Alternate Histories

Achieved a couple things today. First, I finally got in a round of Junior General's Hampton Roads scenario at work.

There were fourteen fourth graders expecting an activity, and the children's librarian was busy. I checked with the teacher and she was amenable - though I presented it as "sea captains and pirates" to begin with.

I divided the kids by color of shirt - five black, nine blue - into teams. (Since Monitor has fewer guns, this is fairer than it sounds.) Then I just went person to person. Each turn, one kid would move a ship, and the rest would take turns "firing". Next turn, whoever was next in line would be "Captain" for the turn and the cycle continued. The firing mechanism is Fred T. Jane's original "pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey" routine, using the bamboo skewers seen in the above photo.

The photo is old, by the way, and I didn't have the storytime rug. Would've come in handy, actually, since the kids were naturally crowding each other; but in general they took turns and learned the procedures quickly. I was limited to the floor-carpet, but it is a blue-grey mix of angled shapes so still quite sea-like.

For presentation, I asked if they'd been studying black history, and they had. I explained that this was based on a real battle from 160 years ago, and that it might take a while or even be a tie because these ships were special. Among the first to be made of iron, cannonballs would usually bounce off! (There were "ooooh"s at this.) I taught them the ship names as well, though I used Merrimac just because it sounds funnier.

I misplaced the rules for casualties (D6 per penetrating hit), but there are other ways to win, by either hitting the waterline, the gunports or Monitor's pilot house. The Virginia took an early lead with a hit on Monitor's turret that knocked out one gun. That slowed return fire. There are two sheets of silhouettes - one short range, one long - and the Union players learned quickly to stay far away where their "crackerbox on a shingle" was too tiny to hit, and Virginia's lower speed and maneuverability made it harder to catch up. Monitor got lots of hits on its bigger target.

However, they eventually learned to present their four-gun broadside, and the few hits they got were eventually crippling. The pilot house was hit once (twice and the captain is blinded and the ship must retreat) and after half an hour they knocked out the second gun. Monitor had to retreat.

Every hit resulted in cheers, and kids were even encouraging their opponents. I had to quiet them down and tell them to sit back and not interfere with each other, but their enthusiasm was infections. The target sheets, punctured in many places, will have to be replaced.

A Bit More Minceheim

 It's been a very long while since I tried Minceheim. I turned up the Warhammer minis I intended to use it with, and just received a Battlefield in a Box forest, so let's get started.

I entered into ChatGPT: "I am playing a small skirmish wargame. Create a map of a 2x2foot table that includes hills, a forest and a ruined house."

I was hoping for a map, but I guess that's only for the AI art prograns. Instead, it gave me quite a detailed description. In addition to a forest in the center, with hills and house in the corners, it also suggested using scatter terrain, craters around the house, and a stream or pond "if your wargame has rules for bodies of water." And it provided suggestions as to whether certain areas should be difficult terrain or partial cover. Not bad.

Next, I asked for deployment of six goblins and three elves. I got units instead, but it should still work.The deployment, unfortunately, was a bit odd - Elves to SE, center and NW, Gobbos to NW, center, SE and SW. (Sort of criss-crossing each other.) This will need a little modification. I'll put the Elves all to the center and NW (largest hill) and goblins at the other three corners.

That's better...

The sides are:

Elves: Two Swordmasters of Hoeth (sword, medium armor) and a Lothern Sea Guard (spear, bow, medium armor).

Goblins: One Night Goblin Shaman (counts as handgun - it can misfire), one with sword, one with sword and shield, one with spear and shield, two archers. All with light armor.

Turn One: Elves go first. Everyone with a bow aims at a target, everyone else moves towards the enemy.

Turn Two: Gobbos go first. The Seaguard on the hill is hit twice, but passes both saves. One of the Swordmasters is hit, and even a better save for being in the forest doesn't save him from being stunned. The Seaguard fires back at the shaman and knocks him back an inch.

The central conflict.

Turn Three: The uninjured Swordmaster steps between his stunned comrade and harm, while the Seaguard climbs down out of the Shaman's view, but falls (rolled a 1) and stuns himself. Well, he was already going to be technically stunned from the climb.

Turn Four: The sides continue to approach each other. A goblin launches an arrow and would have killed an elf but for him passing his 4+ save.

Turn Five: Elves meet Gobbos in the forest, but the Elves pass their saves. In return, one Elf stuns his opponent.

Turn Six: The elf hits his stunned opponent again, but only rolls a two (pushback). I think it's fair to upgrade that to another turn of stun. The other, following up his goblin, is hit in the side by an arrow which pushes him to the side, towards a third goblin that has made it at last to the forest.

This game isn't quite as bloody as it might be.

Turn Six: One Swordmaster continues to stun his opponent. Maybe there should be a coup de grace rule? The other loses a duel with the Boss and is stunned himself.

Turn Seven: I remember thinking that shooting can be too powerful (no roll to hit) and here it is: two elves are killed by shooting. The stunned Swordmaster makes his save...

Turn Eight: ... and is back on his feet, ready to exact revenge. He hacks down his opponent! He's charged in the side by another, but this time the rolloff is a tie (+1 to the Gobbo for his shield).

Turn Nine: The Shaman, who has been waiting for this, fires off a sorcerous blast at +2 to wound. The hapless Elf is stunned and charged. He fails his 5+ armor save and a slash of the Gobbo's jagged blade ends his centuries of life.

Short but sweet again, with only one wound to the Goblins who more than held their own. Perhaps the Elves should get +1 to everything for, y'know, being Elves. Or perhaps I should have chosen an objective rather than an all-out brawl. Or maybe the rules just need a little more complexity.

Still, the rules are fun. Check 'em out! I may try his pencil-and-paper Manor House game next.

Paperboys for Featherstone and Other Such Things.

I've always been enamored of Donald Featherstone's 1963 rules, as shown on Man of Tin's blog:

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Three simple sets, for Ancients (a la Tony Bath), 18th/19th century, and Modern (which at the time meant WWII).

While 18th Century is my first love, I have a heaping handful of basic WWII stuff now that will work alright for the "modern" rules.

My first effort at an M4 - appears to be overarmed!

The tank didn't last long - partly because I made it out of regular "20lb" paper, it is easy to accidentally indent the "box" of the hull, and once it's closed, you can't pop it back out. I also had to use glue to stick the turret to the hull, which didn't last. The intent is to use an exacto-knife to cut a hole in the top of the hull and bottom of the turret, then connect them with a "straw" of paper. Finally, there are many accessories to add on - machine guns, markings, armor and so on, which I left out in this test model.

Two twelve-man US infantry squads.

On the gaming side of things, you'll notice I've based the infantry in three-man teams. This is because those 1963 WWII rules are among the first to have multibases, three figures apiece. These may be riflemen, machine-gunners, mortar sections, etc, but each is effectively a singular element that can be killed by a single die roll (usually a five or six to hit). I look forward to trying this, but tanks and artillery are important to the game too - infantry alone plinking at each other would not be so interesting.

For this reason, I'm considering also using plastics. I've had a canister of toy WWII types for ages, and - in part to provide some armor to use bazookas and panzerschrecks against - I also added a few 54mm scale toy tanks. I'm having the same dilemma between Little Wars Paperboys and Armies in Plastic toys for playing two 54mm-scale games - HG Wells' Little Wars and Howard Whitehouse's A Gentleman's War. I'll discuss that in a future post.

Instead, here's a few more Paperboys types I'm working on:

A third squad of US WWII infantry

A few Sioux and buffalo for Native American Heritage Month.
Not shown - an Aztec house and a couple Tipis.

The newest Paperboys are tricky to assemble because they do not have tabs - they must be stuck edge-on to the base. White glue is best for this, but I've found it helps to add the drop of glue, then leave it several minutes to set before sticking the figure into it. It also helps if you can vertically bend or "kink" the figure, and while you can achieve the same effect by cutting out the legs and giving them a "step out" pose, it works better on rows of figures than on individuals, as you can see. So in future I may leave the space under their legs uncut.

Something else gamewise I need to plan: a Dungeons and Dragons encounter for tomorrow. The Youmedia manager wants me to run it properly, in place of the generic games and puzzles, so, ah well, I'll try it. So I'm reading the basic rules, listening to a couple how-to-gamemaster books, and prepping dice sets.

I also have a few things to try to paint: 8th edition 40K starter Space Marines, and 10th edition starter set Tyranids.

And a couple things to game - that test Dragon Rampant game, and a round of Minceheim.

Oh, and a job interview.

I think I'm under a certain Chinese curse...

Sergeants Three

We played a Gunga Din scenario at Das Krieg Haus last week. I haven't seen the film since university, but it was the GM, Devon's, favorite, and he even had miniatures of the stars for us to play. It's been a long while since I've gotten in a game of The Sword and the Flame. The blocky but attractive setting:

Some of the simpler building were made by Devon's grandfather,
a nice keepsake!

One of the objectives - fallen telegraph poles which I had to raise
to request reinforcements.

In the film, starring Cary Grant, Douglas Fairbanks and Victor McLaglen, Kipling's "Sergeants Three" find themselves holding off a swarm of Thuggee cultists. (I asked if there was a miniature of Indiana Jones about, and there was!) I got McLaglen, AKA Sergeant McChesney. Each sergeant had ten Indian troops, Guides I think, and a bhisti. The bhistis allowed a roll against a D8 for wounded troops. 1-3 dead, 4-6 no result, 7-8 recovered. I'm sad to say nearly all our attempts got the wounded men inadvertently killed, to the point that at moments of crisis we were actively hoping for it so that we wouldn't have to carry them out of reach of the enemy! (In TSATF, Colonial troops take morale checks when wounded men are killed by natives, but two men assisting one wounded man aren't available for the firing line.)

The combat result table was simplified; in particular, British
shooting is better. Normally the best is 7 or less on a D20.

A typical result. Devon uses squares of red felt to denote the 
resting places of casualties - a handy way to make it look more
like a battlefield without cluttering the table with figures.

That's Ballantine's squad above, patrolling the town while mine fixes the telegraph lines and Cutter secures a supply building. Thuggee appeared in random buildings to pester us. The theory was that this would be like a zombie film, with enemies increasing in number as ours sank, but in practice we were lucky enough to not have more than we could handle for most of the game.

My squad were attractively painted with fur trim on the coats.

They succeeded, with random rolls, at raising the
telegraph poles and calling for reinforcement.

Despite the bad guys raining fire on me and eventually killing
both McChesney and my bhisti.

My survivors went off to help Ballantine, but ended up having to 
hide in cover until our relief under Higginbotham turned up.

Some of the opposition.

I love this figure and its enormous sword!

Cutter beseiged on the Residency roof.

While casualty-burdened good guys limp down the street.

Did I mention I was surrounded?

Higginbotham arrives, and my leaderless squad hastens to
join him.

Cutter, meanwhile, assisted by dynamite, has done enormous damage.

Ballentine and Cutter escape the board ahead of hordes of unhappy cultists.

End game - (most of) the Indian Army chaps have escaped,
leaving a lot of frustrated or dead Thuggee.

This was basically like the smaller-skirmish version The Sword in Africa - with only four players (one for each squad) and a GM trying to kill us. I was surprised that it went so well on such a small scale, but Devon removed all unnecessary mechanisms and ran the game at a fair clip. We all enjoyed ourselves, and there were, appropriately, plenty of cinematic moments. I don't think any of the bhistis survived, though, nor were they much help! A fine and atmospheric game.