Reading and other Miscellany

You'd think I'd get something gaming-wise done during a four-day weekend. Nope.

I had a couple things planned:

• I broke out my two Kill Team boards with thoughts of playing 8th edition 40K on them. Never got around to it, since the pieces have to be removed from three different boxes first, all of which are buried under the table. But I was looking through a Charles S. Grant scenario book, and realized that 30"x44" (the size of both boards together) is barely over half the size of the 5'x7' Tabletop Teaser maps. Add a drop cloth so the game isn't set on Mars, play at half move/range, and I can use the 18mm Wofuns just as I did for Blasthof.
• Jim Johnson is running his annual Christmas Carnage game at Das new Kreig Haus tomorrow. I can't make it due to a prior commitment, though if it finishes quickly I might be able to drop in at the end. Traffic around here is hell though on Black Friday weekend. We'll see.

On my reading list:

• Wargamer's Annual volume 1 - with a miscellany of articles on 17th-to-19th century topics - mostly by Charles Grant, Phil Olley and the late Stuart Asquith. Also lots of lovely Bob Marrion illustrations and other eye candy. This series is hard to obtain in physical form, and I was delighted to find this issue in pdf on Wargames Vault. I hope they publish more.
• Challenger, by Adam Higginbotham - about the space shuttle Challenger disaster, this was chosen by my former workmate for next month's book discussion. Looks very thorough. Sadly, the members were reticent (despite my assurance that it's not quite as technical as it sounds) and I selected something more "conventional," but I'll still read it, and maybe try to talk them into using it for January. The 40th anniversary is next January, and a manned flight to the moon (!) is scheduled for February. Good luck to them.
• Homer's Odyssey, translated by Robert Fagles - an old and spotted Penguin edition I weeded from the library collection. I never have read the Iliad or the Odyssey, might as well get to it now.
• Anzac to Amiens - an old classic by CEW Bean, a one-volume extract of the twelve-volume official history of Australia in WWI. Pretty good, though it takes a third of the pages to get past Gallipoli.
• Hero of the Empire, by Candice Millard - about Winston Churchill during the Boer War. A fine adventurous story with potential for TSATF games.

I've ordered some terrain by Games Workshop. With the reproduction of the "Old World" Warhammer Fantasy, their plastic hills, walls and fences are available again. The obstacles are 28mm, but the hills can be used with my 18mms as well. I hope to paint the obstacles up with speedpaint markers as those become available - the local shop has told me they will be getting a display in a couple weeks. They may not work for the hills as those are much larger and there's not much paint in the markers, but touchups and edges? Maybe.

Finally, a tempting project that Paperboys are planning:

A massive commemorative display game for the anniversary next year of 1066. I haven't done any papercrafting at all recently, but I could use the relaxation - provided I can source the required paper, card and ship the lot back to Peter Dennis afterwards - it is a community project to make a one-to-one-scale pair of armies. Would be cool to do, but a fairly massive project as it involves making one huge base with up to 300 figures on it!

Should I?

Reading, Reading, over the bending page

A short and breezy autobiography of Fred Haise, who was Lunar Module Pilot of Apollo 13 and later tested the space shuttle. Clearly ghost-written, except for the technical jargon, but okay and with some interesting insights into the development of the LM and shuttle.

Moshe Dayan in the center.

A straightforward account of the runup to war and the battle for Jerusalem in 1967, by the Israeli commander. Makes me want to look up Peter Young's accounts of the Six-Day War and of his service with the Arab Legion. Makes an interesting point that King Hussein's involvement in the war was reluctant.

Not a single C-47 appears
in the book.

Reading this for the library's book club. It's your typical romantic wartime novel, partly set in the Warsaw Ghetto before and during the Rising and partly postwar in Hollywood, with the beautiful heroine forced to decide what she will do to survive. (Revenge and murder, mostly.) The local population is very Jewish, so hopefully will be an interesting discussion. I find it contrived and melodramatic; it doesn't feel right given the theme - though I have seen an RPG like it, Grey Ranks, set during the later 1944 Rising, in which players are teenage soldiers, complete with a romance tracker. 

The club's move to Das Krieg Haus 2 is mostly complete. It's much smaller than the old one, but more comfortable as it's in an office space rather than a storage center. It's also closer to home for me, about twenty minutes.

A separate "storage" area with bathroom and fridge.

Room for a 5x10 table, and normal floors rather than concrete.

Significantly less storage space, though some stuff is only
temporarily there, held for members who will take it home.

Gaming at home? Dunno. I did just buy a few speedpaint markers, looking forward to trying them. 'Til next time.

Slow Blogging

Sometimes I do get some gaming in, but I'm unmotivated to write it up. Work has been tiring and depressing lately, and often when I get home or have a day off, I waste it (well, unless excessive reading doesn't count). A couple weeks ago I spent a Sunday at Das Krieg Haus - possibly for the last time, as the club is moving to a smaller space which will at least be closer to home for me. I got in a game and a half and have let the photos age long enough; let's see if I can muster up enough memory to do them justice.

The first is a Crimean War scenario taken from Wargames Illustrated issue 18, in which a British brigade held off a Russian division for some time among broken terrain. I was asked if Charge! would work for it, but given the figures available (we would need 32 to a battalion) and the genericness of the units, I doubted it. So we went with The Sword and the Flame instead, which has the great advantage of familiarity.

On the right, the British position, as the Russians are
set up on the far side of the river.

Regiments of twenty-four plus a gun each.

Stolid Russian columns

A handful of Russian cavalry

I got a Rifle regiment to command.

The Russian players started by sending their minimal cavalry up our left, keeping my partner busy whilst the infantry crossed the river. With 20" musketry (24" for my rifles) we could only respond with cannon for some time.

Laborious crossing.

Here's where things really went wrong for us:

The two British regiments, on separate hills, were too far apart to support each other. When the Russians went for my partner in overwhelming force, there wasn't much I could do to help. I moved a bit down the hill as they got closer, but one of the columns moved aside to hold me off and my vaunted rifle fire didn't do enough damage even with close range cannon fire to assist. If I'd vacated the hill, I'd have been caught between by a Russian column.

The Russian objective was to take only one hill; for a fairer game it might have been both. Our opponents concentrated entirely on my partner while I took potshots at the rearguard.

Here a column comes at me in "the old style", but my
dice failed me and I didn't do enough damage to make
them take a morale check.

The British take the charge, despite high Russian casualties.

Closeup CC.

Russians hold the hill...

... Thanks largely to my immobility on the next one.

"Oriskany Jim" has been demoing his own space game, Darkstar, at the club for awhile, and this is the first time I got to try it with me and another Jennifer, versus Jim and Mark. It appears to be effectively WWII in the 26th century, as the sides are generally the same:

A typical ship plan, in plastic
for wet-erase marking.

Damage is straightforward; the blank squares are pure armor, but once two of them are destroyed, further hits on that row or column start taking out critical systems.

The game is played on a hex-grid, and marked up like
a WWII battle-map to track movement.

Actual physics are adhered to, in movement at any rate - movement points are dedicated to slowing, speeding up, or making turns, so momentum is important and can, for example, carry you into an opponent's line of fire if you aren't careful.

Velocity is thus tracked; individual
ships move according to an initiative roll.

I command the American destroyer, which has two
banks of torpedoes (the right triangles at its bow).

This ship has taken a lot of
damage from head-on, and
deep enough to hit the bridge!

I left early owing to another event I wanted to make, but the game was enjoyable enough and fairly easy to play with its designers right at hand.

So that's one day's gaming ... two weeks ago. Besides that, I've read as usual - currently some Charles Darwin, and Christopher Duffy's classic study of Frederick's army. I would like to get back to Charge!, but still have Kill Team stuff on my table. See you next time.