Thanks for the Meme-eries

 Howzabout some light hearted fun using shortcuts to humor?

This one was somebody else's:

But it inspired me to make this:

Because sometimes it really do feel like this:

Tiny Turns

 These N-scale turn templates from Litko should work fine for my 6mm Gaslands game.

It is a little bit, but we can make it work.

The Littlest Gaslands

Picked up a batch of the "Mad Ron" road warrior vehicles from Irregular Miniatures on a whim.  Just look at these tiny little knights of the road:

Still have to paint those motorcycles, and the big dang semi-trailer slash war-rig.  The good news is that terrain is already done.  I've got the little city all laid out and ready for some vehicular mayhem.  These are perfectly scaled to the terrain set-up that I've got for Riot!

The only issue that gives me pause is that the gauges I ordered are N-scale which maps to 18mm figures, and these little rugged adventurers are in 6mm scale.  Normally I'd be fine with this.  I use smaller scale figures all the time.  Most wargames use a very reduced ground-scale compared to the figure scale.  This should solve my biggest complaint with Gaslands - that even in sixth gear the cars only move about four carlengths per turn.  The speeds just don't feel right when you watch live plays, and don't get me started on the weapon ranges.

I'm also glad to make it harder to ram.  Tagging a vehicle that is actively dodging you at full speed isn't as easy as most rule-sets make it out to be.  This should reduce the numbers of collisions and make the game more about the racing and shooting and less about trying to notch that one big RAM attack.

But there are other considerations here, for sure.  I just don't know what they are, and won't until I get some lead on the table.

Stay tuned!  

In the meantime, enjoy some additional eye candy:

My cars are painted in considerably more day-glo colors than most of what you see on the YouTube reports.  Everyone favors a black matte coat, a bit of gray and metal and rust drybrushing, and then they call it done.  With vehicles this size, I don't have the luxury of a monochrome schema.    You need those colors to help identify the cars at a distance.

Also, it's just a lot more fun to play with colors.

Not sure you can see it, but that bike on the right is carrying three guys and a big-ol' cannon.

Scale Mail

One of the things every wargamer wants to know prior to purchasing figures is, "How will these figures match with the ones I've already got."  Some think that this question becomes more critical at the smaller scales, because a millimeter out of six or ten is a much bigger difference than one out of 28 or 30.  Personally, the smaller scales are less detailed, and so if there's a slight difference in scale, I think it matters less.

In the interests of furthering the culture of the hobby, and now that I'm back into 10mm skirmish, here's a few shots of my figures from various manufacturers that shows how well they all stand with each other.

Sorry for the focus on that last one.  You can see the heights well enough.  That's a Copplestone, Pendraken (I think - I might have those two reversed) and Irregular elf in each shot.  Bear in mind we're comparing wood elves to high elves, so in my mind a little height difference is understandable.

Bowling Green? #NotAtMyTable

With apologies to the Ohioans out there - it might be a fine university, but a bowling green makes for a bland wargaming table.  With very little room left in my One Fantasy Box to Bind Them All And In the Dark Closet Rule Them, grand topographic chances are off the table (heh).  That doesn't mean we can't spruce things up with some nice terrain blocking templates that also help to funnel figures around and even make for some interesting defensive challenges. 

These three small hillocks were carved out of one plain round piece of Styrofoam picked up for a couple bucks at the craft store.  The slopes are just low enough to allow figures to stand almost anywhere on the terrain piece, and they were painted to match the hill on which the Nameless Tower stands - a small touch that helps unify the table theme.

As you can see, the overall elevation difference is less than 15mm including the terrain base, so they can be treated as a linear obstacle for climbing purposes, or the players can agree that they are not to scale, and that these little cliffs actually block all movement.  In that way you can even have a couple of short canyons to funnel troops through. 

 

Oh man, I'm working on something big right now, but I can't show you what it is.  A huge project compared to my usual, but I don't want to ruin the surprise for my players, so posting might be lighter than usual here despite increased output.  Maybe I'll be able to share the photos with you as a Christmas Surprise.  If you don't already follow this blog, now's a good time to subscribe so you don't miss it.

The Compleat Castle Meatgrinder

Who are we kidding? A project like this is never complete, it just goes into hibernation. As we round out the year of fantasy skirmish here at War In A Box, let's take a look at where the project stands. At the current time we've got over 50 characters in four different races for player pawns.  We've got at least a dozen each of orcs, ratmen, lizardmen, undead, cultists, and frogmen.  We've got creatures from vermin to ogres, flying things, climbing things, swinging things, and tentacled things.  We've got traps galore and puzzles to boot.  As it stands Castle Meatgrinder spans ten dungeon levels, each with ten to fifteen rooms, and a few hidey-holes to allow for future expansions.

That's a lot of stuff, but in keeping with the mission of compact gaming on a budget, let's take a look at how compact you can make a D&D megadungeon if you're willing to game in 15mm.

Every figure in the fantasy collection.

 

With room for another faction/warband in the case.

The plastic tub contains all of the dungeon floor tiles, and the Old Spice box contains the delicate dungeon dressing.  To give you a better idea of scale, that tub is designed to carry two reams of standard sized paper.

You won't have any trouble carrying this mega-dungeon around a crowded convention hall.

So what are we missing?  A few things:

• Natural caverns.  There's room for a few more halls and rooms in the tub.
• Big beasts.  We don't have a dragon or giant or any number of high-level threats.  Right now it's all strictly low level gaming.  Aside from a few minotaurs, we don't even have any of the heavy-hitting humanoids.
• The Old Spice box is pretty empty.  We can add a lot more dungeon dressing to it, or maybe find a better carrier so that all of the dungeon materials themselves are in a single box.

Quick and Dirty Comparison Shot

Let's add to the pile of comparison shots floating around the web, shall we?  Last week I showed you the three power armored figures added to my space orc/space mercenary/mangalore squad.  Here's a shot of the figures side by side:

Just noticed that one of the guys on the left is a little shy - his back
is turned to the camera.

On the left are the Star Viking figures from 15mm.co.uk (SVP02).  On the left are three of Ground Zero Games' space mercenaries (SG15-X05). 

As you can see, the Star Vikings are a little bigger and bulkier than their GZG counterparts, but that's what you would expect for guys in heavy armor.  They aren't quite as detailed as the GZG troopers, but the blocky armor works well as some sort of exo-suit.  In addition to the unifying paint job, the swords are a nice little touch that brings the two units together.

Big Box Terrain, Part Two

Last time we looked at the forest base.  This time let's look at the canopies for the still as yet unrevealed new project era.

What you're looking at is a cheap and easy alternative to the method used by these clever chaps here.  Their forests look great, but they also look relatively expensive and time consuming.  My wrinkle on their idea is to skip the store bought foliage and use a cheaper alternative, the same green scrubbers that we all know and love from hedges around the wargaming world.

What you're looking at here is three different steps from scrubber to treetops.  I started with a basic roundish template for both canopies, and then just started gluing scraps and tufts of scrubber to the base.  It helps to rough up the scrubber a bit with the flat edge of an exact knife.  This pulls the fibers apart and helps disguise the clean cuts you get with these scrubbers.  After letting the glue dry, I painted the canopy black, drybrushed white, and then drybrushed them with every shade of green in the box.  Here are a couple of closeups for more detail.

Primed

Brushed white

Color added 

Note the inclusion of a few tan trees as well.  To really make the coloring pop, it helps to drybush with a faint touch of mustard yellow.

[Edit to add some advice, thanks for the reminder, arabianknight:

I couldn't find my hot clue gun, so I just used regular white craft glue.  The craft glue works fine on the green scrubbers, you just have to lay it on thick.  You don't want to craft glue with the clump foliage from Woodland Scenics, though, it doesn't hold that crumbly spongy stuff for squat.

If your tree stand width is less than the width of a green scrubber, you don't need a piece of board or cardstock underneath it.  The scrubbers have enough rigidity to hold their shape, and in fact the spongy texture will help keep the foliage from sliding around.  The larger tree stand shown here has cardstock underneath it because it is wider than the green scrubber - I glued two pieces side by side and then hid the seam by hiding it with more foliage. [/edit]

And here's a shot for scale.  That's a 28mm figure on the left, and a 15mm figure on the right.  These should work okay for 15mm, but are way too small for anything bigger.  On the other hand, they are perfect for my chosen scale - 6mm!

What?  A new scale?  What madness is this?

Well, it's the madness of big battle games.  This big box is being built for One Hour Wargames, which are mostly for pushing mass infantry around a table.  If I'm going to build a mass army wargame, it going to look like mass armies.  We'll keep collecting 15mm for skirmishing, but this box is all about the bases chock full of lots of little dudes.

From the Ground Up

We're building this project from the ground up.  A bit of a departure for me, actually.  Normally I just sort of muddle through figures, rules, and terrain all in one big mish-mosh.  This time around it's going to be rules, terrain, and finally figures.

I'm starting with Neil Thomas' intriguing One Hour Wargame ruleset, as mentioned previously.  Neil recommends using a thirty-six inch playing surface with bases with a frontage of between four and six inches, but everything in the book is nice round numbers, so you can scale up or down to your hearts content.  (This fine fellow played a game on a board 30cm by 30cm, which google tells me is a real distance of about one foot.)

I bounced back and forth between a 36-inch field and 24-inch field and ran a whole bunch of numbers trying to be as cost effective as possible when it came to buying figure bases versus terrain bases versus box size and table size versus playing field size and then there's...wait.  These rules are not detailed simulations where accurate figure ratios and frontage per brigade are terribly important.  The author literally says, put enough figures on each base so it "looks about right."  I'm not constrained by anything but my own whimsy here, folks.

Well, my own whimsy, and my playing surface, which just so happens to be granite counter top a little less than 36 inches across.  Smaller could work, but let's push the envelop and make the game as big as it can be and still fit in the One Box To Rule Them All.

Behold!

It may wind up being 31 inches.  It may wind up 33.7 inches.  It doesn't matter.  My figures are going on bases three inches across with a depth of two inches.  Maybe three inch squares depending on figure density.  Mr. Thomas recommends bases with a frontage of four to six inches for a table this size. So my troops have a little more running room around the edges. It'll be okay.

The next question is one of material. Ideally, this would be a chance to give a teddy-bear fabric cloth a shot, but while shopping for the cloth it became clear that teddy bear fabric is just too fluffy.  It'll take up too much room in the box.  The canvas that gets used with the sci-fi figures wrinkles like a beast, and has no nice grassy texture to it at all.  So let's split the difference and use a nice soft terry cloth.  Terry cloth does have a nice grassy texture, and it shouldn't wrinkle up as bad as canvas after being stuffed into a box for weeks on end.

As you can see from the above, the downside is that the edges are tough to cut smooth, and they tend to fray.  That's where marrying a crafty wife comes in handy.  My lady love stitched up seams along the edges of this piece of battleground, and...

Wrinkles.

Apparently, this fabric warps quite a bit when you sew it like this.  Erp. Well hey, no ground is truly flat.  These edges may just help break up the hard line of the edge of the world in a way that looks nice during game play.  So let's run with this a little more.

The only other downside is that this tan fabric is too monochrome at the moment.  So the plan is to dry brush mottled green and browns into it to make it look more natural. Before that happens, I'm going to complete a couple of bases of terrain to find my colors.  Then I can pick my paint colors for the cloth to better match the rest of my terrain pieces.

Terrain teaser shot.

The really nice thing about this set-up is that it should be really easy to customize.  If I can fit two armies and all the terrain into one box, then I can easily add a second box with two other matched armies from a whole 'nuther era.  Toss in a single base of a built up area to match the time period, maybe some period specific fencing and scatter terrain, and then I can game multiple eras with very little extra work.  Giddyup!

Mele Kalikimaka Loot!

Here's hoping your celebration of the birth of our savior was a smashing success.  (As I type this, Hawaii is still in the midst of the throes of the birthday celebration.)  This year the lovely and long suffering wife fed my addiction with a copy of Neil Thomas' latest tome, One Hour Wargames.  This is the perfect book for those of us looking for quick and compact games to fiddle with in the evenings.  Expect a longer and in depth review once it has been read and fully digested.

28mm figure for scale.

Also up for your consideration today, a truly massive miniature (by my 15mm standards), a 28mm fantasy figure.  I know what you're thinking: look at Warren switching up and starting a new scale - that old wargamer ADD finally bit him good and hard.  Guilty as charged, your honor, but there are a few mitigating factors involved here.

Gilgamesh - a tiefling death mage

For one thing, this Reaper mini was painted for my son for use in our on-going D&D campaign.  For a second thing, the second golden rule of miniature wargaming is "build and play what your friends build and play".  Our DM goes to great lengths to draw up elaborate full color maps in 28mm scale, as shown previously.  The effort that goes into painting a few large figures for the campaign pales in comparison.

And yes, that last sentence was a teaser for future posts - you can expect to see the rest of the party in miniature over the coming days (and probably weeks, if recent history is any guide.)  My Christmas gift to the D&D group is a figure representing their character, with a book handling wizard for the DM (who as you know doesn't have a character of his own.)

Merry Christmas everybody!

One Scale to Rule Them All

It's time for the 10mm sci-fi figures in my collection to shuffle out of the regular rotation.  For a variety of reasons, I'm abandoning the scale.  There are too many great looking 15mm figures out there for me to ever buy and paint them all.  The selection is broader. Ditching the 10mm terrain frees up more space in the limited storage box.  The list goes on...

That's not to say I'm getting rid off all of my 10mm figures, though.  Pendraken's line includes a fair few 10mm figures that work great in 15mm.  Their space minotaurs match up well, for example.

15mm.co.uk, two Pendraken 10mm, Khurasan

The other salvagable pieces are the green !aliens.  They are a little undersized, but for a mindless swarm army, they'll work fine in 15mm scale.  Yo check it:

Oh, and speaking of limited storage, wait'll you see my fancy-dancy new case...

Song of Sticks and Fat Fingers

Fat fingers?  Not me - I actually have tiny little girl hands, which serves a modeler like me well when it comes to putting together fiddly bits of terrain and figures.  Fiddly bits like these measuring sticks for the Song of... series.  

Fat fingers or no, sometimes you want tight packed terrain, and getting a full blown ruler into the nooks and crannies can require moving terrain around or hovering your ruler eight inches off the table.  That's where these little numbers come in - the little handle lets you plop them down into just about anywhere.

Simple basswood sanded and cut to fit, start to finish these were built in about a third of a Spiderman movie.  Thought about making two sets, but why?  Only one person needs to measure at a time, and the "passing of the sticks" is a great way to signal the end of  a turn.

Now if I can only find time in this three day weekend to try them out...

Quick Size Comparison

A while back I posted my 15mm sci-fi dwarf army which features a pair of heavy power armor troops.  The main force is composed of rebel miniatures with a few 15mm.co.uk figs for a command squad.  The power armor consists of Hasslefree's 15mm Grymn figures.  Now you can buy assault backpack weapons that make the things look even more...mechy?  Mechish?  Mech-like?

I'm not a big fan of the sprues.  They look a little over the top for my tastes.  And I'm not a big fan of using the Grymn figures for standard power armor.  The limbs are not proportioned right to fit a human sized trooper like armor, and the chest cavity looks like a tight fit for a guy curled up in the fetal position.  Some folks disagree, and in a bid to save them from the path of error, here's a quick shot proving that I'm right.

Rebel dwarf, 15mm.co.uk dwarf, GZG orc, Khurasahn human, rebel human, Hasslefree Grymn in powerarmor

Naturally, this is a YMMV situation, but if this reference photo helps folks make up their minds one way or the other, it's worth it.  Here we can see that the Grymn figures tower over humans, standing somewhere between 12 and 15 feet high.

Short Shot - Shorty Comparison

Quick update for future reference:  The above shot shows how Rebel Minis' Sons of Thunder stand compared to more standard 15mm fare.  All figures are Rebel Minis.

Goldilocks and the Three Scales

A funny thing happened while teaching my kids how to play Necromunda in 15mm.  We played two different games, one in the big rocket using the standard movement and ranges in inches, and one in the urban terrain converting all measurements to centimeters.

We test drove this WIP terrain - not a fan of playing
on unfinished terrain, but sometimes you takes
what youse can gets.

Oddly enough, the inches worked fine in the rocket ship, and centimeters didn't work in the urban terrain.  Obviously, converting to centimeters essentially 'grows' your terrain, and the rocket is meant to be a small, confined space.  As it turns out, using centimeters wouldn't work in the rocket, because you'd spend two or three turns just crossing one room.  When you use inches, the confined space favors the pistol packers and the melee specialists at the expense of the long range shooters - as it should be.

On the other hand, we didn't much care for the use of centimeters in the wide open city.  It made the city feel  way too big.  It took too long to get anywhere, and moving your little doods a whopping 8-cm per turn running?  It didn't feel like you were accomplishing anything.  Instead, we scaled the game down by cutting the ranges and movement in half.  And that scale was juuuust right.

Turns out scaling down by 50% instead of 60% makes a big difference in the feel of the game.  Who knew? At any rate we're going to stick with halving all ranges...

Sort of.

There's one aspect of the game we're going to leave as-is - templates. 

Hand-painted and way cooler than the black
and whites in the rulebook.

Here's where things get interesting.  I honestly don't know how close to the RAW these templates get.  I just printed up the page from the rulebook onto a 5-inch by 7-inch card and used what the printer spit out.  These could be too big for our half-sized rules, and are certainly too small for our full-scale fights, but we don't care.  They are too big or too small for everyone, and that's how we balance things out.

Size Matters Plus

Here's a comparative shot of each of the different types of figures in my sci-fi collection. It's worth seeing how they all stack up against each other.

Action shot!  The lizards are caught by the human marines in a classic pincer movement. 

Finally got around to getting the BNL logo onto the side of the colony buildings.  This outfit doesn't have nearly enough logos to fit the canon universe, and it uses colors other than red, white, and blue, too.  It must be a prequel colony or maybe one of the other ships in the fleet pulled a Voyager and wound up half way across the galaxy where they gave up on the cruise and built their own space-empire.

New Project: Back to the Roots

With the latest car wars debacle still fresh in mind, it’s time to completely jump genres and scales.  It’s time to get back to my dungeon crawling roots. It’s been a few years since I’ve hosted a dungeon crawl, and this is as good a time as any.  Some thoughts on planning:

What rules?

This ranks as the most important question and the least important question at the same time.  On the one hand, the rules drive the miniatures.  On the other hand, there are a lot of rules out there, and they all operate from the same basic perspective with respect to the physical aspect of the game.  Every rule set worth its salt uses a square grid, so until we’re ready to really start rolling dice…we don’t need to answer this question just yet.  We will later, but not today.



A selection of Pendraken hero types in 10mm. 



What scale?

The big 25mm to 28mm miniatures are widely available and in a huge variety of styles, but they are so darn big.  You can only fit a few hundred in the box that I’ve got, and that’s assuming flat terrain tiles.  Which are boring.  They are also really expensive, on the order of $3 to $10 each, and they take an hour or more to paint.  Each.  Without the time, space, or money these are flat out wrong for me.



There are a lot of nice figures out there in the 15mm range, but most of those are sold in lots of 40-50 figures, the better to build an army.  You get a lot of personality, but wind up with a lot of unused lead in the bargain.  So that’s out, too.

Considering the three critical variables, there is really only one scale that will work for my dungeon crafting purposes, and that’s the not-quite-too-small-10mm range.  They are cheap – less than fifty cents a figure, and you can buy them in small enough lots for dungeon delving.  As if that’s not enough, Pendraken make a line of dungeon furniture in 10mm, too.  And if you don't think figures at this scale have enough personality, you haven't seen what Copplestone Castings can do:

Copplestone Casting's brilliant hero pack in 10mm.

What figs?

Here’s a question to which there is no final answer.  I can tell you this, though: I was able to pick up almost 20 heroes,  30 orcs, 16 ratmen, 3 bases of rats, a couple of food tables, a sewer beast, fire, pack animals, and a crate of food for less than 25 bucks.  That’s not a bad start.  For the record, I ordered one pack of heros and one pack of bad guys from each of Copplestone Castings and Pendraken Miniatures.  They'll be shipped out from the UK which gives me plenty of time to get started on a dungeon for them to guard and loot.

What dungeon?

That's the fun of this whole project.  I'm looking at all the various and sundry ways of building a 10mm dungeon from print your own to pre-cast walls and floors, and none of them look like as much fun as scratchbuilding my own.  At this point I'm still browsing the craft stores and kitchen drawers to see what looks cheap and effective.  At any rate, that's what you can expect from this blog over the next few months.

Pedestrians Double Crossing

On those rare special occasions when your driver actually walks away from a wreck, you need a figure for the other cars' aim.  Caesar Miniatures sells a box of Modern Militia (Asian and Somali Militia) that should serve just fine.  A lot of these guys are obviously Arab terrorist types with AK-47s and turbans and whatnot.  They'll look fine on the table top when painted up right.  I'm thinking flashy logo apparel.  One guy has a balacalava that looks exactly like the ones NASCAR drivers wear under their helmets, so he's good to go.

These little guys are 1/72 scale, so the scale is a little bit off.  But Matchbox cars have a pretty fluid scale themselves.  If you don't think about it too hard, they fit in just fine.  Thinking about using The Dip technique.  I actually prefer to drybrush white, then block in colors and dry brush one or two layers of lighter color for highlights, but that would mean buying three times as many colors, and I just don't have room for that.  So it's The Dip for me.  Stay tuned and I'll try and post a walk-through of the technique.

I had to special order this box from my new favorite hobby shop, Weller's Hobbycraft.  Right now I'm painting up 10 of the 36.  While writing this post, I realized that some of my 10 cars have gunners, so I may have to prime up a few more extras.  I'd paint up the whole box for pedestrian on vehicle mayhem, but they won't all fit inside the One Box to Rule Them All.



Next Up: Gunfight on Madison Avenue