Reaper Bones Slow Crawl

It looks like the Reaper Bones kickstarter is making progress. I just took a look at this video update of all of the completed figures available in the basic Vampire level package...


That's... that's actually pretty intimidating. And I added on bonus figures. *Gulp*!

Hail Caesar Skirmish #7: Back to Basics

Before children, my wife and our friends Rob and Laura would meet regularly to play games. Catan, Ticket To Ride, Roborally, and more hit the table at least once a month. Since we all started infecting our houses with time-eating rug rats, our game nights have become infrequent at best.  The stars aligned the other night though, and we managed to get a game night with all four of us. Surprisingly  the game I was informed we'd be playing was Hail Caesar. Find out how teaching two wargaming newbs the art of ancient warfare went after the jump.
I set up a pretty standard table, a large forest along one edge, a pair of hills mirroring each other on the opposite side, and a few small impassable copses of trees along the midline.

I've found playing Romans the easiest to grasp so I gave each of the newbs a division of three heavy infantry and a single "fun" unit, Cretan archers for Rob, a small unit of Numidian cavalry for Laura. "Hey," she remarked looking at her enemy figures, "your guys don't have pants."

"LOL You did a really good job on his pubic hair.
Let me take a picture of it for your blog."

It was true. My wife and I took a pair of barbarian warbands, one unit of which was fighting naked. I took a unit of medium cavalry while my wife took a unit of celt slingers. I set the figures out in a battle line, gave a brief overview of the rules, and let them customize their deployment. This was to be a learning game so there was enough cushion within the Roman forces to let them take some casualties without those losses making the game unwinnable for the Romans.

I tried to give some tactical advice, but I largely let everyone make their own decisions on deployment and objectives.  Laura's Romans on their left were going to take the hill just in front of their starting position and let the Numidian cavalry harrass the barbarian Celts. The Roman right planned on using their archers to screen some infantry as it advanced to take the gap between the large forest and small copse of trees. Two infantry units would be held in reserve.

For the Celts their plan was to take off their clothes, shake their privates, and charge the Romans (the standard Celtic battle plan). The cavalry would be kept in reserve to prevent flanking or to attack a vulnerable Roman unit. How clever.

Cretans are Cretins

The battle began with the warbands advancing, the Celt slingers taking the lead and taking cover at the edge of the wood on the Celtic left. The Romans advanced as well, Laura's two infantry capturing the top of the hill with Rob's Romans milling about timidly on the Roman left.

The Cretan archers took up a position in front of the Roman lines and peppered the Celt slingers with arrows.

On the Celt turn my wife's slingers returned fire and inflicted a single casualty, hitting with a 6. They only needed 5's to hit, so that single 6 was enough to trigger a break test. The Cretans rolled, hoping to roll high, but winding up with a piddly 3 on 2d6. Checking the break test chart indicated the Cretans fled the battle. In both of their appearances on my table the Cretans have suffered the same fate: one casualty before breaking and running. What a bunch of worthless goat farmers!

Incensed, two of Rob's Roman cohorts broke off and advanced on the Celt slingers who were no doubt hooting in derision at the fleeing Greeks.

Celts are Cretins

Seeing the Romans advance, the Celts clashed their swords and spears against their shields, shouted epithets and oaths to their bloddy handed gods and looked to their war chief to give the order to charge. He stood before them, waved his hand at the young singers who were now under threat of Roman assault and addressed his troops.  "Quick! Hide behind those skirmishers!"  A blunder on the command roll saw the Celtic warbands drift left, tangled in the trees and behind the celt slingers.

As initiative passed back to the Romans they seized the opportunity and struck. They charged the slingers who fled backwards through the Celts to their rear, and continued on to crash into the front of the Celt warbands.

Numidian Gnats

On the Roman left, the advance of the Celts facing them had been repeatedly stalled by the Numidian cavalry. Laura grasped pretty quickly their purpose, closing to short range and peppering the Celt with javelins and then fleeing out of range when charged before returning again to do the same thing the following round.

"What's a Numibian?" "Tribes from North Africa. Have you heard of the Berbers?" "Like the rug"
"mmmm..Sort of. They live in like Algeria today. That's all that's left of the Numidians." "Awwuh /sad"

The initial clash on the Roman right was fearsome, the Celts using their Wild Fighters ability to reroll any misses on the first round of attacks, but over the next few turns the Roman's mettle would prove strong, gradually wearing the Celts down.

The Romans committed their reserves, swinging around to attack the already engaged Celtic left on their flank.

With the other Celt warbands on the right forced to pursue the Numidian cavalry or charge the Romans atop their defensive position on the hill (because of the proximity rules), the only hope for the surrounded Celtic left was the barbarian cavalry.

"Sorry guys, can't help. Gotta get these Romans on the hill. TTYL!"

Charge!

Pro Tip: Don't let this happen. This is pretty much the Blue Screen of Death for your cunning plan.

The Celts found themselves under an absolute crush of Romans (that's the plural for Romans right? Flock of birds, herd of cattle, crush of Romans?). Surrounded and outnumbered two to one, the leading warband was annihilated and the other thrown back disordered. The Romans consolidated their forces using the free move after victory, but having already conducted a combat on their turn were only able to reengage the Celts.

Seeing an opportunity, the Celt cavalry sounded their horns, rolled three moves on their order dice and charged home into the Roman flank.

Legionnaires aren't quite as panicky as Greek archers though, and the Romans held on through the cavalry attack. On subsequent turns the Romans managed to finish off the shaken Celt warband before surrounding and throwing back the barbarian cavalry.

A few mopping up moves by the Romans saw the slingers decimated and cavalry fleeing off their rear table edge. With one division broken, and the other having failed to do much of anything, the Celt generals conceded the game to Rome.

We finished off the night with a proper curry and then it was off to try out a game of Pandemic, but that's a  review for another day.

WIP for Crusader Miniatures Carthaginian "Libyan Spearman"

This big block of 32 Carthaginian spearmen are going to take quite a while to finish, but I figured I could post a progress update. A few more progress pics after the jump.



I started with my standard brown primer and started blocking in the colors. I decided to try a little preshading, using thinned down black to get into the cracks of the pteruges, and provide a little shading under the shoulder pieces, straps, and arms.

I went back over the linen cuirass and pteruges with some GW Astronomican Gray foundation paint, and then a coat of Vallejo Bone White. The preshading around the straps and shoulders didn't show up once the lighter colors were applied, but the black between the pteruges provided a lot of definition.

I also experimented with some ornamentation on the linothorax, adding thin lines to the shoulder pieces and armored skirt. It's a bit tedious, and I'm not sure the effect works at distance.

Plain linothorax on the left, the detailed version on the right.

Agema Miniatures Plastic Roman Republican Velites!

Wow! I didn't even know these were on the horizon! Agema Miniatures will be releasing a set of 16 plastic Republican Roman velites at Salute this year. Nice!

Check these masters out. Look at the hand holding the raised javelin. THAT'S how a hand should look. So much better than the cupped flipper hands you see on so many plastic sets that hold separate weapons.

It looks like they are including wolfskin head pieces too. I love the flowing look of the pelt, something you can't do in single casting metal.

Lots more at the Agema Miniatures site. Can't wait for the April 20th release!

"My Way", WWII from the Korean Point of View

I had a chance to check out the Korean WWII film "My Way" the other week when it popped up on Netflix streaming. Like all wargamers I'm a sucker for war movies, and I'm more than happy to branch out to non-English movies. "Downfall" is fantastic, and Kurosawa's samurai films are classics, but "My Way" was the first Korean historical piece I'd seen. My thoughts after the jump.

Here's the trailer that doesn't give too much away, but you're not going to watch this flick for plot twists and turns anyway. You're a wargamer so you're going to be counting the rivets on the tanks or trying to figure out what sort of leadership rating you'd give to each of the Japanese officers:

 

"My Way" starts off strongly, introducing our main characters as children: Hasegawa Tatsuo, the grandson of an occupying Japanese general and Kim Jun-shik, the son of the Korean servants to the Hasegawa family. Both boys enjoy running, their primary school foot races giving way to competitive marathons and culminating in a rivalry for a spot on the Japanese Olympic team. Europe gets a lot of attention in World War II flicks, but I found the pre-war exploration of the two character's growing adversarial relationship and the cultural tensions between the Koreans and Japanese quite interesting.

Our hero gets involved in a riot that sees him and a number of his Korean comrades arrested and drafted into the Imperial Japanese army as punishment. Before you can say "a training montage usually has more than one shot" we're at the front lines with our band of Korean soldiers trying to survive the horrors of war as well as their sadistic Japanese overseers.

All because he didn't fill out his TPS report...

Over the remainder of the film this band gets involved in a number of battles — or defeats, rather — as they are constantly captured and pressed into service to fight for their latest set of captors. The battles are fairly well done, with a mix of combatants you rarely see on film (Soviet BT- 7 tanks vs. Japanese infantry charge for example), are suitably brutal and have a decent (though not complete) amount of historical accuracy.

Check out that weird cylinder turret on the tank. BT-7, right?

In some cases the battles feel like nothing more than a mad lemming-like rush into overwhelming enemy firepower, but they're still gripping enough to be worth watching. With each defeat comes an obligatory death scene though, and here's where the film broke down for me. These death scenes are played very melodramatically, almost like parodies of "Oscar bait" death acting. One or two would have been fine, but when one of Kim's allies gets three (THREE!) death scenes after charging a German machine gun position my eye-rolling became too much to bear. Like a villain in a bad horror movie, just when you think he's dead he pops back up, lashing out with more drama soaked monologue-ing.

"No, your friend is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead."

Get to the Good Stuff

As a wargamer, you'll likely be looking at the film from a different perspective than most audiences. The annoying melodrama I mentioned can be overlooked if the film gets the battles right. Here's what you get in "My Way":

• Japanese unit under sniper attack in Mongolia. Interesting skirmish scenario fodder. 
• Japanese infantry charge against Soviet attack using BT-7 tanks. My favorite battle of the movie. 
• Soviet infantry charge against German positions in an battle scarred urban landscape. There's a strange looking German tank involved, but shots were too quick for me to make it out. 
• D-Day, but from the German perspective. Pretty historically inaccurate, but interesting to see the battle from the entrenched German perspective.

Other than the increasing levels of melodrama and the historical inaccuracies (check out the airborne troops dropping onto the beaches of Normandy under a clear blue morning sky!), I still think "My Way" is worth watching. The battles are engaging, the non-Western perspective on the war in novel, and the character development over the first half of the film are all worth your time. Just have some figures to paint once the battle dies down and the actors get around to dying dramatically.

Excavations at Lead Mountain

"All right!" I thought to myself, "Time to get cracking on another unit for Hail Caesar." I went elbow deep into my lead pile and emerged with a handful of Crusader Miniatures "Libyan Infantry". A lot of Libyan Infantry. No matter, I've got my shield transfers...

I've got my spears...

and I've got over 30 Libyans prepped and ready for priming.

I started dividing them into like poses to make assembly line painting easier, when I stumbled across an abnormality. One of the four packs of infantry was wearing mail rather than linothorax. Now, I bought these figures two years ago, and I'm sure I had a plan but I'm mystified as too what that was. Was using a few Libyans in chain part of that plan? Did I order them by accident? Was I going to use the figures in chain as part of a command stand and use the remaining linothorax figures for a pike block of 28? Didn't the Carthaginians pick up their chain armor from the Romans? If so, I suppose I could mix them together to represent a unit just beginning to scavenge from their Italian adversaries.

I really wish I could go back and ask myself just what I was thinking.

WWII Germans in Color

I've seen color WWII photos and films before, but I still find them rare enough to be novelties. A set of German propaganda pics popped up on Reddit. I found them interesting and thought you might too.

Panzer III?

Is that a lend lease Sherman and T-34 on the easter front?

In researching German uniforms I was aware that the Hollywood gray was much lighter than what the Heer actually wore, being darker and greener like the dirty faced fellow below:

But check out the uniforms on this anti-tank crew. Even taking into account the altered hues in this early color film, their uniforms are nearly black. Is that a "trick of the light", or did the uneven production quality of German textile mills produce such sinister looking uniforms?



More photos available from the original imgur album.

New Year, Old Games

Games were a big part of college for me. With hours to fill, often snowed in or without transportation off campus, and before the internet was anything more than some ASCII interfaces and screeching modems we spent a lot of time after class dealing cards and rolling dice. When I got to school I found a deeply houseruled local version of "Spades" was the lingua franca across campus. Everyone I met at school either played or quickly learned just to be able to fit in. A few months later another card game showed up in our dorm, but to a crowd that was already accustomed to playing cards late into the night, "Magic: The Gathering" was not alien, just novel. Nobody had heard of it, but "flat crack" spread like a wildfire across my dorm, all before the stigma of Magic players being a bunch of neckbeards and cat piss men had laid hold of CCGs. Everyone I knew played: the brogrammers, the former marine, the coke dealer, the usual assortment of geeks and nerds, and my roommate the Insomniac.

Eventually we all got burned out on Magic after sinking to much money into preorders of an awful expansion. Packing away our cards we looked to new diversions. I veered off towards the geekier side of RPGs and Battletech, while my insomniac roommate pulled some of his old boardgames from storage, the most popular proving to be "Axis & Allies". It's a classic, and I'm sure you've played, but briefly it was one of the big box games released by Milton Bradley during the 80s allowing up to five players to play out World War II at a grand strategic level. It's fairly simple compared to the hex and chit or block wargames but to college kids who didn't even know such things existed A&A was a titan that frightened off lesser players by the sheer size and scope of the rules, the huge board and the thousands upon thousands of tiny plastic men, tanks, planes and ships. We played it a lot, but after graduating real life responsibilities gradually encroached, curtailing our ability to get five people together and play massive 5 hour long boardgames. I still stay in touch with the Insomniac, who's been trying to schedule another Axis game for a few months in vain, but it was his wife who managed to rope enough of us together to play this year on New Year's day. What a gal!

The New Year's Game

We drew straws and I wound up with Germany, the one nation I had never played in Axis. I faced off against frequent opponent Mike in Russia. Scrambling for a plan, I attacked too cautiously in the first round, perhaps the worst mistake you can make with Germany during the early blitzkrieg years. Oops! I managed to recover and threw the bulk of my strength into an attack on Karelia, seizing it and leaving the Russians bloodied and falling back to protect Moscow. In Africa, my panzers routed the brits and were poised for an attack into Syria. In the east, the Japanese had a field day, destroying the U.S Pacific fleet and securing the ocean for themselves before running rampant across Asia. Of course, I had to take a pic of our victories which only seemed to rub salt in the Allies wounds.

Panzers and Luftwaffe ready to descend on Moscow.

Germany demilitarized.
"Hey! Hey dude, take a picture of THAT!
Where's your Instagram now?"

My fortunes began to reverse over the next few turns when the Brits dropped an industrial complex in South Africa, the Russian transport I had failed to knock out dropped a tank off in west africa, and the U.S. turned her entire attention to building a European invasion force. I continued to attack, but quickly the Allies began landing multiple amphibious assaults into France. I struggled to hold on as the Japanese army overran Asia and began to mass tanks just south of Moscow, but after the "Battle of the North Sea" (I sent four fighters to take out six, virtually unguarded transports. I knocked out one, but all of my fighters were shot down by TRANSPORTS), it was clear Germany's offensive was done. The 6th Army could only watch in horror as the Allies overran the depleted rear guard in Berlin. As part of Germany's reparations, they were forced to take a photo of their defeat. Sadness.


Still, what a fun game. I'm a little wary of playing these large strategic WWII games anymore out of fear of simply seeing history repeat itself. Luckily in this play through things went pretty bonkers. Russians in Africa, Japanese threatening the Middle East, the Pacific ceded to the Rising Sun. It's nice when a game I've played dozens of times with the same guys can still offer a surprise. Hope your New Year was as full of gaming shenanigans too!