was the only faction that could, with the assistance of others, come close to ending Argathi hegemony. The team did some good salvaging of wrecks to boost their fleet numbers as well as judicious trade deals that allowed them to gain many tech advances.  The heavy tax burden ended up being needed by the Argathi to build a giant ‘Death Star’ style armed moon, this preceded the imminent arrival of both galactic empires. At this point the plots started to really stack up as the espionage/ diplomacy part of the game centred around assassinations of the Emperors at the singing competition. Meanwhile, at the map the fleets gathered to try and take down the ‘Death Star’ like space station. At the end of the game both emperors were dead, and the death star was blown up; the different player factions had coalesced into two big groupings… hopefully the stage has been set for a sequal.

 I’d been feeling a bit burnout with megagaming so I was unsure how I’d feel after doing this one but I was pleasantly surprised to be full of enthusiasm for them again. I’ve even been having ideas for my own again. Many thanks to Ken and the rest of the control team, as well as all the players, for making this a really enjoyable day out gaming. I’ll look forward to the games being run next year too.

 Cheers, 

Pete.