Broadsword 5

I hadn't realized it'd been so long since my last post, but I blame Twitter :-) Since I changed jobs at work in the new year, I haven't been responsible for a work Twitter account which has let me get my own personal one that I devote to hobbies (gaming and Canadian football), so my instant gratification for game reports, painting successes and mad purchases goes there.  I'll try to catch up, though I see I still have photos from conventions in 2014 that haven't made it here!

Anyway, this post is prompted by my attendance at Broadsword 5 in Hamilton last Saturday.  I had committed to host a game in the afternoon, a new scenario for Song of Drums and Shakos, and then in my enthusiasm for Toofatlardies new What a Tanker rules, I convinced my friend Mike to bring his tanks and we'd use my terrain in the evening to put on a game and learn the game ourselves.  So that left the morning for me to play in a game, more on that in a second.

First though, some photos of some of the new terrain and scenics I prepped for the SDS game, another 1812 in Russia scenario.  These are 15mm MDF sleds from Things From the Basement:

Obviously the one on the bottom left will also be used for Christmas scenarios in Fear & Faith games (Monster Hunter International), when snowmen go bad!

Next up are some Novus Design Studios 15mm pieces, two livestock pens and a rickety wooden bridge.  I did one pen for the winter (below), the other for the summer (still needs its flock), and the bridge in the middle is sort of generic, not committing itself to a season.

The night before the con all of southern Ontario was under a wicked wind storm - one brother in the eastern part of the province lost a good chunk of his roof, another in the same city had nothing happen.  My mother lost a tree (actually her neighbour did, it landed on her property though!), and another brother in the western end of the province lost a few shingles but his neighbours got hammered).  I kept my car far away from any trees till the winds blew down, and otherwise avoided any damage, though my town got beat up pretty good.  The point of this aside is my gaming buddy Ron, who was going to come with me and run his own game in the evening, lost a chunk of roof and a 40' pine tree that landed in his neighbour's driveway (not sure if cars got crushed or not), and therefore had to bail on coming.

So I had a solo drive from Peterborough to Hamilton and got there in plenty of time to kibbitz with the fellows.  I also got a good parking spot to make my haulage distance bearable.  The extra time did cost me though, as I ended up buying a couple of t-shirts on offer, one of the Hamilton Tabletop Gaming Society's flagship "Peace Through Superior Firepower" club shirts, and a cool faux "Drink Coca Cola" Cthulhu shirt.

For the morning session I played Dux Bellorum by Dan Mersey (Osprey Games) for the first time, one of the few rulesets of his I don't have.  Working from my 1/8th Welsh heritage, I chose to play Welsh raiders making their way back with some cattle liberated from those filthy Anglo-Saxons (possibly 1/8 to 1/4 of my other heritage though - these decisions are so complicated).  The game was set up as basically two side-by-side battles, two of us Welsh (Howard and I), with Howard facing John and me up against Alex.  It was a very congenial game, and the rules were pretty simple to pick up, though it took me a while to sort out a good use for the skirmishers.

And we'd obviously forgotten to milk the cows before we made off with them, because they were bloody slow!  I only got 2" of movement out of them on the last turn, otherwise it was 1", 1", 1", 1"...

Some of the intense early fighting as the battlelines met:

Reinforcements for the Welsh!  After about 500 messages begging for them...

Pretty fun game with good company.  Not sure I have any ready projects that I could use the rules for, at least until maybe someone makes some 3mm Dark Ages (looking at you Magister Militum).

Then it was a chicken salad sandwich and buying some MDF bases for my Anglo-Zulu Wars / The Men Who Would Be Kings project (Dan Mersey again) and possibly 3mm samurai (Chrysanthemum Throne / The Pikeman's Lament (uh, Dan Mersey) / Irregular Wars).  I wasn't sure 3mm bases would work for 3mm figures, but since this will be truly big battles, with 30-64 figures per base, when I did a test set-up later they looked ok.  I also picked up some resin craters, all from 6 Squared Studios.

After the food, I set up my Song of Drums and Shakos game, this scenario being the "Thin Sled Line", where retreating French infantry have barricaded most of the table but Russian infantry have flanked them.  Also playing a part are Cossacks and French Hussars.  I'll do another post with my last playtest game later, as I only got this one shot of my game Saturday:

Not sure why it looks snowy maybe my phone's camera was suffering from condensation, the room was getting a bit muggy.  Hopefully some of the other attendees with cameras will do a full recap for us, I'll post a link later.

The game itself went ok, it ended with a fairly quick convincing French win, which I'd never seen in playtesting.  Oddly the Russians had one returning player and the other has the rules and read them, and the newbies whipped them despite a suspect initial set-up that left potentially lots of gaps for the Cossacks if they'd been bolder.  It was only an ok game for me as GM as I had one player struggling to get the rules; I was rushed at the start and didn't bring out my "So It's Your Turn" intro guide, and I think that was a mistake.

For the evening timeslot, I'd asked my local friend Mike to bring out his HO scale-ish WWII tanks to go with my 15mm terrain for a game of the new Toofatlardies rules "What a Tanker!".  Both of us were interested in them, but other than a few solo games by me in 6mm to get myself ready for Broadsword, neither of us had played.

I set up a bigger 6x4 winter mat and brought out all of my Russian village and most of my road pieces and winter trees to fill the table.  We opened it up to another four players to sign up for, for a full game of six (all I had the tokens for).  It was a Long Ball/King of the Ring scenario, so no real objectives other than blowing the enemy up.  Mike's tanks weren't really balanced, so we started with a Pz.IVB (me!), a IVG, and a StuG III on the German side, and two T-37/76s and a Lend Lease Sherman for the communists.  As tanks died, better tanks could come up - Tigers, KV-1, SU-152.  And tanks died...

A few pictures to tell the story:

The long view of our table.  The river was fordable, didn't want to make the Russians go over that bridge! 

The side view of the table, Germans coming from the left, Soviets from the right. 

The first kill of the game, Brian in the StuG IIIG took out the Lend Lease Sherman - oddly it ended up being Brian's only kill, but then he was also the only player to survive the entire game in his original vehicle, so he claims to have been the biggest tanker. 

The line-up of Brian's shot. 

Alas, I was the second player to have his tank deaded, killed by a T-34.  I almost had a wicked shot on one of the other T-34s, but after getting to rolling my damage dice with 3 sixes out of 4 dice, I realized I'd been buttoned and didn't have enough acquisition dice to walk through the acquire-aim-shoot sequence, so I had to take all that drama back! 

I did, however, eventually get one of T-34s when I came back as a Tiger (handy trick, that), and then as the game was winding down I got a second kill on the SU-152 when it kindly decided to stop facing me off and gave me a flank.  Here's the view with my Tiger carefully concealed behind a shrubbery and the 152 in the distance.

And here's the close-up from another side of the table, just so the reporters wouldn't miss this news:

In the end, two of us had two kills, but both of us lost tanks; Brian had one kill and no losses, and Keith (the other German) had one kill and one loss.  Both Keith and I got our first kills by finishing off guys Brian had damaged, but that's the way the cookie crumbles...

With that I attempted to escape Hamilton, which was harder than usual as the bridge over the harbour was closed for construction and I had to drive through most of the city to get out.  Got back at a solid 2:30am and that wrote off most of Sunday for me...

Broadsword 6 is in August and I'll be back with at least another SDS game.  A few other things are in the near-done pile and we'll see how my focus holds up over the summer.  I'm off to CanGames in Ottawa the weekend after next, just to play games though!

No Sword Like a Broadsword

As my last few posts should have made clear, I was down in Hamilton this past Saturday for Broadsword 4, put on by the Hamilton Tabletop Gaming Society at the Royal Hamilton Light Infantry Veterans Association.  It's a one day convention with a mix of miniatures and boardgames, and some that blur the line between the two, like my friend Mike's game of Conan.

After an early start, I picked my friend Ron up along the way, he was putting on a game of his homebrew 6mm operational level WWII rules (which I played, so more below), and we had a fairly decent drive into Hamilton.  Much better than the drive home!

Getting there we hobnobbed a bit with some of the other early arrivals that we knew and ran into Robert who we'd met at Hotlead in March.  I later learned Robert had built his own 1:1 scale Dalek and I'd probably seen it at the Ottawa Comic-Con last year!

I'll start with the games I played in, which were the morning and evening sessions, before I get to the game I ran in the afternoon.

First up was a game of Might of Arms with Mike M., set in the Northern Crusades circa 1197, which the Danes coming to civilize the poor, pagan (yet heroic) Estonians.  As you can probably tell, I was an Estonian, holding the right flank with Ralph on my left.  Mike and Dan were against us.  We had a stream with a lot of woods and rough round around it to use as our defensive line, and we made use of it, only our left flank had a gap in it between the wall of our village and the stream.

 My part of our line, before we actually put our troops into position.  I had a five medium infantry units, three went to defend the river line, two on the hill as reserve.  My five or six skirmish units either went in front of the mediums to chip away at the incoming Danes, or on a wide right flanking maneuver, eventually coming at the Danish subheavy foot from the flank and rear.

 The view toward's Ralph's side of the table, again before our final set-up.

 The lines are starting to meet, with the Danish mounted knights coming up against Ralph's heavy and light horse.  Mike is bringing his infantry in behind, and Dan (the Danish left) is angling some of his infantry to the right to hit our entire line.

 Dan's subheavy foot have gotten through my skirmishers, though some are still behind, firing into them when they can, and Dan's trailing unit is about to have guys on three sides firing at him.

 The Estonian left at the end of the game.  A hole was punched into our line and the knights were a-coming in against our rear, but their right had totally fled the field and we had our whole reserve to deal with them if we hadn't called the game at the point (an Estonian win!).

My side of the battlefield at the end of the game, after the Danes had routed away.  My skirmishers nickle and diming them on their way in, plus the defensive advantages of the stream and rough ground were more than the attackers could bear.

After that game, I checked out RAFM and 6 Squared Studios, who were there as vendors.  I didn't need any bases from 6SS this time, after making that buy in May, but from RAFM I was able to pick the two packs of Crucible Crush Pulp Figures (sculpted by Pulp Figures' Bob Murch), which included a guy who looks an awful lot like Silver John, from the awesome series of stories by Manley Wade Wellman (greatest name in the history of names) and another guy who looks like he should be a night stalker in 1970s Chicago, if you know what I'm saying...  I also picked up an old west store which will be perfect for my 1885 Riel Rebellion project, it looks a lot like one of the (or the only) store in the old pictures of Batoche.

Blackfyre Productions also had a great-looking table (I think they had two) as they're part of the Ontario Hobbit Adventures society (?) / collective (?) that plays Middle Earth SBG:  Ents vs. Uruk Hai:

Jumping ahead to my evening game, I played in Ron's WWII game against Robert, this one generically representing part of Gazala in 1942.  I was the defending British, Robert was the attacking Italians (it was his choice!).  Ron's game is area-movement and card-driven, the cards letting you move and shoot, or use artillery/air power, or some special events (like engineers putting down minefields).

I only got a couple of shots of the game, here's things near the beginning:

 The town and entrenchments are under my control, I've already lost a truck to long-range fire.  The Italians are in the distance, trying to spot my weak point.

This is at or near the end of the game, as the Italians ran out of time (cards) without taking any part of the town.  They'd done a good job of swinging around my left (the red smoke markers are where their vehicles died; yellow are my dead vehicles), but a carefully placed anti-tank minefield made them take the long way, and a spoiling attack I made with my Bren carriers really distracted them.

Now back to the afternoon, where I ran a game of Song of Drums and Shakos, "Out of La Marisma".  A squad of French hussars and a full squad of French carabiniers tried to seize a crossroads and road exit from British rifles and light dragoons in 1813.  There was a lot of rough terrain on the board, which channeled things a bit, but it was also the debut of a few buildings I've bought/built/painted over the last while, including a Spanish windmill only finished the Thursday before!

Robert played in this as well, commanding the French hussars, and also on his side was Harry (with the carabiniers).  The British rifles were under the command of Dan S., and my friend Brian from KEGS had the light dragoons, who had to wait a couple of turns to saddle up before they got into action.  The French victory conditions were to either take the crossroads by clearing the mill and granary of the British, or get a certain number/type of troops off the western exits, or just drive the British off the field completely.  The British had to stop all of that from happening.

The British rifles set up with their marksman hidden in the windmill, three riflemen in the mill on the second floor, and Lieutenant Lovecraft (it was a Mythos themed convention!) and three more riflemen were around the bridge.  The light dragoons, under Sergeant Reilly were saddling up behind the granary.

The French hussars decided to ride along the small trail to the main bridge, while the carabiniers would take the southern road towards the windmill.  

 This is about where things turned really wrong for the French, the riflemen in the open had moved into the swamp (good protection against cavalry!) and the riflemen in the mill had clear targets.  Also, the French carabiniers were rolling terribly!  About four turns in a row either the officer or the group he was ordering rolled a turnover.  They barely budged and the hussars were hung out to dry.

 More from that moment, you can see the smoke coming out of the mill.  And things get worse for the French as the light dragoons are up and on their mounts.  I really wanted this shot though to show off the windmill!

Near the mid-point of the game, despite the near-destruction of the hussars (4 out of 5, including Lieutenant Tindalos), the carabiniers are opening fire on the combined light dragoons and riflemen who are still out on the field.  Everyone's trying to hide behind shrubberies!  The riflemen soon retreated to the granary, and the light dragoons behind it to regroup and await the French moving towards the road edge.  One trait I gave the light dragoons to help balance things was Individualistic, meaning they couldn't be activated as a group.  It worked pretty well (and is pretty historic), though it frustrated Brian!

 Another shot from that moment in time.  The French were still rolling some really ill-timed turnovers!  The British had a couple, but nowhere near the frequency of the French - and all pretty troops had Elan, which with an officer or NCO meant they only needed to NOT roll a 1!  I'm also showing off my new roadside cross here, from Hovels.

The end game for the French - they've gotten close, but between some fire coming from the granary and their decision to tackle the light dragoons hand to hand, their end was nigh.

And that's a wrap for me at Broadsword 4 - a lot of fun at my second time at that convention, it was good to see a lot of friends again, and make some new ones.  I think my game went well, probably one of my best jobs at GMing, and SDS seemed to be popular.  A couple of the guys in the game had really wanted to play some Ganesha Games live and this was their first chance.

A few other AARs from Broadsword have shown up already too:

Must Contain Minis

Rabbits in My Basement

and on Facebook, the KEGS page.

Hotlead 2017

I've run out of cute titles for this report on Hotlead 2017, probably because I'm still suffering from sleepiness and random napping episodes after another fun-filled weekend in Stratford.  I'm just going to cover the games I played, other games around me, and my selling and shopping experiences in this post, then I'll cover my two (yes, two!) sessions as game host in a follow-up report.

My buddy Ron and I drove up together, so my Friday started with a mid-afternoon departure from Peterborough to meet Ron after he finished his afternoon shift as a crossing-guard in Pickering.  We hit the road ahead of schedule from his place, and despite some iffy predictions in the days leading up to the weekend, the weather was great.  Traffic was pretty good until we hit Cambridge, and then there was a lot of swearing in the car as traffic slowed to a crawl for no apparent reason (all the construction is off to the side of the highway) and turned our arrival into a bit of a scramble to eat, check in, and set up my Friday game.  I basically ended up doing all three at once.

I'll cover the game in another post, but here are some shots of what was going on Friday:

The shots above and below are general views of the crowd that night, folks were saying there was a lot going on for a Friday.  They're taken from my table, which was very conveniently right beside the bar :-)

I'm going through the schedule for the night to figure out which game is which, this is "Send Pirates, Guns & Money!" by the fellow who brings us "Mongols and Mausers" every year.  You didn't hear it from me, but word on the street was the Thai Rangers ended up with the drug cache.

Mark's "Battle of Slovchenko, Russo-Polish War 1920" game with TooFatLardies' Triumph of the Will rules, I heard this year the armoured train was captured!

These next two pictures must have been a late arrival to the schedule, unless I seriously misunderstood the Battle of Crysler's Farm in high school.

Charlie Company Vietnam game:

Frank from KEGS ran TooFatLardies' Dux Britanniarium games all weekend!  This Friday night one ended in a Saxon loss.

Brian's "Island in the Sun" Napoleonic naval game in a close-up view of the ships.

One of the set-ups at the Ontario Hobbit Adventures booth (they were selling terrain and bits too), a very, very, awesome Goblintown!

I also did almost all of my shopping that night, some PSC 1/72 Universal Carriers for Chain of Command, The Men Who Would Be Kings rules from Osprey, and some terrain bits and bobs.  After the gaming and shopping, many of us ended up in the bar for a few drinks and multiple wide-ranging discussions, and it was about 1 or 1:30 before I headed up to bed.

Saturday started with a run to get some fresh air and breakfast, then I was back to help Ron set up his operational-scale 6mm Kursk game, which he ran in the morning and afternoon Saturday (with an impromptu repeat Sunday morning) and get my stuff into the bring and buy.  I had some 15mm sci-fi, the bleeping 28mm not-Star Trek figures I've been unable to unload for about four years, some rulebooks, and one lone Osprey (that I'd accidentally bought two copies of) for sale.  All but the Osprey sold, so that was good and I basically ended up dead even for buys vs. sells over the course of the weekend.

While doing that, I also ran into Ontario Hobbit Adventures' other awesome set-up:

Before the morning's gaming started, I also did a bit of shopping at one booth (I'm guessing it was Empire and Eagle) and got some German and American WWII trucks, and Pz IIC's, all for Chain of Command.  And that was it for my shopping.  I've sort of run out of things to buy, there's a lot of 28mm pulp or VSF stuff from the vendors, but those projects are sort of on hold because I'm about 100 years behind on them; ditto for RAFM's 15mm sci-fi - and in that case I basically have everything.  So terrain, buildings, and 1/72 Chain of Command stuff made up almost all of my shopping list.  I did a couple of casual sweeps by the bring-n-buy table, but I wasn't committed enough to dive into the crowd.

Anyway, for Saturday morning I got into Brian's "Bloody Buron" battle with TooFatLardies' I Ain't Been Shot Mum rules, my first choice for the timeslot.  IABSM is my preferred set for whichever century I finally get my 6mm WWII stuff finished, and I love to play it.  In this scenario, three of us Germans defended a town in Normandy from a couple of Canadian companies.  It was a pretty bloody battle, like the name says, with a lot of artillery hits and burning Shermans, and was a marginal Canadian victory in the end, the Germans still held the town but were running out of resources to do so.

The table as the forces were setting themselves up:

My half-section of Pz IVH's, hiding.  I had a full platoon as reinforcements, but the game ended before they did more than race up the road.  These two guys did do a bit of damage, including later firing HE into those two buildings on the right.

This is probably about mid-game, before the German ATGs got revealed but after the Canadians dumped all sorts of smoke onto it.  The red-roofed buildings on the left are now occupied by Canadians, and you can see a couple of TDs following along.

Saturday afternoon I played in a six-player game of Frostgrave.  To avoid it turning into a deathmatch, the victory conditions encouraged us to do things other than kill each other's wizards, but that didn't last long and my magic-flamethrower-armed dwarves got into a drag-out battle with the wizard across from us (he started it, I swear!).  I think I killed more of his guys, but he killed the important guys in my warband.  Anyway, the terrain was spectacular and the GM did a good job of getting us all up to speed on the rules and magic; four of us hadn't played Frostgrave before.

This is just a plain awesome observatory.  I magically leaped one of my guys up there, and he did pick off some opposition but eventually got nailed himself.

My warband, pre-battle:

.

The later stages of the game, an icewall has been thrown up and I've got some opposition interfering with my attempt to read the ancient writing on the walls of the ruins at the centre of the table.

For Saturday night I had a crazy number of games I wanted to try and get into, in the end I had two that I agonized over, One was a big samurai battle using Chipco's Chrysanthemum Throne rules, which I have and have thought may be the best solution for middle-ground samurai rules and the other was an ECW big skirmish game using the new The Pikeman's Lament rules from Osprey.  I went with the latter and it was superb, a lot of fun and I ended up earning the most Honour by achieving my major and minor victory conditions (perhaps the only time in the history of the world that's happened to me).

The scenario had three Scottish forces and a Parliamentarian one (I think, it was at the other end of the table) vs. four Royalist forces.  The game was set up through so it was basically four two-player games, though with a bit of side to side action.  I think that was a good call, as it let the game flow and my opponent and I just had to worry about each other and we could work our way through the rules on our own.  Our main challenge was figuring out how hits turned into figure losses (it wasn't on the QRS) and after reading the rules again when I got home, I realized we'd been doing it wrong.  Luckily we kept turning to our host Mark to solve things for us and that didn't affect the game.

From left to right on the Scottish side, there was a battle over the body of a martyr who'd been tossed from the tower of a church, a battle over that same church, a village battle to find the guy who'd tossed the guy from the church tower, and then a fight over the high ground to see the town, church, and martyr.  I was the immortal Donald McHaggis, hero of the Covenant, fighting over the churchyard.  Here are my guys early into the battle, having not moved far because three of my first four activation rolls were 3s (and I needed 5s or higher on 2d6):

I had two shot units, a pike unit, a Scottish forlorn hope of crazies, and two Scottish trotter units, who were a bit handy with the pistol, but not up to fighting off a Royalist charge.  The photo below is mid-battle, the Royalists had seized the church and churchyard first because of my crappy rolls, but now I was fighting back.  I've driving off their pike in the centre (they're way behind the churchyard now) and my shot is working over the Royalist shot, with my forlorn hope ready to charge the church.  My cavalry on the left are protecting that flank (the Royalist horse never came after me in the end) and my pike block is doing the same on the right.  My other trotter unit has been drive back through a random event, they had been shooting at the Royalist shot unit in amongst the graveyard.  They did return though.  Shortly after this, the forlorn hope took the church, my shot took the churchyard, and though things got a bit crazy when some Royalist horse jumped over the wall and into the fray, ultimately things weren't sustainable for them.

I'm now super excited to get a TPL project underway.  Well, probably a few projects, you could do the ECW, TYW, WSS...

So that was my personal Saturday, here are some shots of the rest of the day:

Above and below are some more crowd shots, this must be from before the BnB opened.

A great Death Star set-up for X-Wing:

Beside the Frostgrave table was this Metaverse game that lived up to its name, Star Wars vs. Star Trek vs. Battlestar Galactica vs. Babylon 5!

That's alotta space ships!

An awesome village (Huron or Iroquois?) for Flint and Feather:

And of course Mongols and Mausers, as I said in a text with this photo I sent to my nephew: "Rule #1 is wear an awesome hat!"

The big "Fenian Raids 1866" game run by Pete and Keith:

Saturday ended with some chats with friends, another drink, and then a run to A&W to get a second dinner, things had been pretty hectic helping Ron take down his game, getting signed up for the evening game, so I just had another sandwich for dinner, which is about 1.5 sandwiches too many for me.  Not sure A&W counts as real food, but it hit the spot at 11pm.  After that I hit the sack as I had to get breakfast, check out, and set up my Songs of Drums and Shakos game all before 9 on Sunday morning.

So that wraps things up until my post of my own game hosting experiences, it was another great year of Hotlead, lots of familiar faces and friends and new ones as well.  Clearly the social event of the season!