Plans for 2019

I didn't do a planning post last year and managed to avoid going terribly off course so maybe I am courting disaster by doing one this year but since one of my goals is to use the blog to keep focused I will go ahead anyway.

My basic goals for the year are to play more and buy less. I would also like to paint more but I have realized I need to be in the right state of mind to do that so I am not going to push that but I will make sure I have my painting setup ready to go when the mood strikes!

These are the games that will be in my mind (and hopefully on the table this year)

SAGA

This was my most played game last year and with the appearance of  the Book of Battles looks likely to be my most played this year. I have created the terrain needed for the Book of Battles (as discussed here ) so my next goal is to paint some baggage and livestock that is required for some of the scenarios

I should finish my Spanish Warriors

But I seem to have a bit of a block with them so I might skip ahead and paint the foot troops for the Franks which I think will give me enough of a force to actually play with them (though not enough to use Roland which is my long term Frankish goal).

Next up will be the Black Hoods mercenary unit and beyond that it gits a bit hazy but I want to get some more units painted for my Islamic forces

The Age of Magic will be coming out this year and I will hopefully finally paint the Revenants and I am tempted to paint some Mantic Games Naiad to use alongside some Vikings

The Walking Dead: All out War
Now that the Motel is finished, my terrain goals for this are to finish the Diner and the office building (I also have a swimming pool and playground to go with the Motel that should get done this year)

In terms of painting, I want to get through the figure from the Made to Suffer expansion and once I get those done (at least the survivors, I feel that I have more zombies than I would need now) I will get the Fear the Hunters expansion -- I have some interest in the Campaign rules, but realistically I know that I won't play enough to actually use them.

I have two side projects that I would like to at least do something with this year -The first is to do Cops vs Narcos using the Walking Dead rules

And the second is to use the town terrain to run Gaslands with 28mmish cars -- The Sunday Drivers expansion for the old Steve Jackson Games Car Wars was always a favourite.

Cruel Seas
I have high hopes for this game but I am holding off buying more until we have played at least one game. If it does play well I am seriously considering running a larger game at CanGames with either an attack on the Monitor HMS Abercrombie at D-DAY or and attack on some Liberty Ships in the English Channel

Team Yankee

I should get the airbrush out and finish of my Soviets but I am not sure if that will happen. I do hope to play some more games of this -- it has always been a fun game in spite of itself.

I am tempted by the Czech Dana Self-propelled artillery but there is too much unpainted to add more to the pile.

Flames of War

The OMG club is running a Stalingrad campaign this year and I will play in that but I have no desire to paint anything (I do have some Soviet SMG troops that are primed that I feel I should paint but I don't think they will actually get done)

Hail Caesar

At the moment I have no strong desire to run this at Cangames and my painting passion is more geared towards SAGA so I think there will not be much movement on this front this year

Boardgames

I am looking forward to another year of Boardgames with the Thursday night group 

Bagotrix Strikes Back

Back in May at Cangames I ran another of my Roman - British Hail Caesar games.

In the game last year, recounted here, the Romans managed to capture a defensive dyke from the British and the over the winter have built a watchtower and are preparing to reinforce it in order to use it as a base to attack further into the British lands. At the same time, the British warlord, Bagotrix, has gathered some of his fellow kings for an attempt to drive the Romans back over the dyke.

The Roman forces consisted of the garrison at the watchtower -- Legion troops divided into line infantry, slingers, mano-balistae, and sentries as well as 2 scorpio and auxilia archer -- and the reinforcements -- a cavalry force with 3 units of medium cavalry and 2 skirmish units of Numidian light horse and an infantry force of legion and auxilia.

The British have 2 forces consisting of Warbands and skirmishers and one force with cavalry, a chariot unit, medium infantry and wardogs.

The Roman reinforcements lead by the Numidians approach the dyke.

The garrison of the watchtower prepare themselves for the British attack.

The Britsh line up for the attack.

The opening battle lines.

The British move up towards the tower with one force heading over the dyke to try and slow down the Roman reinforcements.

The Roman cavalry moves up but the Infantry is being indecisive and only moving up very slowly.

Meanwhile the British Cavalry seems very frightened of the British slingers and rides past them rather than over them!

The warbands, supported by the medium infantry move up to Roman lines.

The British cavalry take some hits riding by and the medium infantry takes care of the pesky slingers.

The noose tightens around the watch tower.

The two cavalry forces move towards each other.

 The British medium infantry press to the front door of the gate as the Legion pushes the warband back.

But the legionnaires may have moved a bit too far away from the tower as the British warbands engage it in force.

The two cavalry forces get stuck in.

They each win one of the battles so no resolution yet at the end of the dyke. The second British warband unit is moving down aross the dyke to to engage the Romans.

The legion at the tower is wiped out so now there are only a unit of sentries and and a unit of slingers guarding the outside of the tower.

The overall view of the battlefield.

The British cavalry move up to try and get the Roman infantry in the flank.

The British wipe out all the Romans outside the tower.

The Romans have a bit of good luck and defend well against the British cavalry, wiping them out before the warbands arrive.

In the mean time the surviving Roman cavalry has reached the tower and is trying to relieve the pressure on it.

The warband have reached the Roman infantry.

The remaining British cavalry engage the Numidians.

The Roman Cavalry has some success in pushing back the British.

The other warband wipes out the Roman auxila and pushes back the legion.

On the far flank the Numidians engage the British slingers.

In the centre, things continue to go badly for the Romans.

The Roman cavalry have better luck though and have pushed the British away from the tower.

The game ended with the Roman relief force almost completely wiped out but with the tower still in the Roman hands. The Romans will keep the position but they will be unable to use it to attack further in to British lands in the short term.

There will be more adventures of Bagotrix next year at Cangames, I have more British cavalry on the painting table right now (and a Roman elephant -- but I am not sure if I will use that or not)

2016 Plans for the New Year

With being sick and being very busy with my new job I haven't had a lot of time yet this month for the blog or for gaming (though hopefully there will be gaming on Sunday) In an effort to kick-start some progress I will set down my plans and goals for this year.

Team Yankee

This is going to dominate my painting time (and hopefully, at least to some extent, my gaming time) for the first part of the year. I put together 2 starter boxes of Soviets when I got back from Halifax and a handful of Americans and have been planning to start painting them since then. With any luck that will get started this weeekend -- the Soviets should go quickly since they are one colour (I plan to try a bit of "colour modulation" with the airbrush to give them some depth) and then I will follow up with the US. I plan to get enough of both forces so I can do both a mechanized and a tank force. The real test here will be to actually get the infantry done.

SAGA / Dragon Rampant
Here I want to get the rest of the Islamic forces from the SAGA starter boxes painted up. After we play a few games of Dragon Rampant I will get a better idea of how many I HAVE to paint but to be honest, I enjoy painting these. Once they get done I do have some plastic cavalry to paint up but they are not currently in the "official queue". I also want to play more games with the 3 SAGA factions and get good at at least one of them!

I am also going to paint up a force for Nick's Trojan War campaign but it will likely be the smallest force possible i.e. all hearthguard.  I think I will go with Foundry Greeks for this but I haven't decided yet.

Frostgrave
I want to have two relatively coherent warbands for this and paint up most of the stuff I got from the Nickstarter. I foresee this being a useful break from the Team Yankee painting.

Bolt Action
I would like to paint my Canadians but my only real goal is to finish the basing of the Germans and to play a game with them.

Hail Caesar
It didn't look like there would be any Romans in my immediate future but Ed want's to try out his siege rules that he developed for the French and Indian war in a (much) earlier period so we are dusting off our plans to do some Dacian war battles. I am planning to paint up 4-5 Roman siege engines for this and maybe a unit or 2 with some Aventine figures (since I have to get the set that has Trajan and Decadulus' head)

Terrain
Weirdly, the terrain I most want to do is for my Ortona campaign for 28mm WWII for which I don't have any inspiration to paint the figures! I want to do a river bank type terrain, a piece with the gully and a cityscape.

I have some ideas for Frostgrave and Team Yankee terrain and I should probably get more 28mm terrain suitable for SAGA.

I think that should keep me busy for the rest of the year and I am going to make a real effort not to get anything that is not on this list

2015: The Year in Review

Looking back over my blog posts for this year it was a pretty good year for playing games but it wasn't all that great for painting (but it wasn't really terrible for that either). I will divide the year up by game rather than time and take a look at what was (and wasn't accomplished)

Descent 2nd Edition:
After having this game for over a year (and buying more expansions than I would care to admit) I started playing this in the summer (we are about halfway through the Heir of Blood campaign now). When I bought this my plan was to paint all the plastic figures and that way I would get something out if it even if I didn't play that much. I did manage to get a reasonable chunk of the base set done when I first got it and I thought that once I started playing it, I would be frantically painting but the reality is that nothing got done (but the game is a lot of fun!)

Flames of War:
We played 2 campaigns at the club in 2015: Firestorm Lorraine and a Fate of the Nation Escalation campaign. Both were a lot of fun and I did a fair bit of painting for both.

For the Fate of a Nation, I painted a bunch of T-55s, SU-100s, PT-76 and and IS-3s for the Egyptians and some Ishermans and AMX-13s for the Israelis. On the downside I bought some M48s and Sho'ts as well as infantry for both sides that didn't get painted (though some of the infantry is primed!)

For Firestorm Lorraine, I had posted my painting goals here and I think I did a pretty good job of getting through that stuff. The PZ IV/70s, the PZ IVs and the Panthers all saw action during the campaign and I think the halftracks got assembled. I also didn't buy anything new during the campaign which is a victory of sorts.

I might as well mention my Vietnam stuff here as well-- there was almost no progress. I based some and primed some infantry but nothing that really gets me close to a game. Again I resisted buying anything new (especially the Riverine stuff  which I am still tempted by)

Hail Caesar:
The beginning of the year was good for Hail Caesar as I painted a bunch of Roman Legion as well as archers and slingers for the game I ran at Cangames in 2015.  The Romans are still my favourite army to paint. I had plans to paint up zombies, skeletons and Beastmen for a Hail Caesar Fantasy game based on the Teutoburg Forest to run at Cangames this year (I had a weeks vacation in September where I was going to paint up a large chunk of it and ended up playing Destiny on the PS4). I would still like to do this  but it is on the back burner.

Frostgrave:
This got played a few times and up to the end of the year, I managed to keep to my plan to play this with the figures I already had. Then this happened. I didn't plan to paint these this year so I don't consider that a negative (yet!).

Bolt Action :
This has been my painting millstone around my neck. I have a lot of good ideas for games based on the Canadians fighting in and around Ortona at the end of 1943. I have discussed terrain with Ed and he has even made me an Italian Farmhouse to try and get me inspired. The idea of running and playing the games is very appealing and even making the terrain should be fun but I just can't get myself to paint the figures.

The number of pieces for each figure in the Warlord Games army box was daunting to start with so I put off putting them together. Then once I had them together I really didn't want to paint them. I wanted to get them painted so I kept them on the painting table and put off starting other projects just so I wouldn't be distracted (the result of which was that nothing got painted for several months). With some prodding from Ed the Germans are mostly painted (but they all need their bases worked up and the halftracks need some weathering and decals.

For the Canadians, I have put together a mortar, a vickers MG and an AT gun and maybe 5 other guys. I am not thrilled with this but I pushed them aside to paint SAGA stuff and hopefully when I come back to them I will be more inspired.

SAGA:
The year did not begin well for SAGA. I had bought a Frankish Starter army and the Gripping Beast plastic medieval guys to paint over the Christmas holidays and I ended up being sick so they are still in their boxes.

When the Saracen set came out for Crescent and Cross as I was pretty good and got that painted up quickly and played a few games with Mike but then the Bolt Action block got in the way. I have managed to catch up and have played with both a Mutatawwi'a warband and and Moorish one but there is still a lot unpainted (my ultimate goal is to have a genericish Arab/Islamic army for Hail Caesar).

I did also pick up the SAGA revenant army in the thought it could also be used in my Hail Caesar Fantasy game and I have done nothing with it.

Other:
I played some Fistful of Kung Fu this year and finished painting the figures I had for that (well, to be honest, Ed painted most of them). I based and primed a Transylvanian army for By Fire and Sword. And I bought a lot of stuff for Team Yankee at the end of the year but that is definitely a 2016 project.

Stop the Romans, the Battle for the Dyke at Cangames 2015

My computer is back in action so I now have to get through my backlog of Cangames reports.

First up is Stop the Romans

In this battle the Romans are rushing forward to try and seize a defensive dyke from the British before the bad weather sets in. The Roman forces are 3 divisions of mostly infantry with some engineers, light cavalry and archers. The British have 2 divisions of warband and sling and 1 division of cavalry and chariots as well as assorted light troops on the wall and a group of fanatic warband lurking behind the dyke.

The table at Cangames was quite a bit narrower than the one I used when I playtested it (as seen here). I did briefly think about getting another table but that would have made the table awkwardly wide so I had the dyke extend into the river and declared it as passable but bad going (and refused to answer any questions about the British chariots got across the dyke!)

The forces I used were the same as for the playtest -- I had hoped to add one more cavalry and one more warband to the British and one more legion to the Romans but the British reinforcements got lost on the way so I just left things as they were before. The British were set up further back from the table edge so that would be closer to the dyke if they chose to fall back to it.

The Romans could choose for each of their division to either not come on on turn 1 or to come on but have each unit roll individually for orders and to be ordered to move forward the maximum they could. All 3 Roman players choose to come on and the command rolls went pretty well for them.

The forces did get a bit mixed up like the archers charging ahead towards the British cart but most of the units came on the table.

 The British weren't quite so lucky with their rolls and one infantry division didn't move at all. The other did move up towards the Romans.

The Romans continued their march across the battlefield towards the dyke.

The British chariots charge into Roman Auxila

The battle is raging on the Roman left but on the right the British are mostly staying out of contact.

But finally, the Roman Marines fight the British warband.

 The Numidian Light Horse shows more bravery than common sense and attacks the British Cavalry

The light horse is easily driven off but the Legion are another matter altogether.

The victorious Romans resume their advance.

The Legion advances slowly to the dyke.

But due do a blunder in the command roll, the auxila advance much less cautiously and put themselves in front of the Legion

The Romans manage to get them selves sorted out and the Legion clambers up the fascine to the top of the dyke

The druid fanatics charge up the reverse slope of the dyke hoping to drive the Romans off.

The right wing of the Romans spend some time regrouping before they face the dyke.

The druid fanatics drive the romans off the dyke and charge down into the main Roman force

While on the other flank the Romans continue their more methodical advance.

After driving of the druid fanatics the romans go back up the fascine only to run into yet another druid fanatic.

But the Romans on the other side are now at the top of the dyke and there is no real opposition left on that side.

The game ended as a Roman victory but it was a hard fought battle and I think it could have gone either way.