Pizza, plaster and paint: CSW hosts hobby night

Last week a few Chicago Skirmish Wargames members gathered at my home for an extended evening of hobbying. Drop-cloths descended, bins of supplies emerged from storage and we completely took over my dining room and kitchen. About midway through the evening we paused to order Chicago-style deep dish pizza from the place down the street, which gave us fuel to carry on and make some good progress on various projects.

At the first table, Pat was hard at work on a batch of Stonehaven Dwarves, which he recently received in the mail following a successful Kickstarter campaign. They had only been primed gray, but he managed to get three of them block painted and highlighted to the point where they were ready for the dip.

He then proceeded to put a second layer of paint on a batch of roads I had been working on. They are made of latex caulk spread in sections on hardboard, then sprinkled with just a bit of sand and painted brown. After a bit of dry brushing, we'll have some nice dirt roads for our wastelands. We'll have photos of these roads on the battlefield soon.

On the opposite side of the painting table, Mike was arranging his Imperial Guardsmen for an epic mass painting effort. A veteran of 3mm, 6mm, and spaceship fleet painting, Mike likes to paint in huge batches and today was no exception. He was painting the pants and sleeves on 60 Imperial Guardsmen! Here's some of the progress he made.

Across the room, Josh was hard at work building a set of hills. He is a bit new to terrain building, so we started with basic styrofoam hills. Despite a few mishaps with the foam cutter wires, he managed to carve and prep one section of hills, and he cut out a few more beyond that. The hills are made from a four-section styrofoam shelf display arrangement that was designed to display Lemax Christmas houses. I picked up the display at an after-Christmas sale for $4!

Josh also brought along a few Pegasus Hobbies Gothic Ruins that he had glued to hardboard triangles. He took this cool project to the next level, though, by beveling the edges of the baseboard and adding real broken ceramic tiles to the floor, then scattering kitty litter around for rubble. The end result is pretty great looking.

I really like the substantial look (big pillars, etc) of the Pegasus gothic buildings. They don't have as many bits and pieces, but they look good -- and the fact that they are not covered in skulls gives them a much wider appeal outside of Games Workshop battlefields.

Lastly, I worked on a bit of terrain that is sort of a bunker or mine entrance. It was originally sold as the "Brendam Dock Playset" from the Thomas the Tank Engine toy line. I found the main section for a buck or two at Goodwill. It's scaled nicely for 28mm figs, with the walkway being the perfect height for use a firing trench. It would have looked like this when new.

I removed the storage rails behind the garage door -- which still opens, by the way -- and I also chopped off the various tabs on the building where the railway and roadway would have been attached.

I added doors, fencing, a fuel tank and some other bits. The doors and hatches are all made from a bag of precut wood rectangles that I picked up from Michael's. They come in three fairly standard sizes, give or take a millimeter or two, making them an excellent option for cheap panels for sci-fi modeling.

It's since been primed and ballasted, but I'll do a post about it later. A great time was had by all, and a lot was accomplished. We've only managed to have three hobby gatherings in the nearly three years the club has existed, but I hope we can do this more often. Maybe deep dish pizza is the key?

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Mech Attack and Panzer 8 for 10mm sci-fi gaming

Last week, while Pat and Josh were playing This is Not a Test, the rest of us were playing Mech Attack and Panzer 8 sci-fi. For 10mm gaming, most of us have rebased Mechwarrior clix without any repainting. However, there are some exceptions. Tim has repainted his mechs in a green scheme that matches his 28mm Neo-Soviet forces.

Jon uses some really nicely painted Games Workshop Epic 40,000 titans. Technically they're 6mm, but they are big enough to make great 10mm mechs. Here's half of Jon's force. Vintage awesome-ness!

Panzer 8
Panzer 8 is part of a family of two-page rulesets based around the same fast-playing rule system. It's free, so check it out! For the game, we setup an urban layout using lots of card buildings. We house-ruled that any building of 2 stories or higher blocks line of sight, even for mechs that appear taller than the building. At some point we hope to build some of the excellent free cardstock buildings from the Dropzone Commander games, as they are taller than our current buildings.

We modified the rules as follows, mostly to accommodate the fact that we use 10mm figures based on fairly large bases. Due to the large bases we use, any gap (even one smaller than a unit) between units is enough to allow other units to pass through and shoot. Similarly, we ruled that shooting is measured from any base edge.

Jon and I began with Panzer 8, while Terrence and Tim took over the adjacent table for their Mech Attack game. We were a bit rusty so we began with a meatgrinder, kill-em-all game. I was using a pair of mechs and two platoons of armor, which you can see in this photo.

As the game started, I attempted to quickly bring my armor up the center and left flank, with my mechs bringing up the right flank.

Unfortunately, it wasn't long before Jon began to concentrate his fire and systematically dismantle my forces. Here's a shot of his titans pouring fire into my team.

I did manage to take down one of his light mechs, as well as a heavy mech.

But it quickly became a massacre. None of my forces even made it much past the center of the board.

 
Here's how things looked at the end of the game.

Mech Attack
Mech Attack is a game from Armor Grid Games that distills the fun of classic BattleTech into an actual, playable ruleset. The PDF is $6. For our game, we setup a maze-like rocky layout. I didn't end up with very many pics of these games, unfortunately. Terrence and Tim started off on this table with a simple meatgrinder game.

 After that, Tim and I played a game where the objective was to get a squad of elite jump troops to occupy a gun emplacement at the center of the board. The troops unit were given the following scenario specific rules.

• The ability to cross all terrain (not a standard troop ability in Mech Attack) 
• In increased speed to 5 inches 
• Didn't enter the board until turn 3, when they entered from a side of the players choosing 
• One new troop unit would respawn every time one was killed

It ended up being a very fast game as once the troops entered the board, as it only took them two running moves to reach the emplacement. The game simply came down to who won initiative on turn 5 for their troops to enter the emplacement. It was a bit of a 'blah' scenario, but it has given me some ideas for future scenarios.

Conclusions
In the end, this evening reminded me why I like these two rulessets so much. Panzer 8 is a great way to get a mass of figures on the board without being bogged down in rules. We could have easily fielded twice as many units per side and it wouldn't have lengthened the game much. The rules are extremely streamlined, but as we've seen, a few house rules can really round it out nicely. I'm looking forward to increasingly making this game our own.

Mech Attack did it's usual job of making a Battletech-sized game (roughly five-vs-five units) resolve in about a quarter of the time while still retaining essential mech-game elements: damage grids, heat tracking and weapon systems with varied effects. It did, however drive home the benefits of a well-built scenarios. Without one, it can simply degrade into a dice rolling slug-fest. Such games are fun for a while, but not likely to hold one's interest for an extended period of time.

As a club, we've decided to postpone the start of our winter post-apocalyptic campaign until early February to allow for one more evening of 10mm sci-fi. Stay tuned for more Mech Attack and Panzer 8 next time!

-- Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

TNT playtest: Attack of the Rad Bugs!

Last week the CSW crew gathered for a bunch of games, including another playtest of "This Is Not A Test" (TNT), the forthcoming post-apocalyptic game we've been following for a month or two.

For this game, we decided to put a bunch of rad bugs on the table and craft a scenario around eliminating the insectoid threat. I had a bunch of rebased Heroclix Brood minis that I'd been itching to get on the table for quite some time now. So Josh and I put together a tight, cramped urban battlefield, then put a big ol' drainpipe in the center of the table. This, we decided, was the objective: the first warband to lob a grenade down into the drainpipe and stop the outpouring of bugs would be the winner.

To start out, we scattered 8 bugs randomly around the board. Each one was attached to a particular terrain piece as its home base. As per TNT rules, these bugs would venture out from their home base to attack enemies, but wouldn't go more than 6 inches away.

On the flip side, the bugs that were going to be pouring out of the drainpipe (1d3 per turn, starting on turn 3) didn't have any such limitations. They were going to close with and attack the closest target in line of sight.

Beyond that, Josh and I agreed that our warbands could certainly fight with each other, but that our primary objective was to destroy the drainpipe and save our respective encampments from the bug threat. He was running a group of heavily armed Preservers (seekers of lost technology, represented in the game by relic weapons). I was fielding a group of primitive techno-scavengers using the Tribals force list. Here are our respective armies in action.

With those broad guidelines in place, we got the game started. We were playing at about 450 points, lower than the game's suggested threshold of 600 points, but more appropriate for our small, terrain-choked table space. (With the rest of the club playing 10mm sci-fi mass combat games, we were relegated to a 3.5 x 3.5 foot folding table.)

We started in opposite corners. Josh's Preservers moved to explore a ruined area and almost immediately came into conflict with a pair of bugs. For these smaller guys, we used the Giant Tick profile from the TNT rulebook. For the larger flying bugs, we used the Giant Mosquito profile. Both monster profiles seemed to strike the right balance of being more than just a nuisance but not so deadly that they'd wipe us out if left unchecked.

Across the table, I was positioning my Tribals to avoid contact with the bugs if at all possible. Instead, I sent them into the ruins where they could hopefully use their hunting rifles to pick off bugs (and Preservers) from cover.

The game unfolded well, with both Josh and I being fairly familiar with the rules. As before, we found ourselves using a variety of colored tokens to track conditions -- though not nearly as many as in our previous game. This was due to our reduced point level (450 points instead of 600 in our first game) as well as a note from the game's creator about a rules tweak that reduced the bookkeeping.

We battled the bugs pretty much exclusively for about 4 or 5 turns. Then Josh's warband leader (a singularly awesome figure who we took to calling Snake Eyes) fought his way to the drainpipe and hurled in a grenade. The ensuing explosion won the day for Josh, but it also frightened my primitive tribals -- causing them to turn their attention to the Preservers warband, which was still heavily engaged with the remaining bugs!

 

So Josh had to fight the bugs as well as the increasingly accurate potshots coming from my Tribals across the table. This he did, though things got a bit dicey at times. Eventually our two warbands killed all the bugs and fought each other to a complete standstill. We decided to call the game a draw -- we had defeated the bug threat, but our warbands were uneasy allies at best.

Once again, we had an enjoyable game of TNT that didn't result in too much rulebook-flipping. We agreed that it's a solid system and is easy to teach to new players. The playtest rulebook we have is just jammed full of campaign material, including random weather event tables, a currency-based barter system, and a big list of irradiated pests and predators ready to be dropped into your games. There are still a few holes where the author obviously intends to expand the book a little bit. But this playtest rulebook should be sufficient for us to launch our post-apocalyptic campaign in early February.

-- Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member