Good Tuesday morning, here at least.  I clicked the odometer over for another year and while getting older is not cracked up to be great things are looking good.

I spent the past week or so pulling out terrain pieces and either repairing, making new and even finding some long lost pieces.

The first motivation to update terrain pieces came from a huge set of purchases from the national model rail road convention that was held here a couple of weekends ago.  Anyone with a sharp eye will see that not only did I purchase additional terrain items, shown on the left, but also some HOn3 narrow gauge equipment and buildings for the model railroad that is tucked away in boxes.   That may change....

I then pulled out some "Christmas" trees that I picked up fairly cheap at the local Home Depot DYI.
As they are all flocked with "snow" I had to touch of 60 odd of them up with a highlight of dry/wet brushed spring green.   I added those to 20 I had done a few years ago.  Work in progress followed by all of the completed trees.

I decided to complete these trees as we have been playing a fair amount of skirmish type games and some of my existing nice trees get in the way and sometimes become casualties.   These trees should take any amount of fire and survive.

 

My long lost shore battery and star fort for our sailing ship games.  Shown with one of my Valiant ships.  We use Ship of the Line rules and have a great time when we play these.   It might be time to think about putting one of these games on in the near future.

Saturday's game was a big success though we had to modify our original plans a little.  We were not able to run Jim's rules but luckily Daniel had brought along his copy of Bolt Action and we also had enough figures between him and John to set up our first game with these rules.  This was a late war battle we set up on the fly where German Fallschirmjagers  were defending vs. a British attack.

Overall the rules worked pretty well.  We made a few errors, like close assaults.  We played it that the assaulting troops could only roll to match the number of defenders which led to a superior platoon being destroyed by a defender very quickly.  We should have allowed the units to roll for all of their figures involved in the close assault.  The end result may have been the same but our version indicated that you never wanted to close assault!  This was of course wrong.

We also played the rules for unit actions when they were pinned.  We did not make pinned units pass an order test to move etc.  This makes some of the things I have read about Bolt Action make more sense.  I had read that you really needed to roll off your pins or your units would become next to useless.  If we had played this rule more correctly we would have found units to have not been able to execute orders nearly as readily as they did.

Thanks to Daniel for running the game on short notice.  We decided that we would be willing to play these rules again at some point in the future.   When we do all of those who own the rules be sure to have familiarized themselves with the rules so we minimize the errors as we play.  Considering this was an unplanned pick up game with a set of rules none of us had played it went very well.

I will attempt to give a AAR report on the game along with some photos.

 

 

These are a few of the over all shots of the table at the beginning of the game.  You can see a few Germans skulking around n the woods.   The Germans were defending the long wooded ridge and a line that stretched on to a ruined building, a barn and a series of woods.

The next shots are of the British starting their attack with 2 Bren carriers, support mortar (2 inch I believe),infantry and a 6 lb gun with carrier.

 

 

 

 

 The next photos show Germans in position and advancing on the right flank and into the wooded ridge.   The Brits start to take hits on the right flank from the wooded ridge.  The German MGs start to fire.   The German assault on the British left fails, most likely due to our misunderstanding the close assault rules.  The outnumbered Brits destroyed the German unit as an effective fighting unit.

The British 6 pounder searches for a target, decides that the reports of a German armored car on their left flank dictate limbering up and moving to that flank.   The German armored car, sorry no photo, ended up holding down the German right flank after the infantry on that flank was destroyed in the above mentioned assault.

 

The British attack on their right flank starts to stall due to hits and pin markers but they are able to eventually destroy the few Germans to their front and just as they are ready to start moving forward again the only reserve German figures take up positions on the ridge.   The British infantry advancing, sneaking?, along the road and the hedge with support of their Bren gun appear to be ready push through the enemy lines when 2 hidden MGs open up on them and the advance goes to ground.  The MGs were the only German units on the right center of their line as the infantry had shifted left to cover that flank as mentioned earlier.

The British pounder was not able to complete its redeploy before we called the game so neither the gun nor the German AC were able to really engage each other.

The British had about 6 or so less casualties than the German Fallschirmjagers but they had been  hit hard enough that it was safe to assume their attack would go no further.

I am sure our next Bolt Action game will prove to be an even better game with some of our rules questions cleared up.   We will also have more troops available as not all of the available figures were brought to the game.

 

A special thanks to all that attended.  In no special order this included:  Josh, John, Greg, Daniel, Rob and Titch.   Hopefully I did not forget anyone.

 

Our game in August will be the postponed WWII early war scenario with the French counter attacking the Germans.  The date for this game will be August 10th, 2013 and should provide an interesting comparison between Jim's rules and Bold Action rules.

 

Oh WOW!  That only took numerous reboots and goodness knows what else to finally get the photo to load!  So any way....on with the show.

The piece in the rear of the photo represents a bog or marsh type area.  This started as a 30 year old Kibri Model Rail Road accessory that I have carted around for all of that time.  I glued it to a blue piece of foam, added tufts of grass and a coat of artist gloss medium to make the shine of the "water" pop a little more.

The large piece on the bottom left started out as another Model Rail Road accessory that I picked up within the past year.   This represents an impassable patch of rough ground if used for the "That's not on the Map" card or a patch of rough terrain if used as regular terrain.  I glued this one to a thin piece of craft wood and then cut irregular edges to it with a saw.   I then glued rocks, additional grass tufts and misc. to.

The third piece on the right is actually a small pond that I picked but from the Most Honorable Howard Whitehouse some 20 plus years ago at the first or second HMGS Midsouth Wargamers Reunion held in Tennessee.  Here all I did was add tufts of grass, old wood and a fresh coat of gloss medium for the water

The month of July is speeding on by, the good news is that I have started getting back into the hands on portion of the hobby this month.  While I am not yet painting figures I have been working on some other projects.  The only one completed thus far is to upgrade or make new scenery items.  They will work for any period and scale but my main intention is to use them for Maurice as either a regular terrain feature but mainly as markers for the "That's Not on the Map" card terrain features.
I have tried to load a photo of these pieces at least 5 times this morning and every time I get an error telling me the internet explorer has stopped working.   WTF, never been a problem before.  I will post the photo and a brief description later .....I hope.

We had our monthly game this past weekend.  Jim ran a "Check Your Six" WWI airplane game that was very enjoyable.  Jim had set up 3 scenario's of which we were able to run 2 within 4 hours (we decided to break at this point so everyone could handle family obligations).

The year was 1917 during the 3rd Battle of Ypres (July 21st until November 18th)
The first scenario had Mark and I playing allies.  I had 2 Belgian Hanriot HD-1 fighter aircraft and 1 Belgian Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter Observation plane.   Mark had 2 British Sopwith Pups and one 1 British Sopwith 1 1/2 Strutter Observation plane.   Our mission was to locate a large French infantry formation that had gotten trapped/lost behind enemy lines.  I don't remember if this was identified as a battalion or anything.   Jim placed 4 random makers on the table to mark the locations our Strutters were to search for this missing Frogs.  Given my usual luck with pilots I rolled for all three of mine to be zero skill, I believe Mark may have had 1 skill level 1 pilot.  The Germans had slightly better pilots over all.  Greg and Jim each commanded 2 Albatross D-III aircraft.  The aircraft Mark and I commanded only had one forward firing machine gun vs. two on the Albatross D-IIIs.  The amount of damage that the German's could inflict with hits was significantly higher as a result.

Below is a photo of one of my Hanriots, nice bright blue target isn't it?

We got off to a fast start, my Strutter found the Frenchmen at the first counter area I searched.  Now the challenge was to get the observer off the board so this information could be relayed to higher command.  So I did something that wasn't very clever I flew my fighters one direction and the spotter the other.  Suddenly it seemed the Sopwith was going to be overwhelmed.

It was about this time that one of Mark's pups went down in flames.   The next photos show that and some general shots of the table.  One of the photos shows two of the Albatross D-IIIs bee lining toward my Sopwith seen in the background.  The final photos in this series shows one of my Hanriots being shot down the next turn by the same pilot (Jim) that had just shot Mark down.

My hero!  Mark saves my bacon by hitting both of the German's who were intent on shooting me down.  While neither were shot down both had critical hits placed on them that forced them both to break off pursuit and allowed my Sopwith to escape and deliver the valuable location of the lost troops.  The last photo shows my lone remaining fighter showing up too late to accomplish anything other than looking pretty in blue.   Both of the damaged German pilots were able to save both aircraft (and themselves).  This would be important in Jim's new WWI air campaign he is running at Gigabytes Café and Games on the third Saturday of the month (I believe).

One win for the Allies.

Second game:  Mark and I took the Germans for the second game.   The allies consisted of two commands each with 2 Hanriots and one Sopwith Strutter.  We did not know their objective and were considered on patrol.   This time I rolled one of my pilots as a plus 2 skill level, of course my other was a zero.  Everyone else had a mixture of skill levels, I seem to remember that both Mark and Jim each had a skill level 2 pilot also.  As the location marker from the first game was still on the table we were brilliant in figuring out that the allied objective must have something to do with it.  Almost immediately the 2 Sopwiths were able to successfully drop supplies to the cut off French.  I was able to hit Jim's Sopwith and put damage on it but not force it down.  Both of the Strutters then turned for a second run to drop more supplies.  The last photos show the general "fur ball" going on and the last photos are of my skill level 2 pilot putting the hurt on one of Greg's.   The second supply drop was half successful.   Greg was able to drop his supplies on target while the damage to Jim's caused to him miss the drop zone and he provided the Germans with the supplies.  Perhaps Cognac?  It was determined that 3 out of 4 successful supply drops gave the allies a second victory on the day.

 

More to follow shortly.

We all enjoyed the games.  The third scenario that we did not run would have been on with the allies making air to ground attacks on German positions to allow the cut off infantry make it back to their lines.  Perhaps that will show up at a later game.   Almost all of the aircraft used were from Shapeways and all were from Jim's and Mark's collections.  Shapeways make a huge range of very nice aircraft for WWI.

The rules were great fun, while not as simple as the basic Wings of War they are still simple enough and have some nice chrome.  I hate to say realistic touches as these are toys but the chrome that is in the game can be rooted in "realism".  Ok, the logic used in the rules makes sense to us!

Our next game will be a 28mm WWII France 1940 game.   The French are actually launching a limited counter attack against the Germans.  These are skirmish type rules where everyone can command at least a platoon or so.  They have been put together by Jim and we have had at least 2 previous games with these rules and we have enjoyed them.  For me that says a lot as I am normally not much on skirmish games.  This game is scheduled at our normal 2nd Saturday of the month for July 13th.