This Indestructible Man Will Show What He’s Worth.

A slight departure from gaming for this post, but a chain of events last week inspired me to look up those marvellous pictures that graced the end credits of the 1960s puppet series 'Captain Scarlet'. They were painted by the artist and illustrator Ron Embleton, and this is the first time I've seen them without end titles and credits all over them, so I thought I'd share them in all their glory.

And, for anyone feeling nostalgic, or who has actually missed out on them in the last 45 years, here they are in context. With the song:

Go Outside And Play

It's a public holiday and, because it's Australia, it's sunny. The kind of day when your mum would say "It's a public holiday and it's sunny - why don't you go outside and play?"

So Maya and I did. Whilst Catherine and Cei went off with fishing rods pretending to be Jeremy Wade, Maya and I found a shelter in the park, and set up a game of Clobberin' Time. This was her first time playing it, but she picked it up quickly and enjoyed it. But then she is a bit of a comics geek, which helps.

We set up the same X-Men/Brotherhood of Evil Mutants game I played last week. The felt pieces represented buildings. We spent a lot of the game chasing after them, as the breeze kept blowing them away.

Both sides had to take an objective from the opposing side of the board, and get it to their own side.

Here's the game set up and in progress. That's my daughter, Maya, for those that don't know. She played the X-Men (Cyclops, Wolverine and Nightcrawler - she luuuurves Nightcrawler), and I played the Evil Mutants (Quicksilver, Pyro and The Blob).

The various objects on the board edge were to stop it blowing away in the breeze coming off the lake.

Quicksilver zipped ahead, and was opposed by Wolverine.

Maya kept Cyclops to cover the objective, as his incessant whining annoyed the other X-Men.

The first turn of action. Nightcrawler had teleported to the central building, The Blob was moving up to help Quicksilver and Pyro was trying to make himself useful on the sidelines.

 Nightcrawler teleported again, but ended up too close to The Blob who, not one to miss an opportunity, attacked him. He scored four hits, but Nightcrawler's agility saved him from all but one.

With Quicksilver zooming around elsewhere, Wolverine moved up to assist his team-mate. He inflicted a couple of hits on The Blob with his claws, although The Blob scored one back.

Ah, there's Quicksilver! He'd run right around the central building, and raced over to grab the objective whilst Cyclops failed to stop him.

However Nightcrawler had also got the X-Men's objective, and was teleporting for home, slowed only by hinder markers (I rejigged Teleport so that, instead of being inaccurate with distance, there was a high chance of losing future actions the further you went). Pyro also slowed the German mutant's return with some flame-control,

Wolverine took down The Blob.

He then closed in on Quicksilver, who was on the run home. It was touch and go whether he'd make it back before Nightcrawler got his act together enough to teleport, but Cyclops finally did something useful and blasted the speedster before he could move.

Nightcrawler teleported to victory.

Maya's victory dance. Yes, she still does victory dances.

 I think Cei and Catherine caught a couple of fish. We had more fun though. And we got out into the fresh air and sunshine.

Paris Is Saved!

WW1. The Western Front. A flight of German bombers head towards Paris. Only the RFC can stop them.

And so the scene was set for tonight's game - 'Spandau and Lewis', using my newly rebased 1/600th Tumbling Dice planes, and a first outing for my big bombers.

The Germans had three Frederichshafen GIII bombers, escorted by three Halberstadt CLIIs. They had to fly as many bombers as possible off the opposite end of the table.

Opposing them, the RFC had a flight of three Sopwith Camels and a flight of three SE5a.

Here are the dastardly Germans.

And the Se5s of the RFC.

I used the new spotting rules I'm trying out, but all three formations spotted each other so quickly that I probably shouldn't have bothered.

The first set of German initiative rolls was pretty good. Really the kind of rolls you want when the enemy are on your tail, though.

 The Camels line up and close in.

First contact, and a swirling dogfight begins whilst the bombers press on to their target.

The Halbertadts get in the way, as lead flies in all directions.

A bomber comes under a concentrated attack.

One bomber tries the novel strategy of dodging. It is curiously successful, at least for a while.

First blood; long range firing from a Halberstadt finishes off a damaged Se5a.

But the RFC have got the bombers right where they want them. They seemed particularly skilled at picking off the rear gunners; two of the three bombers had lost half of their defensive capability by this stage.

A Halberstadt goes down. Specifically the one with the veteran crew, on which a lot of the German defensive strategy was based.

An embarrassment for the RFC - a veteran Camel pilot finds himself with a bomber and a CLII taking clear shots in his rear arc. He was shot down. By the bomber.

There are no more pictures.

In the absence of morale, or a pilot-preserving campaign structure, the RFC pressed their attacks regardless of casualties. They lost a couple of planes before the first bomber went down, and several more before they got the second. The third bomber was shot down by their last plane, which then fled for home pursued by the two surving CLIIs, who lacked the speed to catch it.

So, losses heavy - the Germans destroyed five RFC aircraft, and lost a CLII and all three bombers. But it was quite a fight. And a lesson that a scenario needs slightly more in the way of victory conditions than 'Shoot down the bombers'.

Gong Con 2013 - 30th/31st March 2013

This weekend the University of Wollongong Gamers Guild is holding Gong Con 2013 - a two-day feast of games; role-playing, board and miniatures.

Here's the relevant information.

We'll be putting on out Battle of the Five Armies HOTT game, whilst Ralph and Bryan will be running some WWII games.

If you're in the Wollongong area on Saturday or Sunday, pop in and say hello and stay for a game.

Clobberin' Time

Aunt Petunia's favourite nephew wants you to guess what time it is ...

As you can see I have, for now, decided to go with 'Clobberin' Time' as the name for my superhero game. I'm not worried about copyright/trademark issues as I'm not planning on doing anything commercial with the rules, it fits the idea that the game is purely about combat and it firmly establishes my personal bias with regard to which of the two biggest producers of superhero comics I like.

For something that started out as (someone else's) one-page rules, they have grown a little. They are up to eight pages long now, although at least two of those are sample characters and the ramblings that make up the Introduction and Design Notes. I'm not very good at one-page rules, as you can see; I prefer to explain precisely how things work, even if that means adding to the text. At the end of the day I prefer to eliminate ambiguity rather than length. But I like to balance that against coming up with rules that can be pretty much held in your head during a game, so you don't have to look anything up.

So when will I be posting them? Well, the plan was to stick them, in a purely draft form, on the Free Stuff section of this blog today or tomorrow, and invite comment, criticism, additions and changes. But I have been playing odd games in spare moments, and have started tinkering with a whole new mechanism I want to add for pinning characters. I'm trying to strike a balance between forcing characters to deal with enemies who are 'in their face', so to speak, and keeping the fluidity of the current game. Pinning gives a tactical use for those hordes of henchmen, of course; whilst they stand little chance of hurting a higher level character, their presence can delay and restrict an enemy. Anyway, I want to try out some ideas for the mechanism and then, if it seems to work, decide how to incorporate it into the text (most of it's still floating around inside my head at present). Whilst most of it fits neatly under Movement, there are exceptions and oddities which need to be built into the power and ability descriptions and I need to decide the best way of doing that. It's all about streamlining the text without losing anything important.

The desire to keep tinkering is a terrible thing.