Random Shots

 As we ease into the weekend, let's take a look at a couple of preview shots of battles coming up on The Joy of Wargaming.  First up a look at Osprey's "Black Ops" which features a surveillance fight gone wrong when competing espionage agencies arrive to gather blackmail from the same luddite professor's backwoods cabin.

And here's what a game of Patrick Todoroff's "Nightwatch" looks like when dwarves encounter undead in a high, rocky desert.

Both of these are parts of on-going campaigns featured on the channel.  They are great examples of the rich experience this hobby has to offer when you embrace long-term play with steady advancements and long-term injuries.

fun this weekend, guys.

Finished Figs

 Just a couple quick shots of some quick paint jobs today.  My 15mm fantasy adventures needed some Bowman at home in the woods.  These DemonWorld figures have amazing detail for the scale. Best of all, you can order them individually.

And what the heck the XCOM fan in me has wanted snake man like this for a long time. No real plans for these figures, but they are fun to paint and make a useful addition to any sci-fi collection.  One squad of Critical Mass Astagar figures makes a good faction or good unit to add to any kind of xenos Empire faction.

Cha'alt 28

The Blackraven action has shifted to the alien planet of space weirdos some call Cha'alt. 

And that means it is time for some eye-candy.  Here we see the Cult of the Spicy Wyrm, ambushed by the ragtag band on the right.  For some reason, Cobalt-15 brought the MSB along on the mission to ambush these pilgrims and steal a sacred relic that took the form of a pretty juicy rifle.

Now, in all it's glory, and with the fuchsia skies of the drug-addled planet of mystery, we can play some Planet 28 and figure out how well it works for a long-run narrative campaign. 

The short story is...not great.  It's a fun little skirmish game, but it's really made more for short-run campaigns filled with nameless mooks.  It's a brutal game that is hard on its characters, and the advance system doesn't allow for a whole lot advancement without incurring a whole lot of devolution along the way.  The cost to stay in business just overwhelms any advances you earn along the way.

Or perhaps the game shines when you're running campaigns of 5+ games.  That's possible, but at three games and ready to move on, I can't say for sure.  If you have a few teams going against each other then the drop in team quality over time should be matched by that of your opponents.  Or maybe in a 'race against time' campaign, one where you're struggling to preserve your resources for as long as possible, it could work great.  The core rules are certainly robust and offer a lot of room to play with different team strategies.

But for an episodic throwback to 1980s action-adventure TV where you're looking to bop on through various settings and fun, it just doesn't work out all that well.

Highly recommended for what it is, but what it is just isn't what I'm into at the moment.

 

Rogue Stars Eye Candy

 What can I say? I'm a sucker for a good infiltration mission.  Here, the crew of a tramp freighter have snuck into Starport Moai to re-clone a couple of forcibly infected crewmembers.  This looks like a job for Gold Cross.  Not even an mRNA scrambler shot of nano-trackers can survive the cooking up of a full-blown clone.

Here, the crew of the Blackraven have to sneak two crew-members from the front door, into the Gold Cross franchise, and make their getaway before the alarm is sounded.

Spoiler alert: They don't make it.

The guy watching the camera feeds (lower left, above) was not fooled by Marion's hack for quite long enough.  Once the jig was up, he managed to race back to the main office and alert the guards, who promptly set out to stop the crew from making good their escape.

Here's one more shot, in the moments before the storm broke.  In the end, the alarm was raised too late.  Not early enough to leave the crew unscathed, but too late to stop them.  The sole injury was a wounded arm, and Lt. Dayne losing his favorite blast rifle.  All in all, not a bad trade to keep the crew healthy and untrackable.

You can watch the full action here:

The Very Model of A Modern Wargame General

 The modern table continues to take shape.

A bit of screen, a bit of scrap wood, and a bit of sand...

And you've got some nice tall fences.

I'm not crazy about these fences.  I should have oriented the screen diagonally to make a diamond pattern, and the cloth style screening is pretty flimsy.  If you make these, go with the wire screen for better rigidity and robustness during storage.  Also, I cut the popsicle sticks in half thinking to save space, and now they aren't as stable as they could be.

You can see the half-sticks better here:

The brown lumps will automagically turn into a lumber pile and a stack of 8-inch diameter PVC pipes once they have a little paint on them.

Also added two lengths of rough board fencing to the table.  That's a pretty good start.

Modern Conflicts Call for Modern Solutions

Starting to amass a little ultra-modern warfare collection for use with Black Ops.  To date, I've only ever played that game using sci-fi figures, but for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to get a handle on how modern warfare can be wargamed.  More on that later.  For now, how about some terrain eye-candy?

All of these office trailers come from Game Craft Minis.  Resin pieces with only a trace of bubbling, and all of it down on the underbelly.  I added a couple of safety posters and a bulletin board using cereal packet to spruce them up a bit.  For sixteen American dollars you get three different 'sculpts' in each pack, a fine addition to any work site.  These will do double duty as makeshift housing for separatist compounds, but for painting, the construction look will do.  

To give them a bit more character, I put two of them up on concrete blocks cut from matte-board.  Thicker than cereal box cardboard, the matte-board paints up just fine as flat concrete slabs, the better to keep the trailer off the ground.  Just a little touch to make these pieces all mine.

Death Cult for Cuties

Alternative Armies' sci-fi death cult paints up great.

All right, smart boys, so it's actually the Post-Apocalyptic warband (HOFP05).  In the House of Wargaming, we treat them as cultists.  Look at them robes and death masks and heads on pikes - what else could they be?

Vince Venturella over on YouTube taught me how to get a better look out of the color purple.  The trick is to know whether you're dealing with a red purple or a blue purple, and what you want to get out of it.  Here's a great lesson in how to get the most out of yours.

Rogue Stars - Gauntlet

 When old Andrea Sfiligoi tells you that a game is built for four to six models, he means it!

Tried running a gauntlet style run of five figs through a field controlled by ten figs, and it took a long time.  Each character in Rogue Stars, is characterized by around a half-dozen traits.  When you've got to manage one crew of 4-6 it ain't so bad.  Work in a second crew and you can just barely keep the wheels on the road.

In this latest game, I tried to run a security team of 10 figures.  Their stat-lines were kept to a minimum and they weren't terribly powerful, so it looks manageable.  Unfortunately, this game requires the tracking of three different states (pins, wounds, and one of several modifiers like shaken or resolved or disarmed).  Throw all that together and it turns into a bit of a slog.

Particularly when its your first real game and you've got to keep returning to the rulebook.

Lesson learned.  Gotta keep those squads tight if you're going to run two of them at once.

Eye Candy

Not a lot to say here.  I snatched a bunch of screencaps from recent videos posted up at the YouTube channel, Joy of Wargaming.  Full battle reports are available there.  For those who lack the patience for such things, here's a brief rundown of the action so far, with plenty of photos for your entertainment and inspiration.  

We're using Void Pirates for these, with a heavy dose of Five Parsecs for inspiration.

The crew of the Blackraven, led by Cobalt-15 are hot on the trail of a magic space baby.  If they can deliver it to Big Guv, their spotty records will be swept clean.  In the second battle, they have to search a small psychic isolationist dwarf compound for on L. Ron Sluggard, a missionary from the Discordian Church seeking to convert the dwarves away from Space Thor.

Marion hacks an ATM and discovers that L. Ron Sluggard is in the building to the left, which forces a smash-and-grab on the part of the party's Shootist.

 The psychic dwarves were unable to do much to stop the crew who escaped without injury.

Bracing the man, he tells them that they need to hit up a Shrineworld and seek the location of the magic space baby within an oracular woods.

 He didn't tell them about the feral yelizard guardians...

Luckily for the crew, Marion identified the shrine in the first wood searched.  Unluckily for the crew, the yelizards proved tougher than your average alien bear.  They managed to drop all three men of the quartet.

Leaving Marion to abscond with the information gleaned from the shrine and the menfolk nursing a variety of wounds.

Little does Cobalt-15 know, Marion could not resist the temptation to ask the shrine about something more important than some magic space baby - she now knows the location of her One True Love!

Hey, don't look at me!  Blame Nordic Weasel, it was their character creation charts that rolled up Marion's motivation as "Looking for Love in All the Orbital Places".

Next up, the crew returns to L. Ron Sluggard's house to get him the business for sending them on a wild goose chase.  But nothing is ever easy in this fallen universe, and they have to beat a band of slavers to the punch if they want to squeeze another red herring out of the fat bastard.

Things are getting a little more complicated than your average wargame campaign, and that's just the way we like it around Chez Abox.

Alternative Sci-Fi Pulp Adventure Armies Figures

Here's a quick line-up of a nice batch of pulp sci-fi figures, ready for the table.

Including a few civilian types, to help flesh out the space station. Still trying to work out the best way to grab photos using my cell phone.

A Heavy Dose of 15mm Sci-Fi Fun

The Alternative-Armies great big sci-fi-stravaganza has added a whole lot of fun to my collection.  Before, I had at least one of everything that I needed.  Now, I've got all sorts of options, and if my Void Pirate early plays are any indication, they will be put to good use.  Let's kick off the night's entertainment with some entertainers.

And then add a beefy squad of high-tech savages to the mix.  That mad lad in the center is a Draccian 28mm figure, but he's a close enough match to the rest of the boy-o's that we'll call him a nob of sorts - the biggest of these boys just keep on growing until they are dead.

And then add some ladies to the fun.  Space witch, heavy lass, and Missus Blade.

A proud couple of legal-beagles who are aren't to defend their kith and kin when the slavering hordes show up on their doostep.

And a half-dozen general heroic types including a couple of techies and some dashing square-jawed chads ready to leap into action, gun frst.  Love these Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers throwbacks.  They just make me want to run a wholesome good fight between the American way of freedom and burgers and the perfidious alien way of collectivism and soccer.

Don't be surprised if you see a few of these guys show up on The Joy of Wargaming.  They are too much fun to spend a lot of time in storage.

Adventures of the Blackraven

The first game of the Adventures of the Blackraven has come and gone.

In this project, I used the campaign tables from Five Parsecs from Home to generate the quartet of space faring ne'er-do-wells plying the shipping and smuggling routes way out on the fringes.  Once I had personalities and rough characteristics done, I shifted over to Void Pirates  built out a 55 point crew from there.

From right to left we've got:

• Cobalt-15, a sentient warbot AWOL from the Unity military forces
• Marian, his technician assistnt, a Reclaimer tech who helped him escape with the Blackraven, and who just wants to find her true love
•  Rusty, an escaped slave from the rust mines who takes any off-book odd-job to keep his belly full.  He is the team's melee specialist.
• Lt. Dayne, an arrogant military brat and shooting specialist who is thoroughly unlikable, but too good as his job for Cobalt to turn down.

The preliminary fun presents Cobalt and Co. strong-armed by a Unity agent into finding the most important alien baby in the universe.  He hits up the Tortugastra, a little space station out on the Fringe, to meet a contact, and discovers that a mercenary unit out of the Pelagic system has beat him to the literal punch.  After some heated words, a fight breaks out in the quiet morning halls.

After a furious fight in the halls, curiously absent of security forces most likely due to the Pelagics buying them off, Cobalt-15 managed to put all of the mercs on the floor with only Rusty taking it on the chin.  The former slave/miner took a bad wound and will be lame and gumpy for the next scenario.  On the upshot, Cobalt got the info he needed and the next mission will determine whether he gets closer to finding the important magic alien baby...

And whether or not he should turn the magic alien baby over to the Unity once he does.

Expect a live-play video to go live over at the Joy of Wargaming on July 21st!  We're up to 40 subscribers already, which has been very gratifying - thanks to all of you who have jumped on board over the last few weeks.  It's been a lot of fun.

Space Station Gallery

For those of you who prefer still life to video life, here's a shot of La Tortugastra, still a work in progress.  I've got a few more terrain items to slap down, and the walls are looking pretty bare to this day.  Needs more travel posters, artwork, graffitti, and utility boxes.  Still, it's shaping up nicely, and once I finish playing through the Necromancer King's Crusade, I'll get cracking on some sci-fi shoot-'em-ups here in the biggest little spacestation of all.