Project Olustee: Starting the Endgame Work.

     It is almost a finished project. I still have a lot left to do for the final month before Historicon 2018, but it is closer to being finished. I have have a few hundred figures left to paint, several trees, markers,and touch up work to do. I am confident that I will have the time. Either that or I will make the time. The only hick up that is currently stopping me for a couple of days is the trip to this year's Nashcon in Franklin, TN. That should be a good trip. Kalissa will be running the Bolt Action Tournament there.
     When we get back, it will be a Convention Game Blitzkrieg! I have been keeping up by doing at least one thing a day towards finishing our projects. Even the baby steps add up. This way I will not have to find myself doing overnight projects to get things done like I might have back in high school for the papers that needed to be done. Besides, I would like to done more test runs for the games to make sure I understand the rules well enough with out looking at them. If they are the success I plan them to be, looking up a rule or two for special circumstances should not be much of an issue. I plan to have multiple quick rounds per hour with lots of dice throwing. There will be blood, but not oil like the Daniel Day Lewis movie. Anyway, here is a little overview of pictures of how close this is to getting done. Enjoy!

AAR: Pantheon: Testing Out Kalissa's Pantheon Board.

     This will be a first for my wife, Kalissa this year. She will be running games at Historicon 2018. Since we have been playing Mythic Battles: Pantheon, we have had some awesome games. However, since we do not know other people who have gained this game, since it's success on Kickstarter, Kalissa decided to demonstrate this game at Historicon. It will be interest, since we both will be running games at the same time. This leaves me to my own devices. Scary!
   Of course, I cannot let her run her first convention games without a nice set up, so I made a board for her. This is my third hard board I have made. I usually like to still with mats. However, I pretty much put together this board in about eight hours give or take. I found myself kind of sidetracked watching Guy's Grocery Games on T.V. Either way, we decided to take it to Hobbytown to play test on. And if anyone wanted to play a game randomly, we could have done that, too!
    Kalissa and I ended up playing two games of Pantheon. She won one game and I won the other. It was funny for the firs game after discovering in mid-game that it was nearly impossible for me to win based a  rule that all of Kalissa's units had called "Block." Since this is mainly a board game, this rule keeps opposing units out of areas unless your unit also has a rating of "Block" You can only guess what ratings I did not have. She swore that she did not do this on purpose, but these are good things to know. It has been decided that lists must be made for the players in advance for the convention game. This will eliminate some accidental power playing that could ruin the game experience. The second game was a hard win in my favor after some countless attacks. I only managed to loose Medusa. The rest of the time was spent trying to hack away at Zeus, who Kalissa was running. This game was twice the game time. And below were the pictures of both games.

This is the board. The black wire divide the different areas that have the same terrain rating. The numbers are the amount of units allowed in an area.

The gems that you have to collect more of to win.

The partial paint Hercules that is angry in the woods! Paint me!

Good ol' Zeus!

The blocking force!

This was Kalissa's way of showing me how close I was to killing Zeus.

This is one of those rolls were you know that you troops hate you!

AAR: Normandy Firefight: Neighborhood Fight in Sicily

     It has been decided that we needed to continue to go out into the crowd to expose historical wargaming to the public. It is nice to play games in the household with friends, but we had not met too many more new people in our hobby with the large exceptions of going to wargaming conventions. Nashcon is the next one coming up! There is also a plus side to this, since the reality has set in that I am behind schedule on projects of both commissions and personal ones and they are taking up the tables we play on. So we have booted ourselves out of the house to the local Hobbytown, USA.
   Kalissa and I decided to play Normandy Firefight. It is not mentioned very much in the wargaming world, though a walking by/spectator mentioned how fun the rules were. Odd to here, since we never met people who played with exception of our friends, Hugh and Bill. Another person came by to state: "Wow, a game that you can't power game in!" Most of the games in our area seem to be in the 40K nature and Star Wars: X-Wing. So, now it this is turning into a goal to bring whatever random historic games out. I am beginning to sense people wanting something fresh and new in wargaming. Kalissa has gone as far as to mention demonstrating games in the future. She is a teacher and teaches rules better than me by a long shot!
    Either way, for our Normandy Firefight game, Kalissa had her trusty British while I have stuck with the Germans. Normandy Firefight is great for the fact that you only need up to three figures to play, but with like going with five. It is a random card driven game while using two D10's to fire and a D6 to unpin. You keep track of your movement, action, position, and ammunition you use per figure. So you do not want to many figures to track.
   In our game, we started on opposite corners 12" in. This was a Free-for-all type game. We, both, tried to rush our forces towards the center of town. I ended up rolling a bit better to get there faster. Three turns of movement, the bullets started flying. The normal game size uses a smaller sized table. We were not in a hurry. One Brit took a head shot killing him instantly after surprising one of my Germans sporting an MP40. One of my riflemen was pinned down and crippled to a state of crawling. The same was with another riflemen who tried to flank three British soldiers. The big damage was running up onto a balcony and throwing a hand grenade at the three Englishmen. One guy bit the dust with the other two with serious wounds. Kalissa sent a guy after one of my Germans with a Thompson Machine gun dropping him to the floor! The final shots came from the upstairs German running down and plugging that British soldier point black with his MP40. Thus, the game ended in a German Victory! Below are the game photos!