A Too Fat Lardies Game Day in Canada

Last Saturday I made the two hour trek south from Barrie to Hamilton, Ontario, for LardEhs, the second such event run by some dedicated Canuck gamers, the first being in November.    The name LardEhs is a play on Canadian speech patterns (IYKYK, if not, Bob and Doug will explain it to you here).  I ran a game in the afternoon, of which more in a subsequent post, but here quickly are some of the photos I had time to take in the morning.  The event attracted about 40 game masters and players, a small but impressive selection of vendors, and brought in at least one person from out of province.

Thomas Sero ran a Large Chain of Command game in 20mm featuring British and German troops fighting for Rauray, Normandy.   Thomas’  village, seen here, featured many of his own scratch-built structures, including a rather fine looking church.  I ran the British armour, and made the mistake of rolling too far forward in my Sherman, paying the price for not looking to my right and noticing the Panther in the orchard (top right).   It was a close fought game still in the balance when we had to finish the session.   Well done Thomas!

Howard Tulloch made an even longer drive than I did, coming down from Orillia to host morning and afternoon games of What A Tanker!  Howard’s skills running games, honed running DBA events for years, were fully on display here, with a novel and very interesting table taking the players to somewhere in Burma later in the war.    

 Japanese tanks, not often seen on the wargames table, stalked British Shermans and Stuarts for much of the day.    Tanks were continuously exploding, new players came and went, and much laughter was heard.   

 Roger Chrysler hosted one of two games of Sharp Practice, featuring a War of 1812 scenario by the late Mike Hobbs in which British troops and their First Nations allies are wreaking their revenge on Americans as they stumble out of their tents.   My friend and podcast partner James (top left) along with Dan played the British/Indians, and appeared to have victory well in hand as the Mohawk warriors were last seen crashing into what was left of the American flank.  Ouch.

 Sean Malcomson ran a game of Infamy! Infamy! pitting angry Britons against Claudian Romans, seeking to impose their evil metric ways.   I played in Sean’s Infamy game at Hot Lead this March, and was glad to have the chance again to see his colourful armies on the table.

 I do love me a chariot.  These are very tasty.  Somebody should write a chariot rules set called “Wicker and Whinnies”, I’d buy it.

Romans grimly hold the line.  I didn’t see how the game finished, but it looked like the Romans were a tough nut to crack.

Chis Robinson, a friend of the Canadian Wargamer Podcast, ran another game of Sharp Practice, an ACW battle that featured abundant numbers of cavalry.   Chris ran two distinct but linked games, with the morning game having a bearing on how the afternoon game played out.  Chris’ 18mm figures are highly distinct, sitting in the sweet spot for size and detail between 15s and 28s, and are very well painted.  Both Chris’ games were popular and well subscribed. 

 A high point of this event was the $400ish dollars raised from the charity raffle to support the local university children’s hospital foundation.   I want to thank Richard Clarke of TFL for donating a handsome number of red Lardies dice, which we sold as part of the fundraiser.   That along with other prizes donated by various vendors and by a certain Canadian podcast show the spirit of our Lardies community.

There were a few notable absences - no games of I Aint Been Shot Mum or its successor, O Group, no flying games, and it seems that the latest Lardie publication, Mark Backhouse’s ancient big battles rules, Strength and Honour, haven’t made it over the water yet.   There will be a LardEh 3 in late September, I hear, so maybe we’ll see the newest Lardie game then.  It would also be wonderful to see Lardies fans in other parts of Canada follow Ontario’s lead and run similar events.

Well done to Chris, Barnaby, and all the good folk who made this event a success.

Blessings to your die rolls!

MP+

Games at Hot Lead 2022

Hello friends:

On of Canada’s most well-known miniature tabletop gaming events is now in the books, and can be counted a success.   After two years of Covid-induced suspension, the games were back, the players were a little fewer in number and all masked and well behaved.   Congratulations to my friend James and his crew of redshirts for making it a success.  You can read James’ account of HotLead and see his own photos here.  There are lots more photos and videos on the Hot Lead Facebook group page here.

This was the first time I’ve stayed over at the Arden Park hotel, the venue space.  Previously I’ve cheaped out and couch surfed at my friend James’ expense, but this time I went all out and my lovely bride Joy came with me to sample Stratford’s shopping delights and to do some anthropological studies of the wargaming tribe.  She said “your friends are weird but nice”.  Truth.

My own brief account of what I played in and what I saw begins on Friday night with on of Dan Hutter’s signature multi-player rules, where no one is a friend and the guy sitting beside or across from you is probably gunning for you, so best gun him first. The game was set in Somalia during the disastrous UN intervention there in the early 1990s: several factions of Somalis, UN peacekeeping troops, and secretive mercenaries all had their own agendas and bullets soon flew in all directions.  Rules were a very simple and mostly playable version of FUBAR.  Grand start to the weekend.

 

Test of Honour samurai game going down on Friday night, lovely table. 

 Chris Robinson, a friend of the Canadian Wargamer Podcast and normally an historical guy, put on a Star Wars game that looked quite attractive.  It was good to hear that the young players enjoyed it.

 Some of the Hot Lead crowd were playing this impromptu Victorian SF game on Saturday morning, involving big steam powered clanks AND dinosaurs. 

 

Saturday morning I played in this beautiful WW2 game hosted by Joe Saunders of Miniature Landscape Hobbies.  Joe is a friend of the Canadian Wargaming Podcast and a lovely guy. 

 This scratch built railway gun was done by Joe and part of the table dressing.

 

The game was called “Countdown to Launch” and featured the Germans trying to delay the Allied onslaught long enough to fuel, arm, and fire off this V1 rocket.  

 It was quite an onslaught.  The Germans died in droves but managed to fire off the rocket.  I confess that tanks massed track to track are an example of why I don’t personally like Flames of War, but it did deliver a fast game, and at this sort of event, with three hour game slots, you need quick fast games.

 This beautiful medieval game, the Battle of Tewkesbury, was hosted by Ian Tetlow, who always puts on good looking games at Hot Lead.

 

 On Saturday afternoon I played in Sean Malcomson’s “Hard Brexit” ancients game using Too Fat Lardie’s Infamy, Infamy rules.  The object was for the Roman players to move a herd of (unfairly) taxed cattle across this table to safe harbour.  The British, strong believers in No Taxation Without Representation, were trying to stop them.

 Some of Sean’s beautiful ancient British figures.   The British deployed from a series of ambush points.

 Life got quite difficult for the Romans.   Their legionaries stood in line like rocks while their auxiliary reserves ran back and forward plugging gaps and counter attacking.  

The British skirmish cavalry, seen entering here, were annoying but not decisive.   In the end, we ran out of time but called it a British win.  I found these rules similar enough to Sharp Practice that I got the hang of it fairly quickly, and would try them again as an excuse to get some Romans to oppose my Germanic war band.

 

My last game at HotLead was on Saturday night.  Brian Hall, one of our local masters of 6mm, hosted an ACW corps-level game featuring the Battle of Cedar Creek.   Since the battle began in confusion and alarm for the Union, both forces started under blinds, with three of the four Union corps well back from the start of the action and thus the Union in a poor position to stop the Confederate advance. 

 By this point the Union had stabilized a line and were beginning to hold.    The rules were Altar of Freedom, which I found fast playing and quite bloody.   With each manoeuvre unit in the game a brigade, whole divisions were being quickly shattered, but the rebels lost too many men to sustain the assault, ending in an historical outcome.

Since a lot of my playing is solitaire, I found the points bidding initiative system in AofF to be a bit of a turn off, but as Brian noted to me, a card drive initiative system could easily be bolted on to the core combat rules for solitaire gaming.

 and 

 

 

Finally, it wouldn’t be a convention report with the usual haul of goodies.  My dear friend MikeB gifted me these Warlord Crimean War sculpts by Paul Hicks for use in my Alt-ACW project, which was kind of him.

Another friend sold me these antique Avalon Hill rules for Napoleonics, which are more of a collector’s item than a viable gaming system, though I gather they were once influential and I will try them out some day.  I gather it was AH’s equivalent of GDW’s System 7 Napoleonics, though the cardboard counters in the AH set were designed to give players a taste of the system and motivate them to buying miniatures.  There are some vintage adverts from minis companies of the era in the rules books.

And I stocked up on tree and basing material.

So that was Hot Lead.   I ran out of stamina after four games in 1.5 days, but as I said goodbyes on Sunday it was grand to see the crowd getting ready for the traditional mass VSF game.  

Huge congrats to James, Elizabeth, and the crew for making this revered event happen and I look forward to returning next year without a face mask!

Cheers and blessings,

MP

Scenes From Hot Lead 2019

Last weekend was Hot Lead, southern Ontario’s biggest (and, I think, best) tabletop wargames convention, which celebrated it’s 25th anniversary, a  considerable achievement for its organizers.   I was able to get to Stratford and attend Friday and Saturday.  I did a little admin to help the redshirt crew of organizers, got to play a bit, and got some images of some of the many games.

One of the many tables hosted by OHA (Ontario Hobbit Adventures), a super-dedicated group of gamers dedicated to the Games Workshop LOTR rules.  The terrain is quite stellar.

The Battle of Britain, one of several large-scale games run by Bill Bean.

Adam Gow’s fantastic samurai table using Test of Honour rules.   The photo doesn’t do this table justice, but the stone pillars along the path and the buildings all featured hand-soldered LED diodes.   It was quite magical.

Some chaps came up from the States to run this Battle of Hastings game, using a new set of ancient and medieval rules called TRIUMPH!   I wasn’t really tracking the game, but people seemed to enjoy these rules.

Dan Hutter’s crzy multiplayer games are a Hotlead fixture.   This is an ancients skirnish game set in the back of beyond of the Roman Empire.   Dan described it as “lying, bribing, cheating and back stabbing”.

 

Three more tables run by the Ontario Hobbit Adventures club.   The quality of the bespoke scenery attracted a lot of attention and admiration.

 

Another of Bill Bean’s BIG WW2 aerial games.   These B17s are off to bomb the Reich.

But they’ve met some opposition.

 I had a chance to command a MIG-15 in a 1950s melee with some NATO Sabres, in one of Keith Burnett’s meticulously organized games, this one using Check Your Six rules.   It was very zooms and shooty, but the NATO flyboys had the worse of it.

 Another Hot Lead veteran game master, Ian Tetlow, ran a reprise of his 1914 Le Cateau game.   Here the Kaiser’s hosts prepare to step off.

 Somewhere in this terrain lurk the BEF defenders.

 The German objective, this British battery, ignores the skirmish behind it.  They obviously have a more important fire mission.

 A very big Star Wars game.

 Another of Dan Hutter’s crazy multiplayer games, and a Hot Lead tradition, “Mongols With Mausers”.  Chinese warlords, Mongol bandits, European adventures, Reds and Whites mix it up on the Silk Road in the 1920s.

 Of course there are silly hats.

 

Dan receives the Emperor’s congratulations on a fine game.

 

 An amazing 1/32nd scale WW2 game using the FL What a Tanker! rules.

Basically a big game of cat and mouse. 

 With big cats.

 Speaking of big cats, this Leopard from James Manto’s 20mm Afghanistan collection watches as ISAF and ANA forces move forward against heavy Taliban resistance, 

James’ terrain is all home made and very effective.

I didn’t get the chance to stay on Sunday or see the epic SF/steampunk game which is another Hot Lead tradition, but it was a grand time out and good to see the hobby going strong.  There was some talk from the veteran gamesters about passing the torch on, and after 25 years, I don’t blame them for thinking that they’ve done their bit.   Sometimes I find that wargaming is a lot like church, in that people with gray hair worry about the institution dying out, but I saw enough younger gamers present that I’m not too worried about the future.