Jutland Battlecruisers

Thursday's club theme was naval, so four of us played Broadsides: Empires Of Steel. The game was some phase of Jutland involving battlecruisers. Ralph and I were the British with six fairly good ones under our command, whilst Caesar and Stuart played the Germans who had five less good ones, but some supporting light cruisers as well. 

The Royal Navy, looking very organised. 

The Royal Navy looking less organised as we decided how to deal with the approaching light cruisers and their torpedoes.  

Ralph used his big guns to pound the German battlecruisers, and caused a couple of fires on the German flagship. 

We took very little damage back, but  those dastardly light cruiser started to move into torpedo range. This one missed with its first shot. 

It didn't survive long enogh for a second. 

We had to finish the game at that point, with a second wave of cruisers descending on the British, who were checking the rules for firing secondary guns.

I had a couple of older battlecruisers at the back of the line, so got to fire pot-shots at the cruisers. But I didn't get a single shot on target. Still, it wasn't for lack of trying.

Gaslands - Capture The Flag

We had four players for Gaslands last night. This meant that we were happy to go with a 50 can game. And three of us brough single 50 can vehicles.

We rolled Capture The Flag, which is an interesting scenario with just one vehicle. You have to have a flag on one of your vehicles (obvious choice if you have just one) but it's deposited in the arena if you wrecked. It can then be picked up. You win if you have two flags on one of your vehicles. Obviously harder to do if you have multiple vehicles, but fun with one vehicle.

Anyway, Daniel has a single flamethrower-armed truck from the Order Of The Inferno. Craig had a Scarlett truck, but hadn't really read through how Scarlett works, so had a less than optimal design. Caesar had two trucks, sponsored by Rutherford and both equipped with front-mounted tank guns. And I bucked the trend with my James Bond Aston Martin DB5 - a Verney sponsored performance car. 

After some early moves there'd been a bit of shooting. Biond had inflicted a hit with his machine-guns, whilst one of the tank-guns had failed to make an impression on the DB5 (it's tough).

The DB5 in action. 

Daniel chased down Bond and set the DB5 on fire. 

It took some speedy driving to get to a unfrequented part of the arena and put out the fire. You stay on fire so long as you have hazards, so I had to dump them fast. Best way to do that is to wipe out, which I did in such a way as to stay in the game for that gear phase.

Daniel did a slick turn around an obstacle with his truck. 

Caesar shot him, and his vehicle wrecked. This dropped the flag.

You can just see the purple flag tucked in behind the obstacle. And Bond had a plan. Of course. 

Meanwhile Craig's mini-gun armed truck was hunting Caesar's other truck. I think Caesar was taking a bit of damage. 

Back to Bond's plan. Caesar was lining up for a run on the flag (out of shot). So I had to be faster. Being in a perfoamnce car, that was easy. The rest was pure Gaslands. Step One: Ram the obstacle. 

 

Step Two: On the next gear phase, ignore the obstacle, drive through it and pick up the flag. A win!

Also drive through oil and loose gravel. The hazards were stacking up. 

We finished the activation phase. The DB5 was wildly out of control, but Bond had already won. However his move finished next to Caesar's truck, so it would have been rude not to use the Eureka! perk to magic up a one-shot tank-gun, and blow his truck to smithereens. 

Bond then wiped out. And flipped ...

...  over the arena wall. 

Technically that disqualifies a vehicle, but the game was won once the flag was picked up, so the later bits were just extra chrome. Bond grabbed the flag, took out an enemy in passing with a gadget and then escaped into the night. 

What a hero!

Holiday Hunting

I fitted in a short game of Palaeo Diet whilst I was on holiday. I'd loaded up my terrain because I'd planned to play HOTT with my sone, so sticking in the Palaeo Diet rules and the two small boxes with hunters and beasts in was no great hardship. 

It was a basic no-frills hunt. I had four hunters - one each of the basic types. There were two large grazers and four herd grazers. So a win would be one of the rhinos or a couple of horses. 

I sent most of my hunters to the left, whilst the fire-wielder went to the right, upwind of the beasts. The aim was to use fire to drive the animals into the hunting party. 

As it was, the bow-armed hunter took a shot at a horse and killed it instantly, so that was 50% of their target achieved with virtually no effort. 

The animals panicked as a series of fires started by the fire-wielding hunter raged towards them. Interestingly beasts still base their moves on hunter proximity, so although fire dictates a reaction coumn, the move is still driven by the nearest (or active) hunter. This does mean animals will try and run towards (or around) fire. You have to position your hunters carefully to use a ground fire to move the animals in a specific direction. Panic is panic, I guess. 

Anyway, the horses (which were now the primary target) moved towards the hunters.

They managed to wound one, which caused the three horses to race off past the fire. The hunters set off in pursuit. 

The bowman brought down the wounded horse. When hunting herd grazers someone with missile weapons is worth their weight in meat. 

The rapidly spreading fire also scared a couple of critters out of a thicket, but the hunters elected not to chase them. They concentrated on moving their first kill out of the path of the fire. 

A nice game that whiled away an hour at the end of a long day of being on holiday. 

Ten Years Ago - March 2016

Over the years our club has been involved in playtesting rules, mostly by Sam Mustafa. It's an interesting process and often good fun.

Playtesting is often secret at first, and this post from ten years ago was our first go with a new set of WW2 rules. They eventually became Rommel, but were very different in their original form.

More Secrets

Triumph!

Geoff has recently got hold of a copy of Triumph! and suggested we give it a try last night. 

For those that don't know, Triumph! grew out of one of those interminable schisms that happen every timeWRG update a rules set. One of the DBA updates upset a group of people enough that they wrote their own DBA update, filed off the serial numbers and published it as Triumph! So, as you can guess, Triumph! is basically DBA. Part of the fun of the rules is looking at how familiar BDA/DBM terms have been clumbsily renamed to avoid the set looking the same.

To be fair it's a nicely laid out set of rules, with proper paragraphs, sections and diagrams. I don't know how tight the language is in terms of covering situations, so can't comment on whether any ambiguity has crept in whilst trying to make them readable. We let Geoff run the game. 

We played Early Imperial Romans against Selucids. Armies are built using a simple points system - elements are 2, 3 or 4 points and you build an army with 48 points. Naturally we found ourselves juggling the army structure a little when we found ourselves one point over or under. 

I did like the card-based terrain deployment system. It's a neat idea, albeit one that requires a deck of special cards or several pages of lookups in the back of the rules. You choose your terrain, then number each piece. Then you randomly determine a layout that shows where on the table each  number must go. There are 36 layouts (I think).

Anyway, here are the armies all set up. Geoff played the Romans whilst I had teh Seleucids. Dave watched and offered advice. 

My phalanx. Geoff has them based deep for ADLG, so they looked impressive and overly deep.

I started off well by losing my general. This has no battle-loss effect like in HOTT, and teh general doesn't even count as more points like in DBA. Yu jusy have command difficulties for the rest of the battle.

My cavalry-based right flank got disrupted pretty quickly.

What saved me was my phalanx getting lucky and killing the Roman general, which left both armies starved of movement. 

We fought on and both reached the point where  decent kill would see us win. I had a go at some Roman auxilia on my left. Failed to kill them. 

Geoff had now flanked my phalanx, but they steadfastly refused to die. 

A useful run of PIPs - sorry, 'Command Points' - saw my cavalry get into action and kill some of Geoff's 

On the same turn some of my phalanx dies. We were now both over our breakpoints ...

... so it went down to who had gone over the least. That was me, by one point. So the Romans lost and I won a Pyrrhic victory.

What did we think? The three of us basically felt like we'd played a game of DBA with too much extra fiddle to make it fun. To be fair the other two play ADLG a lot, and I think that's just DBA that's been overcomplicated. But I think our view was that we weren't unhappy with the latest release of DBA when we wanted a small quick game, so Triumph! offered nothing new.

We did like that there was a troop type called 'Bad Cavalry'. Dave saw in as Bad in the Michael Jackson sense. I saw it as cavalry that needed to be punished. And did just that to it. 

If you don't like DBA but want to play DBA then Triumph! might be the rules for you.