Lestrades_Game

I have complained on a few occasions about the random movement in TooFatLardies games and the die roll for actions mechanics in DBX style games. It's not that I think that random movement is wrong or bad or that random activations are bad but in both cases the range of results can seem to wild. In Chain of Command vehicles can sometimes seem like they are driven by learner drivers, surging forward one turn, stalling out the next. In DBA Hannibal can have a brain wave one turn and forget to move both flanks on the next. The story of the battle in my mind hits the record player stopping sound effect and I feel irritated on these occasions. With that in mind I want to talk about Winter Hammer. I played a Winter Hammer scenario at Ferret Con in Sheffield a few weeks back. This is a ruleset by Nordic Weasel for the Finnish - Soviet Winter War. I have not read the rules, only played Tom's excelent game set in a ~brigade level action south of Lake Lagoda in the intitial soviet of...

  Bit of a gap in my blogging (too much time spent miniature painting). But I will start 2024 with a rundown of the last 12 months.   Time (and monies)  Spent: I got into miniature wargaming at the end of August. Since then I have painted; Ø   >  1x 15mm Carthaginian army of around 30-40 bases Ø   >  1x 15mm Greek army of around 15-20 bases.   Have at it you fools! These are for any classical rule set I can lay my hands on but so far I have just played L’Art De la Guerre. Which is Ok, see my review.   Ø   1x 28mm Goths / Saxons / Vikings army. These I have not used for Saga yet, which was their original purpose. They have been hosed by dwarves ( I killed one dwarf and lost half my army) in a game of Warlords of Erewhon. Erewhon gets a tentative thumbs up. Need some more games and fewer rules mistakes before I decide on it, but I had fun.   Ø   >  1x 28mm late Roman army – these mostly still nee...

  I have played a couple of games of this now and watched one more. Not an expert but enough to share my opinion.   It’s mixed   I have enjoyed my games and will enjoy several more but I would caution the general recommendation for this rule set that gets chucked out regularly on reddit when anyone asks for a medieval or ancients ruleset. Hannibal surveys the field from behind  his gallic infantry   I will stick the boot in first then end on the positives.   As a simulationist by preference this game is nonsense. A generalist ruleset is going to struggle to represent the nuances of warfare in a specific era. I should not be surprised that the way elephants are used is not that similar to their historical deployment, or that running three lines of republic romans is a bad idea however I’m not sure that these rules represent any ancient or medieval warfare in a particularly meaningful way.   Let’s start with the victory conditions. Yo...

Qwixx is a Dutch abstract dice game about filling out a scratch pad to get a score, Chain of Command is a WW2 platoon level miniature rule set. What do they have in common? Read on…   I played Qwixx as an after dinner game at some friends house this past week. It’s a quick dice gambling, even push your luck game. There is no theme, you are just trying to fill out four coloured rows of numbers by rolling those numbers sequentially. On your turn you roll 6 dice, 2 white, 4 of different colours matching your four rows; red, green, yellow, and blue. Once you have rolled you can add the two white dice for a number to fill any row in the pad, and then add one white die to one colour die to fill a number out of that colour. With me so far? Good. You have to fill out your numbers in sequence for each row. Two rows count down from 12 to 2 and two count up from 2 to 12. So, early in the game I want to roll 12s and 2s. If I roll a 4 I could fill it out in a row that starts at 2 but th...

I don’t know what the rule set we have used is called but it’s based around Tsushima, so im going to refer to it as that (Pete may comment with more info). In both games I’ve played the Russian Baltic Fleet, Pete the IJN combined fleet. Tsushima is a game of two very distinct halves. In the first you move around paper markers trying to out bluff and out manoeuvre each other to cross your opponents T and get your destroyers in close. This is by far the most nail biting time I have had with miniatures. Paper counters - three real, one decoy remain Once your two bluff counters have been seen through and your others revealed you swap them out for metal ships (1:1200) and your fleet is on the table. The first half is the initial jockeying for position and the first pass. The second half is the following confusion and then perhaps a second or more passes. The first pass is very much a calculated icy affair of trying to secure the best fire angle for your fleet. After this ...

I shuffled in to 2018 with a weekend of Wargaming at my friend Pete’s. Here follows a look at four of the games we played, two miniature, two board. Five Core Brigade Commander is essentially the RTS video game Wargame Airland Battle in table top form. Our setting is cold war gone warm central Deutschland 1980s. In this weekend’s game I had a Soviet Armoured regiment mostly composed of T72s with some infantry and specialist support, and crucially two hind attack helicopters. The game is structured around ‘bases’ a square a few cm wide holding some 6mm minis that represents a company, either armoured, mech or foot. You get perhaps 12 of these with a few platoon sized assets supporting them. Each asset, e.g. Anti-air manpads or engineers either confers a special ability to its attached company or operates as an orbital unit that is thrown out from its parent to do something useful. For instance recon units can be thrown out to spot enemy in cover. T72s line up against BOARs Chi...

My friend Pete convinced me to buy some 1:1200 scale metal ships for fleet battle games. He picked up some Russo Japanese War Battleships and frigates and I being the most dapper of war gaming hipsters acquired some 30 ships from the well known Sino-Japanese War. I spent today gluing my fingers together and basing the ships. Yesterday we played a short skirmish with the Russo Jap ships using a simplish rule set. It is grey at sea The game is pretty simple, ships are split in to squadrons, plays roll for initiative then take it in turns to move each squadron and fire with each squadron and there's a phase for damage control and spotting (no ships start on the table instead you move dummy paper counters around until you are spotted). Combat is bucket o dice with a mixture of better dice and modifiers for the bigger guns. It makes sense, does a reasonable job of simulation and plays quick. The game adds colour with some interesting critical hit tables and a wide range of wea...