OP THIUNDERING DICE ROTO 16-3 Complete

My wargaming bestie James was over last weekend for the third instalment of what we call OP THUNDERING DICE.   Since we moved further apart last year, we have been running an ongoing series of slumber parties, and this time, ROTO 3, we decided to play another game of War of the Ring, try Sharp Practice 2 with my ACW collection, and then play a fantasy game of Dragon Rampant.

James got caught up in the Friday not rush north to cottage country and arrived late and somewhat frazzled, but some barbecued goodness and a beer downrange later, he was good to go.   We started with War of the Ring (2nd ed) by Ares Games.  You can read his account of our weekend here.  It was our second complete game.  The first time I played Mordor, this time I played the noble and winsome free peoples.  Both times Mordor lost when the Ringbearer achieved his quest.   It was a near run thing, and it turned on the draw of one chit.  Some would say that a game which invests so much in the military and political aspects of the war, and then hangs on a couple of dumb hobbits meandering through Mordor, isn’t really much of a game at all.   Well, I suppose, but you could argue that one could say the same thing about Tolkien’s book. We had fun, at any rate.

On to Saturday, when The Other Mike joined us.   James introduced us both to Sharp Practice, the second edition of Too Fat Lardies’ well known black powder skirmish game.  We threw an evenly matched force of Yanks and Rebs on the table.   Other Mike and I were new to these rules, though I’ve played SP1, but despite that faint advantage, Other Mile picked it up very quickly.

Here the gallant Major #5 leads his Union boys forward to try and flank the Rebel line.

My company on the left wing gets into line and goes up against an equal number of Yanks.   However, the extra Union Big Man keeping their line steady, plus those annoying Yank skirmishers in the cornfield, would make it difficult for Rebs.  However, it’s the little hill on the right where the game will be decided.

Shock builds relentlessly and my line breaks.  As shock exceeds the number of troops standing in each group, the formation breaks up.  One thing we didn’t realize was that each time a group retreats because of excessive shock, it lowers the overall Force Morale of they side, and that’s a bad thing.  We almost lost the game when this formation was defeated.

 

The game was, as I said, decided on the right.   Here in this incredibly amazing, exciting action shot, Other Mike’s troops charge down off the hill and shatter the Union left.    It helped enormously that we were able to get our skirmishers on to the right flank of the Union line.

All of us liked SP2 enormously.   As Other Mike noted, it really felt like a subset of a regimental battle that you read about in the battle histories.   It had a gritty, small-unit feel that was very satisfying, and very different from another ACW game we like, Sam Mustafa’s Longsteet.

In the afternoon we reset the table, keeping the terrain and adding my Rohirrim village to play Dragon Rampant.  We gave the forces of Isengard the usual mix of Uruk Heavy Foot, crossbows (Heavy Missiles), archers (Light Missiles), Berserkers (Bellicose Foot), a shaman (Wizardling), and Warg Riders (Heavy Riders).  Against that daunting mix, we gave the Rohirrim a unit of skirmishing cavalry (Light Riders), one of heavy cavalry (Heavy Riders), two units of Heavy Foot, two units of Light Missiles, and two heroes, Gimli and Aragorn (both single model, 6 strength pick units).  We rated Gimli as Elite Foot, Aragorn as an Elite Rider.

It was a ripplingly fun game, where victory seemed within Other Mike’s evil orchish grasp.  Mike’s goal was to burn as many buildings as he could and capture the adorable and plump barnyard animal, Bakkonraed the Swine.   Here the surviving Rohan light archers (some old Wargames Foundry HYW English archers filling in) exult after they routed a unit of Heavy Foot.  In the middle, Gimli exults after massacring the Orc Bellicose Foot.

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An overview of the battle, just before the Rohirrim Heavy Horse smashed into the warg riders and routed them, killing their general.   Other Mike threw in the orcish towel at this point and we spent a happy dinner hour with James and OM deciding to order their own copies of Dragon Rampant and scheming as to the armies they would field.  We all had terrific fun.

Note, BTW, in the last photo, my amazing spiffing Rohan watch tower.  I’ll get some photos of that in another post.

 

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

OP THUNDERING DICE PART TWO: Infiltrate, Exfitrate, Eliminate, Fullplate

 Picking up on my account of last weekend's war games slumber party Chez James, here are some more thrilling accounts of small scale derring do and (increasingly for the weekend) my tactical misadventures.  Again, you can read Rabbitman's take on it here, with different pictures.

During OP TD1 I got a chance to play with James' modern Afghan kit, and I certainly wanted another crack at it.  In a recent post here, I commented on how some gamers inspire me with their determination to assemble a large project, and with their perseverance to get it right over time.  James' Afghan project is an excellent example of what you can do with a vision, some determination, and some spare cash.   He also made a very interesting and, I think, wise decision to do it in 20mm, to be able to represent platoon scale actions and to take of the variety of metal, resin, and plastic kits out there.

We decided to try Black Ops from Osprey, using their rules for sneaky covert stuff in the dark.  I was quite interested in evaluating the utility of these rules for my own Weird War project, which will also involve lots of dark sneaking and frights in the dark.  We decided that we would send a small team of Canadian JTF special forces operators into a remote village to neutralize (good) or capture (better) a high value target.

Here's the view of the recce team from their mountain perch.  Just waiting for night and the insertion of the grab team.

First team makes it move in the pitch darkness.  Two more teams approach through the dry creek bed on the far side of the village.

 

Sniper team lies in overwatch.   I was very nervous about using these fellows, as missing a shot and having a wounded, loud guard on a rooftop could have been bad,  However, they did prove very useful once the op started.

 

Case in point.  'Hey, Achmed, you want to go get a falafel after our shift? Achmed?'  At this point I had used the sniper to take out the guard closest to Alpha Team's infiltration route and had gotten lucky.  However, a random movement roll brought the sentry's partner over to his colleague's direction.   I committed my sniper a second team and, fortunately, took down this fellow before he could give a warning.

 

Both rooftop sentries down, Alpha Team moves past a ruined wall.  In a small orchard nearby, another sentry was patrolling.  Alpha team leader snuck through the trees and came up from behind, dispatching a third sentry.

Alpha team stealthily clears rooms, killing the sleeping Talib fighters.  None of this is heard or noticed by the sentry above them, who, inexplicably, never looks down.  It must be very dark in the wilds of Afghanistan.

 

On the other side of the compound, Bravo Team is not so fortunate.  The roof sentry above them notices figures moving in the dark and challenges them with a burst from his Kalashnikov.  One round hits the Bravo leader, but his chest armour saves his life.   The rest of Bravo team, and the sniper, unleash a hail of rounds on the guard, who amazingly passes five saves before he goes down.   The blue tiles are noise markers.

 

I would have thought that the whole warband (minus the half dozen killed in their beds) would have poured out of their huts, but that wasn't how the rules seemed to work.  Instead, the leader came out to see what was going on.   Alpha Team, hiding behind a Hilux pickup, watched through their NVG incredulously as Mr. High Value Target stauntered out in front of them..   Two operators dashed forward and bested HVT in a quick struggle.

 

Mr. HVT is bundled into the second truck, which has luckily was left with the keys in the ignition.  Alpha Team throws HVT in the back, none too gently, and  drives off into the night, singing BTO's Taking Care of Business loudly.  Bravo and Charlie (Charlie never fired a shot, was never needed) melt back into the dry creek, where Alpha abandons the truck, rigging it with a block of C4 just because.    A good night's work, and another Black Ops story that will never appear in the Globe and Mail.

 

 

In the afternoon we shifted to a game of Chain of Command in 15mm, pitting my Soviets against James' Jerries.   A can of beer seemed the perfect accompaniment to a Too Fat Lardies game.

 

 

A randomly determined scenario had me on the attack, using a somewhat compressed games table. My objective, the village of Turnipograd. With 12 support points, I bought an elite squad of scouts, a 5-man Maxim MG team, and an opening barrage to hinder James' opening deployment. With our jump off points quite close to one another, I thought I might have a chance early on to grab at least one of his.

 

Turn one and my elite scouts grab part of the town and hope to press on. Thanks to my opening barrage, James doesn't get to put a lot fo troops down for Turn One, but diastrously for me, he rolls two sixes, meaning that he gets two turns in a row.

 

Turn one and my elite scouts grab part of the town and hope to press on.  Thanks to my opening barrage, James doesn't get to put a lot fo troops down for Turn One, but diastrously for me, he rolls two sixes, meaning that he gets two turns in a row.  Because James took two green squads with his support points, he gets two eztra LMG teams, and he has a lot of firepower and bodies to put in the way.  I get held up on the right.

 

And on the left, my poor scouts are hammered by the Germans, waiting for them with an LMG in the cottage and the rifle team on the far side of the farmyard.

 

A third German squad deploys by its jump off point and while it can't move, it can shoot.  They shred the squad supporting my scouts.   I discovered that in a game of CoC where the Junp Off points are close to one another, the battle becomes a knife fight where you can be cut up quickly and fatally. 

 

My Maxim team opens up and punishes James, landers in return, but on the right, my rifle squad is getting bashed about by its jump off point.   Just before this shot was taken, my Maxim team got ten hits on ten dice, an amazing throw.

 

And in their second turn of firing, the Maxim team rolls ten misses on ten dice, and is now suffering from incoming fire.  Meanwhile, James uses his infantry advantage to swing wide, taking my first JO point and threatening my second.  My Force Morale is plumetting.   The only good thing about my effort is how nice my Jump Off points look.  They are painted resin objective markers from a ompany called Army Group North miniatures.

 

 

My scout squad has been wiped out, and I an now down to one intact squad.   Time to call it a day.

 

 

After filling me full of lead, James filled me full of excellent Indian takeway.   It seemed a fair compensation.

 

 

It was good to playChain of Command again but sobering to realize how unforgiving it is to poor tactics.  My plan was very poorly thought out.   I led with my best asset and had no way to support them.   I put two JOs on the right axis of my attack but committed almost all of my attacking elements to the left axis of attack, leaving these JOs to be tempting prizes just asking to be grabbed, which they were.   While it was unlucky for me when James got two turns in a row, these things happen and a plan which depends on luck is not much of a plan.

 

Black Ops was a lot of fun to play, probably more fun for me than for James, who bore his sentries' incompetence with good humour.   I like the mechanisms in Black Ops, especially those for covert actions, and think it would be quite easy to modify them to my own Weird War Two project, which has lots of sneaking and skulking and frights in the dark.

 

Op Thundering Dice concluded with us playing the Lord of the Rings boardgame I have described here previously.   It took us a good four hours, but I watched in increasing frustration as Sauron while the nasty hobits got into Mordor and kind of ambled their way to Mount Doom.  Actually it was tense.  I had several good chances to stop them but several supporting characters (Gandalf the Grey, Boromir and Legolas) all sacrificed themselves willingly and allowed the Ringbearer to achieve his mission.   It was terrific fun, particularly as we imagined the Nazgul advisors leaving the council meeting where Sauron declared war, shaking their heads.  'Now my irrigation project for Nurn will never go forward.  Always war, war, war.'  'Yeah, and my Mordor Tourism Board budget is getting totally slashed now.  I had this great idea for aerial tours of Mt. Doom by Fell Beast.'  'Always war, never trade.  My free trade agreement with Gondor was almost ready to sign.  Years of work wasted.'  Such is the sad lot of an evil counsellor.

 

Blessings to your die rolls and may all your games be as much fun!  MP+

First Take: Playing War of the Ring

Last night three of us tried War of the Ring at the club.   Vincent, who owns the store we play at, raised his eyebrows.  “That game takes a long time, you know, like, six hours”.   He was right.  We didn’t get it finished in the three hours we had, but we got much of it figured out and we had a lot of fun doing it.

Steve and Bruce took the Shadow side, and I took the free peoples.   Here I watch as the forces of evil mass on the borders of Gondor.  My strategy was to try and push the Fellowship as far each turn as I could.   It seems to take about six to eight turns for the Shadow player to get Mordor and Harad to a state of war and to get enough forces massed on the border to start the attack on Gondor.   During that time I could have detached Strider  and Gandalf from the Fellowship and moved them south.  They might have had a better chance of preparing Gondor and encouraging Rohan to get into the war.  Bruce came out last night with a sheaf of printouts of strategy tips for the game from various websites, I will clearly have to do some research.



Too late.  By about turn 10, Minas Tirith had fallen to a siege, and Rohan was more or less just sitting around watching.   I think as the Good player I need to find a better strategy for getting Rohan into the war to aid Gondor.  The only thing I had going for me was a reinforced garrison in Dol Amroth, thanks to a Muster card called Prince Imrahil and his followers.   That garrison was a rock against which the Shadow armies broke in a terrible run of dice, which would have given me a bit of a base left in Gondor had we had more time to play.   It would have taken Steve and Bruce time to muster more troops and move them into the war.




During all this time, the Fellowship had gotten very close to Dale.  My hope was to use them to activate the Northern peoples and get them into the fight, then make a run with the ring bearers from Dale all the way to the gates of Morrannon and into Mordor.   I think the only real hope of the Good player is to run the Fellowship as hard and fast as possible and trade the cities of Men for time.



Also yesterday, the first expansion of War or the Rung from Ares Games arrived in the mail, though we didn’t have time to figure it out last night.



This expansion allows the Good player to use some of the key figures of the Council, Elrond and Galadriel, as well as an enhanced role for Gandalf.   The Good player gets three new action dice which represent the three Elven rings of power worn by Gandalf, Elrond and Galadriel.  The Evil player gets some additional minions, including an enhanced Nazgul King, a new baddie called Gothmog, Lt. of Minas Morgul, and of course the dreaded Balrog.



Some of the new cards that come with this expansion.  



I’m looking forward to playing more with this game and trying the expansion set.

First Look At War of the Ring by Ares Games

It’s been all Diplomacy all the time here, lately, but now for something different.

Years ago I had a copy of an old SPI game called The War of the Ring, a huge multi-map affair with two game systems in one:  a hex and counter military game, featuring the armies of Middle Earth, and a character game using cards which depicted the progress of the Fellowship of the Ring.   It was a terrific game that I bitterly regret selling in a period of hard times.

Recently my memory of that game was stirred when I was reading Matthew Sullivan’s excellent blog, Oldenhammer in Toronto.   Last month Matthew described a project where he was painting old school LOTR miniatures for Ares Games’ War of the Ring.   Matthew wrote that “I’ve never played a game that better captures the flavour of Tolkien’s work.  Perhaps the best part of it is that while staying true to the essentials of Tolkien, the game gives you the freedom to re-shape the events in his trilogy”.   This praise got me thinking of the old SPI game and wondering if perhaps there was a way to replace it after all.   So far, I haven’t been disappointed.

Last week I found this in my local games store.  It’s a heavy beast, somewhere around 2-3 pounds in a big box, and not cheap, though any imported game bought new these days isn’t that cheap here in the Mexico of the north.

 

The first things one unboxes are these two beautiful illustrated maps.   They are so big that I had to stand on a chair in my dining room to get them both into the shot.

 

 

I see crossover possibilities for using these maps in my Dux Rohirrim project.   Here the diamonds are Settlements, which can be used as possible locations for bringing reinforcements into the battle.  Small rectangles are Cities, which confer a slight defensive bonus and count as victory points in the military game.  The large squares are Citadels, which can shelter defending armies in sieges, and which count the most for victory points in the military game.

 

 

Some of the character cards, beautifully illustrated by fellow Canadian John Howe.  Characters include the Fellowship of the Ring and three Minions:  Saruman, the King of the Nazgul, and the Mouth of Sauron.  The Fellowship characters can be used to take the Ring to Mount Doom (as with the old SPI game, there is a sub-system built into this game for the Fellowship and Ringbearers) or characters can be detached to help in the military game.

 

The beating  heart of the game are these Event cards, divided into two types for both Good and Evil sides:  Army cards on the left, which confer benefits in recruiting and leading troops, and Character cards, which assist in the quest of the Fellowship and/or the Hunt for the Ring.  Both sides can play these cards for these purposes, or, they can use the bottom half of each card (the bit below the line) in army combats during the military game.  Once cards are played, they are gone for the rest of the game, so using a highly useful card in the Ring game to confer a temporary bonus in the Military game can be an agonizing decision.

 

The kinds of cards you can draw and play, or the actions you can take with characters and armies, are determined by the types of action dice you roll.   The Evil player gets more dice than the Good player, but the Evil player can find some of dice diverted, either intentionally or required if he rolls the eye icon, to the Hunt box, reflecting Sauron’s obsession with finding the Ring.   The more eyeball dice are in the Hiunt box, the harder it is to move the Fellowship  without detection and even damage, which can be taken either as Fellowship members dying, or the Ringbearer taking what are called Corruption Points, reflecting the Ring’s malign influence on the Ringbearer.  The Evil player can win the game either by accruing military victory points, or by maxing out the Corruption of the Ringbearer.  The Good player can win by getting the Ring to Mount Doom, and also has what seems to be a faint chance of a military victory.

 

 

The game also includes a generous amount of army tokens, in the form of these soft plastic models, which appear to be somewhere between 15mm to 20mm in scale.  Each nation in the game (Elves, Dwarves, the Northern Peoples, Gondor and Rohan for the Good player, Isengard, Sauron and the Southrons for the Bad player) has the same troop types:  Regulars, represented by the smaller tokens (the blue foot guys here), Elites, represented by the larger figures (the blue Rohan horse figure here) and Leaders, who are shown in grey plastic and which confer the benefit of re-rolls of unsuccessful combat dice (ordinary d6) in army battles.  I suppose one could either paint all of these figures (a council of madness) or replace them with larger figures from the GW or similar ranges of LOTR figures.

 

 The Evil army tokens are cast in this rather distressing reddish-orange.  I love the Oliphants for the Southron player.  The evil player gets Nazgul as his Leaders.

The only difference between Regular and Elite armies is that Elites can take two hits before being removed, whereas Regulars are removed after taking one hit.   The Evil player can bring his casualties back into the game as Reinforcements whereas when the Good player loses an army unit or leader, they are gone forever.   Army combat is fairly basic, with a dice rolled per side with hits on a 5 or 6, unless your target is in a citadel or city, in which case you only hit on a 6.  Armies can be as large as ten units in a map region, but you only get to roll a maximum of 5 dice per turn.    Army combat gets interesting depending on the cards players can dedicate to to fight, and depending on which Characters/Minions are present.   For example, the King of the Nazgul is a pretty bad dude, but his abilities can be largely negated if Gandalf the White is present (Gandalf the White is basically a power u of Gandalf the Grey, just as Aragorn of Minas Tirith is a power up of Strider).  

I have not yet played the game through, as it seems to be a long game, at least 3-4 hours.  My friend Bruce and I gave it a go on Monday, and liked it a lot.   We found that the Evil player can quickly get a juggernaut going, but has difficulty getting his armies rolling quickly if he wants to check the Fellowship.   The Good player has some hard choices to make in the military game, and faces some agonizing choices in sacrificing his irreplaceable units.   However, the Good player can afford to trade victory points for time, so he can sacrifice one or two Nations without losing the game on VPs if the Fellowship is successful   The Good has to use his or her armies cleverly to buy time while still leaving enough action dice each turn to move the Fellowship.

Wr of the Ring is a two player game, but 3-4 can play by dividing the Good/Evil nations amongst themselves.

There are a series of very helpful videos here which got me into the game fairly quickly, but I found the rules to be fairly simple and well written.  Tolkien fans may be disappointed that the game does not include some iconic figures, such as the Balrog, Galadriel, Elrond, or  Treebeard and the Ents.  However, Ares games offers two expansions: Lords of Middle Earth  and Warriors of Middle Earth.

War of the Ring gets the Mad Padre blessing and a bonus genuflection.

MP+