The Littlest Big Igloo

Back in the day, at the height of the Cold War, cloak and dagger battles were deadly earnest affairs, with only the rare example of a Get Smart to lighten the mood.  Today is no different, with the added frisson of a clandestine asymmetric war waged by entrenched forces against a beleaguered and largely leaderless resistance.  Into such weighty matters and ray of humor must shine, and here we have my tongue-in-cheek campaign wherein the forces of CONTROL and KAOS are played by Hapless Control Freaks and a Well Meaning but Poorly Led Herd of Cats.  You can decide which is which for yourself.

Here, we have the Black Hats infiltrating a small, rural airport on the hunt for Very Important Financial records that take the form of rare Pokemon cards.  Black Ops involves more status tokens on the board than I really like, but they speed play and I'm less inclined to obsess over "visual appeal is everything" than in my younger years.

The leader of the Black Hats, Very Special Agent Ray Getard, takes aim at an airport guard from the corner of a field office.  The resin terrain came from GameCraft Miniatures and they offer a set of three different models for $16.00.  Not a bad price for the kind of terrain you can drop into a variety of settings.  They work for everything from 1950s Africa through modern, post-apocalypse, and well into the future.

And here's a group shot of our plucky resistance.  The guy in the cowboy hat is charismatic leader Ron Wildcard, and for the first time in a short stealth-campaign, he has managed to get his hands on not just an RPG, but a guy who knows how to use it without blowing off his own head.

The campaign has really helped maintain my interest in this ruleset, which I've discussed at length elsewhere.  Just good stuff, man.
 

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.

 

Utility Terrain

Final shots of some utilitarian terrain.

The lumber here is coffee stirrers liberated from the local coffee shop eating on a bed of popsicle sticks and lies.

 

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.

Painted Desert, But Not the Real One

 It is done.  A full table of desert terrain.

Primed and ready for color

But not too much color - it is a desert after all.

Chicken Joe showing off some big rocks.

A small camp near the dunes and columns.

Hiding behind a small dune.

Deep in the shade during the heat of the day

Easy storage for the down time.

More Vendeean Eye Candy

Been playing around with Osprey's En Garde! while waiting for the Big Battalions package to arrive, and it's been nice to fiddle with a new ruleset and some blackpowder scenarios.  My fantasy town works well as a backdrop if I leave off the wizard tower and skull mountain pieces.

The game doesn't work all that great as a solo game, what with a big part of the combat requiring some bluff and counterbluff.

Random draws for combat ploys often results in pointless rounds of combat where not much happens.  That happens in two player games as well, to be fair.

In the first battle fought, the press of numbers proved overwhelming with two Rank 2 figs supported by five Rank 1 figs dominating a team composed of a single Rank 3 and four Rank 2 figs.  It also included the usual first volley bloodletting followed by everybody charging straight into melee.  A completely historical result if my years of Hollywood movies are to be believed.

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.

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.

More Details on The Turtle Station

Coupla quick shots today showing some details of the wild and wooly landing bay 1-2-3 for the space port.  That planter is just shown for scale.  Barrels are wooden dowel cut to size, the boxes are balsa cut to size.  Both have been tapped with bits of cereal box cardboard.  The Big green machine in the lower left is a bunch of odds and sods slapped together and painted industrial.  I'm thinking that floor needs some dirtying up, and we need to put some more mechanicals and electrical boxes on the walls to really clutter up the place and make it look grimy.

Tortugastra Interior Decorating Start

My 15mm space station nears completion.  Of sorts.  This is the sort of project that begs for little details.  Take a look at the bar and lounge area shown here.  It's ready for gaming with all the final cover in place and painted, but it still needs some curtains behind the stage, posters for local synthwave bands on the walls, and a decent rack of booze behind the bar.

 

The rest of the station is waiting for this sweet haul of loot from GCMinis and Khurasan to get painted up and fixed permanently in place.  

Before permanent installation, I dry-fit the naked terrain in place just to make sure that everything looked good and that I knew where it would all live at the end of the day.  As you can see, the place is really starting to come to life!

I did have a bit of salvaged terrain already dumped in place, and some more kitbashed works in progress, but you'll have to wait for those.  Full details on the construction of this lovely terrain will be provided on my Joy of Wargaming videos in the coming weeks.

WIP: Tortugastra

My sci-fi boys have been warring over the same stretch of suburban ground for years.  They deserve a proper star-faring battleground.  To that end, I have been slapping glue, foamcore, and paint around the kitchen table for a while.

Just a sneak peek at my own personal wretched hive, the seedy galactic waystop for captains of dubious moral and legal fiber.  The Star Turtle represents the best of the worst - a Casablanca for the star drive set where all your quasi-legal dealings can be dealt...if the price is right.

Scale Neutral Fantasy Terrain

Nothing helps sell the players on the notion of the dungeon as a place of pure, seething chaos like a good altar of evil, expect maybe TWO altars of evil.

 

Finding fifteens in the local FLGS (that aren't remaindered Flames of War remnants) represents one of those fun challenges that true gamers embrace.  This little altar for instance, allegedly scaled for the big 28mm figures, offers a chance of three different pieces for my preferred fifteens.

Of which I took two.  For permanence, the base and top have been joined permanently, creating a sort of summoning circle.  The round altar pillar has a convenient bit of stone finishing on top, making the pedestal a perfect height and look for a dark altar graven with ghastly visages and pressed with the bones of its victims.  Yeah, the skulls on the dais are a little oversized, but that can be chalked up to either stone carven skulls, or the skulls of giants, depending on the DMs mood and inclination.  The latter - ten giants killed to create the dais - has wide ranging implications perfect for your chief, jarl, or king's local steading, rift, or hall.

The pre-primer on these resin pieces didn't work out so well.  The red basecoat, done to provide a hint of eldritch and bloody mortar joining the stones, took several coats to reslly stick.  Next time I will prime coat Wiz-Kid's 'preprimed' figures for better and more consistent coverage.

Fifteen Odds and Sods

Just a couple of quick and dirty terrain pieces completed over the weekend.  The jersey jersey barriers and skull mountian are from Rebel Minis.

The skull painted up nice.  The barriers have a printed plastic feel with a striated look the takes some sanding to get a decent look.  The pieces are really light and don't take plastic well, even with a base coat of primer.  Can't recommend them.

These two wetland/marsh/boggy ground fill a much needed gap in my terrain of "blocks movement but jot LOS".  It doesn't take that much more effort to build two rather than one, so now each of my boxes (fantasy and sci-fi) get one.