Off to Historicon 2009

I'm off to Historicon again this year! I promise to bring my camera and take photos for the blog. Also I'm co-hosting a game this year with my good friend Rich Oster from Ohio. Rich and I are running Event S-410 on Saturday at 7pm. Here is the event description from the PEL:

S-410 - Blue Max Flying Circus
Sat. 7 PM, 3 hrs, 10 players
GM: Richard Oster with Alan Wright and TWA
WWI 1:72, Rules: Canvas Eagles (Blue Max varient)

Come fly with the infamous Richtofen's flying circus escorting a Gotha Bomber (yes a Gotha in 1/72 scale). Richthofen's flying circus has been
ordered to excort a Gotha bomber to its target. Fly with Manfred and Lothar Richthofen,Ernst Udet and even Bruno Stockel from the movie The
Blue Max. If you prefer the good guys fly Eddie Richenbackers' Spad XIII with the allied powers to stop tyrany.

Come play in our game, or just stop by and say hello.

Just a quick update on why you haven't seen a lot of new painted figures on the blog lately. Recently I suffered some water damage in my hobby room due to a leaking clothes washing machine. I've spent the past two months repairing and remodeling the room. The work is finished and hobbies have resumed. Both will be the subjects of posts after I return from Historicon. See you all there!

Second Field of Glory Game - Part 2

To kick off the holiday weekend we all returned to my friend Mike's house on Thursday to finish up the second Field of Glory game in our Second Punic Wars campaign. This photo was taken by Mike and so see the rest of the gallery you can visit Mike's Picassa page.

In this second session I continued to try to stem the flow of Carthaginian lights in the woods on our left flank, but Leo (playing for the other side in this game) continued to dominate my Velites eventually routing all four units. To shore up the flank my partner and CinC of the Roman army, Mike brought in some Legionaires to defend the ground outside the woods while I clung percariously to the hill to the west of the woods. During this prolonged delaying action Mike was finally able to press home the attack in our center and right with our legions. Although it was a touch-an-go situation for many turns, eventually Mike was able to defeat the Spanish on the right flank and then isolated, the Gauls also gave way. After these areas were in control Mike was able to turn several battle groups to our faltering flank and rescue me from my almost certain defeat.

In the end Mike's play saved the Roman army and won the field of battle in a narrow victory over the invading Carthaginians.

Second Field of Glory Game - Part 1

This past Saturday we got together at my friend Mike's house to play the second Field of Glory game in our Second Punic Wars campaign. One of the players had to leave before we finished so this will be post one in a two part series on the battle. For this game we also brought in a gun-for-hire, our friend Leo, to help out pushing the Carthaginiains. Leo will probably end up being a Roman player eventually but we were desparately short on Carthaginians so for his first game Leo was a turncoat. These photos were taken by Mike and are just a few of the many photos that he took. To see the rest of the gallery you can visit Mike's Picassa page.

This second battle is the battle of Ariminium, in Northern Italy. As you can see the Carthaginians have brought their Elephants over the Alps with them. Again they caught the Romans unaware and have attacked a small portion of the Roman army in hopes to destroy it quickly. If the battle looks familliar to those that read my entry from game one, that's because the situation and terrain dictated a similar defensive deployment. The battle took a while to develop as the Carthaginians deployed in a very compact deployment and used the early turns if the battle to deploy and re-deploy their assaulting troops into positions of their choosing.

These photos show the first early combats of the battle. On the right (also the Roman right flank of the battle) you can see the Numidian light cavalry skirmishing with the Roman Legionaires. The left photo shows a large skirmish battle in the woods on the Roman left flank. Early losses have forced the Carthaginians to withdraw one battle group of skirmishers and replace it with a fresh one. The Romans also swapped out one battle group of velites to allow it to recover its morale. When we return on Thursday night to finish the game many fine Roman and Carthaginian soldiers will meet their maker on this field of glory.

Pegasus Bridge

This past Saturday (June 6th) I played in a 20mm World War II game run at our club's game day. The scenario was the D-Day attack by the British Ox and Bucks glider airborne troops on the Pegasus bridge. The game was run by fellow Northern Conspiracy club member Mark Decouteau.

Mark chose to run the game using the Crossfire rule system. Our club played Crossfire fairly actively for a short period right after the rules were published, but since then they have not seen a lot of use. After playing in Mark's game and enjoying it thoroughly, I'm actually fairly surprised that we haven't played more Crossfire. After playing in Mark's game I have a renewed enthusiasm to host some Crossfire games of my own.

I'd like to compliment Mark on his scenario design and especially his terrain. Crossfire is very dependent on good terrain for the rule system to work well. Mark not only had a sufficient ammount of terrain, but his tabletop was quite beautiful as well, right down to the scratch-built gliders!

Board Gaming

In addition to historical miniature gaming, I also like to get together with a group of friends to play 'Euro Game' boardgames. We used to get together every Saturday afternoon/evening for a long while, but eventually our schedules started interfering with that. Since then we settle for getting together for a Saturday anywhere between one and three times a year. We call these game days 'conventions' just for fun, named after the host. This past weekend I had a great time board gaming at Combscon 2009 redux. You can read all about it over at my friend Scott's boardgame blog - The Settlers of Dune.

If you're a miniatures gamer, don't overlook our hobbies origin - board gaming. Board gaming is still alive and popular in Europe. The European game designers are putting out some amazingly fun games. Our group prefers those based on economic or rail themes, but if you're looking for military boardgames, they're also still being developed. My favorite resource for board game information is the Boardgame Geek website.

First Field of Glory Game

Until now my experience in the world of ancients gaming has been fairly limited, consisting of mainly DBA and big-battle DBA/DBM games as that's what the ancients aficionados in our club prefer. Recently some of the ancients gamers in our club have been trying and enjoying the new Field of Glory rule set. One of my club mates, Charlie decided to start up an ancients campaign revolving around Hannibal's invasion into Italy during the second Punic wars. During our annual First man of Rome DBA tournament this past March I was the winning Roman player and current holder of our First Man of Rome trophy, so I felt obligated to represent Rome in the campaign with my fellow Roman commander, Mike Coppinger. Opposing us are Michael Bailey as Hannibal, and Randy (King Jubba) Fields as co-general of the Carthaginian forces. This was the first conflict of the game, with Hannibal's large army catching the defenders of Tarentum isolated. This created a game with Hannibal's army having a large advantage in numbers, almost 2:1.

Here we can see Hannibal's forces, marching onto the field of battle. They're an impressive force with a large cavalry arm, Galls, Psoli, and almost as many imitation legionaries as the Romans have true legionaries. Our only advantage at this battle was the terrain. There was one choke point on our side of the board, and just like a scene out of 300, we chose to defend that point and force the Carthaginians to attack us in waves, rather than allowing them to outflank us. At least that was the plan....


Here the much smaller Roman army marching onto the field of battle. We deployed the majority of our skirmishers out on our right flank, while the rest of the army marched on between two woods, hoping to beat the Carthaginians to the town directly ahead so we could anchor our flank on it.




This is a photo midway through the battle as our line has reached our goal and deployed to receive the Carthaginian attack. Guarding our flank in the woods are several units of skirmishers. In the town on our left a single unit of skirmishers with cavalry and Triarii in reserve behind the town. At this point it was time to wait for the assault to begin and try to survive the onslaught.


During the initial melees, we fared pretty well, giving as well, or sometimes a bit better, than we received. My co-general Mike Coppinger did a masterful job of defending the woods on our right flank from multiple assaults, but eventually the Carthaginian numbers weighed in there and our defenders in the woods started to get eliminitated, unit by unit. In the center we were able to repluse all of the Galls, but when the Carthaginian heavy infantry hit our line which was softened up by the Galls' attacks, our units began to fail. This photo was taken just before we called the game. Although our army broke, we felt good being able to inflict similar numbers of casualties on a numerically superior force. Hopefully in our upcoming battles we can campaign our way into fights where the numbers are slightly more equal. Hannibal won this battle, but the war is far from over!

I've posted several more photos from the game on the Northern Conspiracy's Past Events page. So what were my first impressions of Fields of Glory? I liked a lot of the mechanics and the combat resolution seemed straight forward and easy to understand. The disruption/disorder system still confuses me a bit, and I think that the casualty and morale mechanics are quite 'dicey', i.e. the rolls of the dice tend to impact the results more than the tactical situation does. All in all I think they're worth consideration for larger ancient battles. I'm going to get a copy of the rules of my own so I can better understand them. The rulebook is a wonderfully illustrated hard cover book which seems more than worth the cost. I'm looking forward to future games in the campaign.

Tournament Game Night at AJ's

Last Friday night I had a few friends over and we played two more of our Napoleonic tournament Volley & Bayonet Road To Glory games in my basement. I split my 6'x12' table into two 6'x6' tables (it's designed to do this for just such an occation, or for double-blind games). On the far table Ed Mueller (standing) and Bob Ouelette (sitting) played their game, and at the close table Phil Hammond and I played our game.

Ed's French army ended up narrowly edging out Bob's Austrians in a close-fought chess match. I was mostly focused on my game which pitted my Russians against Phil's French army. Our game was a back and forth slugfest for most of the game in stark contrast to Bob and Ed's game. I've been requested to keep the photos to a minimum, so for those interested in seeing a lot more photos, particularly of Ed and Bob's game, you can go to the Northern Conspiracy's events gallery where I've posted all the photos I took.

Here's the after-action report for my game against Phil:

Our initial deployment cards were very similar mirror images of each other with both of us losing our right wing and our reserves at the conclusion of turn one. Although it was initially difficult, I was relieved to see that Phil's troops returned to the table a turn earlier than mine, which meant I most likely could count on a slight (1/2 point) advantage in starting victory points. This wasn't enough for me to go full out on defense, but I did assume I had the luxury of making cautious attacks.


About half way through the game, I have had to throw two of my cavalry divisions up against Phil's Swiss guard, which routed two of my Musketeer brigades on the Swiss guard's first charge. After a couple turns of cavalry charges I finally exhausted Phil's guard, and withdrew my bloodied cavalry divisions, each with only one exhaustion point left. I was able to stabilize the left flank with portions of two different infantry divisions pulled from the center and returning right wings, all commanded by the wing commanders and CinC. This photo shows the flank just before the final Russian cavalry charge that exhausted the Swiss guard.

I chose to post this photo as it shows the turning point in the game, where my remaining cavalry division (on the far table edge) makes a fient towards Phil's line of communication (LOC) while my Cossack division screens Phil's infantry that was attempting to guard the flank. This was a 'trick or treat' moment I presented Phil - follow the battle cavalry or attempt to range shoot the Cossacks in hopes of an easy victory point. Phil chose the latter, but the Cossacks survived his ranged fire.

This is the following turn. As you can see my cavalry has charged Phil's infantry in the rear, and with the Cossacks to the infantry's front the infantry had only one way to run when they lost the melee with the cavalry. This congestion cost them dearly with all three brigades ending up in rout, squeezing out towards my lines. Although the fresh infantry didn't exhaust from this, I was able to finish the job a few turns later by following up with my infantry.

In the left-center my guard infantry (with the yellow marker) didn't fare as well and two turns after this Phil's French line infantry counter-charged my guard and destroyed them in detail in one of the bloodiest turns of V&B I've ever seen. In two combats we each scored 6 hits on each other's units, the equivalent of 3,000 casualties in 30 minutes of fighting. The casualties remained fairly even for the rest of the battle and I edged out a victory, the difference in points was approximately what it would have cost me had I lost the 2 extra points on the two cavalry divisions that fought early in the battle. Phil fought an excellent battle and we both had a good time rolling fists full of dice most of the night.

This is a photo of the aftermath of Ed and Bob's game. As you can see it is a much more orderly affair with the difference beeing the exhaustion of Bob's converged grenadier division (marked with the red marker in the far center of the table). Ed and Bob had a fun time playing the "thinking man's V&B". That's the great thing about these rules. They don't dictate a particular play style. They're flexible enough to work under many styles. Also noteable in this photo is Bob's table felt, which he purchased from Hots Artworks. It's quite nice and makes a great travelling table cover.

American and French Officers

I needed some additional wing commanders for the Yorktown game I put on last month (see my earlier post for an after action report of the game). Yorktown is a large battle with multiple American and one French wings. I had many brigade commanders, which in V&B are represented by a single mounted officer, but only one army/wing commander, with the obligitory General George Washington on it. For the game I painted up these two American and one French command stands in a couple of evenings, one to paint the figures, and one to base and flock the stands.

The figures are a mix of American and British mounted comanders by Old Glory. I chose to use the 'standard' late war continental uniforms for the American generals and tried to use the more 'flamboyant' poses for the French officers. I hadn't posted any of my painting recently and I didn't want everyone to think I'd stopped painting just because I've been playing so many games.

In a future post I'm going to show my 15mm ACW re-basing project that I'm about half way through. I'm changing from Fire & Fury to Volley & Bayonet for this army.

Another V&B Road to Glory Game

I received the dreaded 'bye' in the second round of our small tournament and had to sit out while the other competitors had fun in their rounds. In order to speed things along, the organizers released the rest of the pairings for the tournament in order to allow those that wished to, to play their later round games when it was convenient. For my 3rd round opponent Ed with his middle French army featuring a very high-quality cavalry arm and I, last Friday night was a good time for a game.

Above you can see both of our armies deployed before the start of turn one. Our armies are very similar in quantity and quality of infantry, with maybe a slight edge in favour of my Russians. Artillery was fairly even with Ed outnumbering me 3:2, but my guns were heavies which out ranged his field battalions. For cavalry, if you ignore my division of Cossacks (and who wouldn't), Ed had a decisive advantage, matching me stand for stand in quantity, but besting my Russian troopers in all measurable quality metrics (strength points, morale level, exhaustion and cavalry weight). From the beginning I believe we both knew that the battle could hinge on how the cavalry battle worked out. I hoped to try to shield my inferior cavalry with my infantry and allow my advantage there to with the day for me, but Ed wasn't about to let me off that easily.

During his half of turn one, Ed moved aggressively forward across his whole line. Knowing that my left and reserve wings were returning detachments that would have to leave at the end of turn one, I chose to deny my right flank (opposing Ed's strong cavalry), and deploy my center anchored somewhat on a dense forest with my small guard division as my only reserve. To my surprise at the end of the turn all but Ed's right (to my left) wing were removed to also return later on as returning detachments. Ed's aggressive advance worked and fooled me into not advancing when I actually had the upper hand. The one command I was sure was going to stay on the field of battle (Ed took an unusually long time working on its deployment) was the only command left.

Ed's detachments returned earlier than mine did and he chose to try to outflank my left flank with his original infantry which held up well to my initial assaults, while deftly deploying his first returning wing in his center just in time to deploy a solid line of battle from which he would launch attacks against my line with the French middle guard. On my right Ed cleverly chose to deploy his Bavarians (French provisinal constript troops of slightly lesser quality than the majority of his arny) in a town to secure his flank while the bulk of his cavalry started to outflank my infantry. Forced to respond, I took all of my cavalry and shifted them to answer the threat. Just what Ed wanted. I knew I was bringing a knife to a gunfight but I didn't have any other answer.

On the left flank Ed's original infantry division and my center infantry division mutually exhausted each other in our respective turns, turning that flank into a somewhat comical you shoot me in the flank/rear, I shoot you in the flank/rear until after a turn each I withdrew my troops (without the benefit of Leger reinforcing skirmishers) to a line of battle near my unexhausted Guard Jagers. In the center my Guard held up to the initial charge of the French Middle guard and on their countercharge routed one of the French stands, and with the morale collapse of the small division, permanently disordered the other stand. We were both content to conduct ranged fire in the center, neither of us relishing the task of breaking the other's stationary line. That left us to the flank with the cavalry on it where Ed had forced me into the fight he wanted, cavalry on cavalry, or so he thought.

This photo shows the result of the first round of the cavalry battle. I charged one brigade of Ed's curiassers with two of my cavalry brigades (hussars and dragoons) while at the same time supporting them with two stands of infantry firing on the Curiasser's flank. Alas, it was not to be and my 15 dice scored one hit and Ed's four dice scored two. My cavalry recoiled and before Ed's heavies in disorder - an easy target. Further along I faired better besting Ed's dragoon division and exhausting it but also exhausting one of my cavalry divisions in trade. At the extreme right my light cavalry division (including the Russian guard lights) threatened Ed's position but chose not to charge home.

In Ed's following bound he finished off my disordered cavalry division near the town by killing them to a man, while also collapsing their morale (an additional scenario VP for Ed). Unfortunately for him this put him behind my lines and within striking distance of my infantry. On my following turn I charged my remaining non-exhausted hussar stand stationed adjacent to the town (other than those in the cavalry division holding the extreme right flank) at his Curiassers and brought an additional 5 stands of infantry to bear using small arms and dedicated guns. All that firepower was enough to eliminate the French heavies. With this flank in danger Ed thoughtfully withdrew his remaining Hussar division to guard his flank, while I pursued it with my cavalry and pressed the flank with a division and a half of my army commanded by the CinC and one wing commander.

The final three turns were spent with me pressing Ed's exposed flank to try to capture his line of communication (LOC). Capturing the enemy LOC is an additional victory condition in out tournament. Ed's Bavarians proved to be sturdy due to their entrenchment in a stone-walled town, and his remaining cavalry division and additional corps cavalry brigade did prove to be quite difficult in defence, but the coups-de-grace was when my infantry held to a combined charge of all three of these cavalry brigades repulsing Ed's cavalry and leaving them vulnerable to my cavalry, which made short work of the disordered horse. In the final turn Ed had just enough 'speed bumps' to keep me off his LOC, but the cost of the delaying action was his last cavalry division, which ended up in morale collapse and afforded him a loss greater than the LOC the cavalry was expended to protect.

This was a fantastically close game, fought down to the very last roll of the very last turn. Despite some things we still are unsure we like about the 'new' Volley & Bayonet rules, it's still generating games that are great fun. I'd like to thank Ed for being a good opponent and a great sport.