Diary entry #005

As usual, I attended the club on Monday.

Dave and I continued our search for a set of ECW rules we can use with our 10mm armies that we bought as a project some two years ago.
So far we have tried Forlorne Hope; too much dice throwing for very little effect, Warmaster Ancient battle: ECW supplement; too reliant on luck and several free sets that were not scaling too well.
This time we are trying Regiment of Foote from the Peter Pig stable. We have previously worked out two armies and gone through the campaign stage to end up with Dave defending with an army that hardly suffered from the rigours of campaign and me attacking with an army that did not enjoy the march.
Following the game plan in the rules, we threw some terrain down (I chose close terrain because I had some skirmishers and wanted to see what they could do) while Dave selected a good cross section of items.
On then to deployment; Dave put his central command down first, my left wing followed, then Dave's right wing, my centre and finally Dave's right and my left wings went down.
Now, once again, I am going to be brief.
The battle progresses slowly as it was our first run through. I had trouble activating my central command while Dave held his ground. On mt right, Dave tried pushing into my force with a wing that was depleted by stragglers. The initial infantry clash was inconclusive and carried over. My skirmishers were holding a steep hill against another infantry unit. The next turn saw my cavalry intervene in the infantry fight and wiped out Dave's unit. His other unit, facing the skirmishers, promptly routed on seeing the fall of their comrades. The general started heading back for his stragglers.
On my left, the main cavalry forces came to blows in a to and fro action. Dave eventually won that fight due to activation failures.
Back in the centre, my attack had become fragmented and one of two units that had pushed forward was destroyed. The other came under heavy musketry fire and woulds have probably routed had we continued, but time ran out.
All in all, I enjoyed the game. The lack of activation in the centre was frustrating, but the rules gave believable results. We have agreed to give them another try.

A final note; while we are trying to find a suitable set of rules and our models are being prepared, we are using card counters. For this battle I downloaded some pics and Dave made the counters using these.
here is a few pictures of them in the game..

 This picture shows my centre and left close to the end of the battle. The three near infantry had failed to move all game.

And finally, I've uploaded some pictures.

Diary entry #004

Monday saw me at the club again.
My usual oppo, Dave, wasn't there this time as he was visiting family way down South somewhere so I was glad when David turned up unexpected.
After exchanging a few pleasantries, we resolved to play an impromptu game of Impetus, a recently discovered set of ancient war games rules that have a very different approach to this genre.
I dug out my Early Imperial Romans to take on David's Palmyran. Heavens, they look mean when you look at the meagre Roman army for the same points.
So, referring repeatedly to the rules and to Ken and Paul our resident experts on Impetus, having competed at Derby, we fumbled our way through. As the object was to improve our understanding of the mechanics, this approach seemed to work for us.
The game was strange. I was the defender and placed two woods and two difficult ground patches on the battlefield. David then removed one of the central woods, leaving a battlefield very reminiscent of Agincourt.
I had only one command and David two. I deployed across the gap between a wood and some difficult ground. Legionaries in the middle, flanked by cavalry and, further out, the auxiliaries. Two elements of slingers took up position in front of the legionaries. David deployed two commands, the first had three cataphract units placed on his left and 5? light cavalry placed across his centre front. The second command had two cataphracts deployed on his right and 5? archers behind the light cavalry in the centre.
To cut a story short, David threw his LC forward to skirmish with little effect, I countered with the slingers, forcing half the LC to evade. I charged another with one of my MC and it stopped short of the Palmyran line. Expecting to have them 'blown away', I was amazed to see the massed archery from the enemy infantry totally fail to even cause a disorder. So David charged them with some cataphracts with a general attached, lost the melee and to cap it all, his general was captured with a collapse of his command. Effectively that would have ended the battle in the second turn, so we chose to ignore the collapse leaving the command intact but without a general.
The battle then moved very slowly with David trying to reorder his left without a general and me unwilling to approach over the open ground with all that super heavy cavalry out there. The skirmish battle ensued at long range during this time, and the Palmyrans were winning that. Eventually, David was persuaded by the onlookers to send in a cataphract unit against a legionary unit. He went straight through as the legionaries were disordered and had a casualty their effect was minimal.
We called it a night at this point and I conceded the battle to the Palmyrans though it was far from over.
Impetus, as a rule set, deserves further experimentation. There's going to be an Impetus Day at the club soon, but I can't do Saturdays.

Diary entry #003

Well, I haven't had the opportunity to prepare the pictures from the game at David's.
I will get round to it soon, though.

In the meantime I attended the club, Hartlepool Wargames Society (HWS) on Monday and supported my pal, Dave G., in his first Blood Bowl League game against the young Josh. Both are relatively new to the game and we had Dave using a standard Orc team, while Josh was using an Undead team.
After the pre-game preliminaries, Dave set up his team to receive then Josh set up his team to receive and then Dave kicked off. Yes, you guessed, Dave got it wrong. Josh duly collected the ball and moved the weight of his team towards the left hand side of the pitch. Dave countered by moving his team that way in his turn. So Josh moved to the other side loking for a weakness in the wall of brown flesh. Yes, brown! - my Orcs were painted before the GW green became universal (and ubiquitous) and I would still paint them brown if doing all over again.
Anyway, back to the game. Dave now made an attempt to get involved with little effect. Josh tried a push through the middle and actually started to create a hole, but didn't move to exploit it. Dave now lost the plot, took several haphazard attempts to damage the opposition and ended his turn without moving all his team. The undead used the oppportunity to widen the gap and move their runner through with some back cover for him. The Orcs failed in their attempt to catch the runner which promptly crossed the line in its next turn. The remainder of the half saw some skirmishing on the skrimmage line with a few KOs and the half ended 1-0 to the undead.
The second half went pretty much the same way as the first in reverse. The Orcs collected the ball and ran it slowly up the field to score late in the half. On the way, two Orcs were injured and one sent off the undead suffering only KOs.
So the game took the whole evening and ended 1-1 to the undead. Josh had to leave but Dave stayed and we did the post-match procedures. One injury resulted in lost strength, the other had no effect. The Orcs gained 70GP and bought a goblin.
I had found the evening rather frustrating but fun anyway. Both team owners showed a level of inexperience that doesn't bode well for the campaign. Josh goes on to meet my Dwarves in his next game while Dave is to play Ken's Skaven. Good luck lads, you're going to need it judging by this outing.

TTFN, Yogi

Diary Entry #002

Planning to go to David's in Darlington tomorrow.
The intention is to play a BGC game, I think, as it may be a DBM hitoric battle.
Either way, I intend to take the camera and post some pictures in an AAR.
Hoping that making this entry will spur me on to actually do it, after promising myself for years and years that I would, I should.
Till tomorrow, then...

Diary entry #001

Got to the club late on Monday due to family commitments (assessing a senior school for my son) and got into an ambitious game of Wings of War.
I say ambitious because, for the first time in my career, we used ground forces, take off and landing and missions. The game also included altitude, but this was the second time we have used that.
Needless to say, we all had fun. Ultimately, there was very little air combat compared to previous games mainly due, I think, to the extra dimensions that were added.
Handling altitude differences proved a little confusing for some, and diving out of trouble often brought you into range of the ground fire from the trenches.
My first sorty, in an Albatross, saw me take a few pot shots at the allied bomber as it took its bombing run and in avoiding the chasing fighter escorts, I dived through the ground fire, took some hits and so left the battlefield hurriedly seeking home turf.
The second sortie found me on the other side, flying the same bomber I had attempted to shoot down with a reconnaissance mission to do. I took a circuitous route to the target and was bounced by a tridecker which, despite jammed guns paralleled my course allowing my tail-gunner to get severasl shots at it and dismiss it to the scrapheap amongst the trenches below. Continuing undaunted, I flew over the target, photographed it and may my way to my home airfield. By now the skies were clearing as attrition took its toll on the chasing pack and despite over flying the runway the first time round, I was deemed to have made it home and recieved congratulations accordingly.
WoW has a very simple mechanism that provides a game eith plenty of atmosphere. Well worth a go for any gamers out there.
Cheers, Gelbstein (The Golden Baron)

Day 1: The experiment

Having always wondered how easy, or even necessary, it is to maintain a blog, I am giving it a go.

So, here we go.

This little blog will be used to chronicle my humble efforts at my hobbies of wargaming, military history, very amateur photography, film and TV documentary watching and programming using VB.
That's a good few pastimes, but I want to give myself enough scope to be able to blog at regular intervals with something relatively new to say each time.

Wish me luck.

Gelbstein (aka Yogi)