Game night with Luke, 8th August

Luke popped round for an evening game and we played another Helldorado, this time with the terraforming rules for setting up the battle field. Luke set up all the terrain he could as crevasses between me and him to keep me away from him missile troops. Despite this it was not his evening, I managed to brave his fire and grab the objectives on one side, and on the other side managed to cut through the Dopplesoldiers and claim victory.

Despite this it was a fun little game, although I think I need to add to my Westerners to help Luke out.

Game night with Luke 29th March

Luke was able to pop in before a night shift again and so we set up the terrain and tried Helldorado again, this time with customised forces. Luke again took the Westerners but tried out using some Doppelsöldners to accompany his arquebusers. I used the Daemons and used Tsilla (just because I love the figure) and the Daemon of Flesh, but stuck to a few basic Daemons that I know how to work and the Succubus after her supreme performance last time.

My biggest disappointment was the Daemon of Flesh, who has 8 Life Points, and at the start of its activation can heal up to 8 Life Points. Unfortunately Luke picked up on this and peppered it with gun fire, and aided by some good dice rolling blew it apart before it even was able to regenerate.

In the centre the Doppelsöldners were proving tough, but I discovered one of Tsillas spells ignore armour and this proved to be their downfall. Overall I managed to snatch victory as it was an occupy territory scenario and while Luke had caused my problems by keeping his men in small groups for mutual support, this meant that as the last turn arrived he could not spread out enough and with Tsilla ability to fly and grab an extra territory meant victory was assured for the Daemons.

Game night with Luke, 21st March

Luke popped round to mine before he started a late shift and I cleared some space for us to play a little Helldorado game. It was the first time I had played it since the English rules and I was really looking forward to it and was not disappointed.

Luke took the Westerners starter box and I took the Daemons.

I suffered early from the musketry for the humans, but once I got a frenzied Succubus into combat swung the battle back the other way. I didn't take any photos and so much is crammed into the 4 turns you play it is really hard to recall exactly what happened.

The rules are really easy to pick up and really do generate a frenetic game. The next game will see us customise our forces slightly, then we can start to look at teraforming.

Club Night 9th March

Luke and I dusted off (in some case literally) the figures and buildings from our 2009 show game and decided to give the original version of Ambush alley another try. This time we played the Alamo scenario with the Israelis under Luke in the centre and me commanding the Arabs surrounding them.
I hurried my forces forward to close with Luke's forces and stop them being able to move. My opening volleys pinned them down, but as they returned fire I began to take casualties. And now my problems began, although my force did receive regular reinforcements, they all seemed to be single special weapons men. With the way Ambush Alley works this is quite problematic as single men do not work at all, so all I was doing was adding to my existing teams at a slower rate than I was taking casualties without being able to attack from a different direction and stretch the Israelis.
I really enjoyed this game, but I am still not quite sure about the mechanism, we will just have to try the rules again!

Club Night 4th November

Steve K and I decided to try out the 7TV rules from Crooked Dice that he had purchased at SELWG after seeing them at Salute. Now my youthful years means a lot of the 70's jokes I don't get, but I follow enough to get an idea of the intention of the game and so was looking forward to trying it out.

I naturally took the bad guys, an evil boss, his henchman and a series of faceless heavies against a smaller (and female dominated) band of heroes. We set up the terrain to be outside and distinctly Scottish by using a few of the buildings from the Border Reivers game the club put on a few years back to get a nice busy table.

The first game was a rescue as the good guys tried to rescue a prisoner from my crooks. But it stated going wrong for the good guys from the start, I ended up with more action tokens as well as having more men and was able to quickly bring my guys against a smaller part of the raiding force and mercilessly gunned them down, before switching against the other part of the force and gunning them down too. A dreadful start for the good guys and certainly not good for the ratings!

The second game was a more simple reconnaissance mission and the good guys made a better start, clearing a couple of the objectives and taking out a few of the bad guys, but then my SMG armed heavies came into action again and gunned down the good guys. It was so bad one of the good guys ran out into the open to shoot down my henchman, with all her skills and gadgets she just needed a 2+ to hit, promptly missed and then despite needing a lot more to hit her in return machine gunned her down.

Despite a ratings calamity with the good guys getting taken out twice, they are fun, clever rules and with some more figures and tweaking the forces should make for some more balanced games. We did a few things wrong (you can't aim an SMG, one of the good guys with the melee skills could infiltrate so avoiding running the gauntlet of the fire) and the limitations of the figures (way too any SMG armed bad guys, although it did cost points), they showed some real strengths and I can see them useful for many other, personality driven, episodic type games.

Terrain Painting 4

I finished the lava/skull cracks. Was surprisingly time consuming, There is a lot of little skulls in there!! Just need to give it a protective varnish and it is all done.

Terrain Painting 3

I finished off the small scatter items tonight. There are a couple of burning braziers, a well, the weapons and fire from the LotR set, two signs and a skeletal signpost. I just followed the same basic colours as the main boards and think they are nice little additions to the scenery. Just have to finish the skulls on the last two boards and I am done (for now!)...

Terrain Painting 2

I continued on with the terrain painting to try and get it finished this weekend, which I have almost achieved. I added some bright yellow over the orange between the skulls and then washed it with Baal Red to tie it together and give a nice glow. I then painted the skulls here, and elsewhere on the board Scorched Brown.
The trees were drybrushed Chardonite Granite.
And then brushed over that with Khemri brown.
The ruins where drybrushed bleached bone and then the edges highlighted with white
All the bones where overpainted with Dheneb Stone.
All the rest of the bones except in the glowing cracks where painted bleached bone, washed with Devlan Mud and highlighted with white, completing all the other boards
The trees were given a final highlight of white and the rope wrapped around some of them painted Khemri Brown, washed with Devaln Mud and highlighted with white to complete the woods.All that is left now is to finished the skulls in the glowing lava areas, and finish some scatter bits, then varnish all of it with some hard wearing, probably brush on varnish to protect it.

Terrain Painting

Over the Bank Holiday weekend I though I would finally get round to painting my GW Realm of Battle and all the matching terrain, primarily intended for my Helldorado games. I took advantage of the nice weather to spray it with some brown acrylic paint. I then drybrushed it all with Daler-Rowney System 3 Yellow Ochre which is a good match for GW bubonic brown which I use on my desert bases,
I then used Dark Flesh to shade the rocks and other areas
I then overbrushed all the rocks with a Codex Grey-Graveyard Earth mix to give a warm grey base.
This was then highlighted with Fortress Grey
A final light highlight was applied with Daler-Rowner System 3 Buff Titanium which is a close match for Bleached Bone
A red wash was applied to the skull areas and over the edge of the rocks surrounding them
The whole boards were then drybrushed with the Buff Titanium
Then a final highlight of the Buff Titanium and white
The skulls had blazing orange added between the skulls as the start of a glow to appear below them.
The arcane ruins were then drybrushed with Graveyard Earth
And then with Bubonic Brown
So I have made some good progress but need to make sure I give it some time to finish.

Club Night 24th September

At Colours Luke bought a set of modern rules called Ambush Alley. They have been about for a while and had good reviews and we have looked at them a few times, and so Luke bit the bullet and bought them as he really wanted to have a go with them. We dusted off the terrain from last years show game and swapped the US Marines for Israeli paras and tried to see how it worked.

On the night I was joined by Duncan and Luke was joined by new club member Luke. This wasn't going to get confusing! The first mission was for me and Duncan to rescue some contractors, clearly Israeli intelligence from a horde of angry Palestinians.

After a slow start as we tried to work everything out it ran really quickly. Duncan and I split our fire teams up and got mowed done in detail! Small units under a lot of fire-power are doomed. We quickly took too many casualties to complete our mission.

The second game saw us joined by Luke (the new one, not the old one!) and take 3 fire teams on a sweep and clear mission. Some atrocious luck and the inability to hit a horde of PLO standing in the open meant we again found ourselves on the back foot. however the fog of war saw fit to send us a sniper team and this seemed to be our saviour as the quality of this team was superb and managed to balance out the range advantage we had lost by the dust storm blowing across the table. Despite heavy casualties again the Israelis managed to achieve victory, but at a great cost.

These are really easy to pick up and play and have some clever ideas in, but I still have a concern about the firing mechanisms. Each firing figure gets a dice with bonuses for range and weapons, well the target unit gets a dice a figure then bonuses for concealment and cover. The actual type of dice rolled depends on the quality of the men. As such although insurgents generally have low dice, as bigger mobs they get more of them and it seems to make their fire more effective and them harder to put down. Now we may have been doing something wrong, or our dice were not that good, but it felt wrong. Not enough to stop me giving the rules another play, but enough I have some concerns.

Club Night 23rd July

Tonight I joined a game run a 25mm French-Indian wars game run by Ian using the Savage Worlds role-play rules. This gives quite a quick skirmish with enough detail to be interesting, but not so much it gets bogged down. I commanded one of the French detachments defending the stockade, along with the Indians and a small unit of Coer de Bois outside the stockade. Steve H had a similar unit of French and the militia on the other side of the stockade.

Against me I had Andy and Steve K with two units of the infamous Ranger, British Regulars and British Marines (not yet Royal, that happened in 1802). While the Ranger moved out around each flank the British attacked the Indians and the Marines the stockade.

I was able to put out enough fire to disrupt the Rangers over round to my right with the Coer de Bois, while I had to hope the terrain delayed a similar move to my left. Meanwhile the Indians opened up a desultory fire against the Regulars as they implacably advanced upon them. Eventually they drove the Indians out with their bayonets just as the Rangers fell on their flank and only 4 survivors made it back to the stockade.

In the centre the Marine attacked straight up the hill at the Stockade. Carefully directed fire caused enough casualties and disruption that when they hit the wall they were outnumbered and I could move men to assist those fighting and swing the fights in my favour. The Marines were eventually driven off to be replaced by another wave of their fellow, who adopted the same approach.

The weary French struggled more but it was the same result, just in time for some of the French to move to the other wall to join the Indians, and some forces from the opposite side of the Stockade who had pinned down more British regular and their Indian allies ready to face the flanking Rangers and the other British Regulars. See the results of the other assaults and that were now on their own they chose discretion and withdrew leaving a victorious French still in command of their position.