A New Platform

In April I started writing for No Dice No Glory, a historical wargaming blog. I’m not sure what this will mean for this blog. Most likely it will lie fallow for a season unless there is something that I want to write that doesn’t fit with the NDNG theme.

 Here are links to the posts that I have published there to date: 

• Multiplayer FOW - reflections on our D Day game from a few years ago 
• Thoughts on the FOW Missions Pack update from April 2021 
• A preview of the Mid War Finnish booklet for FOW.  
• A review of the Panzerschreck tournament that was held in July 2021. 
• Modelling the Priest Kangaroo for FOW

I want to thank the people who have visited this site. I just checked the site statistics and my posts have had over 10,000 views since I started posting here in 2015. Many of those visits would have been bots, but hopefully some of those visits were by real people who have got some value out of what I have written.

Seven Days to the River Rhine

In a spur of the moment decision during our lockdown last year, I purchased the PDF version of 'Seven Days to the River Rhine', a WW3 ruleset by Great Escape Games, and this week I played my first game of it with local blogger Pelarel.

The game is designed for 15mm and to suit Team Yankee basing. It's a smaller game than TY: set at reinforced platoon level, with activation by team.

The rules are brief at about 30 pages. The Facebook group has a FAQ/errata sheet, which is essential because there are a couple of places where the writing is a bit loose - particularly with shooting. There are embedded QR codes that link to tutorial videos on Youtube, which I think is an excellent touch.

Points are provided for a wide range of teams and nations, but apart from that there is no structure to support list building. Unit stats are relatively homogeneous across all of the nations, e.g. all infantry teams have the same stat line except some nations have slightly better morale.

A few scenarios outlines are provided, but these leave a lot to the player. Deployment zones and the process for placing objectives need to be agreed with your opponent.

The best aspect is the initiative rules. Each turn, both players get one command token per team (excluding APCs/IFVs), plus an additional two tokens for the battlegroup commander. The players dice off to see who starts with the initiative, then spend these tokens to activate teams, or to react to their opponent's actions. The initiative can pass from player to player during the turn, a process which continues until all the tokens are spent, at which point the turn ends. You can activate a team more than once, but each activation makes the next one harder to achieve. The chance of activating is also affected by the accumulation of morale markers, generated when the unit takes fire. 

We played 500pts on a 6x4 table, and completed the game in about 2.5 hours. This gave me six infantry teams, six BMP-1s, three T-64s, and two BRDMs. Pel had two Chieftains, two Swingfires, two Scimitars, three infantry teams in FV432s, a Milan team, a Marksman, and a Lynx. This was a good amount of equipment for the table size. Having more variety in his list seemed to work out well for him, and next time I’ll definitely run fewer infantry and a wider range of units.

My thoughts from the game are:

• The initiative rules create a fantastic ebb and flow across the turn.
• Tanks die really easily.
• Infantry on the other hand are hard to kill. They can only be removed through the accumulation of morale markers, which takes either a long time or a significant concentration of fire.
• You never really have enough command tokens to do everything that you want, particularly when you start to lose teams. You need to think really carefully about what you want to do in the turn and concentrate your command tokens on doing that, rather than spending them reacting to your opponent.
• It gets really hard to do things mid game, as the accumulation of morale markers makes activation harder. Things just don't do what you want them to, which I think is a great mechanic.

I really like it. I don't think the game would replace TY as my WW3 game of choice, but it is a very different experience and an enjoyable change.

2020 Retrospective

It's hard to do a hobby retrospective for 2020 without mentioning the pandemic. In New Zealand we were blessed that our remoteness gave the government time to put together a heavy-handed but effective response, combined with a whole lot of luck, which eliminated community transmission of the virus and allowed us to have a normal Christmas.

I managed to keep up with monthly posts until June, after which I totally overwhelmed with work and lacked the motivation and energy to do anything. In that time I did however manage a total of 13 posts, which was a significantly better effort than the year before.

The year was bookended by 100pt TY at ValleyCon and 60pt FOW-MW at Remember December. I ran T-64s at ValleyCon, placing fourth, and Afrika Korps panzers at Remember December, also placing fourth.

I didn't write about Remember December, nor take any photos, but as usual it was a great day. I ran a Panzer III company:

Panzer III Tank Company - Afrika Korps

Company HQ - 2 x Panzer III (short 5cm)

Panzer III Tank Platoon - 3 x Panzer III (short 5cm), 1 x Panzer III (long 5cm)

Panzer IV Tank Platoon - 2 x Panzer IV (short 7.5cm), 1 x Panzer IV (long 7.5cm)

Panzer II Light Tank Platoon - 3 x Panzer II

Total Cost: 60 pts

I thought the list would be terrible, but it was felt pretty good. I lost my first game against a US Rifle Company -  I made the error of choosing Attack rather than Manoeuvre, which forced me into a No Retreat, losing because I didn't know that the newest version of the mission requires you to remain within 8" of an objective to keep the game going beyond Turn 6. I won the next two, against US Lees/Stuarts in Free For All (by the skin of my teeth and some very lucky Unit Last Stand tests), and a Panzer IV company in Encounter (confirming that the short 7.5cm is terribly over-costed).

I had a good spurt of painting FOW in the middle of the year, finishing most of the remaining models I had left for my Mediterranean British - two more platoons of armoured cars and platoons of Mk VIBs, Carriers, Vickers MGs, and 4.2" mortars. I didn't touch my TY Syrians.

I had three goals for 2020 relating to 28mm - painting and playing. I painted two squads of Perry Fallschirmjager, but did not play any games with them, nor did I do any work on the 28mm Landsknechts.

My most successful goal was to paint a Black Seas fleet box, which I changed during the year to be painting the Royal Navy ships required to play the Smugglers' Run campaign. I fell slightly short, needing just two more cutters to complete this fleet. With Warlord Games not having released a cutter model at the time (one is now available), I ordered some from Hagen Miniatures in June. Covid got in the way, with Deutsche Post spending much of the year not shipping to New Zealand, and I only received them in December.

I have decided to set fewer goals for 2021.

1. Field a T-80 company for Team Yankee. I have picked up the Soviet halves of a couple of the new TY starter sets, which are great value for the number of sprues that they contain, so need to paint them up and get them on the table.

2. Play a 1500pt game of 40K. I painted up about 400pts of Adeptus Mechanicus this year, so there's a bit of work needing to be done first.

3. Play through the Smugglers' Run campaign for Black Seas.

4. Administer a FOW ladder tournament for the club.

So happy new year, and thanks for reading the blog. Stay safe, and best wishes for 2021.