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| The Pointes across from Martin airfield |
The first game of the new campaign, oddly enough not actually from the Vice Alley book. We went for one from Perilous Island; Last Flight. We simply substituted substituted the location and used cops instead of French troops. Otherwise it fits well with the Vice Alley theme, one faction trying to sneak a star witness out of the city while the other seeks to prevent this from happening.
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| Martin Airfield |
So, I have been working on the buildings for the up coming campaign. Some of them had been started many years ago while others were started recently. Some, like the warehouse above (red brick and green) had been used before but had to be taken apart and redone. Still others were purpose built from either Dust tactics buildings or Pegasus gothic buildings.
So, the other night we got together for another board game night. This time around we decided to try a new game (to us) Horrified as well as yet another game of Sentinels of the Multiverse. The game features many of the classic Paramount monsters from the 30's, 40's and 50's.
So, a completely cleared gaming table, almost never happens. However this is just a temporary thing as I have already started working on the next campaign layout. This time I am going a bit over board...
So, we had a two player game, home brew Mystery League (a duo league) vs The Sons of the Empire league from one of the Pulp Alley books. The Empire league was played by a first time player. Well for a first time player he certainly picked up the rules pretty fast. He made great use of the cards dealt to him even though this was the first time playing with this league he picked up on the nuances of the league.
So, another board game night. This time we tried out Hamlet, prior to playing our usual Sentinels of the Multiverse game. I have a lot to say about Hamlet, but I am not certain that I want to waste that much time on this game, as I already wasted enough time playing the game. One thing I can say is that at least it was better than Darkest Night!
So, we pulled out Small World, a game that neither of has played in quite a few years (decade+?) I cannot understand why this game has not seen much action. We also played a couple of games of Sentinels of the Multiverse.
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| Rematch Goblins vs Dwarves |
So, with the battlefield still set up, we thought we would have time to play FB and still get in a game of Pulp Ally. However we were delayed in starting the game and just did not have time or the energy for two games.
This was another stab at a Dwarf army defending against a horde of fast moving Goblins. I acted as ref for the game as neither player was all that familiar with the rules. The armies were 1000 points each and each army had 5 captains, 3 wizards and a Warlord. The dwarven army was made up of my FB purpose based Roman Dwarves (with a couple of WH based hand-gunner units) while the Goblins, for the most part, were on my homemade movement trays.
So, we tried out yet another new to us game, Death Angel. It is another cooperative game, we seem to play a lot of these, that pitted our group of eight space marines against hordes of Genestealers. Neither of us had played this before so we were playing with little knowledge of the game.
Another Venice adventure.
This time around we played a modified China Station scenario, no creeping fog but still some horrific Deep ones. Also made the plot points mobile just to keep the players on their toes. For one of the players they were their own worst enemy as they kept faling any random challenge that came their way. The other player, new to the game, ultimately decided to just stay out of the way and let his opponent self destruct. By the end of the game one league was down to one character, holding 1 plot point and his opponent had 3 minor plot points.
By the way, with this post I have now exceeded the post that I made all of last year, so an improvement.
So another board game night, another disappointing evening, well maybe just not that great... We played Sentinels of the Multiverse and Darkest Night. The Sentinels game worked out to be another slow slag as the villain git some lucky card draws that stymied our attempts to defeat her. However we are nutters and kept playing even though it was going nowhere very slowly. Ultimately we called it a day after 3 out of the four heroes were knocked out of the game.
For no good reason we selected Darkest Night (1st ed) for our second game. Never having played this before there was a learning curve involved not aided by the rule book. The rule book is a mess and much of the rules and the enemy counters are not really all that intuitive. The game is for 1 to 4 players. Regardless of the number of players you always use four characters. We each selected our two hero characters, selected our powers, placed our standees in the starting space (the monastery) and settled back for what worked out to be a painfully slow death.
The game has simple mechanics and apparently lots of optional powers for your characters (I only got one power boost for one of my characters but I did have two decks that promised more powers) So I went through the game pretty much as I started. There is a lot of dice rolling in this game, a lot, rarely for good reasons, usually to avoid death. These dice rolls have a target number which all too often is 4 or 5 (many 5+) Often you will find yourself rolling only 1 die which all too often will result in a failure. Each turn you will encounter a random event (which is usually bad) Then you get one & only one action. With this action you can move one space, search, attack, rest etc. Then your turn ends. This worked out not to be all that satisfying. Each turn the evil necromancer tries to track you down to attack you. He also places random nasty encounters like vampires and spies. The pressure is on the players and we never felt that we had a chance to defeat the evil.
In the end we failed. The necromancer placed four encounter tokens in the monastery and mercifully the game ground to an end.
I had heard good things about this game, but in further review it seems it is a good game if you have the add-ons. Well it is not a good thing that the base game is so bad that the only way it is fun to play is by spending more money.
Apparently there is a second edition that includes all the expansions and while it fixes a lot of problems I think I will give it a pass.
So, a couple of days ago we sat down to play our usual board game, Sentinels of the Multiverse but we also took out and played Space Cadets away missions!
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| Deployment after mishap roles. Not much impact on either army, one Dwarf unit suffered -2 Resolve & one wolf rider unit rushed ahead 4BW. |
Yet another classic match up Dwarf vs Goblin, was played today. This was a game originally planned for last November, but had to be postponed. Thankfully Craig was able to attend this game despite the resurgence of winter!
So lots of fun stuff at Hotlead this year! Beyond some really excellent looking games the big thing for me, as always, is the bring and buy. It is often an expensive weekend as I often find plenty of must have items and this year was no exception.
So we went to Venice once again. It has been awhile since I last dug out these buildings, but I think they still work. Three players with me as the facilitator passed a few hours watching three leagues struggle against each other and some nefarious cultists. Everyone trying to locate the mysterious Device 1138!
Just the thing for a winter Pulp Alley game! This is a Matchbox Models of Yesterday. It is a 1922 Scandinavian postal truck but I feel it should be right at home in more arctic conditions.
In all my journeys in many many flea markets I have never seen this vehicle, so it was kind of a given that I would have to buy it. So far I have not attempted to paint or weather it, but I will soon.
So, this past Sunday the Ottawa Miniature Gamers (OMG) held a meeting at the Ottawa Public Library at the Centrepointe location. While it is a chance to play some games it is really a chance to expose the general public to the club and the type of games that we play.
Three games were on display, Space Hulk, ADLG and Pulp Alley. Pulp Alley was my contribution to the game day. The game started up with two players, one a rookie the other had played a few games. By the second or third turn we were joined by a couple of young people who we paired off with the two existing players.
My hats off to the two older players who rose to the occasion and coached the two new players and let them take control of the leagues. We also had a few other people drop by to look at all of the games. Much interest in our activities and many conversations were had. Who knows maybe some of these people will become OMG members or at very least get bit by the miniature gaming bug!
I look forward to the next library meeting at the end of March.
So this is the type of thing I like to find when wandering the aisles of Dollarama. It is a toy that shoots some sort of rubber like disks, but to me it looks like some thing else.
To me it looks like a shuttle craft or will after a little work. It seems to match up well with my 15mm figures. So it will take a little patching here and there and I may add some round bases to represent lifters on the feet, but in the end it looks like a pretty easy fix.
So, I found these fine Buzz Lightyear space craft at the local Dollarama. I think they are a good size for 15mm figures and should repaint up nicely. I figure I can use them as troop carriers or shuttle craft ar just have them sit there as big damn space craft.
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| The painting table😒 |
My shame...
So, to be clear I am not stopping the painting challenge, but if I am to continue I really need to take care of a few things. Normally I try to clean up and organize my room prior to the AHPC but this year I just did not have any energy or drive and well I just sort of fell into the challenge. Well now that lack of preparedness has come back to haunt me. It is slowing down my painting production.
So, this is how my organization of the Legion, using the Dirtside II rules, is going so far. I am, more or less setting it up as per what I can glean from the book shown above. I hope to have the vehicles painted up this week and I have already painted up their opponents vehicles. I also have 150 proxy enemy figures on the painting table and I will soon place an order for the Legions troops.
Well, last year was the worst year so far as posting goes, a meager 15 posts for the entire year, and nothing since August, simply unforgivable!
Please forgive me, oh wait...
Last year I hit a major down turn in interest and motivation in gaming and in blogging. The only gaming that I really did was board gaming and that only because a friend regularly visited me and 'made' me play games. Oh, I enjoyed the games, but left to my own devices I most likely would have played nothing.
I did start up a miniature campaign, Pulp Alley China Station, and that went well for a while but an illness throughout October and that same low level of motivation saw that campaign grind to a halt. Perhaps it will resume, but experience does say that when you have a long interruption it just is not that likely that it will start again. We shall see.
On the plus side my new drugs seem to be working better and my malaise seems to be dissipating! Happiness has returned (drug induced but so what) and I have finally started to produce things for the Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. The challenge started on December 21st 2023 and it took me until January 13th 2024 to put up my first post 24 days into the challenge. Hell it took me until today to update this blog, archiving last years data and updating titles to indicate 2024.
All this being said I note that this is the 4th post that I have made this year vs 15 for all of last year. Some may not realize it but I have 5 other blogs plus the Itinerant Gamers blog. For the most part those blogs have limited activity being meant to focus on specific aspects of my hobby life. The League site has some activity, but really only myself and one other person ever posts on it. The painting & building blog site has at times had a lot of activity, nothing much lately, but soon to see more posts. The other sites will only ever have sporadic posting (though I really need to up date the cat & dog companion blog)
This has been a rather long winded rambling, the gist of it is that I plan to post more often and more regularly than in any previous year (fingers crossed)
So, for no special reason I seem to have embarked on a mass purchase and thankfully mass production of 15mm Sc-fi figures. So far I have been sourcing the figures from three companies; Ground Zero Games, Brigade Models and Alternative Armies. There has been a recent binge buying on my part that has seen the acquisition of a few hundred infantry and 50+ vehicles. All these augment the preexisting (and largely ignored) forces that I already have.
The plan, such as it is (and subject to change) is to be able to field 7 different forces. Each army will have from 12 to 28 vehicles (a mix of APCs and AFVs) as well as 75+ infantry. The tech level of each army will vary quite a bit from low tech track/wheeled vehicles to full repulsor lift high tech vehicles. One army will be the exception in that they are very low tech troops with few if any vehicles but armed with captured weapons and arms given to them by an alien race that is keen to disrupt the status quo.
The rule set, Dirtside II, is intended for micro scale figures but I am adapting it to a larger scale figure. I am keeping the basing a multiple figures on a base, using Flames of War size bases, but I am including some personality figures to add something extra to the game. So far I have been fielding 'native' armies 3 to a base and plan to have 4 to a base for the more regular army/marine type forces.
A few years back a fellow gamer took the chit drawing system that Dirtside employs for combat damage resolution and converted it to a D10 system. I have adjusted this system slightly to reduce the frequency of 'BOOM' hits that automatically take out a vehicle, but otherwise the system remains intact. So far I have been thinking through other changes but I have yet to record any of them.
To date I have painted up 20 Hammers Slammers vehicles, and 91 Ikwen native freedom fighters. I have drawn inspiration from the three Fifth Foreign Legion books and to some extent the Hammers Slammer stories.
Some photos; The Hammers Slammers, vehicles only so far
So, on a dare and a whim we decided to play this game. We probably should not have tried this game without at least one of us having at least glanced at the rules... Well neither of us had played this before nor even opened the rule book so it was a slow slog of a game. First was the challenge of going through the rule book, then quite a lot of prep work to set up the game, then the actual trying to figure out what we should be doing with our faction. It took some time.
There are a lot of options in this game and a lot of variables, enough to wreak havoc on any plans that you might make. The dice determine what actions you can do. Each turn you role a certain amount of dice, the Good side starts with 4 while the Evil side has up to 7 dice but you are allowed to allocate dice towards the hunt (for the one ring) Each dice face has a unique action associated with it but the rub is that you may not always get the results you need right now. The dice actions are resolved one at a time and in alternating order. So even when resolving the dice actions there is a certain amount of strategy as you may want to delay some actions until you see what your opponent has done, but then again hesitate and they may do something that directly impacts on your side. Choices, choices.
Each player also draws 2 event cards each turn. These cards can trigger events, or allow you to recruit more forces or effect the game in some way. They also can be used in combat, the bottom part of the card grants a bonus to your forces when engaged with the enemy. So do you use the card for a special event or save it for battle? Between the cards and the dice we were presented with a wide array of options every turn.
So it was a slow game as we carefully negotiated our way through the rules and tried to figure out a game plan. We set a time limit for the game (thankfully) as the time just rapidly ticked away. (We also interrupted play for dinner) In the end we called it a game around 12:30 AM. At that point we had a pretty good grasp of the rules and what we wanted to accomplish.
So, I have said that it was a slow slog but, it was a fun slog too! This game has a very high replay factor going for it. It was always interesting always challenging and always fun!
Check out THIS review by Shut Up & Sit Down for more details, and opinions that I agree with, I think they covered it very well!
The second game sees us at Dunkirk where the Germans are presented with many ship targets to fulfill their victory condition; they must sink 4 of the 6 ships. It was a tight game with the Germans eking out a victory despite being down to just one stuka.
Some pictures from the first game:
