Wargames Among the Warplanes, Spring 2025 Show

 I had an absolutely amazing time today at Wargames Among the Warplanes, a twice-annual 1-day event held at the National Warplanes Museum in beautiful Geneseo, New York. I went to college in Geneseo, and never knew there was a warplanes museum five minutes from campus, until now. 

Truth be told, I almost didn't make it to the show today - in the past week I've pinched a nerve in my shoulder and had my car break down (was thankfully able to get it repaired - to the tune of $1500 - on Thursday!) and this morning I woke up queasy, with last night's dinner disagreeing vigorously. I'm so glad I soldiered through and made it though. 

I ran a homebrew scenario for Fistful of Lead for four players, with me just standing to the side and refereeing. Here's the precis the players were given:

 Angela Dellamorte, the daughter of the head of the Dellamorte crime family, has been kidnapped by the Jamaican Kings, an upstart gang newly arrived in town. Her father has tasked his top lieutenants with getting her back and punishing her kidnappers. The lieutenants see an opportunity to get each other out of the way and ensure their own advancement in the family. After all, once the bullets start flying, who's to say who shot who?  

Everyone except the Jamaicans were armed exclusively with short-range weapons - pistols, submachine guns, and shotguns. The Jamaicans had a trio of submachine guns, as well as an automatic rifle and a LMG being carried by their hulking behemoth of a leader. I figured the Jamaicans could stand to have a little extra firepower since they were under siege and outnumbered, and the shorter ranges would make players move their figures around the board instead of just hunkering down and sniping at each other.

Additionally, there were a few side-missions that could be undertaken for additional victory points - collecting pallets of laundered money and hard drugs and carrying them off the table, giving a sympathetic interview with the TV news crew, and trading in their small arms for an unlicensed automatic rifle from the guy running the fireworks stand. 

Not to toot my own horn too hard or anything, but my table looked great and I got a ton of compliments on my terrain and my figures as well, which felt really good. 

To my very great surprise, I actually had more buildings than would fit on the table. Go me!

The players had a great time, especially once they learned they could hotwire the various vehicles on the table and go on vehicular manslaughter joyrides. One gang quickly piled into the Taco Truck and went on an absolute rampage of destruction before totaling it against the front of the bingo hall. Most of the pictures I took were of that rampage:

Get in, youse guys, we're going on a rampage.

They didn't even run these guys over, just gave 'em a driveby shotgunning.

Ramming speed!

The destruction smelled amazing, though.

The mobster known as "Fat Paulie" was ultimately the winner - having rescued Angela Dellamorte, put two rival gang leaders (and most of their henchmen) out of action, and having a gang member upgrade their weapon at the fireworks stand. The Jamaicans came in second place, having given an interview and collected the laundered money.

Make sure you get my good side, or you'll get on my bad side!

All Paulie is thinking about is the tragic destruction of the taco truck.

I didn't play in anybody else's games (though there was a biplanes vs. King Kong game I would have loved to have played), simply because I had a very long commute and my game took three hours to play through. I did walk around during the lunch break though and took a look at some beautiful tables.

I also had a couple people encourage me to bring my game, or something similar, to Running GAGG - the annual gaming convention put on by the gaming club at the college, which I've been attending for the past 20 years - next year, to increase the number of wargames being played there, and to better promote "Hey! There's more to wargaming than just Warhammer!" to the next generation of gamers. I'm open to the idea, but I might choose to bring something where I don't need a giant tote bin of terrain and can run 30-minute demo games instead of one 3-hour scenario. 

***

Today was really, really good for me. Like, being at Wargames Among the Warplanes today nourished my soul. I've taken a few knocks in the hobby lately - some verbal scrapping with people who think I'm an elitist for wanting to play with painted miniatures, people telling me that seeing my painted miniatures makes them feel bad about their own painting, and so, so, so many people who think tournament Warhammer is the alpha and omega of miniatures wargaming and refuse to even acknowledge that anything else exists. 

It gets discouraging after a while to be steeped in all that, but the congenial atmosphere, good sportsmanship, and just general community spirit I saw today - I helped carry drinks and snacks from the organizer's car into the venue, and had offers to help me carry my tote bins of stuff back to my car when I'd packed up - was reaffirming. This is what I want out of the wargaming hobby. I want more of this atmosphere, this community. I want to spend more time surrounded by people who just want to have a few laughs pushing painted figures around on a table with some nice terrain on it. 

And I'm going to get it. Because in chatting with the organizer, he asked if I'd be open to doing more wargaming outreach-type programs like this. He was so happy to see me add Fistful of Lead to the schedule, because he's played it before and thinks it's a great game, and regretted that he had administrative work to do alongside refereeing a Bolt Action tournament that forced him to miss out on playing it. He mentioned how happy it made him that everybody brought painted figures and terrain to the event today; there was no bare plastic or metal to be seen anywhere except the flea market table. Hearing him say that was music to my ears and affirmed that I was among my tribe. 

Plus, I bought a T-shirt so I'm now officially part of the Greater Niagara Wargamers; next up will be joining the organizer's club, the Whiskey 7 Wargamers. They've got snappy short-sleeve button-down shirts with embroidered club logos. 

I'm excited for the next show, and for what the future holds. 

organizer's photo of me talking through some of the rules with some of my attendees.

Merry Christmas 2024

 Best wishes of the holiday season to everyone out there in wargaming bloggerland; may the season bring you good food, fine company and plenty of toy soldiers and reading material.

My wife Gina outdid herself this year; for the past few years I've been a big fan of the painting "Military Tactics" by Alfred Lyndon Grace, which shows two boys playing toy soldiers while their grandfather watches and offers strategic advice. It's regularly my top banner pic on Facebook and occasionally my desktop wallpaper. 

Gina went and got me a framed printed of "Military Tactics" for me to hang up on a wall somewhere here in the house; it's likely going to be the dining room, since the dining room table pulls double duty as my wargaming table. Probably going to end up being in the same spot where my dad hung his framed print of "Washington Crossing the Delaware" for many years. 

(As an aside; we spent a night at the house back in April, while my parents were on vacation, to get a sense for what the house was like at night. Gina's comment was, "there are more pictures of George Washington on the walls then there are pictures of you or your sister." Perils of being a family of historians!)

And then to top me off, she also got me an MDF building for my modern wargaming tables; a pawn shop from Atomic Laser Cut Designs. I'd first heard about ALCD from Mr. Martin at The Safe Hole, who gave them a shout-out after buying some Old West buildings from them. I'd had my eye on their "Big City Streets" line and put a couple options on my wishlist for Gina to pick from. Since a lot of my building choices are inspired by the Rust Belt surroundings I've spent my entire life in - and thus are dingy, rundown, obviously not a wealthy area - she chose the pawn shop to go along with the bingo hall and trailer park I've already got. 

Manufacturer's photo of the assembled kit

I've already got some ideas for painting and furnishing; I'm also looking at graffiti decals I can apply to the walls especially around the back of the building...

Figuring Out 2025 Plans

 So first thing's first - I haven't done any gaming lately. Haven't gotten my army to the game store for Warhammer: The Old World. Kind of...not really feeling it? I've just been really tired lately; both physically because insomnia's been on me like stink on a monkey, and mentally drained by holidays, adjusting to homeownership, and caring for my spouse, who's been having mobility issues lately. It's hard to justify trips to the hobby store right now as well - my beloved cat Atticus is going to need a couple hundred dollars' worth of  of testing done at the vet's office in the new year, as the old gent is likely experiencing arthritis pain in his hips, has a heart murmur, and needs bloodwork done to get his new vet to sign off on renewing his thyroid prescription. So I am looking at putting away money towards those bills in advance.

I have been painting a fair amount of scatter terrain, and working on some modern figures:

Pallet of cash by Miniature Building Authority

Junk Pile w/ Engine and Dead Donkey by MBA, mattress by Crooked Dice

Sweaty lowlife by Brigade Games

Which brings me to looking ahead to 2025. I know, I know, I've had two posts about this before, outlining plans for prehistoric and samurai wargaming as focuses for the year upcoming. But I think I need to be realistic and take a few things into account. 

I've got a bit less in the way of disposable income right now regardless, because we've got property taxes, school taxes, things I didn't have as a renter. And it's a hundred year old house; it does take some upkeep. 

So starting new periods, and building accompanying terrain collections, seems ill-advised. I have a respectable collection of modern buildings, roads, fences etc., and expanding my scatter for modern games, and a number of the games I enjoy playing fit that time period perfectly - Fistful of Lead, Majestic 13, and Perilous Tales - which is newly out in finished PDF! 

I'm laying out three goals for myself for 2025:

• Remain focused on one setting - modern-era urban environment, reflecting the Rust Belt surroundings I've spent my entire life in. 
• Play two games a month, solo or otherwise. Especially in the winter months it's going to be solo games. Having friends over and hosting games of Fistful of Lead or co-op games of Majestic 13 when possible. 
• Paint more than I buy. Moving this year really showed me just how big my leadpile has gotten, and I'd like to work that down if possible. Maybe I should make this a goal of needing to paint one figure for every new figure I want to buy and add to my collection. Either way, I intend to track both figures painted and figures purchased in 2025. 

I don't know how I'm going to count terrain painted towards my painted count for the year, if at all. 

A corollary goal to #2: I've had this idea in my head for a while now of putting on a big participation game for Halloween. Jaye, the author and publisher of Fistful of Lead, does a big annual zombie-hunting game for Halloween where 4-6 players have try to fulfill objectives while zombies spawn randomly at a half dozen points on the table. I'd love to do something similar, set up a big urban table and have a few friends over for pizza and a game where street gangs and the police fight among themselves while also trying to fend off waves of zombies. It would mean an investment in zombie figures (doable), but I think it'd be a really fun time. 

So I think, with three weeks left in 2024, I have an actionable plan for responsible hobbying in 2025. No plan ever survives contact with the enemy, but let's see how long I can make this last. 

Claudia and Adler

 Recently my wife Gina asked me to paint a figure for her; not for use in a game or anything like that, just something she could have on her desk at work to make her think of me. I'd received a box of figures from Dunkeldorf Miniatures and we went through it together; she decided she really liked "Claudia 'Schwartz' Hinkel," a crossbow-armed member of a criminal syndicate, as well as "Adler, Dieter's Cat." Dunkeldorf has consistently sent me a little baggie of extras with every order I've placed with them, and this time that included a resin base with a flagstone pattern. It was the work of a few moments to clip Claudia's metal tab off and glue her to the resin base.

Talking with Gina, the only specific requests she had for color was she wanted Adler to be an orange cat with white socks, and she wanted Claudia to have purple hair; she also asked for a little flocking to be added to the base. The rest of the color scheme was left up to me; I went with a deep red for her shirt and black pants, because those are colors Gina wears a lot. 

I really pushed myself harder to give this the best paint job I could give it; it's not going to win any big competitions, but those are the best eyes I've ever painted and overall I'm thoroughly pleased with the job I did here. The purple I used for her hair came out glossier than I'd like, but hopefully once she's varnished that will tone down some. Her base reads "With All My Love" and once she's varnished, she'll be glued down inside an acrylic display case to keep her dust free and safe from our own cat's attention.

Improving my Solitude

 So I've been in a bit of an odd space mentally in regards my hobbies lately, and it's got me doing some soul searching. I posted a condensed version of this on Instagram earlier, but I want to use this space to flesh it out a bit more. 

Two weeks ago in my monthly session with my therapist, I told her I felt profoundly lonely; that I felt torn between two competing drives: on the one hand, I miss in person gaming. I'm not sure how I feel about returning to running and playing games at my FLGS (more on that later), and I am playing in a semi-regular D&D campaign with some friends face to face, though it's now been over two months since I've been able to meet with them. On the other hand, I have the well-being of my spouse, who is immunocompromised, to take into account; every trip out is a calculated risk and I feel hard-pressed to justify spending a couple hours at the game store where, lets face it, even at the best of times some of my fellow patrons struggle with the concept of personal space. One of my favorite stories to tell is the time in 2019 I was running a game in store, and someone standing behind my chair adjusted the straps on the backpack so that it was resting on my shoulders instead of theirs. Very much a "what the hell" moment at the time, but very illustrative of my point. 

These feelings have been compounded by an increasing difficulty I've had in even getting a virtual table together for a role-playing one-shot over the past four or five months. These two people want to play, but won't play at the same table as each other (even virtually), this person wants a game but can't (or won't) find space in their schedule where they can meet me halfway, that person has a history of canceling an hour before game when they've known for three weeks they can't make it on the date scheduled, and I've had a half-dozen people practically begging me for games but as soon as I ask them "what days and times work for you" I get ghosted. I've bent and twisted myself in knots trying to accommodate people for months and it feels like no one will meet me half way, and I'm tired of feeling taken advantage off. I think the straw that broke the camel's back was a player I've run for, on and off, for five or six years now, who told me they'd double-booked themselves for a date and time I'd finally managed to pull together a game on, and that they'd decided they were more excited for the other game. Just tell me you can't make it, because this was just salt in a wound. 

As far as my miniature painting/wargaming hobby goes, I spent last weekend cleaning and organizing my hobby space. My wife and I live in a one bedroom apartment and so I stake out the back half of our dining room table as a painting space, I've got a shelving unit next to the table with terrain, battlemats, and project boxes on it, and a large storage tote in the bedroom closet that's something of an unofficial "Graveyard of Dead Projects." I cleaned things up, condensed things (all my unpainted orcs and goblins for Warhammer are in one box now instead of two, etc.), pulled boxes out to pass along to wargamers who will appreciate them, and in so doing I've made myself a lot more introspective about my hobby.

These are my shelves post-cleanup. Not perfect, but leagues better than they were.

 

Going forward, I want to be a lot more thoughtful about what I bring into the apartment; I want to make sure my wife has her craft space secured and that I'm not overflowing into it, and I don't want to be shoveling money into projects that I may never actually start, let alone finish. I want to get away from the sense of FOMO I get with miniature kickstarters as well. 

And that leads me into wargaming. I bought the Stargrave rulebook about three weeks ago, because my friend Tom tipped me off that there would potentially be some Stargrave campaigning going on at our FLGS. I haven't been a regular at my game store since they've re-opened to general gaming; and I asked on the store's Discord server about how busy the store tended to be on Thursday nights (which is wargaming night), explaining that with my wife's illness, if the store was likely to be crowded I probably wouldn't be able to attend. The response from the store's social media person (not the owner) rubbed me the wrong way; they told me not to use the crowdedness of the store to judge personal safety and it came across, to me, very condescending and read like "well just don't come in if you think there's any risk." My therapist, reading this person's response, instead interpreted it as "well you'll never mitigate all risk, so just come in." 

I replied to this person that no, the presence or absence of a crowd isn't our sole metric for assessing risk, but it is one of the factors we take into account. Still, I'm having difficulty shaking the nettled feeling I got from the interaction. Maybe it's how the pandemic changed me, maybe it's how it changed the business, but I've felt less welcome when I've gone in for books or paints since 2021 and this feels like a continuation of that trend. And it's made me stop and ask myself, "Do I really want to go in on Thursday nights after work to play Stargrave?"

And finding an answer to that question has gotten...messy. I've had a lot more bad experiences playing wargames in the various gaming stores around Rochester than I've had good ones, unfortunately. Between unabashed cheating, people bringing crowd-sourced tournament lists to "friendly" games, bellicose people who are looking for someone to take their frustrations out on and people who get belligerent at the thought of playing with any victory condition other than "table the opponent"...do I want to keep subjecting myself to that?

Don't get me wrong, I've had a couple really good games at local stores, and games with my friend Tom are always a pleasure, even when he has tabled me. But it's hard not to be wary of gaming with randos. The other thing I'm wary of with gaming at the store is getting caught up in chasing the Next Big Shiny Thing. Right now Stargrave is popular; I don't want to rush to paint a whole bestiary and terrain and this that and the other thing (all of which takes up space - see my earlier point) only for interest to disappear entirely in three months as the community moves on to the next game that catches people's interest. I busted my hump trying to get people at the store to play Frostgrave a couple years back, followed by a similarly failed attempt to interest anyone in Fistful of Lead. 

The only way I'm going to ensure that the local community is going to stay invested in a game long enough for me to be able to afford buy-in and paint everything I need to paint is if I jump back on the Games Workshop wagon; and even then, it's an arms race to stay "competitive" since none of these people play Warhammer 40K or Age of Sigmar as anything but an aggressive, competitive game, always preparing for the next tournament. I danced the Age of Sigmar dance a few years ago, spent a couple hundred bucks and after a few painful months realized I was having a miserable time. I don't want to get back on that wagon, and I'm pretty sure my wife would bounce me off all four walls of our apartment if I tried. She loves me, she supports my wargaming, but she's got no love for Games Workshop either. She also saw how despondent I came home after my last game of Age of Sigmar and how I put my AoS army in the closet and didn't touch it for months afterwards. She won't let me do that to myself again. 

That also takes me to my Oldhammer Orc and Goblin army. I dusted it off last month and started adding to it with plans to take it to Da Boyz GT this year but - why? When I stop and think about it, I almost question my sanity. I've never heard anything about Warhammer tournaments that make them sound like experiences I want - timed games of cutthroat competitiveness and army lists tailored towards victory at all costs is the precise opposite of the leisurely art of kriegspiel that I want to involve myself in. I think I saw the photos of 2022's event and went "I have the miniatures to participate in that!" and jumped in with both feet without thinking. The more I think about it (especially in the light of my wife's illness) the less desire I feel to participate.

I've been playing solo games through the pandemic, and last week, while my wife was in the hospital for a round of treatment, I put Donald Featherstone's 1973 book "Solo Wargaming" on my Kindle and read it while sitting next to her. I came away so much more energized and inspired than I'd been in weeks, eager to resume solo play with a host of new (to me) ideas to make my games more interesting for me such as chance cards, ways of randomizing deployment, etc. I was immediately excited at the prospect of a solo campaign, complete with a map of the area, tracking wins and losses, and letting individual toy soldiers develop histories, personalities, accolades. 

I decided I wanted to go with 6mm scale for ease of storage and gentleness on my wallet; it helped I'd invested in some 6mm scifi terrain a couple months back for use with Wiley Games' "Battlesuit Alpha." A sci-fi campaign set on some imagined world in an imagined future with hover tanks and laser cannons (and maybe a few giant stompy mech suits) sounds very appealing to me. I've got a core idea I've been kicking around for the past few days of what the conflict is and who the belligerents are in it, and I ordered some figures and vehicles (from Microworld Games, since the cyber attack on the Royal Mail puts UK manufacturers beyond my grasp for the moment) to start getting a feel for 6mm scale. I'm anticipating using "Battlesuit Alpha" for tank battles and "Bigger Battles" for more strictly infantry battles. 

Which circles me back to where I started this post; maybe it's not that I'm lonely, per se. Maybe I just need to improve the quality of my solitude. It's important for me not to lose sight of the fact that first and foremost I should be enjoying myself - that this is a hobby, a respite from the day to day, and if it's stressing me out or making me unhappy, I am doing it wrong. Making sure it's a creative outlet that inspires and encourages me, a pleasant place my mind can drift during the drudgery of the work day, I think that will do much more for my mental and emotional well-being then just gaming for the sake of gaming. One of my big takeaways from Age of Sigmar was that not playing games was better than playing games I wasn't enjoying, and I don't want to backtrack on that. 

So this has been a long post, and it's been a lot of kind of just organizing the thoughts that have been swirling through my head for the past two weeks. Call this a journaling exercise maybe. I hope it hasn't come across as too bitter or aggressive; I think I've just not let myself realize how trampled I've been feeling.

Changing Direction

I'm not happy playing Age of Sigmar.  I thought maybe I could make it work, but it's just not the right game for me.  So, I've put out some feelers and might have a couple guys who'll take my army off my hands piecemeal.  And if I'm being honest with myself, I don't see myself putting in the level of work to get a Kings of War army off the ground either. 

Outside of Frostgrave and miniatures for role-playing games, I'm feeling just about done with 28mm scale.  And a big chunk of this is that we're getting ready to move out of our current apartment and into a new one in a few weeks, and in preparation I've largely packed up my miniatures stuff.  It ended up being a lot bigger of a pile than I expected, even with some pretty darn good Tetris'ing to get various boxes packed into a big plastic tote. 

So I've been doing some heavy thinking today, and I keep circling back around to an idea I've come back to a number of times in the past without pulling the trigger on: 1/72 scale plastic figures.  They're inexpensive ($11-$17 for around 40-50 infantry or a dozen cavalry), they'll take up less space to store, and the sculpting has improved significantly since I was a kid (although those old kits I used to see in my dad's monthly Squadron catalog are still on the market in most cases). 

The big stumbling block in my thinking in the past was getting someone interested in playing with me in that scale; and I think I've found the work-around.  Solo wargaming.  Yes, yes, "playing with myself" jokes aside, it does lose some of the social aspect of wargaming, but at the same time, gaming on my schedule, with the rules of my choice, is definitely appealing. 

As for rulesets, I'm leaning towards Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames, which I first picked up almost four years ago now.  I think a couple boxes of figures would make for a really enjoyable winter's solo campaign.  My current inclination is a couple boxes of Zvezda Hundred Years' War English and a few of Dark Alliances' Tolkien-inspired Orcs; run the English as a generic medieval human kingdom using the Medieval rules from One-Hour Wargames, and run the Orcs using the Dark Ages list to represent their lighter armor and looser organization. 

Happy Birthday to Me

Today marks 30 years so far on this funny little world.  And my mother beginning to introduce me as "my husband's son from his first marriage" - technically correct, as they've only ever been married to each other, but since she doesn't feel old enough to have a 30 year old son...

I'm not going to wax on about getting older or any such stuff and nonsense, I will merely note that I had a very nice day today, including donating blood to the Red Cross and eating a great dinner with Gina.  After dinner we swung by Just Games, I had some nice conversation with good friends, and picked up a few new figures to paint.

I figure I could use a break from the blues and golds of my Age of Sigmar army, and I've been reading over my copy of Osprey's Dragon Rampant again lately.  I'd love to play it but I suspect I'll need to provide demo armies to make that happen.  I've got several packs of Reaper Bones skeletons, courtesy of Thomas of Learning By Doing, from last year's Secret Santa exchange, so an undead army is a no-brainer of a side project.  And not just because there's a lot of empty skulls rattling around!

I know I want skeletons to be the bulk of the army, but not for it to be exclusively skeletons.  So when I saw three Reaper "Grave Wraiths," cast in translucent blue-green plastic, I knew I had a reduced model unit for Dragon Rampant on my hands.

Got them home, got them cleaned, and got them glued to some spare 40mm square bases I had laying around:

I'm thinking these will be a unit of Bellicose Foot with the Flyer and Undead (No Feelings) Fantastical rules added on.  What do you think?

Carry(ing Case) On Up the Appian Way

Good lord that's a tortured mixture of pun and pop culture reference in the title of this post, isn't it? Terrible.  But it's the best I could do to appropriately title this post.

Yesterday marked my six year anniversary with Gina, and in keeping with her tendency to be incredibly thoughtful and generous, she bought me a new carrying case for miniatures, Reasoning that I'm looking at building all these warbands and armies for various games and my stated desire to run demo games at the store, she decided it would be a better gift to buy me the carrying case I'd been eyeballing rather than more miniatures.  This is the unbranded "Sword Bag" from Battlefoam, with pluck-foam trays rather than precut.  It came with a 3" tray, a 2" tray, 2 1.5" trays and a 1" tray, which will cover all my needs admirably.

Atticus thinks this is for him.  

Additionally, we bought it from our local FLGS, rather than ordering it online, in the interest of supporting our local gaming community with our purchase.  Just Games was running a Thanksgiving promotion this week, meaning by spending more than $40 in store, we got to select a free game off a pile by the register, and we walked out having added "Nitro Dice," a card/dice racing game, to our collection.  It is a game that can be played with 2 players (unfortunately, a number of games we've bought require 3 or more players to run), so we'll possibly be checking that out this weekend.  I've played a couple very fun racing games in the past, and this one looks like it'll also appeal to my fondness for women in tiny shorts.

*ahem*

Moving on...

I also picked up a copy of Osprey's "Broken Legions" skirmish game yesterday; for those unfamiliar, the premise is that Greco-Roman Mythology is true, and Roman's continued survival rests not on the backs of its legions, but on small teams of "special forces" fighting a covert war to claim and protect relics of divine might from those who would use them to undermine the Empire Without End.  On the first read-through, I'm inclined to agree with Richard Rush's assessment in the comments on my last post, that it doesn't look like it really does anything that Frostgrave doesn't do as well or better, but I'm willing to give it a run-through in play and see if that changes my mind.

Either way, I think I only need to buy something absurd like three or four more figures to be able to field four 150 point warbands - a Greek, Germanic, Egyptian/"Cult of Set," and a Parthian one.  I don't have any Roman figures handy; truth be told I'm eyeing Foundry's line of Imperial Romans for this somewhere down the line.  I have a ton of Wargames Factory plastic Greeks and Persians that I bought on sale two years ago sitting in my closet that will fulfill the Greek and Parthian warbands, and the "Cult of Set" and Germanic warbands will mostly just repurpose the Cult of Set and Valkyrie warbands I've assembled for Frostgrave.

I think the only figures I don't have readily on hand are a werewolf for the Germans, an Oracle for the Greeks and a Prince and Magus for the Parthians, and those will be fairly easy fixes I think.

Miniature Painting in the Blood

No, I haven't gone off the deep end and started applying my own hemoglobin to miniatures for "realism."  I just saw this photograph on the Perry Brothers website:

Painted by a Chris Adcock.  And I happen to be William (Bill, for preference) Adcock.  The Perrys are based out of Nottingham, which is a 42 minute drive from Leicester, where my great-grandfather was born.

It would not surprise me in the least if it turned out that this Chris Adcock and I are somewhat distant cousins.  I joke that holding a university degree in History is the Adcock Curse (I have my degree in History, as does my father, as did his mother, who was one of seven women working towards a Masters Degree at Columbia University that year), but perhaps painting toy soldiers is as well.  I paint them, my father built model kits and 1/32nd scale plastic figures until he was in his 40s, and apparently there are Adcocks back in the Motherland working with toy soldiers as well.

Feeling the Wargaming Bug Again

Traditional historical wargaming, for whatever reason, is essentially a dead hobby in America, I think.  I don't know if the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons from wargaming contributed to its decline, or if it's somehow seen as an "English" thing that we, as Americans, have turned our backs on out of some sense of patriotism, or what.  Either way, I cannot drum up interest locally for historical gaming; wargaming, if it occurs at all (especially where I live), is strictly Warhammer/40K stuff, with a little bit of Malifaux seeming to float around as well.

I don't have the money, nor the time, nor the steadiness of hand and keenness of eye to handle that sort of gaming.  I'm realizing that as I putter at applying paint to a few Reaper Bones figures; even my big, chunky Bugbears are giving me trouble (in part because I can't lay down a basecoat on these figures without clogging the detail).  I think, for financial and eye-strain reasons, if I resume wargaming I'll need to go down to 1/72 scale plastic figures or similar.

Nevertheless, I'm craving the act of setting up painted toy soldiers, pushing them around a table, and creating a narrative of a battle being fought between them.  This flared up extra-hard yesterday; I was listening to the Hardcore History podcast's newest episode, on the rise of the Achaemenids, and I just desperately wanted to recreate the battles fought by the powers of the time - the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Hittites, all of them.

This is probably because I'm some sort of crazy person.

I also want to not spend money on things right now; Gina and I have agreed to do a giftless Christmas because the consumerist urge and the constant media barrage demanding that we SPEND SPEND SPEND BUY BUY BUY takes away from what really has value in our lives.  I don't want to keep up with the Joneses; I want to celebrate what I have that's important.

Instead, we're putting money away instead for two trips to Columbus, Ohio in Summer 2016; in June, to attend Origins Game Fair, which we may attend strictly as civilians or which I may try to run a game of Call of Cthulhu at.  Haven't really made up my mind yet, and I have a few months yet before event registration closes.  Then in July, we'll be returning to the same hotel to attend Pulpfest 2016; we both had a very nice time at the 2015 show, and met some really great people and ate wonderful food, so we'd like to return to that show.

So what's a crazy person to do?

I won't lie, I came close to pulling the trigger on some 1/72 scale plastic Egyptians and Sea Peoples yesterday; each box would have sufficed as a full-sized army for Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames (which I still want to try out one of these days; and there are solo play rules in there...) but restrained myself; even if it only came to $25 for the two boxes of figures plus shipping, that's still $25 that could have been a meal for Gina and I at Origins or Pulpfest, or a new book at either show.

I took a pretty significant pay cut when I switched jobs back in August, and I'm still adjusting to the new pay-schedule (I get paid every other week now, whereas every other job I've held since 2004 paid weekly), plus Gina just went down from working a per diem job plus two part time jobs while going to school full time, to just school and the two part time jobs, so we don't have a ton of excess money right now; we can cover our bills just fine and have a bit left over for fun, but it would feel very irresponsible of me to throw away money on a hobby on a lark like that; What does it matter how little I'm spending on armies if I've got nobody to play with? Playing a solo game just seems lonely.

So I'm going to bank this for now and see how I feel in the coming weeks; if the desire's a passing thing brought on by listening to the history of Cyrus the Great, I'll feel better about not buying two boxes of soldiers.  If this keeps up, I may just have to bite the bullet and play by myself for a bit.

No-Buy July is Coming...

As an experiment, Gina and I are forgoing any and all luxuries we have to spend money on for the month of July.  She's been very worried lately that she's becoming too materialistic, or too greedy a consumer (in large part because she's fallen in love with yarn produced by a specific indie dyer and seller, who releases each collection of vibrant, hand-dyed yarn for only a few hours, one weekend a year, with a different collection available each week).  She feels awful about sitting by her computer waiting for these sales to start up each weekend and feels guilty for spending her hard-earned money so lightly, especially when, with her current schedule, she has very little time for knitting. 

So we decided to try going a month without spending like that - if she wants to begin a new project she has to use yarn from her stash, while if I want to watch a movie, it needs to be one I already own - if I want to paint miniatures, they have to be ones I already have avaialble, and if I want to run a game I have to already own the books.  We're also cutting way back on going out to eat for the same reason. 

We bought a Scrabble set on Friday night and have been enjoying a daily game of that, which seems to help with her anxiety as well, and we also got a folding table and a 1000 piece jigsaw puzzle that she intends to assemble and then frame as a gift to my parents. 

We also had a massive "pre-No-Buy July" splurge; she bought a couple hundred dollars' worth of ultra high-end hand-dyed yarn, and I bought about $90' worth of Reaper Bones figures (it dawned on me that, having the prime them by hand with gesso, Bones will be a great project for me during the winter months when I can't go outside and spray-prime, plus with my renewed interest in Dungeons & Dragons - and nice new folding table to play on when it doesn't have puzzle on it - I'd like to get out the miniatures again for that purpose) and a big stack of OSR books. 

Does it maybe defeat the purpose of No-Buy July if we have a big buying spree right before? You tell me. 

A.R.M.Y.M.E.N.

I've been looking for a wargaming club in my area, and there just don't seem to be any; everything I've found reference to either went defunct five years ago or more, is Warhammer/40K exclusive, or has broadened its gaming scope to be all-inclusive and thus there's one wargamer sitting amidst dozens of people playing Magic: The Gathering or trading Pokemon on their vintage Gameboys.

There are actually a large number of gaming clubs in my area; we've got a plethora of colleges, including my alma mater, and they all have gaming clubs and all put on their own annual conventions.  I was a member of the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, the organization for State University of New York at Geneseo, all four years of my college experience and an officer of some stripe or another for three of them, rising as high as the rank of treasurer, though primarily holding ceremonial posts such as "Minister of Wargames and Board Games."

But the thought occurs to me that now, as then, if I want wargaming to happen in my area I need to be the one to make it happen.  Running GAGG, the convention put on by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, is rapidly approaching; I'm actually scheduled to run a couple sessions of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, 7th Edition during the course of it.  I feel like I've booked myself heavily enough for this year's convention; I need to have time to do the ordinary grown-up stuff of the weekend as well, like grocery shopping and spending quality time with Gina.

For the future though, it might be worthwhile to try and draw some people into wargaming with a big, flashy table display and bring a co-GM to help demo the game.  But how do I do that on my current shoestring budget?

Army Men.  Green and Tan Plastic Army Men.  They're cheap and plentiful to be had, they're big enough to where they and scenery would be eye-catching from halfway across the room, especially once you add in tanks and halftracks and helicopters and the like.

So I, assuming that there's nothing new under the sun, went looking to see what rules people had written to accommodate Green Plastic Army Men (when not melting them with a magnifying glass or, as my dad used to do in his youth, heating up a nail and pushing it into the poor blighters to create "battle damage").  I found a couple and did some reading, and none of them really spoke to me.

So I decided to write my own.

Tentatively entitled "A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. - Accessory Rules Making Your Military Escapades Nerdy," I'm trying to keep the rules as simple and straight-forward as possible to accommodate the player new to wargames altogether, while allowing for complex and creative tactics and strategies.  I'm not attempting to model any actual military with any sort of accuracy or realism; as I'm not and have never been a soldier, I think that trying to do so would be an exercise in futility on my part and would leave me feeling like I was being disrespectful to the brave men and women who actually serve their countries.

The warfare of A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. is the warfare of movies like THE DIRTY DOZEN.  It's meant to be dramatic and over the top, and above all provide a degree of spectacle.

The core mechanic is simple; individual figures and vehicles have various abilities such as Melee Combat, Ranged Combat, Morale, each with a numerical rating between 2 and 6.  To succeed at using an ability (for example, if a squad of Infantrymen wants to Shoot an enemy squad), roll under the rating on a six-sided die; a result of 1 is always a success, a result of 6 is always a failure.  Infantry figures have, effectively, one "hit-point" - on a successful hit, they're removed as casualties.  Vehicles can take more hits before breaking down and becoming part of the scenery.

I've got some rules for some additional stuff as well; while the default Infantryman is assumed to be carrying a rifle, figures cast with mortars, minesweepers, bazookas or flamethrowers can be upgraded to carry such weapons in game, for example.  Gray plastic army men are assumed to be mercenaries, and can be used by either side as cheap allies (though with poor morale compared to the Greens and Tans - the Grays would rather live to get paid another day!), and blue, red and black army men likewise represent special troop types.

One bit I'm particularly pleased with is that either side can be upgraded with the ability to, once per game, call in a long-range strike.  When this ability is activated, the player using it takes a step or two back from the table and uses a dart gun, such as those manufactured by Nerf, to try and take out enemy soldiers.  They get one shot and if they miss, too bad.

I've still got some writing to do but once the first draft is finished I'll post it here and include After Action Reports of playtest sessions.

A Dream and a Review

I might be spending too much time ogling toy soldiers on the Internet lately, because I dreamed about buying figures last night.  Or rather, I dreamed I was agonizing over which figures to buy while taking advantage of a sale (that isn't actually happening) at Brigade Games.  Is that just the saddest thing ever? That even in my dreams I sit there being indecisive and arguing with myself over whether the French Foreign Legion or the Seleucids will be more fun to paint and/or see more action at the table?

Actually, I think the reason I had this dream is because the yarn shop Gina (my loving and supportive better half) frequents also has an online presence, and is doing a "12 days of Christmas" sale right now and she's torturing herself trawling the deals and trying to decide (as money is tight right now, and she can't just buy 40 lbs of Crazy Zauberball sock yarn) which has the greatest value to her - what I was doing in my dream (the sale was 50% off all infantry figures site-wide) was exactly what she's doing right now as she sits across from me.

In other news...

I finished reading Harry Pearson's Achtung Schweinehund!: A Boy's Own Story of Imaginary Combat, which is something of a memoir of wargaming.  I'd read a review of the book at 28mm Victorian Warfare in which Mr. Awdry spoke very highly of it.  While I enjoyed the book, I think there's an age and continental gap; much of the book was really enjoyable, but there were quite a few points where I found myself rolling my eyes at Pearson's almost-calculated curmudgeonly attitude.  His tirades against fantasy gaming and the smugness that came across in his explanation of how he came to collect only 20mm Napoleonics sculpted before 1968 kind of felt like he was affecting an attitude to try and maintain a sense of superiority.  Of course, I don't know the guy personally and I'd probably really enjoy gaming with him as long as I didn't try to put any orcs on the table.  And again, I think there's an age gap; he was born in 1961 and I was born in 1987; my introduction to wargaming miniatures came via the same fantasy figures he so vigorously decries.  I'm actually planning to pass the book along to my father; while he's not a wargamer, he was a military modeler from around the age of 8 until his late 30s when deteriorating eyesight made it harder for him to assemble kits - and a 1/32nd scale E-100 tank frustrated him so thoroughly by having each link of the tracks a separate piece that he finally stopped.  I think he'll find the book amazing and appreciate a lot of what Pearson has to say as well; given that dad was born in 1959 they're basically the same generation just on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Cthulhu Update: Happy Feet!

I cannot begin to tell you how excited I am to be able to share this news with you.  I resumed work on my Reaper Bones C'thulhu again last night, and successfully repositioned his feet so that the pegs and slots on his feet and the base line up neatly and he slots right into his base without difficulty.  

Not going to even pretend I wasn't nervous as hell about doing this.  I've never done much in the way of repositioning miniatures (other then the occasional straightening of a bent sword or a slight arm adjustment), and never in the polymer that Bones are cast in, and absolutely never on a scale as massive as C'thulhu's.  His legs are as thick as my fingers, for crying out loud!

I don't have photos of the reposing process, because both hands were busy and my girlfriend had gone to bed.  So let me walk you through the process anyways, even though I can't illustrate it step by step.  

I brought a pot of water to a boil and prepared an ice water bath right net to it in a large bowl.  Once the water was good and boiling, I submerged C'thulhu into it up to his knees; I just wanted to repose him from the knees down, so there's no point in having his whole body soft and floppy.  I held him in the boiling water for 20 seconds - even used the timer on the microwave (right above the stovetop in our apartment) to make sure I was keeping good time.  

Taking him out of the boiling water, I lined up his left foot peg with the hole in the base, and used that as leverage to bend the legs exactly right so that the right foot hole lined up with the peg on the base as well.  Once I was satisfied, I lifted him off the base and deposited him in the ice water bath for about 30 seconds.  A second test fit to the base showed that one of his legs had shifted a little before going in the bath, so I popped him back in the boiling water for about 10-15 seconds, refitted him to the base, let him cool down slightly while still on the base, then put him back in the ice water for a final setting.  

Now why the hell didn't I take a "before" shot to show how misaligned his feet were to start with? As an aside, I haven't glued him to the base yet - that'll be the last step once everything's fully painted.  The plan for this afternoon is to spend some time with the superglue and Green Stuff and get his arms and tail attached to the body and the gaps between the pieces filled in and smoothed over.  The head and wings are going to be left off until painted, so once this is assembled and the Green Stuff sets fully I can begin painting - probably some time early next week, either Tuesday or Wednesday night after work.  

And honestly, not a moment too soon.  My stress and anxiety levels have been through the roof lately as my responsibilities in the office increase and the amount of time I end up spending working through other people's mistakes goes up, and I'm really looking forward to spending some quality quiet time with the brush and paints and letting myself Zen out while basecoating this figure.  

I Was Bad This Weekend

I spent a lot of money on gaming supplies this weekend, taking advantage of Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales where I could, but I still spent a lot of money, and fairly selfishly at that.  Yes, I did half my Christmas shopping this weekend as well, but still...

I bought:

A tube of Green Stuff epoxy putty and some sculpting tools so I can finish assembling and filling seams on Cthulhu.  I also bought a self-healing cutting mat to use to trim pieces on as opposed to lining the dining room table with newspaper.

I bought a 1/72 plastic model kit of a Medium Mk A "Whippet" tank, as fielded by the British during the First World War, which I will be converting into a "Land Ironclad" for Victorian Science Fiction/"Steampunk" wargaming.  I refute the difference in scale (1/72 scale is equivalent to 20 or 22mm scale, not 28mm) by stating that early tanks were small and cramped, and a fictitious predecessor 20-30 years earlier would probably be even more so.

(As an aside, "Steampunk" is the only thing on earth I'm a snooty hipster about.  I grew up reading Wells and Verne, and was really into VSF/Steampunk as an aesthetic starting around 1999, 2000.  So when people started throwing brass gears onto top hats I was originally very excited, but eventually discovered that a lot of the steampunk enthusiasts I was encountering had no understanding of the literary origins of the subgenre or the historical narrative of the Victorian Age and merely thought it "looked cool," and I subsequently kind of cooled towards Steampunk - but I still confess myself an ardent enjoyer of Victorian Science Fiction)

photo courtesy Wargames Factory.  Used without
permission.

And then I went kinda nuts with Wargames Factory's Black Friday Weekend sale.  All their kits were at least 25% off, some as much as 50% off.  So I basically stocked up for 2015.

First off, I picked up a box of British infantrymen from the Anglo-Zulu war; paired with the Land Ironclad I'll be building off the Mk A, that gives me a pretty solid core of a British army for G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T., my favorite set of skirmish rules and, truth be told, the only wargame I've ever played.  I highly recommend it.  Somewhere down the line I'll find some 28mm Prussians or Martians or the like and have a pair of warbands so I can demonstrate the game at conventions.

From their Legacy of the Greeks line, I picked up one box each of 28mm plastic Hoplites, Persian Infantry, and Amazons.  I honestly have no idea what I'm going to do with them - I'm tempted to base them for De Bellis Antiquitatis, though I think most people playing DBA play at the 15mm scale.  I also kind of half-want to simply do the Hoplites up as a diorama piece showing off the famous phalanx.  I know I want to do the Amazons as archers, and the Persian Infantry will be assembled for their famous sparabara formation, with a wall of shield and spear-armed warriors protecting a second rank of archers.

photo courtesy Wargames Factory.  Used without
permission.

I picked up a box of Orc warriors because they're some of the most gorgeous I've seen - way better then the cartoonish sculpts put out by Games Workshop and their imitators.  These guys I'm thinking will be diorama fodder; I've got no real interest in fantasy wargaming as such and don't see myself buying boxes and boxes of these for something like informal Warhammer tourneys, though maybe they'll get based as an army for Hordes of the Things, the fantasy version of DBA.

So that's...139 figures and a tank, if my math is right.  That should keep me busy for most, if not all, of 2015.  And I'm forcing myself to finish Cthulhu before I begin work on anything else.

photo courtesy Wargames Factory.  Used without
permission.

All photographs (save for the box art on the Mk A up there) belong to Wargames Factory, and if they want them taken down, I'll gladly comply.