HOTT Without Pictures

I would have had a great HOTT report for you today has I not managed to turn up at wargaming last night not only without my phone but also without my glasses. So I played a couple of games of HOTT with Geoff where the figures were blurs and which I couldn't photograph. Fortunately I can see die rolls and markings on the measuring stick, and I could tell the various elements apart even if I couldn't appreciate their detail.

We played two games, and I used my Game of Thrones 'Mother of Dragons' army in both.

For the first game we played at 36AP. I ran my army as 1 x Rider General (Daenerys Targaryen and Dothraki guards), 2 x Riders (Dothraki), 4 x Spears (Unsullied), 2 x Hordes (Freed slaves), 1 x Hero (Ser Jorah Mormont and Ser Barristan Selmy) and 1 x Dragon (Three Dragons). To make it up to 36AP I added elements from my Sundiata army which happened to be in the same box - 2 x Knights, 2 x Spears and 2 x Shooters.

Geoff fielded a Greek force with spears, some chariot riders, a few warband, Achilles and his Myrmidons as a hero general, plus a couple of Titan behemoths and Ares as a god.

Things started badly for Daenerys. I advanced my army to meet Geoff's and came off badly in the first round of combats, losing a couple of elements on the flanks. My centre did better, with the Unsullied spears holding against the behemoths. My left flank started to look shaky, threatened by chariots and Achilles himself. I took a gamble and threw Daenerys's two champions into the fight - it was a 50/50 hero vs hero fight, and I won, slaying Achilles and leaving Geoff's army leaderless. 

Geoff never really recovered from that - a few bad PIP rolls left his army stationary allowing me to regroup and, in another lucky break, to bring on my dragon. This flew behind Geoff's army and either blocked recoils or engaged in rear-attacks. Geoff's army quickly broke.

One minor heroic element on my side was a group of hordes which held off and then destroyed some warband. Extra rations for those ex-slaves!

For the second game we switched to 24AP. I dropped the Malian allies and changed the dragon for two flyers (the element can be split to allow this). Geoff dropped teh behemoths and the god.

In this one I got in front from the start; the first round of combat between our riders saw two of Geoff's destroyed, exposing one of his flanks. I got the PIPs to bring the flyers in on both flanks to harass and pin and slowly ground down Geoff's army to pick up another win.

The pictures would have been amazing.

Frocktober 2023 - Part 2

I am continuing to raise money for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation here in Australia, through their Frocktober campaign and our team IT HAS POCKETS.

As with last year I felt that my opening offers were a little muted, so for Frock Five I went with something brighter. I did a trip up to Sydney to do some shopping.

I continued the colourful theme with Frock Six, a particular favourite of mine. This one I took out to our weekly trivia night, where we were able to add our moderate winnings to the charity total.

Frock Seven was this fun bird-print, which was wasted on a day working at home (not even a Zoom meeting to show it off on), and provided an incongruous backdrop for our game of Battletech in the evening.

And so on to Frock Eight, which I wore for a trip in to town on Saturday to celebrate a friend's birthday.

So I'm eight frocks in and only need to do two more to reach my goal.

Here's that donations link again: IT HAS POCKETS

Battletech: Alpha Strike

Daren hosted a game of Battletech: Alpha Strike last night. This is a fast-play set of rules designed for larger games than regular Battletech; it has a lot less detail but as a consequence plays much more quickly. It also drops the hex-grid in favour of a regular tabletop. That said, we used Darren's huge modular hexes for some of the terrain, so that confused things for a moment.

Here's the terrain - we had a large city on a third of the table, and some countryside on the other, with an objective in each. There were four of us playing, with Darren adjudicating. Here you can see Stuart setting up his mechs.

We played as individual players, each of us running eight mechs aside from Caesar who had a force of lighter mechs and had twelve of them. I set mine up on the edge of the city.

A showdown along a street with some of Caesar's mechs.

Stuart started his mechs out in the countryside, whilst Caesar, Ed and I all started in and around the city. This allowed Stuart to easily take the one objective. Stuart's force was also behind hills and woods relative to Caesar and Ed's, and behind an entire city relative to mine. So he remained relatively unopposed and somewhat out of the fight.

Meanwhile I found myself opposed by both Caesar and Ed, being stuck between both of them. My chunky mechanical monsters put up a decent fight but were somewhat outnumbered and, I confess, out-manoevered as well.

Combat in Alpha Strike is brutal. A mech can fire at one target in a turn, rolls to hit on 2D6 and does a certain amount of damage depending on range. Mechs have a series of armour boxes, then some structural boxes. Losing armour has pretty much no additional effect (there's a small risk of a critical hit), but each time you lose structural boxes you take a critical. Lose all your boxes and you're destroyed. Some small mechs have fewer boxes total than the amount of damaged dished out by the larger ones, so  will die to a single hit.

My three mechs in the street could soak up a fair bit of punishment, but one survived for a couple of turns on its last structural hit and Caesar's continued inability to hit it.

A view of the battle in the city. Whilst Ed and Casar took the odd shot at each other, most of it was blue and red shooting at olive-drab.

Stuart reminds us that he has some mechs as well.

Red mechs advancing on the city.

We fought them in the streets and we fought them on the rooftops.

OK, here's a shot of Start's mechs, who had been bogged down by terrain and blocked from effective shooting at anyone else. But when we called time they were the only team to actually hold an objective.

There was a fair bit of chrome in the game which we didn't play, but we certainly gave the basics of the game a good outing. They really do play a lot faster than Battletech, at the expense of a lot of the fiddly detail that I'm sure some aficionados enjoy. The main thing is that we got to rampage around the table with big mechs and shoot at each other, and that made for a great evening. 

Thanks to Darren for organising everything, Ed and Caesar for teaching me the ins and outs of recording damage and Stuart for providing a lovely static diorama at the other end of the table.

A Barbarian In The Arena

This evening I played a few games of 'Blood, Sweat & Cheers' to try out some ideas I had for running a barbarian gladiator. Regular readers of this blog will know that this has been occupying some of my attention for a couple of years now (although admittedly not constantly, because that would be weirdly obsessive).

Since I had my West Wind gladiatrices out for a Facebook photo-shoot (they're one of the packs not illustrated on Old Glory's website), I decided to use some of them in the games, so picked one of my female barbarians to match them. This is Andromache. She used to be a Copplestone cave-girl, which explains her footwear and fur loin-cloth.

Her first opponent was the secutor Marpesia. In terms of abilities I have been running Barbarians with the same 2 x Glory ability that Murmillos have (+1 on an attack with a bonus push and knock-down if you win), as this nicely reflects a rage-induced attack or a charge of some kind. It's the 1 x Glory ability I've struggled with. For this game I allowed Andromache to move one area and attack at +1 - a Charge.

She used it well, pushing Marpesia back, before downing her and defeating her. 

Andromache's next opponent was the thraex Artemisia.

Artemisia proved a much more dangerous foes, knocking down Andromache and wounding her.

This left Andromache very much at a disadvantage, but she put up quite a fight. Needing a breather to replenish her hand she managed an adrenaline-fuelled retreat across the board, although an attack by Artermisia as she did so meant she ended up knocked down at her destination - a quirk of the combat rules that allows attacks to happen if the gladiators either start or finish in the same space.

Anyway, Andromache was down to her last hit, but managed to fight back and put a couple of wounds on Artemisia. She even managed to get an attack card with the adrenaline bonus, which allows you to add your current wounds to the attack, but rolled badly and it didn't connect. Artemisia used a lightining slash to finish off Andromache, although the crowd spared her.

I was finding that the Charge effect for 1 x Glory wasn't working for me and, oddly enough, felt that it was possibly a touch to much for a singly Glory ability. Allowing an attack plus a one space move was a possibility, but seemed a bit dull. So I had a rethink.

I settled on Intimidate - for 1 x Glory Andromache could attack with her normal value, but if her opponent won their score was reduced by 2 (which actually means that the opponent could then lose by 1 point). This represents an attack that reduces an opponent's ability to strike back, although to be fair it doesn't really do anything is the opponent just defends, which may be a problem.

Anyway, Andromache's next opponent was the retiarius Medusa.

The bout ended is seconds as Andromache charged and was stabbed by a sneaky dagger attack.

I started again.

Andromache managed to use her intimidate ability to block an attack. After a brief, but entertaining fight she emerged the victor.

I might pursue the Intimidate idea as I like the idea of a defence ability that's also an attack. It might still be a bit much for a single Glory ability, but we'll see.

After playing I needed to sort out my gladiators, which are normally stored by type but which had become mixed up. So I took a group-shot of them. There's eighty-three of them, plus the eques pair and three officials.

Gaslands - Night Of Idris

Five of us got together for a game of Gaslands last night, and everyone had managed to put together their own teams!

As ever we rolled for a scenario and, once again, we got the obligatory Death Race. Only a 1 in 3 chance, but seems to come up more often than not.

We had surprisingly little variety in terms of teams.

Bailey ran The Shimmer, a single 50 Can Idris performance car.
Bryan ran a police-themed Idris team with few perks, consisting of a bike, a car and a performance car.
Stuart also ran an Idris team with two well-armed mustard coloured cars painted that morning.
Caesar ran a two-vehicle Mishkin team equipped with rams and mini-guns.
And, finally, I was running The Yellow Submarine, again sponsored by Mishkin. The stats for it are at the end of this post.

With a lot of players and vehicles I set up a simple course - straight across to the the first gate, anti-clockwise past the bus to pass gates two and three and then a run across the middle to the finish.

And they're off! The Shimmer had pole-position and roared off into an early lead by virtue of being able to move Long all of the time.

But Yellow Submarine had a trick up its sleeve - an experimental teleporter, which saw it blip across the board before using its (also) experimental nuclear engine to slide across Gate One and unload gunfire at The Shimmer.

Everyone else got into a bit of a mess at the start, although Bryan's bike was making a good run of it.

Bailey fired up the nitro on The Shimmer, and deliberately rammed Yellow Submarine, causing it to wipe out and spin in place. He then continued his move with another Long, putting him at the threshold of Gate Two and into a commanding lead.

Yellow Submarine followed in second place, whilst everyone else was crashing around near the start.

The first casualty was Bryan's performance car which wiped out and wrecked going through the first gate. A lot of this chaos was caused by Caesar ramming everyone from the off.

I'd planned to pursue The Shimmer using my teleporter, before unleashing a Secret Weapon on it to wreck it and take the lead. But the teleporter has a one in six chance of failing, and guess what happened? I ended up teleporting into the main pack and collided with one of Caesar's vehicles.

I missed a couple of phases in terms of photos, but basically Bailey ran a blinder with The Shimmer; it had all the right perks to pull of a series of fast moves, slides and spins, and was heading for the last gate before the finish when it wiped out and crashed. But it was basically the end of the turn, so he would respawn almost immediately...

Caesar bulldozed out of trouble. Note the on-table cops. They were a light destructible obstacle.

And The Shimmer was back in action. 

First a burst of nitro ...

... and then hell for leather across the finish A fairly easy win for Bailey.

And here's everyone else. Bryan's bike was actually making a good run through the final gate and then on to the finish, whilst Yellow Submarine was beginning to make up lost ground as well.

That one in six on the teleporter was critical. Bailey's car was hovering on its last couple of hits and in a vulnerable position if I'd teleported closer and hit him with the right weapons. It would have kept him out of the race for a few gear phases and given both Bryan and myself chance to build up a lead. Still, that's how the dice roll ...

Still, it was all a lot of chaotic fun, and we seem to be getting better at running decent numbers of vehicles quickly: set-up took 30 minutes or so and we played for two hours.

And here are the stats for my vehicle:

Yellow Submarine
Truck (Mishkin) - 50 Cans
Equipment: Tank Tracks, Experimental Nuclear Engine, Experimental Teleporter
Weapons: Thumper, Steel Nets, Sub Machine Gun.
Perks: Headshot, Eureka

Frocktober 2023 - Part 1

You knew it was coming is! The first Frocktober post of 2023.

As regular readers know, every October I go wild with the wearing of dresses in order to raise money for the Ovarian Cancer Research Foundation as part of their Frocktober campaign. Each year my wife, daughter and I set up a fundraising team called IT HAS POCKETS and demand money with sartorial menaces from people of social media.

And observe! There's a link in that previous bit.

The hardcore Frocktober participants will wear a different outfit on each of the 31 days of October. Some even do themed challenges. If you're on Instagram or Twitter you can follow the hashtags #Frocktober2023 or simply #Frocktober and see what they're up to, although the latter site is mostly full of hideous people these days so beware. My goals are more modest. Wearing a frock every day for 31 days isn't really viable for me (I simply don't have the energy, even if I do have the frocks), so once again I have set myself the challenge of at least ten frocks during the course of the month. In my previous four years of direct fund-raising I have managed over $3000 and worn over 50 different frocks. This year I will be attempting to wear frocks that I haven't worn in the previous five years. As I said before, I have a lot of them.

So on with the frocks. Frock One had sleeves, which is not something I do a lot of. I wore it for lunch with family up in Sydney ...

... followed by a trip to MOAB in the afternoon.

I returned to a more usual style for me with Frock Two, which was just for a day at work.

The weather had cooled down on that day, so I had to resort to a cardigan.

This swishy gingham number was Frock Three.

I wore it for a trip with Catherine up to Bowral to see the beginnings of the new botanical garden there, as well as some shopping at our favourite bric-a-brac emporium there - Dirty Jane's

And Frock Four brings us up to date (so far). Again it was something simple for work and a short shopping trip at lunchtime.

Thank you to everyone who has donated so far!

That link again: IT HAS POCKETS!