"Why Haven't You Started That Period?"

This evening was a wash hobby-wise. I had planned to work on some Gambusian campaign stuff. Instead, I took my daughter to swim practice, followed by dinner, followed by planting strawberry seedlings at 7:00 in the evening....in the rain. Long story, but I had to get that done and over with or I'd never hear the end of it.

So, by the time I checked over my daughter's homework, played a little with son (as much as one can play with a two-month-old), and answered a number of annoying work-related emails, it was too late for anything. Additionally, my mother-in-law is using the "Soldier Room," as my daughter calls it, as her bedroom, and she likes to retire early. Its 10:10 PM and I should be making up a lab exam for tomorrow. Instead I've been reading the various postings over TMP. There is an interesting post on the message board: "Why haven't you started that period?"  It got me thinking about projects past, present, and potential, and why I continued with some and not others.  Here is my list in roughly chronological order of various projects over the years with very brief status for each. I will try to make it as painless as possible:

1. Fanatasy/medieval 25mm. Began in the 70s and collected a lot until the mid 80s, or whenever Ral Partha went out of business. As much as I loved painting them, they were getting too expensive to build large armies, and I really didn't have the space to game with them. Had a few battles over the years. Now sit in storage in my parents' home.

2. Napoleonics 15mm/20mm. Started with 15s in the 70s; ended up with 1/72 Arfix. Never collected enough for a decent game. Interest died out by the time I graduated high school.


3. WWII Microarmor. Started in the 70s and I am still actively collecting and painting, however, I have not had a game in several years. I have a pretty good collection of American, British, and Germans. More recently, I started on the Soviets, but have not worked on them much.


4. WWII Naval 1/2400. Started in the 70s and was very active until the early 90s. Built most of my own ships! Had many epic sea battles in school parking lots on weekend with friends. Never really lost interest, but no one to game with. A number of new rules out there occasionally tempt me.


5. Fantasy/medieval/ancient 15mm. As I was burning out on 25mm, I turned to 15mm and never looked back. I am not as actively working on them lately as I used to, but I have probably about five different armies, maybe 10 if I use DBA or HOTT rules. Over the years, I've played a number of games. I don't expect to ever tire of them.

6. Modern microarmor. Twenty years ago, I swore I'd never be interested in modern (post-WWII) warfare. I take back my words. I started about five (?) years ago, and have grown more and more interested. I have no clue what got me interested, but here I am.


7. Modern air combat 1/300 & 1/600. Grew out of my interest in modern microarmor.

8. Modern naval 1/600 & 1/6000. Again, grew out of my interest in modern microarmor.

9. WWII 15mm.  I started collecting and painting them about eight years ago. I thought they'd be more visually appealing than microarmor. Yes, they are, but then I remembered why I gave up 25mm fantasy and medieval figures. The same reasoning seemed to hold with these.


10. Sci-fi ground combat 15mm. Very recent; maybe the last year or two. OK, why these when I gave up WWII 15mm? I blame all these 15mm companies and their great figures that they continue to put out. Besides, I don't feel like have to put large numbers of troops on the field to have a sci-fi game.


11. Sci-fi/post-apocalyptic skirmish 28mm. I keep planning to have this multi-player game during my holiday visits back to the Motherland (Chicago). I keep forgetting to bring the figures with me, but I keep painting up new figures for the occasion when I remember to bring them.

Projects I have yet to start or never started:

1. Starship combat. In college, when not playing D&D, we would play various boardgames. There were a number of starship combat games that we liked to play. I am also a sucker for epic space battles, both on the silver screen and in science fiction novels. I think about it a lot lately, especially in conjunction with my 15mm sci-fi.

2. American Civil War/American War of Independence.  I've always enjoyed reading up on the history of these two comflicts. When I was into boardgames, two of my favorites were Avalon Hill's Gettysburg, and 1776. I think what's holding me back is just the idea of starting another project, both in terms of time and money. I would definitely want to play these at the regimental or brigade level. Recently, I bought some Civil War ironclad naval rules. I'm tempted to build my own ships, like I did for WWII. I reason that they'll be a lot more simple and faster to build than WWII ships.


H-m-m. I can't think of anything else.  I am sure that many of you out there are like me: moving from one period to another. I'd be interested in hearing how far your interests meander and where you've taken your meanderings.

Vintage Fellowship of the Ring

When I started miniature gaming in 1975, I was a huge fan of the Lord of the Rings. Between middle school and high school, I probably read that and The Hobbit at least 10 times.  So, the first figures that I bought were fantasy, focusing on the Lord of the Rings.  These are one of the very first figure sets that I bought:

Its been a LONG time since I bought these, so my recollection as to who made them is rather poor. I want to say these are Hinchliffe figures. They may be Heritage, but I tend to doubt it, and I am pretty sure they are not Minifigs. 

Its pretty obvious who is who when it comes to the various characters, except for the Hobbits. Sam is pretty obvious because he is carrying a lot of baggage. The question is which is Frodo and which is either Merry or Pippin. I decided the Hobbit carrying the staff is Frodo and the one carrying the sword is Merry. You can argue that the Hobbit with the brandished sword is Frodo holding the short sword Sting. However, Merry had a big dagger that he found during their encounter with the Barrow-wights and used it later to stab the Lord of the Nazgul at the Battle of Pelennor Fields. I think the Hobbit with the walking staff is Frodo. For much of the trilogy, Frodo and Sam are trudging along, trying to make it to Mordor, so it would make sense for him to have a walking staff. His left hand rests on the pommel of a short sword anyway, which can be considered Sting.

The figures are pretty crude in terms of sculpting, but that's not unusual for miniatures from the 70s. My paint job didn't do anything for them either. Back in the day, I did almost no shading or highlighting. Outlining the fingers in black was the extent of things. Note my fancy base, too! Back in those days, my bases consisted of rectangles cut from masonite board painted green.

Often, I have thought about repainting them, but they are a reminder of my very early work.

The Soldier Takes a Wife

My daughter's second sculpt.  She said she didn't want the soldier she made for me for my birthday to be lonely.

As you can see, she's a big lady:

But love knows no differences:

"Garsh, if you ain't the purdiest thang I've never seen!"

Solo Air Battle Using Pz8 Rules

I've had little time for much of anything lately related to gaming. Last Wednesday, I did participate in a AD&D game. The characters were pre-made, which really sped things up. Also, several of the participants were new at roleplaying games. It was a great game. The DM really set us up for several possible adventures, However, who knows when we will be able to play again.

Part of my quest for solo-ness for my Gambusia campaign, I've been looking at various rules. In a previous post, I considered various land warfare rules. Recently, I've been turning to naval and air combat rules. I decided to check out the Panzer 8 family of rules. They cover everything from late 19th century to sci-fi. They are fairly simple and free. There are two rules for air combat. One is from 1935 to about 1965 and the other is from 1965 to 1975. Both rules are pretty similar in terms of mechanics except the later one includes missiles. I thought I'd try out the '35-'65 one just to get a feel for it plus I didn't have to concern myself with missiles.

A Scenario
I made up a scenario depicting the early stages of the First Chalupastani War that took place in the mid-1970s. The Communist North, backed by lots of not-quite-state-of-the-art Soviet weaponry, launched a massive invasion of the unprepared South, whose weapons were largely WW2 and early 1960s vintage. Early in the war, the North had yet to establish air superiority.  In the scenario, three members of the 4th fighter squadron of Southern Chalupastan are returning from a ground attack mission supporting retreating ground troops. They are flying vintage WW2 Corsair fighters.

They are jumped by three members of the 3rd squadron of the 2nd Air Group flying MIG-15s. Up to the war, Northern Chalupistan followed a camouflage pattern similar to that of WW2 Japanese aircraft:

Game Pieces
I decided to test the game using counters rather than miniatures. Like a lot of air combat games you need a hex board to play the Pz8 rules. The first thing I did was print up four sheets of hex paper using the Incompetec online hex generator. You tell it what you want, it spits out a pdf file for you. I chose 1" hexes. I wanted them large enough to put decent-sized counters on, but small enough to have lots of hexes for the planes to move around on. I taped together the four sheets of paper and voila, I had my playing surface.

Onto the counters. I made 1" counters from cardstock and used Adobe Illustrator. Probably any drawing program would work fine, but I prefer vector-base programs for things like this. For each plane, I put in all that stats needed.

When a plane is damaged in Pz8, it looses speed and its maximum altitude. So each plane counter has a front and back to represent the undamaged and damaged state:

I also made smaller counters representing a plane's current altitude:

The Games
I managed to squeeze in two games in between late-night diaper changings.  The first one was an one-on-one duel. It lasted all of four turns, three of which was moving the two planes close enough for the kill. Not too surprisingly, the MIG-15 shot the Corsair down. From this first game, I made a slight change in the rules where changing to a lower altitude will add one hex to the aircraft's speed. This would give a slightly increased chance for a plane to get away, or conversely to swoop in on a target.

I played out the scenario in the second game. Three Corsairs against three MIGs.  To determine which planes got activated, the Ace, Two, and Three of Hearts represented each of the three Northern MIGs; the Ace, Two, and Three of Clubs represented each of the three Southern Corsairs. No, the Ace did not mean it was an ace pilot, but there is are bonuses in the rules for aces. I mixed up the cards and turned them over one at a time. The card that turned up was the plane that got to go.  When all cards were used up, I reshuffled the deck and started over again. To try to be as impartial as I could, I tried to evaluate what maneuver or movement would be the most beneficial during each plane's turn. Not to go into details of the rules, but unlike Airwar: C21, there are only a few specialized maneuvers in addition to turning.

At start, I had the planes on each side move as one unit and could not break formation for either the first three turns, or within one and a half speed hexes away from their opponent, whichever came first. The Corsairs began at the bottom middle side, the North (yeah know, bottom should be South), of the hex sheet. I rolled for the MIGs to determine where they would start.  1 or 2, left side; 3 or 4, bottom side; 5 or 6, right side. They rolled the left side. I also decided that they were at their maximum altitude, 5, whereas the Corsairs were at altitude 3.

The MIGs quickly closed in. Being faster, they managed to get behind the Corsairs and by the fourth turn, one Corsair was shot down. However, several subsequent turns, the MIGs had terrible die rolls and either missed the remaining Corsairs, or failed to do any damage to them.  The Corsairs took advantage of that as well as the luck of the card draw to reverse the roles. Using the move forward one hex, climb one altitude level, change direction 180° maneuver, one Corsair got close behind a MIG and with really good die rolls shot it down. Another Corsair went nose-to-nose with a MIG, which resulted in mutual damage. During what was probably the key turn, The damaged MIG found itself the target of the two remaining Corsairs with no way to fire back. It went down in flames. I rolled an impromptu "discretion is the better part of valor" die (1-3 he fights on, 4-6 he leaves). The MIG pilot decided not to push his luck and drove off to exit the game. The Corsairs had no desire to pursue and they limped back home.

Evaluation of the Rules
The author of the rules state that they are not meant to be highly detailed, but rather rules for a quick game or to be used as part of a campaign. It was enjoyable. The games went pretty fast, and there were some tense moments. About the only issue was the method of activation, which seemed to make or break it for the poor MIGs several times in the game. I am not sure how to improve on this. I have no qualms with the method of resolving combat. The MIGs just kept getting a lot of bad die rolls. Also, it pays to really get in close to your target as it ups the odds of scoring a hit. This helped the Corsairs score hits on the MIGs several times. For another test drive, I plan to use the 1965 to 1975 rules to see how missiles are used. As I stated earlier, the '65 to '75 rules pretty much the same, but with the addition of missiles.

This Is a Test

Funny things are going on with my router.

Stressful Weeks

The last several weeks have been a roller coaster ride for me. On February 8th, my son was born. Last Tuesday, my father passed away after a two-year struggle with bone marrow cancer. He was 84 years old. I have to say, I was blessed with 51 years of a wonderful father. I can only hope that I am as good a father to my son and daughter, he was to my sister and me.

My Daughter's First Mini Sculpt

My daughter made this figure for a Valentine's Day gift. She was very proud of it and so am I. From the base to the top of the head, it does measure 15mm. No, that's not a beret on his head cocked at a stylish angle. That is supposed to be his hair. If I play my cards right, I'll have a whole army soon!