WIP: 15mm AFVs from Darkest Star

Playing a game of Xenos Rampant with my friend James over the holidays has whetted my appetite to work on some recently purchased 15mm figures.  

These are resin models (with some metal bits for the wheeled AFV) from Darkest Star Games, a US (I think) company that makes some very nice models in 15mm and 6mm.   Below are two two 15mm grav (floating) APCs for a Terran force that I am slowly building to fight solitaire battles against my Space Kitties (see previous post).    The paint scheme is for deployments to desert/arid environments, inspired by the Canadian vehicles from the Afghanistan era.  I am used the Sand paint from Foundry tri-tone system, with brown ink lining out over the base coat.

Middle tone:

 And the two vehicles closed to the camera finished with the third and lightest coat for highlights.   When I get back to them, I’ll add some decals saved from various model sets for accents.  

As I envision it, the grav APCs could be dropped from a transport once within a planet’s atmosphere to secure a Landing Zone, whereas the wheeled AFV (can I call it a tank if it has wheels?) would need to b brought down to the planetary surface via heavy shuttle.

More on the project next time.   Cheers and blessings to your brushes!

MP+

In Space No One Can Hear You Purr: A Xenos Rampant Game

As my old pal James has described on his blog, we got together shortly after Christmas for a long overdue bit of dice rolling and a catch up on busy lives.   Too granddads playing with toys, it was lovely.  We’ve been pushing lead around this table in this basement for a long time, since the 1990s, when we were slimmer our hair was darker, and in that time the toys have changed but we always have a good time.

We decided to play an SF game using our 15mm kit and the relatively new Xenos Rampant rules.   James and I have been playing Dan Mersey’s “Rampant” rules for ages, and since many of the core mechanics are repeated in Dan’s fantasy, medieval, and now SF rules, we could get to the dice rolling fairly quickly.  We both built our forces using 24 points, which provides a manageable sized force and a fast result.

My SF army is inspired by Larry Niven’s Kzinti, intelligent and aggressive feline aliens, represented by the Tigrid miniatures from Khurasan.    James’ force is human, inspired by the Martian Marines from The Expanse TV series and novels.  Curiously, the base colour for both our forces is red.

Xenos Rampant is a clever tool kit that allows you to build your force out of some base types (Recon, Berserker, Light and Heavy Infantry, Support Weapons) that are essentially the same troops types as in the previous Mersey rules, and a set of alien traits that can add character and special abilities to a particular army.  For example, to make my Kzinti more “pouncy” I bought the Mobile trait which gave my infantry an astonishingly fast 12” movement per turn, and since Niven portrays them as being aggressive to a fault, I chose two ten man units of Berserkers to get into melee as quickly as possible.   They were backed up by a ten man unit of Heavy Infantry, an AFV with an area effect weapon (negates cover) and a support weapon team.

Here my force advances on the coveted kitty litter processing plant.   Fans of Space 1999 will appreciate the model adding some eye candy, perfectly scaled for 15mm.  My heavies are in the centre, the berserkers on either flank.    My Commander got lucky and rolled a trait that allowed him to make a unit within his 12” command range Assault (melee) automatically without an activation role, which proved useful to have with my two units of berserkers.

 

This shot shows James’ scratch built SF industrial scenery,  Well done James.  

 The Supreme Tigger (far right) and his troops arrive on the objective, which they would hold for the rest of the game.   The tank is a Ground Zero Games model, painted garishly to frighten the hairless monkeys.  It’s firepower proved quite devastating and helped me hold the centre for the game.

 

 

Two spectacular events in a row:  some of my berserker kitties got up to the quite battered human tank and destroyed it with catnip grenades, but were the exultant cats were immediately obliterated when James managed to call in the rail gun of his supporting space cruiser, which was a nice asset but far too spotty to be decisive.

 

There were a few rules that we hadn’t quite mastered, such as the Firefight rule which gives targeted infantry a chance to shoot back at their attackers.   However we both agreed that XR provides a quick and satisfying game with a good SF feel, so we will doubtless try it when we are next together.   James will no doubt reconsider his doctrine of five man units, as my ten man (cat) units proved more robust and dangerous when shooting.  

Later in the day we got to play with James’ endearing Quar figures, an “alt Great War” universe with, well, anteaters.   The figures are charming and I’m just glad that James wasn’t infected with that Turnip 28 disease.   You can read James’ account of our day here.

I’ve been fortunate in that a friend recently gifted me some of his 15mm SF figures, including a human force, and James kindly gave me a box of old 15mm SF figures from an estate sale that I look forward to going through, and hope to post some photos here in the future, so SF will be a focus of my hobby time in 2024 I think.  

Cheers and blessings to your lasers.

MP+

Happy Messerschmitt New Year

Hello friends:  

Three days into the new year and I’m only now wishing you a happy 2024 is about on pace for this sadly diminished blog.   I hope that you and yours passed a happy holiday season and for those of you who still keep Christmas, there are devotions and homilies on my other blog, the “God Blog”.

In 2023 my identity as a wargaming vicar weighed 90% on the vicar side, and only 10% on the hobby side.   At sixty one I still have energy and enthusiasm for my vocation, but began to notice that the hobby and the friendships that make it so enjoyable have suffered.  Until this last week I hadn’t picked up a paintbrush in months, and hadn’t rolled dice in ages.   

Case in point, I have kept a model kit in my church office, in the hopes that I would add a part here or there in my spare moments, but hadn’t touched it since the summer.   I have resolved to be more attentive to these sorts of distractions in future, for my mental health and overall wellbeing.   A thoughtful Christmas present from my wife Joy, a local gym membership, will also be used.  

Just after Christmas I hauled out the model kit, an Airfix 1/48 scale ME 109 E3, and finished it on New Years’ Eve.  I used the paint and decals scheme for the plane flown by Oblt Josef “Pips” Priller, immortalized in the film The Longest Day.

I’m too old a bunny to try an airbrush on a kit like this, so contented myself with using a brush for the cammo scheme. I did try using a dark ink wash for the panels.  

I don’t see any wargaming use for this model, I think it will just adorn a shelf somewhere, and one day sit beside the 1/48 scale Hurricane that is waiting to be built.

I pray that 2024 is off to a good start for you and that we will all be happier and more fulfilled because of the hobbies that give us joy.

MP+

Games From My Past

I admit that I was a weird kid.  In senior high school I was poor, had no car, and was thus severely handicapped in the dating game.  What I had was a love of military history, a small income from summer jobs, and an older friend, David, son of my parents’ friends, who introduced me to paper war-games.    Thus I had a subscription to SPI’s house organ, Strategy and Tactics, and an opponent who was happy to beat up on me on evenings when I should have been learning calculus (I never did).   To this day, old hex and counter war-games, especially SPI titles and their distinct, slightly musty smell, are a Proustian gateway to the late 1970s.

Thus it was with great happiness that I discovered via Twitter a fellow who was selling off a considerable stock of old paper war-games.   I took a bit of a risk in sending him money (I won’t disclose the sum but, while considerable, it was very fair) and then waited while the promised games were boxed.  Once I got a legit tracking number, I figured he was a decent chap, and sure enough a box arrived last week, a sort of time capsule of SPI at the height of its powers in the late 1970s.

Two of these games are well known to me.  I played Empires of the Middle Ages a lot in undergraduate days, and it probably cemented my desire to do graduate work in medieval studies.   SPI’s Middle Earth trilogy was likewise something that I played, a LOT, though sadly I sold both titles during a period of youthful poverty.

The other two titles are ones I’ve wanted for a long time.  Art of Siege features four famous sieges from Alexander’s siege to Tyre to Lille and Sevastapol in the gunpowder era.   Never played, long wanted.  Likewise, Campaign for North Africa is the Mount Everest of paper monster games.    It has a legendary aura, as a ludicrously complex, unplayable white elephant, but as someone who once played Avalon Hill’s Africa Corps, it represents the extreme other end of the complexity scale from that legendary AH game.  Will I play CNA?  Maybe.   Maybe I’ll die with it on the shelf. But I had to have it.

Did I say that these four games were unpunched?

Blessings to your die rolls.

MP+

Finished First Playthrough of Burma: The Forgotten War

I’ve finished my first solitaire play through of Mark Herman’s Burma: The Forgotten War from C3i Nr 35.  Here’s a quick look at how this game and it’s Empire of the Sun system is card driven.   Both sides get four cards in each of the four turns, but at the start of Turn 4 the Allies get a US B29 unit and through a successful Strategic Warfare turn have reduced the Japanese hand to three cards.   Of these, the best card is Col Tsuji, which if used as an Event card gives Japanese land units a boost but doesn’t allow any of the (still substantial) Japanese air units a boost.   The other two cards, if used as Offensive Cards rather than events, don’t activate that many units (the large number top right hand corner plus the HQ value of 1).

On the other hand, the Allies get four cards, all of which can be used as Events, in which case the number of units activated equals the Logistics value in the text of the card plus the HQ value of 1.  So the Allies can punch hard against the Japanese in the last turn.

And the final result at close of play.  The Allies have totally broken the Japanese lines.   One Japanese air and land unit at the top right is isolated and out of supply,  and their are only two Japanese land units left defending Rangoon.  The Burma road from Jarhat in North India can be traced all the way to Kunming in China, India is militarily safe (though politically a little wobbly) and China is still very much in the war, so one the Victory Points are added up, it’s an Allied decisive victory.

Somebody on Twitter (I refuse to call it by E Muskrat’s name) quipped that game designers are too fond of the word “Forgotten” but truth be told this is the only WW2 game I’ve ever played on the Burma campaign.  I have an MMP game on Burma which I haven’t tried yet, but I think that has a crunchier land war focus, whereas Herman gives you a good sense of the limited options available to the Japanese and the limited resources the Allies had to prosecute this theatre.   In another game I might explore the Chinese subgame more, where the Japanese can just defend on the map and use more cards for Chinese offensives (abstracted) which can drive down China’s ability to stay in the war and thus possibly yield more VPs.   Any Japanese cards that can be played to destabilize India are also worthwhile, as that does limit Allied replacements for their land units.

Good to play a hex and counter game again.  I recently purchased Mark’s South Pacific: Breaking the Bismarck Barrier 1942-43 game (C3i Nr 30) which also used the Empire of the Sun system, and now that I know the EoS mechanics I can give it a try before I try the big game.

Cheers, thanks for reading, and blessings to your die rolls.

MP+

New Ottoman Figures and Excellent Service From Warfare Miniatures USA

Pray ye, gentles, pardon this blurry picture of some ancient 28mm Ottomans in my collection, they were quickly painted back sometime in the 1990s and are a mixed lot of Janissaries and the lower row are Tufeckis.  I have no idea what make of figure they are or how I acquired them.  Judging from the primitive muskets they are meant to be 17th century.

I wanted to flesh out the fellows on the bottom into their own unit, and so while searching the internet for Ottoman figures and flags, I came across Warfare Miniatures USA, based out of Virginia.  They specialize in 17th / early 18th century figures.

These are some of the Warfare Miniatures Tufeckis compared to one of my old painted ones.  They compare well in size, though the new figures have longer muskets, which are sadly a bit bendy but otherwise the figures are decent.

And finally, here are the paper Ottoman flags that arrived in the same shipment, printed cleanly on heavy card stock.

Before I close, a word of appreciation for this vendor.   When my original shipment arrived via UPS while I was on holiday and then got returned after I missed the deadline for final pickup because I was out of the country, Clarence at Warfare Miniatures USA reshipped the order via US Postal Service and didn’t charge me for the second shipment,  A real gentleman, and I commend his customer service and products to your consideration.

Cheers,  

MP+

Game On The Table: Burma The Forgotten War

Hello friends:

Just a quick proof of life blog post to show that I’m here and still interested in wargames, just terribly short of time.

On the gaming table currently is a paper game, Burma 1943-44, The Forgotten War.   It’s a design by Mark Herman that shipped in the most recent C3i Magazine publication of Rodger McGowan which is essentially the GMT Games in-house magazine.

This is a strategic-level game that uses the same engine as Herman’s Empire of the Sun (2005) which covers all of WW2 in the Pacific.  I have EOS but thought that the Burma game would be a good way to learn the system, which is card-driven and focuses a turn on a series of possible military, political or economic events.   Cards can be played for specific effects as printed on the card (eg, the Japanese can use certain cards to make India more politically unstable for the British and cutting off key reinforcements and replacements needed to police the Raj instead of supporting the Burma offensive) or the like.

Or, cards can be played for their logistic and command and control values to allow certain units to act offensively, or to react defensively.   Thus, it’s not one of those games where every unit can do something during each turn.  It requires a lot of thought, and as it’s a card game, would doubtless be more fun as a two player game.

The puzzle for the Allies is to use their limited resources to punch a hole through the Japanese defences and push on Rangoon before the war ends.  The Japanese have a decent army and some air units, and can either play defensively or make their own attempts to reach India or knock the Chinese out of the game.

Not a simple game but it’s short (four turns) and halfway through my first try I’m enjoying it and feeling like I’m mastering the system.

Cheers and blessings to your die rolls,

MP+