Archive

Archive for the ‘War games’ Category

15mm buildings from salute 2012

May 4th, 2012 No comments

I thought I would put together a post about the terrain pieces I purchased at the Salute 2012  show in London This April.

I love wargaming, for years I pretty much exclusively played games workshop games, but  a few years ago I decided to branch out and look for other games systems. The thing that really caught my eye was Flames of war. A World War 2 15mm wargame made by Battlefront Miniatures. The thing that First drew me to the game was the terrain. I was so used to playing on pretty much a barren surface, with 3-4 buildings made from pringles tubes, yogurt pots and the odd games workshop building on it. That used to be fine, until I saw a FoW gaming table. It honestly blew me away. I had been living in my own little bubble for years, blindly thinking that “my” game was *best* and it didnt get any better than that. Oh how wrong I was.

Read more…

AAR Multiplayer Flames of War 041011

October 6th, 2011 No comments

Hi!

Welcome to my blog,

This post is an After Action Report from a game of Flames of War I played at Morpeth Wargames club On tuesday night with three other guys (two of which I hadn’t met before).

The game wasn’t really planned, so we all just turned up with a 1750pts list, paired off and played a 2v2 game, which was a mismatch of British Para’s and Soviet Heavy armour facing A german Grenadier list and a German Panzer Lehr list.

I attempted to write down the highlights and take a few photos, this will be my first attempt at a proper flames of war AAR, so please bear with me!

Read more…

Terrain – 15mm River

October 2nd, 2011 No comments

Hi, Thanks for checking out my site,

In this post I am going to show you how I made some terrain pieces, in particular I am going to show you my 15mm river sections.

First, a bit of background into how I got into 15mm wargaming, and terrain making in general, you can skip past this bit if you like!

Read more…

Terrain building – 15mm bunkers

September 20th, 2011 1 comment

Hi, thanks for reading.

I’m currently making some terrain pieces for Flames of war, a 15mm world war 2 tabletop war game.

Unlike some lucky people, I’m limited for space, so all of the terrain I make is “modular” which means I can pack everything up into boxes for storage.
Modular terrain never looks as good as a static layout, which will always look more natural, and will flow a lot better.

This does however give the advantage that it can be repositioned into limitless layouts, which can be really handy for war games as every game is different, and playing on the same board would just get boring.

Read more…

Product Review – Zvezda German SD.KFZ 251/1 personnel carrier 15mm plastic kit

September 14th, 2011 1 comment

Header

Welcome to my second review!

This review will focus on one product from the Zvezda 15mm  range.

Read more…

Miniature Review – Battlefront vs Plastic soldier company Panzer IV boxed set

August 18th, 2011 4 comments

Panzer IV boxed set review

 

Hi, Firstly, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoy this review, it’s just going to be my honest views about these products, I’m not entirely sure if I will be sticking to any kind of writing ‘style’, or whether this will be a particularly good review, it is after all my first ever real product review! But, here goes!

Read more…

Infinity – another wargaming system

April 17th, 2011 2 comments


Infinity logo

Today I got the chance to play a game of infinity by Corvus Belli Miniatures, I found out about Infinity from Beasts of War, an online community for Miniature wargames fans. They do some fantastic vids, check them out!

Read more…

Mordheim/Malifaux Scenery repairs

March 15th, 2011 No comments

Last sunday I decided to fix some scenery instead of playing a game.

A few years ago, Games workshop produced a game called Mordheim which was VERY popular at our club,

they had a range of card terrain (as was the norm with GW until a couple of years ago) which was really nice, lots of destroyed buildings, which were in multi levels, something that was quite rare unless you’d played necromunda.

The club had a whole set of these buildings which were mounted onto 12″ x 12″ hardboard squares, which kept most of the buildings intact long after their life expectancy.

However, with our move a few years back from a small premises to a much larger one, the buildings got packed away into a box, and with the decline in popularity of the game the box was forgotten about. and. squashed.

So, with Malifaux becoming popular, and having a distinct lack of suitable terrain, I thought it was time I tackled the rather squashed and definatly unloved box of Mordheim terrain.

Here are a couple of (rather awful) photos of what the terrain looked like as it came out of the box

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

 

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

ruined terrain

I set about bending back the card so it was all pretty much as straight aw I could get it, then took the pieces that had fallen (or been ripped) off and matched them up as best I could with the different board sections.

after this I cut up lots of lolly sticks to various lengths and used a hot gluegun (purely for speed), to “brace” the card, give it some strength, as the bases were all very strong anyway, the walls just needed that little bit of reeinforcing to bring them back to life.

Now, these still need cleaned up, excess glue taken off, and some painting of the lolly sticks, and a couple of the bases need polly fillered and painted, but the main aim of this session was to get the terrain in a condition where it can be used.
Hopefully someone else at the club will follow my lead and do a bit of painting!

here are the results:

ruined terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

fixed terrain

Malifaux – Another game

March 7th, 2011 2 comments

I managed to get a game at the club today, I used my Viktorias (25 soulstone game, same crew as last time, Vik’s, Taelor, x3 ronin)

I played Von Schill’s crew, against my mate Dave, I had a look through our scenery at the club (of which there is a colossal amount), and found that most of the stuff we could use had been taken up already, so, I dug a little deeper, and found a box filled with old mordheim scenery, for those of you who don’t know what mordheim is, go check it out! it’s a skirmish game produced by games workshop a few years back, set in a fantasy city hit by a meteor, which becomes partially destroyed, warbands battle through the city to find “shards” of the meteor, in some respects, its a heck of a lot like malifaux, but in many, its really really not.

Anywhoo, the terrain looks like this, that link is a google search, and the first image that popped up that has the card buildings from the set, so, at the club we had quite a few buildings back in the days of mordheim, when we were in our old building in Newsham, since we moved a couple of years back the mordheim scenery just seems to have been forgotten, unfortunately, It hasn’t survived very well. However, it is fixable! and next Sunday I will be going into the club, and fixing it up as best I can, as it will be perfect for malifaux, and, hopefully, it’ll even resurrect mordheim!

I picked a few of the less battered buildings, even these however were severly damaged, but it was the best we could get, and I put together a table, and we set up.

Dave flipped for deployment and got diagonal, then flipped for strategies, Dave got slaughter and I got treasure hunt.

Dave deployed first and then we flipped for initiative, I won (Which became a recurring theme throughout the game!) and we set off, again, like the last game against Elazar we both have crews who follow pretty much the standard flow of the game, me only having the viktorias who can companion, and Dave having leader, which lets him activate a model after von schill.

The first couple of turns went pretty quick, with both of us just moving towards each other, then, in about turn three (I think I’m going to write a proper battle report in my next game, and possibly take photos, even if the mini’s are unpainted, as wall of text is starting to annoy me :P )  it all started to kick off,

Dave Had a trapper, who started the game out of his deployment zone, on a hill covering he objective, and the majority of his crew moved round one of the flanks, led by Von Schill, this little group was the majority of his force, so I pretty much had to go for them as he had the objective covered, and was close enough to counter attack if I just tried to dash for it.

I decided to attempt to be clever, and move around the board in pairs. It kinda worked, but only on one side.

I moved a ronin up (my) the left flank with Taelor, the two viktoria’s up the middle, and the other two ronin on the right flank.

The ronin on the left flank performed exactly how I had envisioned, after a couple of turns they snuck up on the trapper, and the ronin managed to chop his face off.

Taelor moved up in front and went for the specialist (i think it was the specialist, he had a flame cannon I think), she only managed this after the trapper managed to cause a few wounds on her, no matter, tis only a flesh wound! carry on!

so she did, she managed to smash the specialist into tiny pieces, only to find out that he explodes when he dies. an epic ball of flames ensued, barbecuing Taelor (and her chebs). ah well! she won’t be doing that again!

meanwhile, I had a plan to get the viktorias across the board in double quick time. I didn’t end up using it, as I thought it would end in one of the viktorias meeting a messy end. As it happens, she did anyway.
The plan (as any self respecting commander knows, does not survive contact with the enemy), was to use companion, and “sisters in spirit”, to move the gun toting vik forward once, then swap places with the sword toting vik, who would then charge forward into combat, with the “free” attack for charging, and her additional attack for melee expert, however I felt that this would leave her out in the open, so, I decided against it.

Instead, I left them both out in the open, just slightly furthur back than they would have been if I’d stuck to the plan, where they got the crap kicked out of them. sword toting vik met a sticky end, and gun toting vik took a few wounds, but in return I managed to take out a dude, and cause a few wounds onto Von Schill.

However the librarian decided he would heal von Schill, which I didn’t like. so I went one step better.

The Viktorias have a spell “another one” which means they can sacrifice a ronin (within 2″) and spend two soulstones, to summon a viktoria, after the sword toting vik died, I looked at my control hand and luckily had the card I needed to be sure to pull it off, so, I sacrificed a ronin who just happened to be near death anyway, and moved convinently close enough to set the spell off.

I pulled it off, and got Vik back. who then charged forward. and got owned. again.

She managed to cause a bit of damage though, I believe I took out the librarian with her? or, it might have been the ronin who took out the trapper, either way, the librarian died,

The other ronin, seeing that everyone was ignoring the objective in the middle made a dash for it over three turns, he ended the game about an inch from my deployment zone, which meant that I didn’t get any Victory Points, but on the bright side, dave didn’t get any either, so the game was a draw.

At the end my crew was pretty battered, one of the vik’s had died twice, I’d lost taelor, and sacrificed a ronin, and only one of my characters had not taken any wounds (the treasure carrying one),

Dave still had Von Schill left, who, to be fair, is nails, and could probably have taken out at least what he needed to get some VP’s if he was given a chance, but fate was against us, as we flipped to see if we would get any more turns, and the game ended.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed the game, we both lost some models, neither player had the game in the bag at any point, and we both learned some stuff about the game. There were a couple of moments for both players where the cards were against us, and where they were on our side. A nice balanced, fun game.

Just how I like it.

Cheers Dave.

Next time I hope to smash von schill into many pieces. ;)

Chris

Malifaux – Progress

March 5th, 2011 1 comment

Just a quick update on my progress with Malifaux, just a small thing really,

But I have decided to laminate my cards for each of my crew members, The guys at the club have already done theirs, and I thought it was a pretty good idea, seen as these cards will see action every time the models do, and although they are made from a high quality card, they are still likely to get pretty battered.

So I convinced my mother she really needed a laminator, and off she went to wilkinsons to get one.

Cost £9.99, and £1.60 for 25 A6 laminating pouches, seen as we’ll get some use out of it, its a worthwhile investment.

Pretty simple really, heres some pics of me laminating the cards.

Laminator

Laminator

cards

cards

card in pouch

card in pouch

 

card in laminator

card in laminator

 

laminated cards

laminated cards

 

close up card

close up card

Now from here I could cut them so the laminate is a nice neat edge round the card (not too close or it’ come apart), but for now I’m just going to leave them be, I’m on the lookout for an A6 ringbinder folder, if I find one, i have some space on each side of the cards to hole punch them and put them in a folder, as I assume I’m probably going to end up with quite a collection of these cards!

Something else thats been cropping up at the club are the need for counters to represent things like soulstones, corpses, scrap in the game, I’m going to be using these glass beads to represent my soulstones for now, cost £1 for a bag with about three times whats shown in the photo below. I think they should be sufficent to act as soulstones for our games

soulstone counters

soulstone counters