Northern Conspiracy March 2018 Game Night

Friday the Northern Conspiracy got together for our March game night. We had a packed house with all games filled with plenty of players. I believe two of the three were at maximum capacity, but thanks to Michael's flexible scenario everyone found a game to play.

Speaking of Michael, he ran his medieval 28mm Castle siege game with the very fun Have Fun Storming The Castle Lads rules. 

Update - Ed has more photos and an additional write-up of game night on his blog here.

Byron ran his 28mm Indian Mutiny game using the Civil War skirmish rules Brother against Brother with slight modifications for the period.




I ran a 28mm Iron Cross game. The scenario was Operation Charnwood, July 4th 1944. Elements of the 8th Canadian Infantry Brigade with support from the 10th Canadian armored division press forward to capture the town of Carpiquet which is defended by the 26th SS Panzergrenadier regiment and elements of the 1st Panzer division.

Below the German defenders on the left, Kevin, Mark and John and the Canadian attackers Earl, Charlie and Bob.

I allowed both sides to pre-deploy up to three infantry detachments on their side of the table as listening posts. The Canadians chose to occupy their sector of the town with all three of their listening posts. The Germans put on each in the town, the farm and the bunker.

The Canadian presence in the town was effective and eventually killed one and drove out another German detachment from the large residence in the German sector. The Germans brought a Tiger I to support the bunker and duel with the Canadian Firefly that had bogged town on top of a hill. Faring even BETTER than the Hollywood easy-8 Fury, the Firefly luckily bounced not one, but THREE glancing blows from the Tiger, and with rousing words from their commander rallied from near death TWICE, escaping from the hill to pound the German-occupied townhouse.

The Canadians brought up an M-10 wolverine which easily took out an over-aggressive Flakpanzer 38(t). Somehow the Flakpanzer crew got brave in the face of just Canadian infantry, but soon found out they weren't a real tank when the M-10 showed up.

This wasn't all one-sided for the Canadians. The Germans reinforced the town with another platoon of infantry and flanked it to the east (far side most photos) with a second platoon that nearly destroyed the Canadian commander's squad. In the middle consistent fire from the farmhouse took out the British 17-pounder AT gun, and in an MG duel Kevin's MG-42 took out a British vickers .50 cal.

At time the game was a dead heat with both armies occupying about 50% of the center of the table's important objectives and casualties even. I believe eventually the Canadians had a good chance of winning the town and the Germans would probably keep the farm and hill with the battle being decided by which of the armor would come out on top.

28mm French Napoleonic Lancers and more German WWII Infantry

I had some pin money from selling off one of my more expensive R/C gliders so I did some shopping on Ebay recently. This post is what I've purchased so far. All figures were purchased pre-painted, although both groups needed some additional work to pass muster. The first is a unit of French Napoleonic light lancers. These came individually based and nicely pre-painted. Unfortunately all of the riders were poorly glued on and most were loose. So were the bent up lead lances and flag staff. I de-based all of the figures, glued all of the riders back on properly, and re-fitted all of the lances with proper steel ones with pre-formed spear points. The flag staff was scratch built from the lead eagle affixed to steel wire. All items were glued on and re-painted. Then I went over all the figures and touched up  the shipping damage. The final step was to give them my usual basing process. Total time committed was about two hours - well worth it for such a sharp looking unit. Only slight issue is I'm pretty sure these guys aren't painted up as an actual unit.  I can't find references to any of the all-blue uniformed lancers with red facings. If it were just the facings, I'd have touched them up in yellow, but that musician.....so I'm leaving them as-is.

The second unit is a few more German infantry from Veteran painting service. These were posted at a very nice price, so I couldn't resist picking up just one more unit. This one has a good mix of cloth caps which I like a lot for variety. These took the usual clean up painting of adding German grey to the helmets and gas mask case, a dry brush of gun metal on the rifles and SMGs and a few of the canteens needed some touching up. The basing on these is spot on so nothing needed to be done there. Total time invested was about 20 minutes.

We have more snow falling tonight, so these photos were taken indoors. Apologies for the poor lighting. I'm still trying to figure out how to remedy that. My gaming table has twelve four-foot daylight spectrum fluorescent bulbs which make the table very bright. Figure close-ups still seem to give me trouble even in that much light.

I'm counting these two groups as 24 painted figures purchased (mounted counting double) and four stands re-based in my annual totals.

Medium Bunker

Lately I've been on a huge 28mm WWII binge thanks to our club really enjoying Iron Cross. Iron Cross games are better with a lot of terrain. Also bunkers in Iron Cross, while good, aren't the unbeatable fortresses that they can be in some other rules. Thanks to that I feel I need to add a few more bunkers to my terrain collection. This is a  medium sized bunker that will accommodate one weapons team on my standard 2.25" circle bases or four individually mounted figures. I was TRYING to make a 5-figure bunker but somehow figured out a way to mess that up. Still this will be a valuable asset for future games.

I've shown it in the photo to the left with some 28mm figures for scale. I intentionally made the layers visible to mimic many of the bunkers that were poured in multiple passes.