Super Cheap Wargaming - my battlemat

 In an effort to save space and funds, I have been trying to figure out how to more efficiently store my wargaming surface. 

I have the grass mat pictured below, which looks lovely, but takes up a lot of space. It doesn't fit in my cupboard when rolled up. I don't have a 1m wide/tall space that is easily accesible so it just sits around in the way. Also, when playing with 1/72 Airfix Cromwells, the tracks get all caught up and hooked in the mat. 

When going to the Super Cheap Wargaming group many different things were suggested, one was spray painting patches onto my already existing desert felt.

So I gave it a go. I sprayed a section of my felt to see what it would look like. I was pleased. A few light areas, a few dark areas. I happened to have a green and brown spray. Lovely. I will try it with a game soon. 

July - Boardgame Night

 I made it out to the Boardgame Lounge the other night. I sat with a couple of people and got playing. The first thing we did was play L.L.A.M.A. which is a hilarious little game.

We also played Lucky Numbers which I really enjoyed. The point is to get rows and columns of ascending numbers. Simple, quick, but fun. Not fluff, no faff. A game after my own heart. 

Cubitos was an interesting game. It consists of rolling dice to create resources in order to buy further dice. The dice provide abilities that help your character move further in order to cross the finish line first/furthest. The entire thing was hilariously fun. It gave me flashbacks of Marvel Dice Masters, drawing, rolling, actions. There is a push your luck element, which screwed me at the very end, but there are also interesting catch up mechanisms. I liked it, it was fun, but losing on my final turn due to pushing my luck too far left a bad taste in my mouth.

Flamme Rouge is a cycling game. A race using cards with numbers on them for movement. But you need to judge correctly. If you speed out too fast, then you are penalised - the cyclists at the front have to draw a 2 movement penalty card that goes into their deck. It combines a bit of deck drawing and planning, which I like. Thoroughly enjoyed it to be honest. Coming second helped. 

I also played Zombie Dice - fun for a few minutes to fill the gap between games.

Activities Day 2023

 Hello all. It has been very quiet on the miniature painting and gaming front this month. I have been playing more board games, and preparing to host a couple of hours of intro wargaming at school. There is an existing Warhammer club on Fridays, but I can't stay on Friday, and feel weird about starting a second wargaming club at school, so I don't really know what to do here. Hosting a few kids wargaming was great. 

I had a few guys doing some WW2 gaming with my single sheet home brew rules. They enjoyed it and stayed for about an hour before wondering off to get chips and mess around outside. 

I forgot my roads...no idea where they are as they weren't in the tub with the bocage. However, that didn't stop them having a good time. It was nice to hear them talk about Panzer IVs and be able to play with essentially zero input from myself. 

I also spent hours preparing a few 100pt squads of Star Wars Miniatures - the Wizards of the Coast OOP game. I started by keeping them pure WOTC squads, as I don't own all of the V-Set cards, but then I realised that literally no-one cares about that, and I ended up screen clipping from Bloomilk onto a Word document. Thus they had their entire squad on a piece of A4 paper, which they could make notes on. I found it useful. Two guys, big Star Wars fans came and played a Captain Rex + clones vs. commando droids battle. They got a bit bored of it after a little while, but I feel I could have explained it better. Another student appeared and played a quick game with me. I had a bunch of jedi vs. General Grievous and some droids. I found it interesting that they all rathered play Clone Wars as opposed to Empire vs. Rebels. 

I home brewed some fantasy rules that were based loosely on Song of Blades and Heroes in terms of measuring sticks, but then dice rolls were different. They were more like Starport Scum. I took a hoard of skeletons who were fighting six adventurers. It was very basic, quick, but lots of annoying bad rolls. For a one-page set of rules pulled out of my bum for this though, I was happy. He had a laugh and may be more willing to come and try some more complex rules at some point.

I also brought: Zombies!!! but no-one was interested in that game. I will continue to bring it though as it is fun. Two other game that didn't see play: Star Wars Pocket Models, and Pirates of the Spanish Main. I just didn't set them up as I was more interested in playing Star Wars Miniatures to be honest. 

The Activities Day was a wild success and I will look to host this again next year. I might be able to start a club this time for reals? Not sure.

Take care all. It was great to be getting going.

UK Games Expo 2023

This year I decided to take my elder two children (8 and 6) with me. We were going to travel up Thursday night, Expo Friday, and see what happens Saturday. We ended up just doing the Friday but man, it was incredible. They were so excited to see their cousins, see the cosplayers, play some games, and buy their own dice. I got my dice out a couple of weeks ago and we just played with them building towers, which then led into playing a wargame. From that moment the girls wanted their own dice, and I can't attend a convention like this without buying a set (ask me when I last used a D4 though...).  

My eldest daughter signed up for a kids DnD session - loved it. We went to a stall where they gave out free D20s with a little snail body to rest them in. My girls are now hooked on dice. We spent quite a bit of time looking at various vendors and ended up deciding on one that was promoting a new RPG game that was crow themed. It was two sets for £10 so I bought one for me, one for each of them and one for my 3rd who immediately lost one when we gave it to him. The guy there also told the girls to pick up a free die from the basket of dice where you pick one for 50p if you want it. They were spoilt. This does mean I will have to now figure out a child-friendly RPG system to do little adventure with them.

These have little frogs inside them. What class. These are my son's dice. He loved them.

Cloud and Rainbow. Lovely.

These have unicorns inside. I cannot wait to use these with my RPGs when I get them started.

Rolled a 1, even with a giant D20 full of dice.

In the evenings I played Terraforming Mars - it lasted a long time but was amazing. We barely built any green areas in the first 6 or 7 generations. It went on to 10 generations. 

I was introduced to Framework and won. What a genuinely pleasureable logic/pattern spotting game. I enjoyed it from start to finish. No fluff, to bolted on theme. Just a puzzle to solve - how to get rid of your wooden bits before the others. 

I was introduced to Kites and Pairs. Both fun, quick games. I want more like these.

Song of Blades and Heroes - sort of

Yesterday morning I managed to get my children to play a battle. I went at them with an army of skeletons, and they each chose a figure from my stash. Middle child specifically asked for a warrior who is a girl. The Boy went for the coolest looking armoured dude. Oldest used the figure she painted herself. It was lovely. They trounced my skeletons...but it was always going to be that way.

 

A Poor Man's A Billion Suns - New Ships

 I have been plugging away at a few new ships for my clothes peg fleet. I find it oddly relaxing, just trying to work out the best shapes etc. I love it. I hope one day to actually use them! 

I have also been painting these guys up. My X-Com team. I love that game. I wish I could play it more.

Modular Magnetic Interior Terrain

 This was an idea that I took from the Facebook group "Super Cheap Wargaming." Someone had printed out these terrain tiles, stuck them to flexible magnetic sheet and then used a metal surface to keep the tiles from moving around. It looked amazing. I decided to try it, but have had a few issues with it which I will document here.

As you can see I had to shrink them down. I essentially screen-clipped the PDF images onto a Word document. I did my best to make sure I kept them all roughly the same scale and this was largely successful. If there is an easier way to shrink them all down 80% then I would like to know. I think they have scaled down quite well. If I were to do it again I would make them slightly larger so the bases fit exactly within each square. 

I am lazy. I wanted the most straightforward, least time consuming method of creating these terrain tiles. First I spent an evening chopping out the tiles. It was lovely, I put on a WW2 documentary and had a blast. Then I realised I would need to attach them to the white side of the magnetic sheet. I would either have to make exact cuts on the magnetic sheet or cover the white. I decided to cover the white with black paper - this happened. This will not do.

After some reflection I decided to reprint the tiles on card, cut them out, and stick them on squares of magnetic sheet. The magnetic sheet does not need to be the same size as the tiles as they are thick enough to hold miniatures. 

This is a seamless edit as I have at this point completed some tiles.

Well it turned out that the white side of the magnetic sheet was something you peel off to reveal a self-adhesive layer! Thus, I haven't needed glue or double sided tape. It has been a dream. See below.

Each tile has a strip of magnetic strip. Smaller than the size of the tile, cut roughly. They hold miniatures well enough. It will just be a bit time consuming cutting it all out and sticking strips of magnet on the back. I am excited about this though. 

I should also at some point buy a non-used baking tray to use exclusively for magnetic terrain.

April Board Game Night

 I made it to another board game night! It was great. I met some cool people and got to play a couple of games. Coatl - I had never heard of this before. Wingspan - I had wanted to play this for a while.

In Coatl you need to build three Aztecish snakes. It is pretty great to be honest. I will be trying to play it again. I had a great start but got caught out at the end and lost.

Wingspan is one of my sister's favourites. I played it and to be honest it was a lovely game. I loved it. The theme is just pleasant, threre is no combat as such. There is just something about it. I was relaxed the entire time playing it.

Blockhouses

 A while back I painted a bunch of wooden building blocks grey. The idea was I could use them as modular buildings, and possibly internal walls. Then nothing happened. 

The other day I had this idea though: the blocks are square. Why can't i just turn them into buildings by sticking greeblies on them?

The doors, fan and ladder are all Iliada Game Studios extras. Then I just stuck a bunch of random bits to them. I intend to prime and paint these this week, but to be honest I feel like they could actually be passable as they are?

If they work out okay I will probably build an entire town of these.

BGG - One Game Per Page - My top games from the top 600

This is a post I made over on Board Game Geek in an attempt to use their blog function. It was less user friendly than Blogger. I was inspired by another blog post to pick my favourite game from each page (one page being 100 games) in the top game rankings. I was surprised at how many I had actually played, but a little sad that some of my favourite games weren't in the top 600. It was meant to be the top 10 pages but I had none from pages 7-9 and stopped looking.

Page 1
Games Played:
6 Terraforming Mars
17 Castles of Burgundy
45 Agricola
62 Star Wars Imperial Assault
71 Eclipse
84 Seven Wonders
93 Battlestar Galactica The Game
100 Dominion Intigue

I am actually quite surprised by how many games in the top 100 I have played. Aside from Dominion and Terraforming Mars I have only played the others once. Also, many of them were played between 5 and 10 years ago.

Terraforming Mars is perhaps my all time favourite game right now. Everything about it is fun, but for me the concept of terraforming Mars as a game just gets me interested. It is like a game version of the Red Planet books.

Page 2
114 Dominion
116 Codenames
119 Pandemic Iberia
159 War of the Ring
160 Chaos in the Old World
168 Memoir 44
170 Cosmic Encounter

I guess Dominion is my favourite from this group. Memoir 44 is a superb game, and I am glad to have it, but it doesn't see much use as it is only two player. With Dominion I like the imagined kingdom in my head. I like the deck building element, which hopefully allows you to create an engine to score points. This is what I love about Terraforming Mars also - playing those cards to build a VP machine on the table. The theme of Dominion is part of what I love, even though some say it is paper thin. If the cards were to represent stocks or military units, or zombie things I don't think I would be as interested. I love my little kingdom and the ...dominion... I have over it.

Page 3
202 Carcassonne
210 Ticket to Ride
230 Taverns of Tiefenthal
263 Dixit: Odyssey
286 Telestrations

It probably has to be Carcassonne from this list. I have played it a lot, picked up the Big Box at GenCon 2012, and recently played it with my children, although I don't play many games with them. I like the tile laying aspect, and that you build a little world on the table. I have never actually played with all of the expansions I own.

Page 4
310 Survive: Escape from Atlantis!
316 Small World
337 Dixit
339 Mysterium
341 Takenoko

I found it odd that so many games, that I love, are on page 4. Small World is likely my favourite here, but Dixit and Mysterium are family favourites. They are games that my wife will actually play with me. In fact, I am going to go with Dixit as my top here, because I have had many a great time laughing about the images and our interpretations of them with many family and friends.

Page 5
401 Love Letter
417 Mice and Mystics
466 Forbidden Desert
467 Colt Express
471 Citadels
490 Catan

The bottom three on this list are the games I most remember. Catan was one of the first games to broaden my mind from Risk and Monopoly. Colt Express was a laugh whenever I played it. Citadels is a useful small game, that is filler with two people, but can last a good hour plus with more. I love the card laying, and small scale empire building with it. Citadels is my top game.

Page 6
510 Time's Up Title Recall
520 Alhambra
527 Sentinals of the Multiverse

Time's Up Title Recall has to be my favourite here. I love the game, many family memories, and the other two I barely remember. I think I liked Alhambra, but I honestly couldn't tell you a single thing about Sentinals. Time's Up is just a lovely, standard family party game that if I owned would be out every Christmas.

Beyond page 6 I moved three more pages and there were no games I remembered having played. As such I am calling it here. A little sad that my old favourites Star Wars Miniatures (WotC) and Marvel Dice Masters haven't made it.

Well, that is that. I hope you like it, and I will see what happens. Game night on Friday... maybe a new favourite emerges.