Time to Vent

The good ship Everything needs a way to move air around for the meat sacks that pilot it.  The things that eat the meat sacks that pilot it also need a way to move around unobserved.  The meat sacks that pilot the ship need a way to move about for those all-too-often times when the bridge is commandeered by hostile forces. It's three, three, three problems all in search of the same solution - vents!

Rich gamers buy fancy pants vents precast by one of the many fine wargame companies that do such things to separate us hard working types from our well deserved money.  Those of us among the hoi polloi make do, as in most things, with cereal box packing.  I carve a square out of said cereal packing, and then a whole slew of strips the same length as that square and about 2mm wide.  Glue those strips in place, slightly overlapped just like vinyl house siding, and it looks like a directional vent.  Here's three thousand words worth of explanation:

1. Just the square.

2. Slight diagonal overlap.

3. All done but the painting.

The ship has five of these installed, and each will be painted with a different identification number, 1 through 5, stenciled on it.  That's a game decision that comes into play during certain scenarios.

Anything that goes into a vent this turn, pops out on the next turn at a random vent.  Roll a d6 and that's the vent you drop out of.  A 6 means you are lost and have to wait until the next turn.  In cases where the model really knows the structure of the ship (like the Chief Engineer) the character in the vent may have the ability to bump the result up or down one notch.

Beautiful Asymmetry

Yesterday we talked about the three different styles of stairs.  Today I want to talk about why I didn't just use one template.  It all comes down to asymmetry.

Asymmetry is important from a gamesmanship perspective.  If all three sides of the rocket are identical, that limits the tactical possibilities.  You need to give players those choices between alternate routes, some faster than others, some with more cover than others, to keep them on their toes.  When there's no difference between right and left, the choices don't matter as much.  If the right path is more direct, but heavily guarded, now you've got to balance factors.

This also gives you more scope when it comes to designing scenarios.  If you place that goal point behind a choke point, you get a different game than when you put it somewhere with multiple routes of entry.

In the case of the stairs, the solid staircase blocks off a potential ladder down to the ground floor of the rocket (in this case, the engine room).  There won't be a ladder down on the right hand side of this picture, either.  That forces the little dudes to cross over to the back side of the rocket if they want to get into the bottom room on this picture.

Note also that there's one door on the top level shown in the photo.  There's a great big hole in the floor blocking the front room from the back left.  To get to that room in the back left, you've either got to run around through the door on the right and the back right room, or climb down to the small landing on the left, around the wall, and back up the ladder on the other side.  Going left takes longer.  Going right exposes you to enemy fire while you sprint around the level.  Those are choices that matter, and those are the kind of choices you want players to have to make.

The solid staircase also makes a nice little hidey-hole for tribbles, and you only really need one of those.

Theme and Variation on Stairs

Among other things, I'm thankful for all of you who check in and make this blog worthwhile.  I've been in a gaming drought for a while, and this helps me feel like a member of the community.  I'm also thankful to live in a time when it is so easy to find so many different figures from so many different small businesses.  This morning I ordered two sets of figures for Major Tom's Spaceship from three different manufacturers on three different continents.  To a guy who cut his teeth on mimeographed* house-rules that's pretty amazing.

Here's the lazy man's way of building stairs:

1. Two bamboo skewers cut to size and glued in place.

2. Build the treads like so. One 2mm wide glued to a 5mm tread.

3. Glue the treads in place as shown.  This preserves line of
sight, and you can even wedge the little mans in place.

Figure for scale.

That's two of the staircases.  I also made one ramp (shown in the back right), and one traditional staircase.  It loses a little consistency, but the ramp provides more cover, and the stairs just plain look cool.  I think so right now, anyway.  I may go back and change it to make all the stairs the same, just to keep the retro-vibe going.

*Note to the under 30 crowd - Google it.

Spaceship Detailing While You Wait

These photos may not look all that different from yesterday's, but they show a three-hour effort to seal up and streamline Major Tom's Rocket. A whole bunch of cereal box cut into 5mm side strips have been plastered to every piece of exposed foam-core to allow for spray painting this piece without melting it.

The start of rocket pods have been added to the bottom-most level as well.  I've got a lot more pieces to add to these (tops of dishwater detergent bottles) to make them look more rockety (rocketish?), but those will have to wait until after the first paint job. In fact, this is one piece of terrain that is going to require careful planning.  I've got a lot of ideas for furniture, but I can't put any furniture in until after I detail the walls and floors.  Just like a real rocket.

The nice thing about this style of construction is that you don't have to get every joint perfectly lined up.  You can always cover seams with piping and detail, as I've done with the long greenish pipe in the corner.  That pipe is covering a gap of about 2mm that no one will ever see.  I'm much better at covering mistakes than avoiding them, so you're going to see a lot of piping in the corners of this project.

Calling Major Tom

It's time for a big reveal of a little ship.  My latest and greatest project was partially inspired by the guys over on TheMiniaturesPage.com pimping Pocketmunda and partially inspired by the pictures inside the Starship Marine rules (pdf warning).

What you're looking at here is a starship that cost ten bucks to put together.  Two five dollar pieces of foamcore gave their lives to make this dandy little piece of gaming terrain.  It stands just a hair under 21" tall, so it should fit into a standard 40 quart plastic tub.

The original plan called for the walls and floors to snap together and come apart for ease of storage and transport, but the the 120-degree angle between wall pieces didn't turn out right.  (No compass and no protractor make Warren a dull boy.)  In order to get everything lined up right and sturdy enough for game play, I had to glue the whole shebang.

That figure standing over on the left hand side of the small middle floor is a 10mm Pendraken space minotaur.  But as a space minotaur, he stands roughly 15mm tall.  Convenient since this will be a 15mm terrain piece, and I don't actually have any 15mm figures yet.

The plan calls for a bridge on the top level, engines and a storage bay on the bottom floors with couches, gardens, TVs, a kitchen set, and all sorts of sci-fi-ish goodness sprinkled throughout.  Wish me luck - I'm gonna need it to keep my gamer ADD at bay.

New Project, New Scale, Old Habits

It's time for a new project, and maybe a new scale.  The size and cost and ease of storage of the 10mm boys is great, but there are a lot of fun little 15mm troops out there, too.  Most of the games I play are more skirmish and having banged my head against the Tomorrow's War wall for long enough, it may be time to move up a notch.

I should probably at least finish painting the 10mm figures I have, but what's a wargamer without some unpainted lead, right?

So here's a sneak peak at the next big (15mm) thing from your host:

One piece of foam core, sans terrain.

FUBAR Ruminations

Woah, four posts in four days, this blog just might be back.  It's amazing how much more time a guy has when he's not coaching his daughter's soccer team to a league championship.  That's right, I know how to coach soccer - the secret is inheriting kids from other coaches who know what the heck they are doing.

Same scenario. Different rules.  Different results.

This weekend, our first game of FUBAR pit two evenly matched forces in a fight for the mining station.  The humans consisted of roughly 25 Veteran troops backed up by three 2-man HMGs and a sniper team.  The lizardfolk had 20 infantry and 5 cavalry at their disposal.  For the purposes of learning the game, we classified the cavalry as vehicles armed only with a single HMG.  In both cases, we used units of roughly 5 men/lizards with the snipers operating alone, and the cavalry split into two units of 2 and 3 lizards.  Aaaaand, fight!

We spent a fair few minutes hashing out what the rules mean by ‘unit’.  In retrospect, it doesn’t really matter from a balance perspective.  Large units means more guys sitting around when they fail to activate. Small units mean that you always have at least a few guys doing something, even if they aren’t as effective as the big groups when they do act.

To big for infantry, too small for vehicles.  Time for Rule One!

We treated the cavalry as vehicles, but it felt wrong.  They were too tough to bring down, and the idea that they have more armor in front is a bit silly.  In retrospect, I’d treat them as vehicles except that every hit should be classified as against the rear armor (roll twice and take the higher result).  That makes them more fragile than tanks, but keeps them fast and dangerous.

We also had a talk about what the lizard-mounted guys were armed with on a personal basis.  He sweet talked me into allowing them to have assault rifles, when I figured the little blue shlubs would be hard pressed to work a big cannon with one strapped to their back.  Not a big deal, but something that should be worked out on both sides before the game starts.

Space-bug-angel-demons!

With this experience under our belts, we're amped up to try the bug rules from the "Generic Sci-Fi" one page supplement.  It looks like they'll handle very different from standard troops.  That's another thing that felt off with our test run - the lizards didn't feel alien enough - but that's a function of using the rules in as vanilla a fashion as possible to get a handle of things.

Next time will be different.