Wargaming is for...

 

It would be nice to have one hobby that wasn't sacrificed on the altar of the moral panicky crowds.

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:

Hawaiians Rise Up

Looking to give Tribal a shot, and scratch pre-contact Hawaiian warfare off the bucket list.

These fellas are 15mm, and ordered from Eureka Miniatures.  They are clean sculpts, perfectly proportioned, and near as I can tell, historically accurate.

The figures are looking good but I don't have enough of them. No one would tell me how many figures you need. Let me ruin the mystery. You need a leader, at least one hero, and 15 to 20 guys per side. You buy warriors in groups of five, and one group, or one leader, or one heroes, all cost one army point.

Get the game here.

Centaur For a Friend

A good buddy, regular guy, not a gamer, asked if I can get him a centaur figure.

Oh yeah.  I can do that.

Modern Warfare: Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Guys

Welcome to plus-ultra mega-elite modern day wargaming where we feature stories ripped from the headlines.  Which naturally means stories that are as fake as the Piltdown Man.

To do that we'll need some modern terrain (working on it), some rules (Osprey's Black Ops), and a matched pair of forces.

In one corner, weighing in at several trillion dollars and dressed all in black, we have the SWAT forces dedicated to protecting the Modernist World Order:

In the other corner, weighing in at a couple hundred bucks and a few thousand rounds of ammo, we have this ragtag band of *ahem* Freedom Fighters.

 

Looks like a gross mis-match.  Let's go down to the sidelines and see what our roving analysts have to say about the coming game.  Take it away, Minh and Walid!

Nightwatch - Spawn Matrix

 Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World has proven to be a delightful little solo wargame that has kept your host occupied for hours.  Almost four of them so far, and I'm finally starting to get the hang of all the basic rules.  One thing that I have found helps me need to remember less stuff is to prepare a 'reinforcement' table before the game begins.  Rather than refer to the table in the book and have to remember turn number and what my current difficulty rating is, I can just grab the next batch of baddies and go to town.

Take a look:

The numbers at the top are the turn numbers, the letters down the left hand side represent "Terrors", "Hordes", and "Vermin" from top to bottom.  Now, once my little Guildsters have completed their four actions on a turn, I can just reach over and grab the next column of reinforcements.  This also gives me a solid 'turn counter', because I can just look at the blank columns and know where I am at in the current game.

Here is some tabletop eye candy showing a scrum as four heroes defend the bones of a fallen saint against the ravages of lizardmen:

And if you want to get your hands on a copy for yourself:

Nightwatch - Revised Character Sheet

 After playing through four games of "Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World", I've found the character sheets needed a little tweaking.

This should be enough to carry your Guildsmen through the full Long Hunt.  It has more room for the notes that you most often refer to in the game.  That means more room for class abilities and spells, and less space for those rare artifacts.  

Wargame Theory

 Not judging.  Just observing.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer.

Nightwatch: The Solo Wargame

 

This is a game about killing monsters. All kinds, anywhere, any time.

So speaketh Patrick Todoroff, the scribe behind Nightwatch.  

This little gem of a wargame is a solo wargame that features a fairly simple core mechanic upon which you can bolt all kinds of weird and wonderful special rules.

The short version is that you take four heroes onto a table filled with terrain and have to accomplish one of the standard wargame objectives. Break a thing. Cross the table. Find a hidden thing and get off the table. That sort of objective. The trick is that there are four spawn points where increasingly strong monsters are going to be pouring onto the table to stop you.

The core mechanic is that each figure gets four actions: a free move and three potential interactions. You've got to roll above a target number of 4+ to succeed. You get one each of the d6, d8, and d10 with which to try and take actions beyond that free move, and that's the core. Each character class gets two things it's good at, and so it can roll two dice looking for a success. Tanks get to roll two dice in melee and resisting damage. Wizards get to roll two dice when casting a spell or moving.

The enemies that spawn on the table have four classes as well. All get a free move and then they scale up in actions from a single d6 to a pair of d8s to three d10s. So each class grows in power exponentially. From one action to three per turn, and an increasing probability of moving and striking, it gets pretty tough. The last class is the big Big Battle, and that last boss has multiple wounds, multiple abilities, and four actions per turn, making it the end-state goal of a seven-plus mission quest.

If it all sounds a bit generic so far that's probably because it is, but that's all part of the beauty of the system. It's meant to be a starting point for you to use your own figures to really make the game come alive.

Got a giant bat swarm? Fine - they are vermin who who fly over obstacles. A minor threat, but one that can zip freely around the table.

Got skeletons? Give them a +1 to resist damage from bladed weapons.

Got a dragon figure? Make it the Big Boss and give it fire breath, flight, and ferocity. It'll make for a serious threat.

It's a refreshingly open game system, and one that looks robust enough after a couple games to allow for just the sort of tinkering that every wargamer does anyway.

Highly recommended.

The Sci-Fi Dungeon

 You don't have to choose.  These are all shots from a dungeon originally built for straight-up dungeon crawls.  By avoiding permanently affixed fantasy elements, you can change the whole look of the place with just a bit of scatter terrain.

The power core columns are blue wooden dowels normally used to hold the upper bunk of a bunkbed in place.  Painted with a blue glow effect and capped with washers, they would fit right into any engineering section.

Here you can see my rounded terminals with green screens, which are simply wooden plugs that cover up countersunk screws. Washers and paint make them a kiosk for all sorts of IT purposes.

In The Shadow of Giants

Banged out a quick weekend project recently, with mixed results.  These towering trees look okay, but the roots are nil, and they are way too fragile for regular use.

Classic construction method consisting of paper towel cardboard tubes covered with tissue, and the tissue is held in place with watered down craft glue. The problem is that even with the glue dried they're very lightweight they need a much heavier base probably a cap of something harder than just tissue paper over the top.

 I'll get some use out of them but it's hard to see how many games. Which is fine I don't have enough storage for these things anyway.

Nightwatch Roster Sheet

 

My first Nightwatch.

Since nobody else is going to do it, allow me.  If you're ready to play Nightwatch, a solo fantasy skirmish game by Stalker7, then you're going to want to use a more compact and efficient character sheet than those in the book.  They are fine.  They get the job done, but they take a full page to do what could be done in a quarter page.

You can either save that roster above and print four to a page using the "3.5-inch by 5-inch" setting on your printer, or print one to a page four times.

[EDIT: On March 15, 2021, I changed this roster sheet to make it more workable at the table.]

Nightwatch: The Solo Campaign

So I ordered a copy of this based on the recommendation of a viewer over on the channel, Justo Perez, and it's been a real struggle to read.

Not because of what's in it, but because life is hammering away at me with reckless abandon.  Not sure why, but every time I grab this book there's an emergency that drags my attention away.  Very strange.

And disappointing, because there's some real potential in this book.  It's a smallish skirmish game that looks designed to be played by a single player.  You would think that could be said most skirmish games, but we live in strange times.

You'll take two to four heroes, each of which has stats a bit less complicated than what you'd find in a Warhammer Quest style game.  They look to be more on par with what you see in Frostgrave, which is nice because you can also plug in a handful of less powerful and hence less-complex allies.

Then you've got to handle the hordes of enemies, whose stats are (mostly) single dice.  The bigger named entities stand out with more actions and more special rules that complicate matters, but it still doesn't look unmanageable for a single player. 

We'll have to play through a game or two to know for sure.

For now, I really like what I see.  It's specific where it needs to be specific, vague where it needs to be vague, and just open-ended enough to allow for some exploration.  And how about that tagline?

In a grimdark world where everyone is falling all over themselves to wonder who are the real bad guys, where Disney keeps trying to explain that witches are cool, actually, and literal satanic pedophiles exercise global power, it's nice to find a game that admits...

It's the monsters.

Monsters are bad guys.

Go kill them.

More to follow after this game meets the tabletop.