Plans for 2024: Marvel Crisis Protocol, SAGA, Blood Red Skies etc.

 Having revived the blog earlier this month to give an AAR for my MCP game with Stan I decided I should probably make an effort to post regularly -- not just for the tiny number of people who read this but because I find that writing these does help me focus (a little bit -- I am still thinking about doing everything and actually doing close to nothing).

Marvel Crisis Protocol was the big surprise for me last year and into this year. Both Stan and Mike were very excited by this and I said I was happy to play but I would be unlikely to buy anything. It turns out it was a really fun game to play (and I notice that I often want to think more about historical games but when it comes to decide what I want to play that games like MCP, Fallout and Star Wars legion are more likely to be on the top of my list). I ended up buying one box just to see what the figures are like (far too many pieces to be honest, but for the most part they go together well) and then after another few games decided to increase that faction (the Winter Guardians who were, purely by luck, one of the smallest factions in the game). Once they were painted (only 4 figures) the faction list increased so I ended up buying the Starter Box. I have all the terrain from the box glued together and half the figures assembled (one of the two sprues -- both Black Widow and the Winter Soldier, the two winter Guardians were on the same sprue). I don't see myself buying any more figures in the coming year but I am considering some of the terrain packs. I do plan to paint everything that I have.

 

At Fall In I picked up some plastic Victrix Numidians to make a SAGA:  Age of Hannibal  Numidian army (I had hoped to end up with an Indian army for Age of Alexander but couldn't find anything) I started painting it late last year before I got caught up in the MCP frenzy. I still have half the cavalry and all the infantry to paint up but I think I should be able to get that done pretty quickly once I get to it since I had the colours figured out painting the cavalry and elephants. I also have a Hun army that I should paint but it isn't really on the horizon.

Also at Fall In, I played in a giant carrier battle game -- which I think deserves its own blog post so I won't go into too much detail here -- and that has inspired me to plan out 2 different games. The first is a carrier clash based on a campaign system in the Blood Red Skies supplement, Wing Commander and the second a game for Cangames based on American Torpedo planes attacking a Japanese carrier during the battle of Midway. I have bought most of the planes I need for these games but I need to start painting and play enough to be comfortable before Cangames. I also need to get a few ships (more for the campaign game but that is further in the future) but I am planning to get some 1/1200 prepainted ones. I also have a some Beaufighters and  Boulton Paul Defiants that are primed from when I was playing Battle of Britain games and hopefully they can get done as well.

Games which are further down my list are Fallout -- there is a new more tactical version of the game coming out which could be interesting (it uses the same figures so it should be east to try it) but they seem to be planning to continue supporting the current more narrative rules as well (which I prefer). I have quite a few figures to paint for this and I would like to do some terrain for this a well. I had an idea that I should paint an ADLG army that I could use at the Fall In tournament and bring to the OMG since I would like to get in the habit of going there again but I really don't know if I want to paint a bunch of 15mm figures so I don't know if that will happen.

The re-release of the Walking Dead is interesting, I don't think I need (or want) to buy anything I don't already have but it will be good to see the new rules. Before they let the game retire, there was a more tactical ruleset but that didn't seem to be that popular (I didn't really like it). I hope to play a few games once this comes out.

I would like to play some more Black Seas and/or Armada as well as Team Yankee (maybe someday I will actually paint my West Germans) and it would be nice to find some rules for 15mm WWII that I would want to play -- I have grown tired of Flames of War through the latest revisions and I think I would find most of the games I played long ago to be too complicated