Fall In 2013 AAR Part One

Hi Kids, Last weekend was Fall In, the smallest of the HMGS-East cons, and the Chuckster and a few of his minions made the 400+ mile 8 hour trek to the show.  Why?  Cause we're Real Hardcore Gaming Men.  (And all you lads in the Northeast chunk of the country who absolutely refuse to drive 3 hours to Fredericksburg for Historicon can take that anyway you like.) (I was also bemused to watch them pump raw sewage out of one of the restrooms, across the main lobby, and out into a sewage truck parked outside.  Yes, truly the Host is without blemish.)  In my humble opinion attendance seemed on the light side, and there were above average game cancellations, but it was still a great con! I forgot the camera on Friday, but took some shots the other days.  Let's go ahead and look at some pictures!

 First off is a couple shots of a really impressive 25mm ACW game complete with river boat action!  The same figs/boats made an appearance at Historicon, too. Scratch builders, I salute you!

 This Vauban style fort was part of the same setup with the river boats.



Nearby was a Japanese war in 25mm.

 A couple shots of the flea market on Friday.  The mob was a little smaller than normal, and I think the whole weekend went by without anyone being crushed.  Still a brisk trade went on.

 

 No surprise here, the Flames of War tourney was well attended!

 Yeah, those are Lee/Grant tanks out there.  Some gamers have all sorts of courage and raw guts, God bless 'em!

 Yeah, I know what you're thinking: this guy needs more tanks!  Don't worry, there were quite a few more out of the shot.

It wasn't all 15mm FOW, the 25mm lads had their time in the sun as well.  Here we have a few shots of the Bolt Action (aka "Satan's Rules") tourney.  I've always been a huge fan of The One True Scale.  Wasn't one of Featherstone's Rules "Look down on those who game in other scales"?

 Nice looking army, waiting for the balloon to go up.

 Js-2?  Seems a little light.  Was the ISU-152 broken down?  Not all "Tiger Boys" are German!

 25mm Ancients.

 A shot of the Tourney/Flea Market room from the staircase. Ancients in front, DBA to the right, Bolt Action near the columns, and FOW is the big group in back.

 Out in the lower lobby in front of the Finkroom was a huge 10mm Gettysburg wargame.

 Yep, that's the Devil's Den, looking north.

 Flat terrain and buckets of figs!  Oh yes, that's the way!  Be still my heart....

There were a handful of games using sunken terrain, this one was Dr. Who.

 And the next table over, The Doctor is in trouble again as the Deleks rampage everywhere!

 Gotta have a shot of the Dealer Room.  You'd need a fisheye lens to get it all. Can you hear me Flag Dude?

 Ok, this is the only picture of Gnome Wars.  I swear.

 Looks like 25mm in the 1400's or so...

 1/72 WW1!  Curse you Red Baron!!

 In a galaxy far away, a long long time ago...  Wait a minute, isn't that Earth?

 Europe in the middle ages.  Autumn.

 Some more of that sunken terrain.  This stuff does look really cool, but must take up a huge amount of storage space.

And a final shot of what looks like the Spanish Civil War in 25mm.  It could also be the Russian Civil War, or maybe even a Very British Civil War, but I'm thinking Spain.  If it's got a T-26, it's got to be good!

So that's it for this installment.  It's been pointed out to me that a huge number of pictures slows down everyone's download speed, so I'm trying to limit these reports to 20-30 pix.  There are still about 60 pix still to go, so stay tuned the next couple days for the rest.

Gunnery Sergeant Harker conversion

Even though I was last in the 40k league another player has dropped so I have ended up in the league play offs. It is 1999 points and I have been working on a list to throw the other players for a loop. The main surprise is I plan to take some Imperial Guard allies. The leader for the troop of choice for the detachment is a Veteran squad. Who better to lead the squad than Gunnery Sergeant Harker. Nothing like having feel no pain and toting a relentless heavy bolter.

I didn't have the time to wait to order a model so I raided the bits boxes and pieced one together, It is still a work in progress and the heavy bolter is just hanging by the pin in the wrist and by the front hand grip. There are a bunch of conversions floating around the web and this one is similar to many. I used the chaos heavy bolter and the front carrying handle is made from some plastic strip and the hand guard from an ork choppa. Looking at the picture I still probably need to file down the hand a bit more to match the wrist but once I glue it together and add a little green stuff it might be okay.

ColKG

Street Racing with the Chuckster

Hi Kids,  Holy Cow, can it be true?  Old Man Chuckster going street racing?  Don't believe it 'til you see it.  All my friends say I drive like a little old man.  Anyway, if I were to go streetracing this is the machine I'd be doing it in.  It's a 2008 Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution X, named Evy of course.  Named after the character Natalie Portman played in the awesome movie "V."  No, not the TV show.  Everyone knows V is the second best movie ever made, second only to "Jaws."  You might not agree, but then you'd just be wrong.  So why am I posting about my car?  Because it's paid off baby!  Oh yeah, after 5 years of writing checks Evy is 100% mine!!!   It only took 28,000 miles.

 Wooooooooooohoooooooooooooooooooo!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

All the kids nowadays are always changing stuff on their cars, the only thing I swapped out on Evy was her exhaust system.  The originals sounded like a 10 year old boy farting through a straw, so I installed Magnaflow cat-back pipes.  She's got a pretty good sound now, but nothing outrageous.  I've been up to the "Tail of the Dragon" http://www.tailofthedragon.com/ US 129 (320 curves in 19 miles or something crazy like that) a couple times and plan to go back soon.  Can I get a "Hell Yeah?"

Quantum Gothic Communication Dish Update

I won a Quantum Gothic Communication dish back in 2011.  My last progress post on the Communication Dish was back in December 2012. In a effort to clear some projects from the hobby table I have put a bit more work on the dish.

After a couple dry brushes on the base and then some green flock and static grass. On the dish its self a black ink wash and a drybrush of boltgun metal.

A closer look at the dish. I could call the job a good 'un but I don't think I will. I plan to add some more details and try for a glowing effect on the coil at the bottom of the dish.

ColKG

The Banana Wars by Ivan Musicant book review

Hi Kids,  Ordinarily this time period is not my cup o' tea, but with the massive boom in Pulp era gaming over the last few years I figured I'd do a wee bit o' research and find out what was going on down south over the last 100 years.  And buddy, I'm glad I did! This 420 page tome was a great choice!  All the info the hard working gamer needs is here, even the freakin' bibliography is 10 pages long!  Each country has it's own chapter or two; Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Panama.  Chesty Puller would be proud, and Smedley Butler (one of the few guys to be awarded TWO Congressional Medals of Honor! (AND lived through it!)) turns up on more than one occasion.  One of my favorite anecdotes was how the Marines were roused from sleep by Butler yelling, "Who wants a fight?"  They then charged out to repel an attack, half dressed but fully armed.   I'm tellin' ya, ya just can't make this stuff up.  Jungle patrols, hidden forts, trains burned, customs houses raided, gunboat diplomacy, every kind of scenario you need.  There's even a guy named Dr. Bobo.  Musicant's style is easily read and very entertaining, if you have any interest in this time period or chunk of the planet I highly recommend this book.  He also has written a few books about warships, I might have to pick them up too!

Disposable Heroes: Chuckster vs. the Dice Gods

Hi Kids, Played a favorite of mine, Disposable Heroes!  This time we decided to do something different, we took an old Squad Leader scenario for the setup and went to town!  In retrospect doing this without checking the point values was probably not a great idea, as it turned out the attacker (me) was about 25% behind the defender in army points.  Arg!  Learn something new everyday!  And to add insult to injury, my opponent had God's Own Dice while my luck was circling the toilet the entire time.  Sometimes I wonder why I game at all...

The long view of the board, the Soviets are on the far end and have to exit the table through the German lines with half their forces intact.  The Huns are set up in the foreground. The Russians have 4 JS-2's and 8 infantry squads, while the Huns have a 128mm Jagdtiger, a Nashorn, and 5 infantry squads.



 The Commies starting positions; everybody in cover?  Good!  We used 25mm T-54/55 for the JS-2's.  It's as close as we cold get, especially since we needed 4 of them.

 The Dreaded Huns, subbing a T34/85 for a Jagdtiger. I do own a 1/50 Tiger, but refuse to build it, hoping that the Tigerboys out there will be discouraged from using the ultra heavies.  Obviously it didn't work in this case. The yellow tokens represent some kind of anti-tank gismo, not sure what kind.  There were quite a few Panzerfausts out there.

 The flare goes up and the Russians start forward, just like the scenario says. This would be the last time the Russians won the initiative.

 First shot of the game, a Panzerfaust takes out a JS-2.  Just the first cold slap in the face lady luck would deliver; as my opponent never once failed an acquire roll, a to hit roll, an armor penetration roll, or roll up catastrophic damage. He also never hit a location with the thickest armor, but that really isn't all that tough to do.

 Same again, my opponents perfect rolls continue with the same results.  The Russian infantry has also taken a pounding, as the MG42's (they had 5, one in each squad) and 128mm HE shells blow the living crud out of everything in sight!  The 128mm has a 50% chance to kill each and every man in a squad when it is on target.  Results ranged from 6 to 8 dead.

 The Dice Gods throw me a bone, as a 122mm HE shell crushes a Nazi squad!  Seven dead out of a possible eight!  So this is what it feels like to roll well...

 The Huns are awarded a skull token, to show that they have lost a squad for initiative purposes.

 The final positions of the Soviets as the final JS-2 gets hit next to the church.  For the first time in the game, the incoming damage effect roll is less than a 9!!!!! (The other tanks' rolls were 10, 10, and 9 on D10.)  The last JS-2 was only a 7, which killed the turret crew.  But don't think I never shot back, the 3rd JS-2 actually managed to acquire and hit the Nashorn!!!!  BUT, the 122mm AP shot only hit the track, and FAILED TO PENETRATE!  Apparently the Dice Gods figured out the 10, 10, 9 results were getting a little monotonous, and decided to even it up during my rolls.  At this point I threw in the towel, as I still had to cross about 5 feet of table and my infantry had taken about 60% losses and had no anti-tank weapons at all.  The Hun infantry wasn't in great shape either, but there was nothing to stop the Hun tanks from crushing everything.

 

Here's the scenario, in the future I'd go ahead and get a rough idea of the points for each side.  For example, the JS-2 is worth 253pts, the Jagdtiger a whopping 850!!!!  Whoa!  Still had a huge amount of fun playing Disposable Heroes!  Figs are 25mm Westwind, Battlefront, and TAG. Tanks are London War Room, Jungle Rot, Hobby Armor Depot, and a 1/48 diecast Marder.

OGRE after all these years

Hi Kids,  Something large this way comes, and its a boardgame!  Fed Ex drivers are sweating under the strain, kidney belts are in sudden demand, set the shock absorbers to extra firm and rig some extra beams under the table, my copy of the Kickstarter Designer's Edition OGRE has made the trip all the way from China!  Yowza!!  I'm a huge fan of this game, have been ever since I bought a Metagaming copy for US$2.95 at Reed's Hobby Shop in Winston-Salem, NC back in the late 1970's. In fact, I've made a habit of continuing to buy copies of this game when I find them, so I've probably got at least one of everything, including Diceland Ogre, Gurps Ogre, Ogre Delux, Ogre Reinforcements, the Ogre Book, GEV, Shockwave, Battlesuit (yes, the Space Gamer version too), Miniatures, Macrotures* (grrrrrrrrrrr**.....), Helltank and Helltank Destroyer.***  Got a bunch of the minis too, including a ChiCub from GZG.  I have even kitbashed an Ogre Ninja like the one in the Ogre Book story.  ("Go Toronto Bluejays!")

 Yes, it is a big box.  And even with the huge box, the counter sheets had to ship shrinkwrapped to the outside.

 Back in the good ole days, reprinted just to bring into focus what a few dedicated Americans can accomplish.  This was included in the kickstarter bonus goals, IIRC.  There were so many goals and it was so long ago I really can't remember all the details.  My original 1970's purchase was this size, but was a second edition copy with a color cover.  If there's a groundswell of interest, I might dig out all those other versions and do another post.

 Always dug this poster, but I hope Osprey stops using cutaway drawings for their vehicle books.

 The four packs of counter sheets, each one a little under an inch thick.  That's roughly 20mm for you metric types.  The Ogres themselves are snap together counters, everthing else is a 2D top-down picture.  I'm thinking of ordering the new size old style black and white counter sheets, but I'm not sure Warehouse 23 has any left, and they cost $25 too!  Ouch!

 The latest version of the original map, its pretty honkin' big too!

 And there are four versions of the GEV style maps, too!  Yes, they are also pretty honkin' big.

 I'm considering playing Ogre Miniatures on these maps.  Everything except an Ogre should fit in the hexes.  I'd hate to scratch them up, though.

 They are some really high quality good looking stuff!

 Some can match up geomorphically, but not in all directions.  This one is the original one from GEV, just 1000% bigger.

 All the rules you'll ever need. There's even an ap for smartphones now.

And it even comes with counter trays!  Yes, this edition must be the crowning glory of all sci-fi gamers!  I've heard they are already starting to show up on ebay, in my humble opinion you might as well just get one direct from the manufacturer.  Can you dig it?  Yes, I knew that you could!

 

*Macrotures were a "line" of miniatures SJ released a long time ago, just like the 1/285 miniatures only bigger, they were 1/60 scale.  Unfortunately, the GEV was the only vehicle ever released.  Pretty weak, considering there were only three vehicles in the basic game.  I would have dearly loved to have the Heavy Tank and the Missile Tank to go with my GEV's, but them's the breaks.  And I would stand in line to kill or die for a 1/60 scale Ogre.  Maybe I can kitbash one out of a locomotive or a lawnmower.  I still have a hankerin' to use my proxy vehicles and power suited infantry and play Ogre in 25mm scale out in the yard.  Maybe someday.....  Armorcast used to make 6" craters out of resin.  No other terrain needed!

 

**Yes, this still annoys me.

 

***Helltank and Helltank Destroyer were two games Metagaming released after they lost the rights to Ogre, both involved huge tanks in the not-too-distant future.  They are pretty good games, too.   And I consider them in the same ballpark as Ogre/GEV, hence their presence.