The Olympics being nearly over I’m looking forward to the coming week. I plan on finishing my current batch of WWII Canadians. This will leave me with eight miniatures finished before I can call the project complete. I’m actually close enough to finishing to begin plotting my purchase of a box of Victrix Peninsular British Infantry. Normally I am not filled with glee at the thought of assembling 52 figures but I can’t wait to see them all lined up on my painting table. I imagine it will look something like this.

I’m not kidding about plotting, none of my units planned for Lundy’s Lane are 52 figures strong. The biggest was the eight companies of the 89th Foot numbering 43 figures. I’m still trying to confirm whether the flank companies were present. If so, that’s 10 figures that I won’t be able to paint until I buy a box of flank companies from Victrix. So, between 9-19 figures from the box will be need to go into another unit. This is a bigger think than I expected—I’d have to plot out the entire OOB to decide—and is getting me off track.

This week I must also prepare for my bi-weekly D&D night. It isn’t too bad, we didn’t get through as many encounters as I’d expected last time, so there’s less to do. I might even take the time to make encounter packets of Dungeon Tiles and monster counters to speed things up during gameplay.

Sunday night I may finally be running a game at my club. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but is looking iffy as many club members will be out at Cold Wars. Right now I have no players. Tomorrow I will send out a final e-mail and if I get no takers I will cancel for another time.

That’s the plan for the week, wish me luck.

Tyler

Ugh, how I hate exclamation marks. Wanted to spend a bit more time on The Great War game I played yesterday. I’d brought my camera and snapped some pictures. This isn’t a full battle report. I didn’t take notes or try to keep a record with pictures. I just played and snapped the occasional shot while chatting with a new club member. It’s funny, he’s probably attended more club days than I have but I’ve been around longer.

My troops wait in reserve for their time to shine, or die, as needed.

We played a scenario from the main rulebook called “The Pocket” which featured a surrounded German force being overrun by Entente forces. Our GM made a decision to modify the scenario because it seemed unfair on paper, though it turns out it was probably balanced as written. The Entente had six turns to clear the Germans out of the pocket and get a scoring unit into the German deployment zone.

The waves begin to move in. Afraid of template weapons we spread out too deeply.

The game worked well enough. As I said before, it played like a GW game. I decided to put my troops in reserve to prevent the Germans from deploying all their troops facing our initial waves. When the captain’s position was being decided everyone but me took a step back, despite my warning that I wasn’t tactically strong.

The German lines. The sandbags represent trenches. The threat of my reserves caused the German players to split their forces.

I decided to refuse the left flank except for a HMG and mortar in order to mass everyone and quickly overwhelm their trench line. Unfortunately this game doesn’t reward depth, sweeping fire is devastating to deep formations and units at the back are unlikely to reach the battle-line in time to have a game effect. A better tactic would have been to assault on as wide a front as possible to prevent the enemy from concentrating fire on single unit.

The new-fangled tank crashes over the German trenches as the Entente are about to hit the line.

Our lone tank did manage to push through the German wire and reach their trench. However, the game was called early before we had a chance to exploit the breakthrough. It wouldn’t have mattered much if we did, as our rearmost units were too far away to have much of an effect.

Germans defending a house. I wonder what’s so special about it.

Like more GW games the path to victory is to forget the specific tactics of warfare and focus on the tactics of the game and more general tactics like not being destroyed in detail. I’ll play it again but won’t be painting any new troops for it.

Tyler

Played Warhammer Historical’s The Great War set of WWI rules at the club today. It’s late and I’m tired, so I’ll give the super short review and follow it up with pictures from the day in the coming week.

Yep, it’s a GW game. Simultaneously glossy and unpolished complete with lack of index, unclear rules and buckets and buckets of dice. Whenever things seemed silly or unexplained I just shrugged my shoulders and said, “Well, it’s a GW game.”

The biggest confusion was pinning. In the description of pinning it says an effected unit takes certain penalties on its next turn, leading us to assume that pinning lasts full turn and then the platoon effected recovers automatically.

Speaking of platoons, the figure scale seemed uninspired. You field a company and call it a battalion. Each company is made up of three platoons of 9 men and an LMG. Why not just call a company a company and get it over with.

In the end, it was an enjoyable game. We didn’t get to finish due to not having anyone practiced with the rules. We’ll give the game another couple of shots and see how it goes. I won’t be collecting anything from the period as I’m already booked up solid.

Tyler

Session Two with my latest D&D group is in the bag. We only managed three encounters in the five hours we played, but my players are still unfamiliar with their characters, the tactics of the game and some of the concepts of roleplaying. As much as I’m tempted I’ll spare everyone the bitching about players. They’re getting better and I hope things will improve in the next session. Two weeks away, seems like a long time.

One thing I do want to talk about is the 4th Edition mantra of “Yes.” If you aren’t a 4th Ed. DM you may not have heard of this new philosophy. Basically, saying yes leads to more fun than saying no. Please note that this was before Jim Carrey’s Yes Man. I am a devotee to this ideal but found out that practice is different from theology.

Let me lay this out: When you want to dig in your heels in support of some ruling you made because it makes sense to you, get stubborn about saying yes instead. My players had, without undo discussion, set up some ranged party members overlooking a potential confrontation. I let them move themselves, make stealth checks, make insight checks. I basically did everything to make their plan a realistic challenge within the D&D motif, except for providing an appropriate reward.

They wanted an surprise round, I thought having cover and being hard to approach in melee was ample reward. There’s two problems with this. I’ll give you the least important one first: If they had failed their stealth check they would have still had cover and been hard to approach. Passing the stealth check should give them something. A +2 to two attacks wouldn’t have unbalanced the encounter in any way.

I won’t even give my reasoning at the time as it’s completely unimportant to the point of this article. I hope everyone’s guessed the second problem: I said no. I say yes, the players are happy that they thought to sneak into these positions, the fight goes down exactly as it did before, perhaps ending a turn earlier, and that’s that. So much better to say yes.

If I can remember to say yes, and the grumpy player I’m not complaining about can roll about a five he may not be so grumpy after all.

Tyler

Snuck me some more painting while my daughter slept today. Made a good mix of my BD shade. I probably could simplify it but it took so many tries to get right I really don’t want to bother. It wasn’t just the colour that was good. It felt good off the brush, laying down smooth and easy over the various folds of clothing. When you get a mix like that you can just concentrate at making efficient paint strokes. It was bittersweet when I finished the coat on all six miniatures. If I’d had more time I’d have pushed on.

The difference was a liberal amount of Slow-Dri. Sure, Flow-Aid sounds like it should improve flow, but it just reduces the viscosity of the paint. Water does the same, it just takes more. The magic of Slow-Dri is it stops the paint from drying between your palette and the miniature. Think on it. Sure, it’s not drying hard but it’s drying a little bit. When you brush it on the miniature some stays on the brush, drying. Repeat, repeat, repeat and suddenly the paint’s not flowing so nice anymore.

You can’t see it in the picture, but there’s a lot of cracked paint on their cloaks and shields.

With Slow-Dri, more paint flows off the brush and the flow your Flow-Aid gave you sticks around that little bit longer. Just be careful with your next coat, you don’t want to see what happens when you put a layer of paint over one that isn’t dry yet. It dries thick and cracks. This was happening with my Battle of Five Armies miniatures because I was painting them so fast. With 10mm you tend to dab paint on pretty thick, and if you’re doing three coats—shade, base and mid—one after the other you’ll end up with cracked paint. I didn’t understand what was happening until after.