St George's Day Game 2016

The annual St George's Day game, which this year actually occurred on St George's Day! An alternative version of Operation Goodwood, as the British try and force their way out of Normandy but this time with paratrooper support.

The ruleset used is Rapid Fire. Figures supplied by Matt and Keiron.

Hero Training

With a number of people missing from the club, I finally managed to get the Heroes of Normandie boardgame into action.

Since this was essentially a training session for the game we worked our way through the first couple of base game scenarios. We decided not to use the cards just to keep things simple.

First scenario was over quickly, the package appearing on an intersection favourable to the Germans. Things proceeded with very little effective shooting, and only one close combat, which was initiated after the game was effectively won.

The second scenario was  the 'Saving Private Rex' one, this one does seem biased towards the American side, due to the amount that they outnumber the opposing Germans, who start with a badly placed Machine Gun nest.

A couple of mistakes made during game play in terms of visibility of concealed Recon units, and the ability to shoot through certain terrain squares to units beyond.

Going to get a couple more containers for the counters, to add to my existing one, as the ziplock solution currently in use is too disorganised.
¶

Horrific Easter

Lousy weather over the Easter holidays, so broke out Eldritch Horror for a couple of solo games, running a couple of characters in each game.

First game, with Cthulhu as the big bad, went disastrously. I chose the Explorer and to face the evil deep ones doings, but couldn't get any traction in solving the first mystery.

Theoretically having two characters working together should help make things easier due to the way the gate allocations and clue tokens to solve mysteries tend to work ( normally half the number of players and round up )

Second game, against Yog-Soggoth, went down to the wire, but managed to lose a number of characters in the process of solving the final mystery.

Charles Kane is not very useful on his own, but with more characters in play I can see his abilities to manage resources being very powerful.
¶

Wasteman Workout

Wasteman, a game by ThunderChild Miniatures, set in a Post Apocalypse wasteland. Not exactly designed for five players, the result being that quite a few special cards were flying around all over the place.

The game resolved into two seperate one on ones, with the fifth group, who had inside knowledge of the game, hanging back\hiding. My group, consisting of a Cat Lady, Shooters, and Cannibal Maws, started off in the open. Cat Lady goes down from a long range shot from Jim's group.

In retaliation I play a card to use my activation to take control of one of his gang, and get them to detonate a bomb in their midst.
No fatalities but numerous wounds.

Matt and Dave M trade long range fire, but DM gets his grunt into close range and starts ripping Matt's force apart. After numerous rounds of fire and a load of dead body's, Matt finally puts the beast down.

 Meanwhile one of my Maw's survives an assault, and chomps down on Jim's Robot, suprisingly destroying it in one munch. The opposing shooters concentrate fire to crit the creature, but my use of the Moojuice card brings it back to be more dangerous than ever. With the second Maw joining in on the assault the enemy boss ends up chomped to pieces.

The game winds down at this point with four out of the five forces not having much left to deal with anything.

Overall an enjoyable amount of chaos.
 ¶

Squeeze

Fistful of TOWs in an early WW2 setting. French trying to hold a river crossing from a German assault, waiting for assistance from the British who are finishing off their tea.

The Germans make swift advance down the table but the German off table artillery suffer loses from counterbattery fire, losing 2 of its three elements.

The British reinforcements turn up to the Germans rear on the right, first a couple of Recce units but soon followed by some proper armour in the shape of A10 and A13s. A French force of 6 CharBis appear on the Germans left flank, as more British armour pours in.

Just in time, the Germans get some reinforcements in the form of some self-propelled guns.

The German attack into the village becomes more frenzied with the slow crawling approach of the CharBis worrying them somewhat.

Finally, the French battalion breaks giving the Germans victory.

(This has been retroactively published a few years after the event based on an old draft, hence no images and scant details)
¶

10 Year Apocalypse

It was the ten year anniversary, on the 3rd July, of the launch of the browser game Urban Dead, and to mark this special occasion the games owner \ designer, Kevan, has sent out a survey for players to fill in. Which was not quite what I was expecting for this landmark occasion.

 Given that the game has not had any significant development in the last five years it's a bit of a surprise that the survey strongly hints at a new wave of features, and that he's finally asking players for feedback\ideas (other than the game wiki suggestions pages, which was little more than player squabbling). But I do feel that this is 3 to 5 years too late to have a major affect.

Phalanx 2015

Made the annual pilgrimage down to St Helens for the Phalanx wargames show.

Furness Wargamers wasn't putting on a game this year so it was just a case of browsing around.

Met up with Matt, Jim and Graeme down there with a surprise appearance by Alan.

Not gone overboard with the purchases, for my FIW stuff I bought a 28mm blockhouse from 4Ground, and a pack of 6 settler minis from Warlord Games. I didn't see any one stocking Galloping Major stuff else I might have bought a bit more.

I managed to obtain a couple of punch boards for Heroes of Normandie, one of support vehicles for both sides, and the Wittman Tigers board.


¶