Games for Historicon 2016
Historicon returns to the Fredericksburg Expo and Convention Center on July 14-17 this year. This year’s theme is “Cavalry, Mounted warfare through the ages”. Myself and a couple of my gaming buddies here in Winchester are making the trip and running a few games.
15mm Soviet Cavalry from Old Glory ready to march to Historicon
Friday at 9 AM Brett and Brian will be putting on a big Lion Rampant game. Brian is custom building a bunch of terrain for the game and it should be a nice spectacle. Read More…
Vyazma or Bust with Battlegroup: Barbarossa
“You can take a picture of it [the dead KV-2] if you put it on your blog. You haven’t put anything there in years”
The picture was snapped and so the challenge accepted. After a 3-ish year hiatus, I am back with some accounts of our latest game.
Last year at Historicon I got a chance to try out the Battlegroup series of WWII rules from Ironfist Publishing. I enjoyed the games a lot and so brought the rules home for the group to try, where they have also been a hit. I’ll let others provide a review, but we have really enjoyed these as they move fast, have enough command uncertainty, and create historically reasonable outcomes.
For our latest venture we have been playing the Vyazma or Bust campaign written for IABSM and converting the scenarios to use with the Battlegroup: Barbarossa rules. This campaign is set during the fall of 1941 as a part of the Barbarossa campaign.
FOW – Back to the Eastern Front
Things have been pretty hectic lately on the home front (more on that soon), so I’m a little behind on game reports I wanted to make. Now of course the memory of the events is a little fuzzy, so I’m going to try and get the gist of the game down, along with all of the eye candy.
Our most recent FOW game was another Eastern Front game set in Summer of 1944. Read More…
FOW – Road ambush in Belorussia
Last week we got together for a mid-week holiday schedule game and decided on a quick and easy Flames of War game. Bob assembled a force of Soviets and I put together German unit, both within the approximate timeline of Summer 1944. We decided to give the Roadblock scenario from the FOW rule book a try. Despite having owned the Version 2 rulebook since it came out, I’ve never tried out that scenario.
FOW – PakFront!
Scott and I got together for a FOW game last week. I had been looking at the Kampfgruppe von Sauken scenario that was posted on the Flames of War website and thought that the set up and general game conditions seemed interesting. However, as written the scenario has a major flaw IMO – there are a large number of forces for the table size depicted. There would essentially be zero maneuver room and the game would be a dice-roling contest. Not my cup of tea. So we decided to take the same basic scenario and play it with a much more reasonable force mix. We ended up inverting the attacker and defender with Scott attacking with Soviets and me playing Germans trying to form a hasty PakFront to hold off the Soviet attack.
FOW at the Tennessee Tussle
On Saturday, a couple of locals gamers organized a game day here in Knoxville called the Tennessee Tussle. In the past the event has largely featured tournaments for the area GW gamers, but this year a couple of groups of local historical gamers got involved as well. The Yankee Peddler club put on a 15mm sail game set in the Caribbean (which I unfortunately arrived to late to get any pictures of) and I volunteered to put on a Flames of War game. I decided to put on the German counterattack against the Soviet road column that we played a couple of weeks ago.
FOW – River Assault
A couple of weeks ago, Battlefront published a report of a game on the Flames of War website covering a river crossing scenario. The scenario interested me, so we decided to take the information provided in the web article and do a river crossing game. We kept with our recent Operation Bagration theme for the setting of the game.
FOW – Bagration Counterattack
I put together another scenario for our running narrative semi-campaign covering Operation Bagration. For this game, German elements of 5th Panzer Division are counterattacking against Soviet the Soviet penetration northof Borisov.
Breakout at Borizov
Last week we continued our series of eastern front Flames of War games set during Operation Bagration. In the first game, elements of 78th Sturm Division stopped the Soviets cold in their sector, as happened historically at points along the line. The Soviets broke through at many other points along the line though and so for this second game I decided to portray a Soviet tank thrust against elements of 5th Panzer Division and 505th Heavy Panzer Battalion . The Soviets were to field a pair of medium tank battalions with the objective to penetrate as far west as possible with as much force as possible. Against them was a pair of German companies tasked with stopping the breakout using minimal forces.
Breakthrough to Orsha
Battlefront recently released the first of their new books covering aspects of Operation Bagration, titled Stalin’s Onslaught. As with most of their recent books, this one focuses on a couple of unique units that opposed one another – in this case the German 78th Sturm Division and various elements of the 8th Guards Rifle Corp used in the initial assaults on the German lines. One of the things featured in the book is a breakdown of the Special Assault Groups formed by the Soviets to punch through the outer ring of fortifications. We decided to try and represent one of these, taking a slice through the unit and trying to preserve the proportions of the various units as much as possible. I put together a scenario in which the Soviets are trying to open as wide a gap in the German lines as possible along the Minsk-Moscow highway. Read More…
Straight from the Painting Desk
Test model for 3mm Caunter camo pattern
Repple Depple 
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