Time for the weekly update on my hobby projects as I try to focus down on my gaming goals for 2024. Things have already changed since I started this three weeks back but that means there's room for improvement right?
I added two new rules sets to the collection this week BOHICA from Empress Miniatures covers Vietnam skirmishing and L'Art De La Guerre v4 both physical copies from On Military Matters. BOHICA is well and truly for later as I'm not planning to game Vietnam for a bit but it looked interesting and I saw a dude on youtube playing it on a gorgeous table. We'll talk more about L'Art or ADLG later.
I'm removing Five Parsecs from Home from the list as the complexity just isn't there. It's a great one to teach folks the game and one to return to when I need something quick to light the miniature gaming fires again. For now, I'll continue playing some Rouge Trader on PC. Always good to strike one from the list!
Hope 2024 is a great one for you all in gaming and life and such here are the updates and revised list.
1) Strike Legion: Platoon Leader - Legionnaire Games
Faction 1 is almost completed. The lizard infantry needs a wash on their gear and I'm still thinking about what to do with their scales. The light blue doesn't wash well so I may highlight it with a brighter white and lean into the problem. Maybe a blue wash or something would be right to do here but I may not fret about it oo long as they are lizards and 15mm. But the army is done with only basing remaining. I'm looking forward to getting some drybrush action going on the stands before flocking them with a few different colors of flock.
It's always cool seeing the finished army done and ready for play. I'll be using these along with the premade rules in the book at first but cannot wait to write custom rules and lore for them. The game has mechanics to build your forces however you'd like.
This army is pretty wild, I still need to come up with some names. We've got the space dwarves, stealthy and good for eating when things get rough in the battle..
Then we've got the robot fish. Are they fish in robots? Are the robot fish? Are the Robots made by fish? You'll have to wait to find out for sure. Either way the look pretty sweet and have a cannon-like thing on their backs although it could be justified as some kind of optics device too. We'll see how the game plays out. They'll be my support units and maybe firepower.
Then the core of this faction, the space lizards. These guys are running around wearing nothing but some body armor and the golden bracers of the faction that keep them calm (relatively). The bracers inject small amounts of toxin to keep the space lizards in a semi-state of euphoria and sedation. This makes for some lousy shooting but they are in close combat with those teeth. They all have pants generators on their backs. You read that right, these aliens don't do well in pants so they carry high-tech devices to generate holographic pants. Pretty cool right? The generators also power their weapons. Just working out some of their vibes you know?
Excited to get through the tutorial games and make their stats here eventually. I should have them sealed and flocked by the next update.
When it comes to army 2 I did decide on a color scheme and it's a very 90s x-men style with a blue body suit accented with yellow elbows, knees and helmets. I think they'll look pretty sweet all painted up this way. The yellow is slightly annoying to paint a solid coat of it. But not bad at this scale it'll really pop on them and it's a different look than anything I've painted yet. I think I'll flock them differently than army 1 but not quite sure if I'll differentiate things too much on the one hand it's cool to have them matching since they'll really only be playing each other but on the other, the base gives them some characters. I may do more of a dirt and mud vibe for these guys with some dead grass where I'm planning to put green grass, yellow grass and dirt on army 1.
I have this water effect stuff that looks pretty cool when done right I'm thinking about trying to create small puddles on the base to be "mud puddles" then mud up the units a little bit to show they've been in it a bit. Trying to make the army unique. For reasons we'll get into on the ADLG update I may not end up expanding these armies too much beyond the starting scenarios but it'll be enough to play some solid custom games.
Trying to keep the momentum up with painting. I like the 15mm scale, almost every other game I've played and painted has been in larger scales. This paints up quick and looks great (to me). Looking at doing a chapter by chapter look at the game but I might wait until I get a game or two down.
Miniatures from Khurasan
Planning to use these same figures to try Gruntz, No Stars in Sight and Strike Legion Tactical someday.
I started reading this one but ADLG arrived in the mail at the end of the week and I've been absorbed in that instead. I will get to this as I think it has similarities to LotF and ADLG. Since I already have functional armies for the game I'm going to be adding this an item on the hobby roadmap to get both armies painted, sealed, flocked and played. This way I can test out the rules to see if I need to get more minis and keep this fantasy mass combat rulebook in rotation.
Miniatures from Splintered Light.
The cool thing here is these armies will be playable for the Mayhem ruleset as well and maybe others? The only thing to figure out is the basing as the figures I have are on 15mm squares so I'll be putting those on top of the 40x40 bases or using them as movement trays. These are actually next on the painting table after Strike Legion: Platoon Leader as the models are ready and I want to see them play a few games before buying into FIW with Land of the Free (and other things..).
This project will be more fun to paint than the Magyar and horses I've got for ADLG so I'll be painting what I have to test the game out and have some fun with this one with painting starting as soon as it's done on SL:PL. Not sure if I'll do the scifi 15 mm terrain I have just yet with miniatures taking precedence in my eyes.
3) L'Art de la Guerre
Dude. This game is awesome. The rules were dense for me to get through the first time so I put some magyar on the table against an opposing Khazar list and tried to play a game. Then I read the rules and repeated the process a few times getting a little further into things each time. This is a crunchy game for sure man. But I'm loving it the complexity is just right. Once you understand how things work it seems like it'll flow very well. I really like the mass combat feel of the game so far and the mechanics I've read around flank marches, ambush markers and more. I'll be doing a lot of talking about ADLG here soon. I'm late to the party as this game came out in 2008 but I'm here now with v4 having released in 2021.
The game is deep but simple with only a few modifiers and most things coming down to a single die roll. The 300 lists in the book are crazy man, they have me wanting to paint and play different periods and try different units out on the table. I've not tried DBA or anything like that but I know folks have said ADLG is like DBM but better written and not as overly written and expensive as FoG no clue if that's valid. But I like these rules, the wheeling and unit movement is sweet along with charging and evade reactions. Paired with learning some history here I'm hooked for now. 2024 may see ADLG taking most of my energy.
I had enough Magyar to play 100 points of Magyar vs 100 points of Khazar with included leaders and proxy camps. So the first step is to paint all of that so I can field a 200-point Magyar list then I'll base up a camp with some tents I have from the original Essex purchase, hoping I have enough here to build three Magyar commanders if not I'll be grabbing a few more horse buddies. After that, I will be grabbing 200 points of Mayan to learn more about Mayan time in and around El Salvador and paint and field a badass-looking jungle-based army.
The other thing I want to spend some time on is working on terrain for the reduced 100 point size game then the 200-point game. The terrain system here is rich and the use of terrain in the game is significant to stack bonuses and negate traits. I've not spent a lot of time building terrain but really need to get into it as terrain makes the table and the game much more enjoyable. I'm going to see if I can make terrain to represent everything in the game. On the plus side, it'll double for terrain in SL:PL, LotF, FB and so much more in the 15mm and maybe larger scales.
There are many armies I want to read more about. I'd like to build army with elephants and scythed chariots sometime and another maybe that uses the incendiary rules or camels. Much to explore here it could keep me busy for a while. The rules are good man, real crunchy and detailed but not too much so. If you don't like that kind of thing avoid it but really it looks like this game will be worth the effort to learn and prepare more armies for as my first real ancients project.
Miniatures from Essex Miniatures
A classical (~500AD) Mayan list is coming someday from Fighting 15s. I'm also on the hunt for good minis to play a North American Indian Tribes (~1000 AD) list for ADLG.
With the armies built here I'd be playing To the Strongest, Trimph and other ancients games someday. Keeping that standard 40mm base width with commander-in-chief/force commanders on 50mm rounds and other commanders on 40mm rounds. camps are 80mm x 120mm.
This game may eclipse Fantastic Battles and knock it off the list once I play a few games of it.
4) Heroclix - Wizkids
Battle Report:
300 Points
Map: Ice Lounge (?) recent DC 2x2
My Team:
Animal Theme
Sleipnir!
Sasquatch
Frog thor
Kazar
Andy's Team:
Daredevil
Thor
Valkyrie
After a turn of cautious approaching first blood was taken by Thor as he flew over the central blocking terrain and smacked Sleipnir into last week with 5 penetrating damage. Tough game out the gate for the ol' eight-legged horse. Kazar and Sasquatch were not close enough to charge but were able to move into contact with daredevil and Valkyrie on the side of the board. Frog Thor hopped around a few times from puddle to puddle waiting for the perfect time to strike.
Daredevil and Valkyrie tore into Kazar and Sasquatch on the left side but the probs on sasquatch helped avoid some of the damage. Sleipnir used some hypersonic speed to dash in and strike out at Thor. Paired with the Outwit coming from Frog Thor and the Probability Control coming from Sasquatch this was actually a pretty viable tactic. That being said I was rolling like crap so it wasn't as good as it could have been.
Also.. let's talk about Daredevil. This Super Rare is giving Super Senses and probability control to all the characters close to him without LOS. Kind of crazy as it means every character had two lines of defense, their printed power for defense and the Daredevil insurance policy as well. This made the team absorb a ton of damage and extended the length of the game by 5+ turns. This is made possible by Thor who makes all Asgardians count as adjacent so the two of them together on team is just gnarly man.
I like Heroclix but when games come down to back and forth with no progress things get a little bogged down, especially with power combos like this. I think it's a result of the power creep in the pieces that things got stronger so they had to also get more annoying to kill. I also think this shows a weak spot in the rules for the game. There's nothing else to do on the board except try to kill the opponent. This is fine most of the time but having a mission or objective to control one area of the map or get characters around a certain square for a number of rounds would give some illusion of progress and add to the dynamics of the game.
We almost never play a piece twice so it's hard to know what everything dose. I was caught by surprise on this one but managed to get the W with some smart play and hypersonic action. Also Frog Thor really cleaned up. the dude was good for me.
Fun game here as always.
5) Boardgames!
Kind os slow on this front with the other projects on this list, work and family. We did play two games of Catch the Moon though and I've got to say it is very fun! You stack ladders on top of each other and balance them to build a big mess that eventually falls over. A fun game that's so fast to learn, a good filler game to chill or use between weightier entries.
Cascadia is on the list to get some more plays of after the first two plays we could tell the abstract style of the game was perfect for us with a lot of challenges and different things to think about in taking your turn and making the best of every pool and piece.
After reading more about the French Indian War and now listening to the audiobook I really want to break out my boardgame from GMT called Bayonets and Tomahawks (I think) it is a cool emulate of the french and Indian war with french and British units and a map of the North east US and Canada at the time. There's so much detail in here I'm only beginning to understand it all but the game was fun to play when I had it on the table last year. There's a long campaign in it that I want to play while reading about each battle before playing them out. GMT makes a ton of games that I want to explore further including one about Vietnam and another about th 3ePlains Wars in the frontiers of the US after the Civil War. Very complex and historical games, fun stuff.
6) Land of the Free - Osprey Publishing PAUSED
I really enjoyed my first read of these rules and saw a lot of gaming fun and narrative potential as well as different angles to learn more about the history of the french and Indian war along the way.
I found several audiobooks covering the historical period that I'm digging into now while I wait to complete some existing painting projects. After painting what I have in 15mm I'll put in a huge order for some miniatures from Old Glory to build this out. The game is going to be awesome but it's not time... yet.
I'm putting this project on pause until I get the following accomplished:
1) Paint, seal, flock and play a game or two of Strike Legion: Platoon Leader SL:PL using unnamed army 1 and 2 albeit with 100% more names.
2) Paint, seal, flock and play a game or two of Fantastic Battles FB with the dark dwarves and wood elves who also need names now that I think of it.
3) Paint, seal, flock and play a game or two of ADLG with my Magyar army using half of it to represent their historical opponents the Khazars.
Muskets and Tomahawks will be getting done along with LotF
New Games this week:
BOHICA from Empress Miniatures arrived along with L'Art De La Guerre ADLG from On Military Matters it'll play 28mm maybe 15mm Vietnam and looks like fun. I want to game Vietnam after French Indian War. So I'm lining up a few different game systems to try and starting to keep an eye out for good miniatures, and helicopters!
Triumph ancients style game like To The Strongest, and ADLG maybe too similar to try on it's own but it looks like it had solid representation at Historicon and Fall In conventions this year. I'm all for playing games that other people play despite what it may seem with all my obscure gaming interests.
Trying to stop adding rules and stop dreaming about projects to get some work done and some games played this year! You know, stop starting and start finishing.
See you all next week, get stuff done! Pain them minis and roll some dice.
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The backlog of games to get to someday
Gruntz, No Stars in Sight and Strike Legion Tactical, Force on Force: Ambush Valley, 'Nam, Clash of Spears, Muskets and Tomahawks, Marvel Crisis Protocol, Malifaux 3e, Starmada, Task Force Zeta, Battletech, FNG, Charlie Company, Mayhem, Gaslands, Castles in the Sky and 40k (again..).
- Rob
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