Family Saga gangup!

The happy Viking about to unleash hell upon his foes!

Last night the Man Cave boys threw down to play some Father and Son 2v2 SAGA action at the games club!

In my first game for 2 or so years, I played Anglo-Danes while my ally Reilly Paulsson commanded a Viking horde in his second game ever.  Together we took on two massed Welsh warbands in the Clash of the Warlords scenario.

One of my lone surviving Hearthguard taunts the enemy levy after his unit wiped out a unit of those pesky Welsh ponies

Welsh can be really hard to get to grips with - so I took 3 Hearthguard (1 with Dane Axes) and 2 Units of Warriors (thanks for the loan Aled).  Reilly Paulsson took 2 Hearthguard (1 as Berzerkers), 2 Warriors and a unit of Levy to give him some long range missile fire, all kindly loaned by the Dux.

 2 v 2 Action on the cigar battlefield mat

We advanced directly against our foes.  I started grinding the welsh in front of me, making maximum advantage of the Ango-Danes' ability to inflict fatigue on the enemy and then take advantage of it.  Reilly sagely kept his distance from the trees in which his Welsh opponent was hiding, preventing them from ambushing him with their javelin attacks.

Reilly's boar snout formation

Taking advantage of the church which divided the field, Reilly slid his army laterally so we could focus on the Welsh in front of me.   He took some casualties as his opponent pressed his left flank but I managed to clear a path into which he unleashed his intact Berzerker unit onto the enemy Warlord in front on me.

The tension mounting...

...as the Welsh begin to crumble as the numbers against them start to tell

Focusing his SAGA dice into a range of death dealing melee effects, Reilly Paulsson unleashed a massive 21 attack dice (re-rolling misses) to annihilate the enemy .  And with that the Man Cave boys claimed Victory on the field of battle - Odin be praised!

My hearth guard clear the way for Reilly to fight the decisive engagement

Reilly's Bezerkers swarm onto the enemy Warlord and dispatch him to Valhalla!

A fun and enjoyable game - I had forgotten how much I enjoy SAGA.  And the lad was most interested when he heard of the impending Arthurian expansion - I think I'll be painting up at least two armies for that now - Sub Roman Brits for the lad, perhaps Picts for me

And so to the spoils of Victory - my Freyja delivered this Beer Advent calendar to celebrate the impending Christian festival. Excellent!

New Terrain

The last couple of weeks I have been getting focused for the upcoming Painting Challenge.  I usually waste a fair bit of my hobby time during the challenge prepping figures.  This time I have a better plan so I am trying to get my figs cleaned up, on bases and undercoated early. However, that does get rather tiresome, so I decided to also progress some terrain pieces (noting that terrain items are not part of the painting challenge anyway).

First up is the Warlord Ruined Farmhouse set, which I did as two different buildings for flexibility.  Its a really nice plastic model with really lovely detail including the remnants of a second floor.  I also added a few extra beams to the roof along the way.

I also decided to ditch the chimney section - its very nice on the outward side but it has been sculpted hollow so that no matter where you place it you can see inside it from the holes in the wall. Rather frustrating really.

The second, smaller building was originally intended to be brighter with coloured, plastered walls. Unfortunately that turned out rather horribly.  So instead I scrubbed the majority of that off, back to the black undercoat but was careful to leave some still there when I bust up the grey dry brushing effect and added some smoke effects.  I like the realistic splashes of colour it leaves, which are vivid on the table, and which suggest the houses's former condition.

I also completed the ruined walls and debris set that I picked up at MOAB last month - painted in a month, a new record!

I went with a black undercoat, followed by far too many layers of drybrushing in ever lighter colours of grey.  That, inevitably, looked way too uniform and boring.  So I dug out my weathering chalks to add some splashed of colour.  That added a nice, dusty look but the terrain lost a lot of depth.  I added a dark ink for shadows, which washed the chalk away - ugh.  We eventually got somewhere near where we wanted to be but it was a love/hate relationship with them.

After fighting for days in the ruins of Arnhem, this para realises he might need some more clever hat camouflage 

Sadly, this terrain project saw a significant loss, forcing a morale check: I dropped and broke my paint water jar of 20 years.  In fact, it was one of my daughter's first solid food jars.  With all that history and colour splodges from old projects, it was like loosing an old friend :-(

Luckily, it has been the Oktoberfest season.  This gave me a +1 sauerkraut re-roll, which I passed easily to push on!

Comrades of Normandie

 Any chance to catch up with my mate Comrade James is a good one.  And this time we checked out a gaming venue new to us in Canberra: Three D6.  Better still, is now has the "Loaded Dice" annex with full bar and snacks, and booths to play in.  And good craft beer on tap too.

A winning combination - if you are in Canberra go check it out.

http://www.canberratimes.com.au/act-news/the-loaded-dice-a-new-pub-for-gamers-and-geeks-opens-in-tuggeranong-20160317-gnl7ia.html

They even had German Ale on tap for Oktoberfest - nice!

And so Comrade James introduced me to Heores of Normandie, which I had heard about but not seen or played before.  Really beautiful components, nice thick card stock and well sized.  While the cartoonish nature of the characters is not my normal thing, they did grow on me.


A couple of perspectives from our game:

• Think of it like good cinema with Hollywood action and a climatic ending 
• Adding your own Commando Comic style quotes along the way adds a lot to the theme ("Mein Gott", "Take that Fritz" etc)
• That aside, its quite a deep game with many many decision points and card resource management on top.
• Unlike most games, the majority of your units wont be firing their weapons very often.  Some wont fire a round for the whole game.  This is probably far more realistic than units burning though all their ammo in a half dozen turns or less.
• I liked the balanced, combined arms ORBAT approach
• It feels like a miniatures game
• Its what I wanted ASL to be, but its also fun (which ASL is generally not, IMHO) with a little bit of crazy added.  This game inspires you to engage an enemy Sniper with a Bazooka team and then send in a hero to bayonet whats left.  Well it did to me anyway (and whats more it worked!)

How we laughed when James' Handgranaten attack scattered onto another of his infantry squads!

You know you've had fun when you get home and immediately start internet shopping for the game you just played, and looking at the detailed review of its expansions!

..and how much more we laughed when that squad then fumbled their own handgranaten attack onto their own location!

In summary: Good buddy + fun new game + beer = Strategic Victory!

Moongrunt

Earlier this year GZG released a new range of hard suited near future models for 15mm Combat on the Moon called "MoonGrunt".  Somehow I missed them but now I'm aware of them they have really captured my imagination - they are very cool!

USMC troops from Ralph's great Putting the Colour into Space Blog

If you ever wanted to do some sort of lunar combat and near future fighting on Mars, these are the business.  The range currently has USMC and PLA-SC (People's Liberation Army Space Force) infantry (riflemen, heavy lasers and rocket launchers)

[June 2018 EDIT] - The first (?) wave of British Lunar Force models has now been released also

Ralph's wonderful PLA-SC forces from his Putting the Colour into Space blog 

And good news - Buggies and Rovers have now joined the range too!

https://shop.groundzerogames.co.uk/moongrunt.html

Detail of the recently released Lunar Rovers, from the GZG website here

I’m thinking some Infantry focused low intensity combat with a squad or two per side could be a LOT of fun with minimal investment.  And if you've ever read books like Stark's War which depicts a lunar war (with WW1 trench raid parallels) this is you chance to reenact those fights.

Combat in a different hostile environment might be a lot of fun too - separatist colonists perhaps?

Yes, I think you might see some of these figs in my Painting Challenge efforts this year.
Because I needed another project...