Beavering Away

My local club (Miniature Wargaming Society in Sacramento, CA) has decided to put together another big game for next year's conventions. Last year, one of our members put on a massive pirate game with 24 players, loads of boats & over 2000 figures. You can see that game at Pirates of the Carob Bean Sea.

The next game is tenatively called Rumble in the Jungle & will be a simplied version of the DUST Warfare rules for Weird World War 2 games.

I have been helping out by building some of the trees for the game. They are 3 sets of the the GW trees. Ironically, I've been looking to pick the GW trees up cheaply for a while, & then GM for the club game hands me 3 boxes of the trees to build that he got for $5 each.

I've finished painting all the separate parts of the trees, but still need to assemble them.

Here are the bases that the trees fit into:

Here are the leaves that will be glued on the the trees:

Here are the trees themselves:

And finally, here are the trees & bases together:

I think they've come out pretty well. My only disappointments are that I didn't fill where the separate model pieces join together, & that the grass I added doesn't show up too well. I may pull the grass of & replace it with small tufts of lichen since I think they'd be more noticable & probably more durable.

Conquest Sacramento 2012

I attended the Conquest Sacramento convention last weekend & had a great time. I got there too late on Friday to play in the 15mm Command & Colors Napoleonic game that I’d wanted to, but I did get some great deals on cows & 6mm ECW (we like to call them WeeCW) at the Friday night flea market.

I was able to play in a medieval Jousting game by Two Hour Wargames. It was simple & quick & I could easily see how you could play a whole tournament with many different jousts in 1 game session since each joust of 3 passes only took about 15 minutes.
The GM did run the game again on Saturday as a full 16 player double-elimination tournament. The board looked beautiful with the 90mm knights, tents and royal spectators.
But in actuality, the game was all dice rolling & we never touched the figures.

Saturday I started off playing Peter Pig’s WW2 skirmish rules Poor Bloody Infantry. It was a light, fun & quick set. We used the Quick Start rules available for free online, but instead of 15mm figures being run on a square grid as the game was designed, we used 28mm figures on a hex grid.

The game was Japanese vs Australians trying to take & hold a bridge. We played this 4-5 times & the system was easy to pick up. Since the only distinction between the forces were the types of weapons they had (as opposed to any national or unit type characteristics), the last few games got very same-y. But I’m sure changing the terrain & forces would have made the subsequent games more interesting.


Next I played Giant Monster Rampage (GMR) by Radioactive Press. It’s a set of rules for fighting Godzilla-like kaiju games. The GM of this game use monsters from the classic Ultraman TV series. I’ve run a different kaiju game in the past, Monster Island by Firefly Games . GMR seemed to have a bit more detail than Monster Island, like the military vehicles protecting the city effecting the monsters, & a having the atomic points that fuel your monster’s powers be variable. But I also don’t have all the Monster Island expansion books, & I think Monster Island does cover military vehicles in one of those books.

Part of determining the winner of the game was based on how many buildings you could destroy. & the GM had the great idea of making the building out of Duplo-like blocks, so when you caused a point of building damage, you just took one of the blocks off the building & kept it until the end of the game to count up. This was a very fun game because the GM & players got into the spirit of the game, & definite didn’t take it seriously. I ran Antler, a giant mutant earwig. Here is my monster saying hello to Uoo, a giant smog monster.

My greatest con moment was when I was able to use my telekinesis to pick up Uoo & throw him into the another monster, causing damage to both of them & the building they were standing next to. & then I used my super-burrow skill to dig all the way under the city & come up in a spot that neither of them could attack me. So they just ended up attacking each other while I was left alone to rack up destroyed building points.


Finally, I played a few games of Formula De, a Formula One racing game. This was very nostalgic for me since I played this a lot in high school during lunches. Actually, my 2 opponents in the Ultraman game also played Formula De so it was a good time.

Throughout the day, my local club, Miniature Wargames of Sacramento, ran a massive 15mm Pirate game. 2 6'x24' tables, over 2000 figures & 20 ships, & 5 GMs. You can find a report on that at Pirates of the Carob Bean Sea. Here is one of the defensive works I built for the project.


Unfortunately, I had leave early on Saturday because my wife was getting sick, so I missed the All Things Zombie game that sounded like it was a wildly fun time.

Sunday I’d ran the skirmish games Song of Blades & Heroes (fantasy) & Song of Drums & Shakos (Napoleonic ) by Ganesha Games http://ganeshagames.net/. See my post here on how that went.

Overall, I was very impressed with the convention. In prior years, the convention seemed to be waning somewhat. Last year's attendance seemed to be down & they actually no longer had a vendors room. But this year, the number of gamers on Friday night seemed to be about the same number as Saturday’s numbers last year. & Saturday this year was packed. & they had an another overflow room because the Pirate game was so big. There were 4 vendors, one of which was demoing new generic skirmish wargame rules. & they had expanded hours on the convention food stand with somewhat reasonable prices & a few more healthy options. So I was glad to see the convnetion was doing well & will be looking forward to it next year.

Birthday Weekend Part 2

After Friday night's WWW2 game, I set out to help with the local Sacramento club's playtest of their massive 15mm pirate game the club will be running at 2 upcoming local conventions: Conquest Sacramento, March 16-18 & Pacificon Game Expo in Santa Clara Labor Day weekend.

One of our more insane members has decided to organize a game on 2 24'x6' boards, complete with 4 national towns (Dutch, French, British & Spanish), a pirate island, 2 native island, a volcano, & lots of minor islands & lagoons to expore.

The organizer has his own blog showing construction & progress of the game called the Carob Bean Sea.

Here is a picture looking out from my Dutch town with my main 30 gun frigate in the foreview. Every national town has 3 ships (frigate, merchant & privateer) with 50 crew each. Plus in the town are 2 50 figure forces for the colonial Govenor & the military Commander. So each national town has about 250 15mm figures. With there being 4 towns, that's 1000 figures just for the different nations.


Here is 1 full 24'x6' board. You can see the 2nd board in the background to the right. The boats are able to move between the 2 boards, but the boards are separated so players can walk between them.


Here are a number of ships ready to sail. In addition to the 3 ships each nation has, the Pirates have 4 ships, for a total of 16 ships on the board. Plus the natives have lots of canoes & the 2 land forces in the national towns each have their own smaller boats.


Here's one of the towns with its land forces deployed. I have built 6 sets of the defensive works & stakes seen in the top left corner of the picture as my meager contribution to the club effort.


& another town.


Some ships mixing it up off the coast of one of the native islands (you can see their huts in the top right corner).


This is the sacraficing natives' island, as opposed to the cannibal natives' island that you will see in a moment.


Here is the view of the cannibal natives's island after I bombarded the shrine to their pagan god. One of my objectives was to "chastise" the sacraficing natives. Unfortnately, I got confused & bombarded the wrong native island. While my crew was focusing on the bombardment, native canoes paddled up to my ship & climbed over the railing. They surprised the on-board Marines & killed 4 stands of them before disappearing back into the sea.


The game will support 32 players, with each player having their own objectives. My objectives were to: 1) Trade with the Spanish, 2) Raid the French, 3) Chastise the sacraficing natives & 4) Explore & find treasure. But my Dutch force of 3 ships & 2 land forces would be split up between 5 separate players in the big game, so those objectives would be split up too. The natives even had their own objectives of crossing the ocean to a lagoon to go pearl diving.

The playtest went well, if very chaotic. The rules were homebrew & this was their first outing. The games was as much to teach the GMs the rules as it was to try to has out any issues.