Clobberin' Time! It's Here!

Four weeks ago I started playing around with a simple, one-page set of rules for fights using Batman characters. After lots of fiddling and some fun little games I have finally come up with something I'm happy to release into the wild.

Follow the link to download the first draft of CLOBBERIN' TIME!

I should stress the word 'draft'. I certainly don't see these rules as complete. Indeed there are a few ideas I'm still playing around with, and there are some holes I haven't even started thinking about filling. But they are at the stage where they can be considered playable.

They are longer than the initial one-page because I feel it's important to explain rules, not to chop them down to fit an arbitrary page limit. I hope that the mechanisms are self-explanatory. If they aren't, please send me questions, and I will not only answer them, but try to clarify what I've written.

I am not trying to compete with other superhero games out there. Supersystem, Pulp City and Heroclix, for example, offer a much richer and more varied experience. But what I hope I have come up with is something that's fast and simple, with a minimum set-up time, no tie-in to figures or background and which covers, I hope, whatever comics you want it to.

I say 'whatever comics'. I have tested the game with Batman-style fights, and with characters drawn from my collection of Marvel heroes. The more powerful DC characters -  The Justice League, for example, I haven't tried. I don't think that the fact that they all seem to have flight, invulnerability and super-strength as a standard ability would be too much of an issue, so long as the game is scaled accordingly.

Anyway, please give them a try, enjoy, and please give me any feedback you have. I'm interested in how people get on with them.

Future War Commander And Maurice

Last night Geoff and I gave Future War Commander a try. Neither of us had played it before, and had both really only skimmed the rules as well. I'd played Blitzkrieg Commander a couple of times about five years ago, so had a little more experience, but not much.

Geoff had thrown together two armies using various figures (including Epic 40K) stuff, the lists being based on two factions from GZG's 'Tuffleyverse'. I had the NAC (Anglo-Americans) whilst Geoff had the Communist ESU.

Geoff's forces consisted of three motorised infantry companies, an artillery company and some scout walkers.

I had two motorised infantry companies, a light tank company and a heavy tank company.

My tanks advanced slowly - they fired a lot (to little effect) but never seemed able to move.

My light tanks were positively static a lot of the time.

Especially when they started blowing up.

Meanwhile Geoff's infantry swiftly seized the objective whilst mine hung around outside, afraid to advance.

At that point we called it a night. We'd made loads of mistakes with the rules, but having sorted them out now the next game will be faster and, probably, bloodier (now we know how to do firing properly).

Meanwhile Caesar, Ralph and John played Maurice. Note that I still haven't painted the Riskovians ...

I have Caesar to thank for the Maurice report:

"Thanks Ralph and John for another enjoyable bash at Maurice, where Prinz von Sparker obligingly mopped up the battlefield with my precious Pink Grenadiers.

It started to go pear shaped when my Riskovian infantry, cunningly deployed for an aggressive march in column, saw a Sans Coleur battery unexpectedly wade through some rough terrain to park on my flank. While “the Pinkies” ably charged these guns down, aided by musketry support from John’s Blackshirts, I had to pivot my entire line of advance to do so. Sans Coleur infantry took little prompting to advance their neat lines into the staggered confusion that was the Riskovian force after dealing with the enemy artillery.

The ensuing fire fight was predictably one-sided as oblique lines of Riskovian infantry crumbled to superior fire power. At one stage Ralph threw in the “Confusion” card to break up my force, which made rallying much slower, as pay back for my use of the “That’s not on the map” card to materialise a swamp to halt his artillery flanking manoeuvres.

Lessons learned:

Changing from column to line is slow without the “Cadence” national advantage.Keep artillery at a safe distance from enemy charges.
Don’t let an enemy flank march distract your main line of attack.
Keep your forces intact whenever possible to economise on orders and aid mobility.
“Rally to the Colours” is a handy national advantage, up there with “Lethal Volleys”.
Still plenty of fun surprises from spoiler cards in the deck.

The closing stages saw Comte de Cesare’s command being overrun and narrowly avoiding capture, absconding the field in a carriage reputedly belonging to one Milady de Winter…"

Clobberin' Time - Progress

I've been quite thrilled by the reception that Clobberin' Time has been getting, both from people who have read the game reports and from those few who have actually played it. I have been working hard on it, tidying up text and getting the wording just so, and am almost ready to release a draft version to the world. There are still gaps in it, and almost certainly areas that don't work as well as they should, but really I'm at the point where some feedback and suggestions might be useful. Obviously once it's uploaded I will announce it here.

Not done this fight yet ...

Recent test games have seen The Scarlet Witch single-handedly holding off The Juggernaut (although not for long enough), Captain Britain in a epic fight with Captain America (as previously documented in this blog), the Fantastic Four being outwitted and outfought by an ad-hoc villain team led by The Crimson Dynamo, and Sabretooth and Deadpool fighting The Hulk and each other, as a team of guns-for-hire and one of villains competed to be the first to defeat the green monster.

I have to say that even the process of drafting and testing the rules have given me more fun with my Heroclix figures than I have had with them at any time in the six or seven years since I first acquired them. So anything else now is a bonus.

Hell Hath No Fury ...

No-one got the No-Prize from yesterday's post, so here's the big reveal ...

The Fury is one of my favourite 'villains' from Marvel Comics - a remorseless organic cyborg designed solely to wipe out super-beings. It first appeared in the UK in the pages of Captain Britain, but has since made it into the mainstream US Marvel comics as an opponent of the X-Men.

As far as I am aware there has not been a Heroclix figure produced for it (I may be wrong), so I decided that I'd have to make my own if I was going to use it in my games.

Here's a gallery of images showing what The Fury looks like.

One advantage I had was that The Fury can remodel its body, so its appearance is not entirely constant. This gave me some leeway in terms of how close my end result had to be to the source material. At the end of the day I wanted to make something that someone who was familiar with The Fury would recognise as such.

I did consider making the figure from scratch; The Fury is 'blobby' enough to be produced by my limited Milliput skills. But I decided to cheat and use a base figure. This is the one I chose - a relatively obscure character from the X-Men called Harpoon.

I used a sharp knife to remove his accoutrements (nasty), then chopped off his right hand, left arm, lower legs and harpoon holster. Cut up, the holster proved very useful for detailing the finished model. Part of it was attached to the left arm to form the basis of The Fury's gun, however. I then moulded the pincer-like right hand from Milliput. The lower legs are pieces of florist wire bent into shape, with Milliput packed around them. I used card to represent the 'feet'.

At this point I have formed the basic shape of the gun and started on the legs. No detailing has been added though.

Here's the (nearly finished) model. The biggest change from above is that I chopped off the head as well, and made a new one. The Fury has a simple head with a complex face, and it was easier to build the whole thing from scratch. I used a thin section of the holster to make the big 'eye'. The rest of the face was made from Milliput. Bits of the harpoons from the holster can be seen attached to the body as tubes or sensors.

A rear view shows the cables and some of the detailing on the back.

The Fury undercoated. By this stage I had also added more detailing, and had sliced off the back of the head, and rounded off the remainder, in order to give a better shape.

The final result. I gave it a heavy drybrush of purple, then a lighter one just to pick out some of the detail. The  illuminated parts were then painted white, followed by some ancient, semi-transparent, GW yellow paint I have had around for years.

With hindsight it's probably about 5mm too short - I should have been bolder with the length of the lower legs I made. But it's recognisable as The Fury, and that's good enough for me.

The good Captain's in for a tough fight here ...

Work In Progress

I sorted out my Heroclix figures last night as the boxes contained a pile of duplicates. Now for henchmen and the like this is OK, and I don't mind having variants of some characters. But five Sabretooth figures in the same pose seemed excessive, for example.

Anyway, I had a spare Harpoon figure, so I decided to have a go at a little conversion project. I'm not sure how well it's going to work out, but there's a Marvel No-Prize up for grabs if you can work out which Marvel character Harpoon is being converted into:

The right hand (or pincer) isn't connected yet, and I have a little bit of putty work to do on the rather unusual feet. I haven't quite worked out how to do the head yet, especially the 'face' - I may try and work with the existing one, or I may lop it off and build a completely new one from modelling putty. Then it's just a matter of adding suitable trimming,  a simple paint-job, and I'm done.