Getting Social

Let's face it, wargaming is a fringe hobby, and my style of wargaming is on the fringes of that hobby.  I play games that are ten years out of print and in scales that are far from popular even in cities with thriving gaming cultures.  Honolulu ain't one of those cities, so it's pretty bleak.  That puts me on the fringe of the fringe, but there's this great technology called 'the internet' that lets me see what cool stuff other outsiders are up to.  It's high time I got a little more connected with those fringe types.  

To that end, I've finally updated by blogroll over there on the left.  If I missed your blog and you want a shout-out, let me know with an email or comment.  I'll also keep plugging in more blogs as they present themselves to my wandering eyes.

More Buildings Moved to the Complete Column

It's summertime.  No soccer coaching.  No homework.  No marathon training.  This is supposed to be the busy time for catching up on a year's worth of miniature wargame stuff.  And yet, thanks to a big move and work and other boring real world stuff, progress has slowed to a standard holiday season crawl.  BUT!  Progress continues...

Just a couple more to go...

Sisterhood of the 10mm Pants

I've had these two archers languishing in my paint box for months.  They are the best I could do at finding female archers for characters in the long-on-hiatus D&D campaign for my kids and their friends.  Pendraken's Amazons might work, but they'll need a lot of green stuff before I let my daughter use one to represent her.  The characters are sisters and elves, so these should work find for that.

Does this mean that more D&D is on the horizon?  Let's hope so...

Update on Painting the Town

Work on the home front and my home on the work front finally slacked off enough to let me paint up two more buildings for the Pocketmunda terrain board.  When done, this board should work just find for the scenarios included in the Tomorrow's War main rulebook as well.

Bright, clean, pulpy buildings.  Hopefully I can even use these is a Pulp Ally/Fantastic Worlds/.45 Adventure game someday, too.

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.

The Other Shorties

If this corn-fed, midwestern wargamer knows his street vernacular, and unless Urban Dictionary has lied to me yet again, "shorty" is a slang term for a hot suburban woman.  That would mean that my daughter's Pocketmunda gang is the first set of shorties that I've painted up.  Which would make the subjects of today's post the other shorties, this time by way of stature rather than gender.

Shorties and gentlemen, behold!  Rebel Minis' Sons of Thunder:

Each pack comes with four squads of six Sons.  That's four leaders, four heavies, and four squaddies (in two different poses) per unit.  That should make the orders of battle easy to figure out.

Squad leaders

The Sons are my own son's battleforce, so he gets to pick the colors.  The base color combo of purple and gold/yellow is a solid choice suggesting a royal force of god miners.  At some point, I may have to build some industrial mining scenery for them to cal

Heavies

Red Squad

Blue Squad

The limited number of poses precludes these guys from being used in skirmish games without a lot of work.  Since these guys are going to be used on my table as a platoon, I've forgone the numbers on the bases.  Instead, I used slashes of color to clearly delineate which guys are in which squad.  The base colors match small highlights on the figures, tying them all together in a way that should help players when looking down on the table from on high.

Future plans for these guys include the addition of some power-armor suits - at the suggesting of some smart folks over on TheMiniaturesPage.com, I'm looking into some of Hasslefree Miniatures' Grymn Power Armor figures.  These are designed as 28mm figures, which just means they'll make great mini-mechs at the 15mm scale.  Stay tuned...

Tomorrow's War AAR: Tiger by the Tail

[Updated May 29, 2013:  Additional AAR's added to links at bottom of post.]

The boy and I had another opportunity to play a wargame in a way that required us to don sunscreen before rolling them bones.  Just another day in paradise.  We have enough 10mm tanks to take the Tomorrow's War scenario Tigers by the Tail for a spin, but not the terrain.  To compensate, we drew out the battlefield in chalk on the concrete patio like so:


 Before starting the game we ran into the first problem: What sort of woods are those?  The scenario didn't specify.  If they are light woods they do nothing, and what's the point of having them? If they are heavy woods, then they black movement and fire. In which case it's a shooting gallery for the US Forces.  We decided they are light woods that prevent rapid movement and block fire after three inches.  That slows down the DPRG, but gives them ample room to maneuver while protecting them from the better guns of the USMC.


The USMC gets the initiative, moves into place, and just like that two DPRG tanks are out of action.  The DPRG couldn't grab the reaction fast enough to get into cover, so the USMC essentially started the game with 2 of the 6 VP needed for victory.  One tank out of action and the lead tank's main gun knocked out - this would be a pretty boring game...or would it?


The DPRG rushes its damaged tank off the table, narrowing the victory margin, and moves the other into position to hurt the USMC with a shot up the tail pipe.  In the back half of the table, the USMC wipes out a second tank, but is too far back to catch Bai Lin's command tank.


The DPRG gets greedy - rather than get off the table for 2 VP, the lead tank takes a pot shot at the weak rear armor of the USMC.  To make matters worse, the USMC rolls a one on it's Reaction roll, triggering an off-board artillery strike that leaves it unable to move.  The DPRG gets a solid shot off and scores another VP by blowing the USMC tank to kingdom come.  With the score 4-3 in favor of the USMC, and one tank ready to move off table at the start of the next round, the game boils down to a single die roll on the right half of the table.  If the DPRG wins it's reaction roll, it can get another tank near the board edge and behind cover, leaving no way for the USMC to hit it.

Alas, it wasn't meant to be.  The USMC wins the roll, swats the tiger like a annoying bug, (leading to my son's quip asking if the DPRG tanks are named after the cat or the mosquito), leaving the DPRG unable to score enough points to win the game.


At the start of turn 4, the USMC again gets the initiative and moves up to take out the remaining DPRG tank before it can get off table.  The USMC tank has just enough movement to poke its snout out of the woods and blast the DPRG, avenging the loss of the USMC tank earlier in the game.

Final result - an 8 to 3 USMC victory.  Not a decisive win, but solid.  The game started ugly, but the DPRG fought back to make a game of it and add some drama in the mid-game, but couldn't overcome the weak armor plating and tech level difference of the two types of tanks.

We did some things wrong in this game (we didn't use the Buttoned Up rules at all, but that wouldn't have made a difference to any of the Reaction rolls), and fudged some things (Ambush Alley, you've got to do a better job detailing terrain effects in the scenarios).  Nonetheless, a good time was had by both, and no one got sunburned, so things worked out great.

As mentioned in this blog previously, part of the fun of running these scenarios is comparing the results of your own fight to that of others.  Here are a couple of other guys that ran this for your own comparison:

• Walworth County Gamers
• The Ooh Shiny Complex
• Tabletop Geeks

 If you know of any other AAR's for this scenario, let me know and I'll add them in.