AAR: Lord of The Rings: Last Game of the Year 2018.

       This is a post about the second game on our trip to Hobbytown, U.S.A. for Thursday night gaming. After playing a fun game of Normandy Firefight, we brought out our Lord of the Rings figures that I have been slowly painting. Kalissa has been saying that I have been painting more of my side than hers. In some cases, that is true. However, I will have the rest of her Riders of Rohan finished after the New Year. Really, I just thought we would play another round, since this board was about to go out to a customer.
      In this match up, Kalissa gained a few figures. Mainly, Legolas, Gimli, Aragorn, and Arwen had been added to the mix. Kalissa still thought that she was outnumbered. She was! However, her characters took out way more figures that I did hers. I think I only won in this game based on the way I took out troops. I could not take down any main character of Good, but the regular troops, I could. I noticed my Troll was heavily avoided. It is like the Good side did not think he was friendly. I will have to work on the Troll's people skills!

AAR: Normandy Firefight: Another Victory for Veterans.

        It was recently that Kalissa and I ventured out towards the local Hobbytown, U.S.A for the Thursday night gaming. Apparently, this has been going on for a while, but it is a school night after all. It happens, even with the teachers in the world. Essentially, we were going out to play our last games for the year of 2018. Since my in-laws were visiting randomly in the weekend, we might as well play on Thursday. We brought to games to play, so the next post is going to be the second game.
     Now on to Normandy Firefight! This is still one game system Kalissa and I find ourselves playing. If there ever was a good enough reason, it is grenades. I cannot stress how much of a game changer that is. This is especially true when stupid game stuff happens. In our game, I ran my veteran Germans. We had found previous sheets of our last game with names on them for our characters. The last game, I had one man killed, so naturally, my replacement had a different name. Kalissa lost nearly everyone, but this did not mean she would not recycle the names. I would look at this as gaming "bad luck". Her men seemed to all be Highlanders. And the "bad luck" did play out!
     I am not saying that one of the Highlanders would have won the Darwin Award, but he did! In the mist of throwing grenades, both Kalissa and I found ourselves in a pickle. I had one German pinned down with a grenade primed. Kalissa had two men in the same situation nearly all within 8" apart. 10" are all you need to feel the effects of the grenade. I survived both the first and the second grenade. Kalissa's men did not. One man, in the heat of the moment, fired his Sten Gun at my German nearest to him forgetting about the whole holding a primed grenade thing. This was following by that said fellow blowing himself to smithereens! I dare say, that would have not been a celebrated man, if he had survived, considering the same blast killed another man and wounded another severely. It was awesome! The end game was the Germans losing one man, which was the replacement! It made sense! Below are the photos.

Solo Game Testing Some Rules for WWII

      In a rare event, sometimes I solo play games. And in this case, I did this for a reason. Plus, my wife was still at work! The reason is that I need to start figuring out my Historicon strategy for rules for my Pacific Game for the fight for Peleliu Island. There are many rules that I can use that is currently on the market. Hell, Warlord is coming out with skirmish game, so I hear. Wasn't that Bolt Action? However, I have a few standards that I am trying to achieve for this historical battle. One, I want it to be chaotic and playable. The whole assault on the beach was filled with men getting lost amongst different units while dealing with some heavy fire. Leadership was not exactly lacking, but very difficult to communicate in the chaos. The research I have read so far about the battle was based more on accounts of individual bravery more than commanders leading them. So my goal was to make the individual matter much like in the game Normandy Firefight with the benefits of Bolt Action.
     The answer to this call is not even a rules set for WWII. In this solo game, I ran a modified Buckskins and Rangers game. Buckskins and Rangers is a set of rules that is written for the French and Indian War. I know. It is right next to each other in the history's time line. What I found great about playing Buckskins and Rangers at Historicon some years back was the mechanics. It is a card driven game. However, the unit set up was unique. For a set of six men, you have one officer and whatever lower ranks you choose. At the beginning of a turn, you roll a D6 for each of you men. The number that arises is the amount of actions that figure has. However, if your command gets a good high roll, you can use the same amount of actions for the rest of you men if they are in a command radius. I believe they have to be the same actions. What is get about this is that you other men can venture off to preform of actions and duties such as: fight a one on one melee, set a house on fire, steal a sheep, or have sex with a sheep! The point is: Options!     So a make so Skibicki-quickie modifications to the rules to work for WWII!
        A couple of the modifications I did were using modern firearms, area fire, grenades, rate of fire changes....the works. The pictures below tell how this worked in six turns. It was looking like the Germans were doing pretty awful in the beginning. They managed to get back into the game after really recovering from "Area Fire" or Cover fire. Pins are only added from "area fire" when each model in a group committing to this action roll a six. A six after that randomly hits a person. Wounds are D3  with a six as a strait out kill. I will most likely share a copy of these, if I go that direction. Anyway, without going into too much detail. Here are the photos.