Messages

31

General Chaos / Re: What Wargames are you playing?

« on: November 10, 2017, 11:58:40 PM »

So while waiting for Gaslands to come out later this month, some friends and I got together to try another "post-apocalyptic vehicular combat" game: Axles and Alloys II - Dork Future, a game with rules loosely based on GZG's Full Thrust.  I brought a bunch of (unpainted, unconverted) hotwheels & matchbox cars and we used minimal terrain from the supply at the FLGS, and I took a few photos:


Axles and Alloys II - Dork Future by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

Rules, dice, terrain & a bunch of hotwheels & matchbox cars (also some dropped weapons templates that we never used).

I saw the skull terrain piece on a shelf and said "this has to be the centrepiece of the table".


First Turn by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

Dindo (Van), Lucas (Sedan) and I (VW Buggy) accelerate from our respective corners.  Some shooting, no damage.


Second Turn by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

I skid, almost going "off table" & fail to line up a shot on Dindo.  Lucas & Dindo exchange fire and Dindo rams Lucas.
photo from mid-turn, before the ram


Third Turn by Bryan Rombough, on Flickr

I don’t skid this turn, but overshoot my targets (should have decelerated).  Lucas & Dindo exchange fire and ram each other, Lucas’ sedan is almost destroyed.

The game was called at the end of the third turn on account of time (the FLGS was closing). We all agreed that Dindo was clearly the victor.

Fun, simple rules: three turns in under an hour.  Almost all the damage came from ramming, and we agreed the skidding rules didn’t make sense, but I’ll be happy to play A&A again.

32

General Chaos / Re: What Wargames are you playing?

« on: November 05, 2017, 05:24:57 PM »

to add a twist to this thread i add 2 questions. what is your favorite style of play? and what is your most memorable moment from playing minatures?

I prefer a more 'casual' style of play.  I've never gotten into tournaments or cared for the overcompetitive attitude many wargamers develop from being immersed in the "all wargaming is tournaments" culture that many gaming companies encourage these days.  I also quite like games with interesting scenarios, ones that incorporate uneven/asymmetrical forces, or an interesting narrative element.  I often see games like those still being run at one of the local gaming conventions.

I have trouble picking out a most memorable wargaming moment.  It's games I ran (which I haven't done for years, other than demos) which I remember best:

There was a scenario a friend & I ran at a local convention after the Colonial Expeditionary Force Sourcebook came out for Heavy Gear.  The CEF forces were so horribly unbalanced, we gave them victory conditions that had nothing to do with destroying the enemy.  We explained this to the CEF players before the game, but they got so excited wiping out the Terra Novan forces, they forgot about their actual mission and lost the game!

Then their was a Heavy Gear capture-the-flag game another friend and I ran using the Duelist's Handbook and Tactical Dueling supplements.  We created a 'maze arena' that was "in-scale" with the miniatures, which meant that weapons ranges and movement allowances were scaled up on the tabletop.  Some players were so excited by the "in-scale" movement rates that they ignored our warnings and tried to race through the maze at 72-84kph!  90 degree turns are rather difficult at such speeds, and a number of spectacular crashes were the result.

One of the last big convention games that I ran was Monster Island, Using action figures and paper buildings.  I let the players crush the paper buildings whenever their monster destroyed one, that was a big hit.  I should run that again some time...

BTW i actually recorded a konflikt 47 game - the intro and then each player commented between turns about what was happening. I took some photos as well. I'll try to post it next month after Patrecon.

I've seen youtube battle reports done that way.  Civilian Gamer, a youtube channel run by a gamer who used to live around here, has quite a few video battle reports like that.

33

General Chaos / Re: What Wargames are you playing?

« on: October 29, 2017, 07:42:15 PM »

I'm a brit so Warhammer was just there. The way D&D is in the US. My friends got into it and the older kids talked about it I got into it around the time of Warhammer Siege and when Space Orks went full Mad Max (Bad Moons!!)

I was tangentially aware of Warhammer & 40k in the 80's.  I don't remember seeing them in the hobby shop in the mall, but there was a W. H. Smith (a British bookstore chain) in the same mall that carried Fighting Fantasy gamebooks and some other GW books, including Heroes for Wargames, an early GW book about fantasy & sci-fi miniatures for wargames & rpgs.  Heroes for Wargames talked about Warhammer and had a lot of photos of minis, including the first published photos of the original space marine minis, a year before Rogue Trader was published*.  In the mid-90's, I found a dedicated game shop downtown (that hobby shop in the mall had closed years before) and they carried a variety of minis and games, but Warhammer & 40k took up the most space on their shelves.

This reminds me, here's the transcript of an interview with John Stallard & Rick Priestley, a couple of early GW staff and founders of Warlord Games, one of the more successful of the game companies created by ex-GW people: https://web.archive.org/web/20110812101508/http://www.battlegames.co.uk/documents/BG_HH-RP-JS-interview_unabridged.pdf

Stallard & Priestley talk about their own introduction to wargames, the early days of GW and the creation of Warhammer & Rogue Trader.  I found it amusing that Rick Priestley said that he considered Warhammer to be a rather old-fashioned game when he designed it, considering how often I hear GW fans these days insisting that it was the cutting edge of wargaming in the 80's.

*those photos were labelled "Deep Space Mercenaries" in that book, and I like to joke about how I'll never forgive GW for that name change

34

General Chaos / What Wargames are you playing?

« on: October 22, 2017, 07:38:38 PM »

I was going to post something in HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING, but I thought that I was posting a bit much about wargames in that thread and since the RPPR crew are talking about wargames on thier podcasts, I'd start a new thread:
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Here's a podcast interview with Jon Tuffley, the proprietor (and sole operator) of Ground Zero Games: Meeples & Miniatures – Episode 230 – Ground Zero Games

The interview begins at about 36 minutes in.

GZG published a number of sci-fi tabletop wargames rules in the 90's: Full Thrust (starship fleet action); Dirtside (6mm ground combat);  and Stargrunt (25 mm ground combat), and sells miniatures for all of those game lines and others.  I own copies of all of Tuffley's rules and have played a lot of Full Thrust, and even after all these years FT is still my favourite sci-fi fleet action ruleset.  And pdfs of their rules can be downloaded for free from the GZG website, there's a link on the podcast blog post.

As discussed in the podcast, GZG is a rare long-time survivor in the wargaming industry who (unlike other companies that have come and gone over the years) haven't tried to become "the next GW" and burnt out as a result.
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One thing I'd like to hear about is people's introduction to wargames and their experiences in the hobby.

I began wargaming in '84, shortly after my friends and I discovered rpgs.  There was a hobby store in the local mall which sold rpgs, wargames, dice & miniatures in addition to models & model making supplies.  While browsing the rpg shelf, we noticed notice some little boxed games with names like OGRE, G.E.V. and Car Wars nearby.  I was immediately hooked on Ogre/GEV and one of my friends was smitten by Car Wars.  I've played plenty of other wargames since then, both hexmap and miniatures, but you never forget your first love, and I still get in a game of Ogre at least once a year at a local gaming convention.

Since first playing Ogre/GEV and figuring out that Car Wars was just too damned complex, I've played a fair number of wargames.  I haven't kept track of hours played, but all told I'm probably more of a wargamer than a roleplayer.

I've gotten into historical wargames, but mostly of the WWI/WWII variety, and mostly of the microarmour (6mm) and naval wargaming scales.  For a while in the 90's I played quite a lot of Spearhead, a WWII microarmour game, until the day the president of the club walked in wearing a "2nd Waffen SS: European Tour" t-shirt and a shit-eating grin, and that was the end of that gaming club.   I haven't played much in the way of WWI/WWII skirmish games, though I did pick up a copy of Crossfire, a very interesting looking skirmish game with a unique initiative/action system form the author of Spearhead a while back, but I haven't actually had the chance to play it.

In sci-fi wargaming, I've played a fair number of games.  As I said above, I've been an Ogre/GEV fan for over thirty years, somewhere in storage I have a full set of Ogre Miniatures from the early aughts, and I'll probably be buying the new Ogre Minis when they come out too.  As mentioned above, I've played GZG's Full Thrust, a game which really has everything I want in a sci-fi fleet action experience.  There was a fellow who used to run FT at local conventions and the FLGS downtown regularly, and I got into his games quite regularly for years there.  I never got into 40k, but I have played a bit of Epic, the microarmour scale version of 40k.  The sci-fi wargame I've played the most would have to be Heavy Gear, a mecha game from a little gaming company out of Montreal called Dream Pod 9 (I've also played Battletech, but never really got into it).  The 1st & 2nd editions of Heavy Gear had gorgeous artwork & mechanical designs and a very well fleshed-out setting; I had a lot of fun playing it, particularly the skirmish/Gear duelling rules.  Unfortunately, the local HG scene fell apart after DP9 put out a new edition which most of the existing playerbase (myself included) hated, and which also failed to attract a new, sustainable playerbase.  These days, I'm not wargaming as much as I used to.  I get in some games every year at CanGames, the local & long-running gaming convention, and I've been demonstrating and organizing games of Mobile Frame Zero, a mecha skirmish game where you build your giant robots (and the terrain) out of lego.  MFZ is heavily influenced by the sort of "Real Robot" anime that I'm a fan of, and the creators are unrepentantly clear about their politics (tl;dr: no space nazis).

I never got into fantasy wargames.  That's purely a matter of taste, the look of fantasy just doesn't appeal to me as much as sci-fi.
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So what's your wargaming story?

35

General Chaos / Re: What Vidja games are you playing?

« on: October 22, 2017, 04:45:54 PM »

Finally created a steam account so I could get the new Ogre game: http://store.steampowered.com/app/517780/Ogre/

It's an adaptation of Steve Jackson's first game design (and my first love in wargaming), a hexmap-and-counter wargame of armoured warfare in a future where everyone has tacnukes and the battlefield is ruled by enormous, multi-gunned, AI controlled tanks.  It's a faithful adaptation of a game that's "easy to learn and hard to master", as an old review once said.

Here's some reviews:

https://techspark.co/classic-strategy-game-ogre-released-steam/

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I've yet to dive into multiplayer, but when I do (and maybe I'll start playing other games as well) I'm cadmonkey1973 on steam.

36

General Chaos / Re: HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

« on: October 15, 2017, 05:23:09 PM »

Harry Dean Stanton's final role:

<a href="" target="_blank" class="aeva_link bbc_link new_win"></a>

LUCKY follows the spiritual journey of a 90-year-old atheist and the quirky characters that inhabit his off the map desert town. Having out lived and out smoked all of his contemporaries, the fiercely independent Lucky finds himself at the precipice of life, thrust into a journey of self exploration, leading towards that which is so often unattainable: enlightenment. Acclaimed character actor John Carroll Lynch's directorial debut, "Lucky", is at once a love letter to the life and career of Harry Dean Stanton as well as a meditation on mortality, loneliness, spirituality, and human connection.

37

General Chaos / Re: Kickstarter: Cool Stuff

« on: October 07, 2017, 03:43:07 PM »

So this recently popped up on my tumblr dashboard:

Consentacle: A Card Game of Human-Alien Intimacy

In Consentacle, you and a partner squirm your way to a mutually satisfying Human x Alien romance... with or without the benefit of verbal communication! You'll need to divine the other's desires in order to build trust, play your cards right, and transform mutual trust into starry satisfaction. How tingly will your interplanetary liaison feel in the end? Will your encounter leave one party sweaty and exhausted, the other hungering for more? It's up to the two of you to find out... together!

It's already funded, but they're still short of the stretch goal for a Consentacle comic book, and there's only two days to go.

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General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: October 07, 2017, 11:15:08 AM »

39

General Chaos / Re: HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

« on: September 24, 2017, 07:33:35 PM »

yeah I have 2 of Osprey's other war games, the hong kong one and Dracula's America. Both look very cool. Need some time to learn the rules though.

And the September issue of Wargames Illustrated has an article about Dracula's America.  I noticed that the dice rolling system makes the chance of exploding successes higher the lower a character's skill, I wonder if that's on purpose?

They also had another article about another car combat game: Mad Maximillian, set in an alternate history 1930's using 28mm vehicle minis.

And in other news: 'It' Producer to Adapt Sci-Fi Epic 'Ma.K' for Warner Bros.

Roy Lee has teamed with Scott Bernstein to adapt the Japanese property for the big screen.

Fresh from the record-breaking box-office haul of horror-thriller It, producer Roy Lee is now setting his sights on giant robots and two-legged tanks.

Lee has teamed with Scott Bernstein, the Universal executive turned producer, and Warner Bros., which released It, to adapt Ma.K, an epic sci-fi property out of Japan.

Originating in the early 1980s in Hobby Japan magazine, Ma.K was a monthly comic that also tied into customizable model kits. It was created by artist and sculptor Kow Yokoyama, who worked with the magazine's editors to create an expansive universe inspired by Star Wars, Blade Runner and World Wars I and II. The combination of manga and models took off, gaining a worldwide cult following over time.

The story is set far, far into the future after a nuclear war caused survivors to flee Earth. When the planet is habitable once again, new colonies are set up, but it's not long before a battle over resources begins. When one side wants to make Earth independent, a new revolutionary war begins, this time with mechanized armor and robots.

"Kow is a world creator in the truest sense, and this project finally gives Ma.K a global audience who will experience this epic and rich sci-fi property as fans have for the last 35 years," says Kevin Munroe (TMNT), who will executive produce with Yokoyama, Rick Privman and Yumiko Miyano.

Surprised this slipped under the radar of the After Hours crew in the "Pitching Netflix" episode.

I've never actually seen the original Maschinen Krieger comic, apparently it consisted of photographs of scratch-built dioramas with captions, but I have seen plenty of the models though, gorgeous mechanical designs.

What I gather of the story is that it's a sort of alternate WWI/WWII where the "Not-Germans" aren't nazis, so you can build your models of blonde-haired, blue-eyed, forage-cap wearing, panzerfaust-armed soldiers without any guilt!  No idea how this IP is going to be adapted to the screen though.  Maybe Warner was looking for something after Disney acquired Star Wars?

40

General Chaos / Re: HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

« on: September 15, 2017, 05:58:24 PM »

So I was listening to an episode of WoD the Heck (guess which one) and I was reminded of another geek podcast which I have yet to mention here: Métis In Space.

This is a podcast by two geeky Métis ladies who deconstruct sci-fi/fantasy/horror movies & tv shows featuring Indigenous Peoples from a decolonial perspective.  The podcast is currently on hiatus, and I don't know when or if it will return, but there are 30 episodes to listen to.  The bulk of each episode consists of the two of them commenting on a movie or tv show which they've just watched, with a critical view to indigenous representation & issues.  Métis In Space review shows & movies that they love as well as those that they hate, so I'd recommend starting with an episode about something they're fans of, like Star Trek: Star Trek: The Original Series “The Paradise Syndrome” or Star Trek: TNG "Journey's End" before moving on to stuff they hated, like Avatar.

Hey, new season!

Métis in Space Season 4 Episode 1 Apocalypto

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General Chaos / Re: Best Internet Vidyas

« on: September 14, 2017, 06:37:25 PM »

Oh, hi TIFF.

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General Chaos / Re: HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

« on: September 12, 2017, 08:02:43 AM »

Usually I get my wargaming news/fix from Guerrilla Miniature Games

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbO4Vs1vlAA9hz7Ad7IMgug/videos

They often cover Osprey wargames like Rogue Stars, Frostgrave and other indy titles.

Rogue Stars series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7F_veyJvJw

I've watched some of their Rogue Stars battle reports, it's on my list of Osprey games I want to try (it was also written by the author of Fistful of Kung Fu).

I get a lot of my wargaming news from Tabletop Gaming News, they cover wargames, board games & card games, basically everything tabletop except for rpgs (though there's the occasional bit of rpg news too).  The FLGS downtown also carries Wargames Illustrated, one of the few traditional miniatures wargaming print magazines still around.

43

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: September 09, 2017, 10:58:08 AM »

what's that from?

Rhymes for Young Ghouls, directed by Jeff Barnaby and starring  Kawennahere Devery Jacobs.  I think I mentioned it in the HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING thread a while back.

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Pretty sure it's available for viewing on most streaming services.

44

General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: September 08, 2017, 03:15:58 PM »

45

General Chaos / Re: HAY GUYS HAVE YOU SEEN THIS THING (Forum Shout Out Thread Thing)

« on: September 02, 2017, 11:59:27 AM »

And in addition, I just discovered a "post apoc game cars" facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/318623315005784/