So suitably chastened and with some spare time, a new post.
The absence has largely been due to a lack of things to report. Lacking motivation and inspiration I have not been painting anything. What shook me out of my wargaming funk was a game of Wings of War. I have been playing the free rules, with a house rule or two and have had an absolute blast. I played the full rules once or twice and apart from the damage cards, I think it pushed it a bit past optimum playability.
The game mechanics are so simple and easy to learn that you end up focusing on the tactics - dogfighting WWI aircraft. This is not to say that it is an easy game to master, just an easy game to learn. This is what makes the game so good and a real revelation for me, coming in from DBM, WH40k, FoW and so on. For the first time a while I was enjoying the playing of games, as much as I normally enjoy the painting. Reminds me of something the Too Fat Lardies say: play the period, not the rules.
Some more on WoW in a later post.
Now I should point out that I still enjoy playing NUTS!, but I am a bit worn out with WW2. Seem to have been playing that for ages and was getting a bit stale.
One of the BIG clubs members posted some news about an award nomination for the Songs of Drums and Shakos (aka SDS) rules from Ganesha Games. In short Napoleonic skirmish rules that have a good simple mechanic that delivers a good game. These are definitely at the "game" end of the "game-simulation" spectrum. But if you are like me - you want to get in a few games in a club day, not spend most of your time with your nose in a rule book. I picked up the basic mechanics in about two rounds of play and otherwise had to look up a couple of factors from a sheet from time to time.
As a result of playing a couple of games I have a set of figures on the table from the Peninsula period. I have:
- French Voltigeurs
- French Old Guard (these guys are terrors on the table :)
- Black Watch Highlanders
- Portuguese Cacadores
These rules are available as online PDF purchases and are great value. The interest in these rules has spawned a broader interest in the Ganesha Games rules. So at the club we now have people playing Songs of Blades and Heroes (SBH), which are the original rules and are a fantasy set. The Mutants and Death Ray Guns (MDRG) has also proved popular for general sci-fi (with some adaption), inlcuding a few Dr Who games. :) I have certainly found some new uses for my idle WH40k figures.
The SDS rules introduced me to Napoleonics in general and as such I also got interested in the grand tactical scale of game. The Meeples and Miniatures blog has taken a look at the Polemos rules for this period. Normally a skirmish gamer, the M&M blogger has taken well to Polemos Napoleonics, a 6mm rule set, which was encouraging for me. So on that note and a couple of other reviews I bought the rule book for a proper look. I liked what I saw and I knocked out a set of cardboard commandos for intro gaming.
A couple of games later and I think it is a good game. The manoeuvring is slower and the combat is more decisive than I expected. That said the rules seem to give the correct feeling for the period (noting that I am a period newbie) and an appropriate level of detail for a commander - be it of a corps or an army. So with a partner in crime I now have a set of 6mm British (and Portuguese) figures from the Peninsula to play against his French. They have only just arrived, but there will be plenty of material about their painting in the future. 6mm should be... interesting.
