Drums along the Monongahela

Played a good game of Muskets & Tomahawks with the old gang recently. It was an intro game as I was the only one to have played the game. The scenario centered on a mixed British force tasked to burn down a French settlement before it was completed. The French had to kill/rout 2/3 of the British force. I really wanted to use the new blockhouse I made but there are no rules for them in the book, so we made what seemed like reasonable rules for defense factors and had at it.

The whole shebang.

The blockhouse. I tried to make it look like the stockade was still under construction. The 'logs' and 'stumps' in the foreground are just sticks from the yard.

I think this is my favorite shot of the day.

The Brits were to enter along the long side on the right and the two short sides. The French started with the garrison (regulars) in or within 4" of the buildings with their reinforcements entering along the road to the left.

Stockade under construction.

A unit of British Rangers (who would be the MVP's for the Brits), flanked by two units of Indians. Sadly, the Indians quickly vaporized from the first few volleys from the French regulars. 

French Indians. The three guys in the foreground are actually running form British fire while the others are advancing through the meadow from off board.

My pink coats enter. (They are actually quite red in real life.) You can see Indians and more Indians advancing in the background.

French chasseurs take aim.

Indians fire.

The other British Rangers use the terrain to their advantage. The French fire from the blockhouse was murderous. In the background you can see Pennsylvania militia wandering through the woods. We played almost three hours and they never got out as they wandered in circles, lost in a  patch of wood the size of my back yard.

Indians from both sides square off as fire from French regulars pours out of the small building in the back. The French Indians are bad news and no mistake. Being 'bloodthirsty', they re-roll all misses in hand to hand combat. Yikes!

The French Indians close but are about to be rebuffed by a volley at Point Blank range. In the background you can see the British regulars and what's that? Looks like Pennsylvania militia lost in the woods.

The pink coats engaged the French regulars all day in the blockhouse to very little effect.

The Rangers light the first building!

The lone French Regular on this side runs from the burning building.

The Rangers set the second building aflame. They've retreated to a safe distance and take aim at the Canadian militia running out of the building.

We carried the ammo, we might as well use it. The Pennsylvanians finally extricate themselves from the woods and go, decidedly, home.

It was a near run thing as some general once said. The Brits got two buildings alight but, once lit, needed to roll a total of 8 pips to actually destroy them before the game ended. They ended up with 7 on one and 6 on the other! The game also uses subplots to help determine a winner. The French achieved theirs, which was to keep a certain officer alive and Brits failed in theirs, which coincidentally, was to kill the very same officer. (There are actually over 40 different random choices of subplots. It was just a wild coincidence that they were related for this game in this way.) The British had wiped out over half the French but they passed their Morale checks. So, it was a Major French victory but very close to being a Minor British. Either way, I think everyone had a good time.

Battle of Five Armies. Take 2

We met again to test this scenario one more time. I was tempted to switch sides (I haven't been the Good player yet in any of our games), but I more wanted to try a few different tactics for the Evil side. Plus, it's fitting and congruent with our overall nature for me to be Evil and Chris to be Good. Natbud joined us as did Ogre Dirty Dog (Craig) in a 4 man brouhaha. Craig and I decided that. tempting as shooting is, is isn't the way Evil is going to win this scenario. Needing 5's or 6's to hit (vs, 3+ for the Elves and 4+ for the dwarves and men), plus needing 6's to kill the dwarves, it just doesn't make sense to enter into a bow fight with them. With that in mind, the new Evil strategy was to move forward the first two turns and then stagger our archers, with every other goblin firing and the others moving full speed. (The rules say a model can only shoot if they move half their rate or less.) Last time we spent turn after turn pouring arrows into defensive positions and barely moving. The rules also make you roll a die for every intervening model, tree, wall or other obstacle with a 50% chance of hitting them/it instead. Couple this with the poor shooting stats and you can see why we eschewed that option.

I was also determined not to make the same mistake in set up as last time. I think it's important to slow the elves down on the western half of the board but I committed far too many troops (and the wrong kind) to it last game. The Elven archers, with their superior range and shooting ability can definitely cause major problems for the Evil side. They especially, needed dealt with.

The plan was to use the wargs and some archers to impede their progress and use overwhelming numbers to pour into the fort.

I didn't take as many pictures this time around, wanting to focus more on the tactics behind our efforts. Plus, yinz seen it last time.

Here's the board after the first Evil turn. You can clearly see the different approach. Ogre's boys are on the far right, waiting to give the Men of Laketown the business end of their pointy bits. The greater part of two other clans are massed in the middle, about to take the shortest route to the fort. I started with 6 archers to the west of the stream and on the Elves' entry, they whacked 4 with their first shot. I was very nervous at this point. Luckily for the Evil side, Good's dice went down hill from there, especially Natbud's. It's always better to be lucky than good.

Turn 4.  Evil is already threatening to enter the fort. Ogre has craftily divided his clan into shooters and non-shooters. His massed archers squared off against the boys from Laketown and consistently wore them down.* (*See Natbud's shitty dice, above.) Finally, on Turn 6, he scored 5 hits and wiped out the last 5 archers!!! This also forced a Courage Test which their leader, Anglo, failed from inside the fort and a 2 point VC swing Evil's way. The wargs have divided, with part going to block ingress of the men on the east side and the rest, with riders, to do the same on the west against the Elves.

I entered 12 wargs on the west edge to cut off the Elven advance. Once again, though, I couldn't resist jumping on them, especially the archers. With more wargs heading for the head pf their column, I reasoned it was better to go after their archers to keep them from harassing the left flank of the main assault. Eventually we killed a bunch, actually causing a Courage Test, but more importantly, we just kept engaging them do they couldn't shoot. (Troops already engaged in melee combat need not take the Courage Test, so though we forced one, all the Elves were engaged and never took one.)

Evil muscles their way into the fort. In the bottom center, 2 Evil heroes gain purchase on the walls before leaping in. It took a 4 Hero Might roll off to finally decide who got to move first. Luckily Evil prevailed which allowed a mass intrusion into the fort. By engaging most of the Good models, it also negated thei ability to move to plug gaps and holes. You can see my troop of 6 orcs got into the fray this time. Their two handed weapons cleaving a few dwarves in the process. The dwarves are so tough though! Most are just pushed back, but that was enough for our purposes. In the top center, you can see Anglo before he thought better of the situation and thought he heard his wife calling. Ogre's clan, with a few reinforcements from the center smash the Men of Laketown like they owed them money. He has swung some goblins round to enter the rear of the fort. Only two men, plus Anglo, were able to get in.

The wargs whittle down the Elven archers. After their first volley which cut down 4 goblins, I am not sure they ever got to fire again.

The Elven advance is halted as wargs and warg riders cut them off before reaching the fort. A few wargs have also disentangled themselves from the archers to hit the Elves in the rear. (Just the way they like it!) Their long scrotumed leader was tough though! Facing up to 6 attacks per turn, Evil could not lay even a single wound on him.

Get 'em, you dogs! Ablaat, goblin hero, stands in the breach, supported by spearmen. (Uh,.. speargoblins?) The orcs lend their two handed assistance. Booglin, one of the other goblin heroes, can be seen in the center right, just inside the fort, with the green hair and red helm. He blew his Fate point trying to save a wound and on the next to last turn, Nat had two chances to finish him off, but failed. With Evil getting Priority, he ran and hid in the corner on the last turn. (You can see him putting a wall of goblins between him and harm in the lower left in the photo below.) Thus another 2 point swing in Evil's favor.

The final positions. Evil has two heroes and 3 clans in the fort for 7 VP. (This time, instead of being out by a half inch, we got a warg rider in by half inch for a point. A deliciously sleazy move on the last turn. He can be seen in the center left of the pic.) Good has a Hero, and two factions (men and dwarves) for 4 VP. The Elves are stymied on the west side, while Ogre mops up what's left of the Men on the east. A very close game once again with wild point swings on the last turn.

The whole game had some wild swings back and forth, especially with Priority changing hands so many times. Both sides fluctuated from acting to re-acting almost turn to turn. There were no tactical gaffs on either side and, all in all, very well played. Once again, on the last die roll of the game, an orc cleaved a dwarf from gullet to gonads. Nice to end with a '6'.

Well Done, Men. Chris, great scenario! 

Battle of Five Armies, LotR SBG style

We met at my brother's place to test his Bo5A scenario for the LotR SBG system, a game we have been playing of late, using our old Ral Partha figs from the mid 70's. Chris devised the scenario with the idea of ultimately putting it online for general use. It's intended for multi-players, 3 per side and it centers on one of the old forts on the spur of the mountain. The scenario starts with a small dwarf force holding the fort and everyone else entering from off board in waves. There were 6 contingents in all: 3 goblin/warg and 1 each dwarf, elf and men from Laketown. Each contingent had a hero leading it, only Fili for the dwarves being named from the story. 8 turns. Victory points were awarded thusly: 1  point for a member of each faction inside the fort at games end. (Starting dwarves and exception to this.) 2 points for each hero inside the fort. 1 point for each hero killed. Points were awarded per *side* not faction. (We also discussed prolly 1 point each for each of the opponents faction to fail their Courage check.)

That all being said, we loaded up on fat and sugar, and started with gusto.

I can't even begin to describe what this group means to me.

The set-up. Each faction enters on a different edge. For purposes of discussion, the left of this picture is north. The dwarves enter from due north, the elves from the northwest corner, the Laketown men, the northeast. Goblins and wargs enter everywhere else. It should be noted the Good side has less models, as would be expected. The Evil side had about 30 more points per faction and 10 more models or so.

The dwarves with crossbows man the fort as the clouds of war gather.

Fili leads the dwarven reinforcements onto the board. Dwarves with weapon and shield are harder to crack than Brazil nuts with your bare hands.

The forest king's contingent, led by their hero who's scrotum hung lower than his penis.

The men of Laketown want their share of the booty too.

Goblins swarm the board. This is a good shot as it shows my biggest mistake of the game and what probably cost us the most. That's mostly my contingent to the east, left of the stream. I entered there for two main reasons: first, I thought I could head off the elves and prohibit them easy ingress to the fort area, but secondly and more importantly: this side of the table was closest to where I was already standing and closest to where the snacks were. I was too fucking lazy to move around to the other side of the table.

No Legolas.

My wargs had a taste for elf flesh. Ultimately this went bad for us even though we outnumbered them. I eventually lost three to his two and my two remaining wargs fled to hunt elsewhere. They sucked there too.

Goblin archers prepare to shoot the shit out of the wall of the fort.

My stupidity revealed: my goblins moved 5, his elves moved 6. Plus Elves aren't slowed by difficult terrain (the stream and based woodlands.) I had no chance of catching the elves as I had planned. They flitted by, thumbing their noses at us as they skipped towards the fort. Note also, if I had used my wargs properly, I could have blocked, or at least slowed, their progress, but I was too bent on murdering them. It cost us.

The men of Laketown blot out the sun with their arrows.

Fili's boys firmly hold the fort while the goblins begin their futile efforts to dislodge them.

Goblins, as is their wont, swarm around the fort, looking for easy access. There was none to be found.

The humans run into a buzzsaw. The goblins turn their flank and start rolling up their line.

The rest of the pics are all on the final turn, showing different aspects, as it was an exciting one. In this shot you can see in the upper left, a warg trying to savage the elven hero. The hero has an escort who saved his life! At the bottom left are my reinforcing orcs with 2 handed weapons. As I have already discussed my stupidity, here's a look at the result. They never crossed the stream or got within 12 inches of an enemy model. Well played Steve! Fucking douche bag.

This also helps illustrate my incompetence. The goblin in the bottom right, you know, the one that is a base width away from being in the fort; the same one who schlepped through difficult terrain of the woods and the stream the entire game: anyway, he's from my contingent and was an inch or less away from entering the fort, thus denying the Evil side a Victory Point. Once again: well played! Not.

The final positions. The men of Laketown are all but chewed up. Literally, I suppose. I did kill a slew of elves with decent shooting but not quite enough to force a courage test. I took a total of 21 shots on the last turn against the elven hero, including using both my Might points from my own hero. We managed to kill the warg attacking him and the elf next to him and actually did 1 wound (but he had 2). I missed with the other 18 shots. I also lost the last two guys of another faction in the fort. All I had to do was win one roll off for a VP. Lost them both. BUT... all I had to do was survive the wound die rolls of 5 or better. Lost them both. So, lost another VP there. Good managed to get two elves and one human into the fort also on the last turn for 2 VP their way and won 5-3. One die roll our way or one less act of stupidity and it is almost certainly at least a tie. The elves and humans were dangerously close to taking a Courage test but alas, it was not to be so. But Good won out. All the dice rolls and stupidity still count in this rules set.

What a blast! Thanks to my brother Chris for hosting and for a well thought out and executed scenario that really made the rules set shine. The 8 turn length was probably perfect. One more turn and Evil would have overwhelmed the fort. I know there are definitely things I would do different. I'd love to give it a try.

An orchish incursion. 7 May 2016

I met up with my brother Chris and his oldest son Nathaniel to play a game of Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game from Games Workshop. We are using our old Ral Partha figs from when we were kids. Chris recently discovered a cache of them in his basement and I have been bringing them back to life with some washes and paint touch ups. I try to leave some of the original paint jobs on as many of the figs as possible just to keep their integrity and as a sort of homage to our teen and pre-teen efforts of 40 years ago. We cut our gaming teeth on these beauties and it is a blast to (literally) dust them off and put them back into action. 

Chris was in a dwarvish mood so I developed a 400 point scenario which depicted an orcish incursion into the region around Erebor sometine between Bilbo's adventure and the start of the War of the Ring. Possibly the Master heard rumor of his ring? We decided we would play 10 turns with the Orcs being caught in the ruins of Dale. It was decided whomever had the most models in the city at game's end would be declared the victor.

The orcs were pretty generic. Their force included a captain and a Banner. 24 out of 35 of them had bows. They also had the benefit of a Mordor troll for a total of 36 models and 402 points.

The dwarves were a mixed lot. About 10 had bows, 8 had two handed mattocks and a dozen or so had shields and hand axes. They were led by Balin and a unit of 5 'Guards'. They also had 36 models and totaled 403 points.

In hindsight, the troll was not a good choice for this force. At 100 points he cost the same as 20 more orcs. Sure, he's tough but he can still only kill one dwarf a turn. In a game where you need to kill guys to force Courage tests, I should have eschewed his brawn for numbers. Truth be told, I just wanted to use the figure and wanted to play to have fun and not build a list with 'winning' in mind. Playing the game with my bro and his son, we were all winners! :-)

So the Evil strategy was to shoot the shorties as much as possible and thin their ranks before closing with them. They are tough little buggers so we wanted to increase our odds in hand to hand without getting in harms way. I had 24 dudes with bows, after all, to his 10. He shot 24" and I shot 18" but as I started in Dale, he had to come to me. I won't go into too many details but I needed a '5' or '6' to hit and a '6' to kill with our orcish bows. (Almost a 1 in 6 chance!) Then dice got involved. Now I don't want it to sound like the Good strategy wasn't sound and well thought out, but I couldn't hit the side of a fucking Barad Dur! There were at least 3 or 4 turns where I had NO kills. None. I killed one guy on the first turn and figgered I'd get one or two anyway so no biggie. By the time they get to me, I'd have whacked 8 or 10 models. Uh.... no.  I think I missed every shot the next three turns. Their return fire wasn't much better, especially on Nat's side but they were picking off a couple guys a turn, needing '4's or better to hit and "5's or better to kill.

After several turns of this nonsense, I abandoned that strategy and charged out to meet them but the odds didn't get any better. The little bastards are tough! My odds for hitting in hand to hand were the same and there were no sixes on my dice. The dwarves ground us down, even with our banner allowing us to re-roll attacks within 3" of it. I won as many fights as I lost but just couldn't sever their piano wire strength mortal coils. They would back up and then come back in and hack us with their mattocks. Nat moved forward like a wall of lava brushing aside my feeble defenses and broke into Dale over the northern wall. My troll played his role as a giant fucktard and killed one dwarf the entire game. (Granted, he hid like a troll sized pussy for the first three or four turns because I didn't want him pin cushioned before he had the chance to do his club work.)

So, my strategy(ies) of winning on one side and not losing on the other both failed. At the start of turn 8, I was down to 50% of my forces and started taking Courage tests (Courage score + 2d6) for all my dudes. With a Courage score of 2 and needing a 10 or more to stay in the battle, you can guess how well that went over with my brave orcs. We called it as Evil was utterly defeated. Sauron will learn nothing of his precious ring from this foray. I think I ended up killing a total of 7 dwarfs to a loss of 20 or 21 and 10 more running!

However, on the last roll of the game I whacked one last dwarf and ran off the table shouting "Evil still lurks!"

The quick set up. We decided on no Difficult Terrain just to make things easier and get into the game.

My brave (?) orcs man the walls ready to shoot down the stunties. Unfortunately our commander was confused and ordered them to place the rubber suction cups on their arrows instead of the armor piercing tips. Check out the awesome fountain Chris made in the background.

With a battle cry of  'Is he fucking serious?' my orc battle line advances out of the ruins followed bravely by their captain and standard bearer.

This is where I intended to win. I think the old Japanese poet Basho said it best:

The summer grasses

For many brave warriors

Aftermath of dreams.

The dwarvish Guard sodomizes my Forlorn Hope.

Orcs look tough.

Probably my favorite picture of the day. The troll runs screaming back to his hole chased (???) by dwarves while in the foreground two orcs are being hacked to death by dwarves as they try to just run the fuck away. The dwarves are pushing each other out of the way to get to crush someone's skull! (Been on both ends of that scenario myself!) Too funny.

It was a great game. After, we discussed the myriad of scenarios we can play with the figures we have. Everything from the First Age through the War of the Ring, including some of the grim battles of Feanor and his Oath, to the Fellowship vs. the Balrog to the siege of Minis Tirith. We got the figs and terrain to do it all. It has been such a pleasure to get these old models back on the table. 

Somewhere, my Uncle John is smiling.