Once More to Take the High Ground

With my son occupied watching memes on Friday evening, I decided I wanted to see if the same scenario I played the other day ("Take the High Ground") would be as close, given my modifications to the "Machine Age" rules for One Hour Wargames.

For what it's worth, in my mind, the infantry are companies, the guns are batteries, the cavalry are squadrons.

• The Italians are defending and have four infantry, one heavy infantry, and one unit of Lancieri.
• The Austrians are attacking with four infantry units, one heavy infantry, and one field gun battery. 

The opening layout. I interpret Neil Thomas's instruction "arrive on the Southern table edge" as literally meaning, place the unit on the edge of the table - and that counts as the attacker's movement.

After a taking a hammering from the Austrian barrage, the Italians in the trench opened fire, with the heavy infantry making a strong argument for the Austrians to reconsider this whole thing.

However, the Austrians launched a trench assault, with two companies supported by a third.  The carnage on that portion of the battlefield would be terrible and not in the Austrian favor.

Meanwhile, the Lancieri launched a heroic, if ill-advised, charge against the Austrians who had taken a position holding the road south. 

 

The cavalry needs their bases changed to the Medium Foliage Green

Their first effort was repelled, and the Lancieri took heavy fire as they regrouped for a follow-up attack.

Meanwhile an Italian company advanced through the woods to engage the Austrian flank and the Austrians continued their assault on the hilltop trench, aided by the field gun battery.

A red die means they've taken 12 + whatever is showing in damage. A yellow die is 6 + whatever face is showing.

The Austrians repulsed a second cavalry charge, and the latter was forced to disperse under oppressive rifle fire.

Still, the assault on the hill had faltered and although the Italians had lost their heavy infantry (no doubt routed in panic after several rounds of intense melee), they had a fresh unit ready to take its place, with another unit providing support on their flank to keep the Austrians from maneuvering around the hill.

Green dice show the number of hits taken (1-6). No die means no hits. I do sometimes move the out of the way for pictures, but only if it's one or two dice.

An Italian victory seemed neatly in hand. 

The incredible firing by the plucky Austrian battery was a bright spot - it took quite a few hits but shrugged them off (the Italians rolled 1s and 2s) while dealing a good bit of damage. 

Eventually, the Austrian heavies disposed of the Italians in the woods and were able to come to bear.

It still wasn't a sure thing.

On turn 14 the eliminated the Italians and on turn 15 moved onto the hill.

With casualties high and morale failing on both sides (morale being abstractly handled by Neil Thomas in OHW by the loss of hit points), momentum (and turns) was running out.

With a last burst of effort, the Austrian heavies managed to capture the trench and establish a defensive position of their own (they cleared the trench on turn 14 by fire, and then claimed it on turn 15). 

From there they could cover the advance of the troops coming behind them.

Austrian victory.

*****

A second One Hour Wargames game that came down to the last turn. 

Maybe I was playing them wrong all of the times before? I don't know. I was surprised though. 

Here are the modifications I used:

• Shooting: 
• No shooting along a trench line (what is shown on the table is a straight line but in reality, it is full of zigs and zags). 
• Units may fire into close combat on a turn when a unit on their side initiates close combat (shooting occurs after movement but is assumed to be accompanying it).
• Trenches:
• Units in trench have 360 LOS with respect to being flanked (i.e. they can't be)
• Units in trench may only shoot as normal(45-degrees forward). 
• Units in trench take half-damage from shooting. 
• Mounted cavalry may not cross trenches
• Close Combat: 
• Infantry units that charge into close combat, stay in close combat until one side is destroyed. 
• Attacking uphill reduces damage caused by 1/2
• Close combat long a trench, e.g. enemy units occupying sections of the same trench, does half damage - reduced numbers of men able to engage immediately and twists and turns of the trench. 
• Otherwise close combat ignores all cover - woods, trench, buildings - (they are lobbing grenades, leaping into the trench, etc.).
• Cavalry charges
• see Rifle & Sabre rules.
• Field Guns: 
• May not move once fired. 
• Field guns may rotate in place (counts as movement for the sake of firing).

I opted to use the barrage option from the rulebook, and defenders would start in a trench. 

Dice rolling played a bigger part in how this one went I feel - poor rolls kept Austrians in the open from being routed. 

I wanted infantry close combat to be a decision to make - in keeping with the history (strangely missing from the rules) but also from a game play perspective. It's a gamble because you are stuck in at that point and you lose the ability to maneuver that unit to other parts of the table where it might be needed (such as the failing assault on the hilltop).

In the Ancients game, I used that fact to pin enemy troops - I had skirmishers advance far ahead to stop reinforcements from arriving as fast as they might otherwise. With everyone in the "Machine Age" rules having the ability to shoot, stopping a unit from advancing is less of an issue and you can wait for them to come into range (and you'll get first shot as they can't move and shoot). 

Engaging just to stop them from advancing makes little sense if they aren't in cover.

The Austrians who fought the Italian company that had advanced through the woods, and taken cover at the edge, received the intended benefit of engaging in close combat - no halving damage at all. Thus, it was worth making the effort to get unreduced hits in (and aided by their +2 for being heavy infantry, they were pretty devastating), even at the sacrifice of being able to move.

The hilltop assault was not the best test of my infantry close combat rules, because attacking a unit on a hill still halves the damage, putting it on par with shooting (since rifle fire is not halved for shooting up hill, just for the cover). You could argue that they should have simply moved into range and fired, with the benefit of being able to fall out of range to be replaced by a fresher unit if necessary.

The default "Machine Age" rules assume cavalry are dismounted/shooting for the sake of combat. I wanted to field Lancieri. The "Rifle & Sabre" cavalry rules worked and gave what seemed to be a reasonable result.

The bounce off in the event of failing to destroy the target does allow them to move somewhere else - giving them an advantage over infantry in close combat, but I didn't take advantage of that. 

Instead, they just repeated their charge and eventually this was to their detriment. I should have kept them out of rifle range as long as possible. Had I saved them for when the enemy was weakened and preferably was otherwise engaged, and THEN charged, they might have been more effective and had more influence on the outcome.

We'll see if I learn these lessons for next time!

One Hour Wargames : Ancients

I had never played One Hour Wargames's Ancient rules. Last night I decided to change that. 

Using my Tanitians and Bokrug Confederacy figures, and for now, ignoring cavalry, I generated two forces:

• Tanitia (orange and black) - 4 infantry units, 1 archer unit, 1 skirmisher unit
• Bokrug Confederacy (lizards) - 3 infantry units, 1 archer unit, 2 skirmisher units

Not a big difference there in composition, but I wanted to play the rules straight before I modify them with elephants and dinosaurs just yet.

Cavalry probably won't be added for Tanitia until 2024 as that's part of my planned army expansion - either using HaT Spanish Cavalry or LOD Amazons (the set comes with two figures on horseback). For Bokrug Confederacy, it occurred to me that smaller raptors would be sufficient and we have tons of those between my son and myself. I might even try to put some Wargames Atlantic lizard warriors on their backs as riders.

In any case, I digress ...

The scenario was #4 - "Take the High Ground"

Two units of Bokrug infantry hold the hill. They will be quite hard to remove - they halve any damage received due to armor, and halve again due to their hilltop position.

The Tantian archers pepper the units on the hill - the Bokrug units don't get their hilltop advantage for archery fire - while their infantry assaults the hill and skirmishers advance through the woods to engage the advancing Bokrug skirmishers.

The Bokrug archers stay out of melee, but everyone else is locked in it or on their way to it.

With one unit of infantry fallen and the other with 9 points of damage, things don't look good on the hill for the Bokrug Confederacy,

Yet somehow they hold out! But for how long?

Not that much longer as it turned out. This is around turn 11 or 12.

The Bokrug skirmishers launched several ineffective volleys of javelins. The archers were far more accurate with their attacks, but time was against them.

After 15 turns (One Hour Wargames standard game length) the Tanitians are the sole occupants of the hilltop. The Bokrug units, seeing victory slip away, melted into the jungle to await the next time they are called to duty.

A OHW game that went the full 15 turns! It's a rare occurrence indeed. It did get me wondering if that turn limit works better with the older pre-gun powder eras. Something that future games may shed more light on.

Units are on 3" x 2" steel-on-MDF trays. I'm not a fan of the green for these figures but I don't have enough steel to have one side sand and the other side green. Santa may resolve that issue! I'd also like to be able to put 8-10 units on the table not just 6 - so again, more steel! Santa is going to need a reinforced bag this year!

The playing area was 24" square - 3/4 the size of the standard OHW table. Ranges were adjusted in proportion. This makes the 3" base equivalent to a 4.5" wide base on a 36" table.

An Experiment in Limiting Options

When my son was a baby, I used to spend hours on the couch with him sleeping on me. In an effort to be a good parent, I would watch Super Nanny. Now, whether or not it did anything for my parenting I can't say, but one idea has stuck with me all these years.

Children often have  more toys than they can play with (sound familiar?) and so some things are neglected or the child plays with no one thing very often before moving onto the next (ahem!). One suggestion Super Nanny had was keeping ten or so toys (a loose definition - a box of bricks would be a single toy), and store another 10 or 20 or whatever. Then every so often, rotate toys out that were not getting much use, and rotate in something from storage.

A similar approach is often beneficial when song-writing. Setting up limits/parameters on what notes or chords can be used or which must be excluded has the counter-intuitive effect of inspiring creativity rather than restricting it. Limits force you to stretch more. 

And of course, "less is more" is an accepted aphorism - outside of miniature gaming circles at least.

For a variety of reasons, I have decided to apply these ideas to my toy soldiers.

Borrowing the "Battle in a Box" concept from other bloggers (such as Ross Mac) and posts on Facebook groups, I decided to create some "Battle in a Box" combinations of forces and to limit myself to just three such containers.  This required leaving some figures from each force/genre/period in storage. 

Don't worry! They aren't gone! (I've already let go of a ton of figures in the past year).

Of course, to make any decision that I wouldn't have to amend almost immediately, I decided to narrow down the selection of rules that I'd aim to have forces for. Here I was inspired in large part by Norm's observations about the the benefits of limited rule sets.

Although I have thousands of rulebooks, when including PDF and Kindle formats, I tend to come back to the same sets repeatedly:

• One Hour Wargames (well, my modified versions) - Kindle (originally) and print (within the last few years)
  
• One Hour Skirmish Wargames - print
  
• The Portable Wargame - any of the variants. I have Developing in print form, others in PDF.
  
• GASLIGHT - original, but I have the Compendium, too
  
• 1BC Toy Soldiers - free PDF
  
• One Page Rules: Age of Fantasy : Skirmish / Grimdark : Firefight - free PDFs
  
• My homebrew rules 
  

I'm not ruling out other rulebooks, but these cover all of my needs. The only thing missing, really, are dedicated sets for individual figure games set in WWI or WWII with more than a section-ish per side.

Figure-wise, here are the three containers I kept out for this experiment:

 VSF / Lost World / Fantasy / Ancients : Tanitia (Carthaginians), Bokrug Confederacy (Lizards), French Foreign Legion

British and Solis Nox (Medieval) left out entirely this round, the others have a fraction of their figures in storage.

WWII Italy Invasion of France - June 1940 (I tossed in my 1/35 Weird World War One since the space is there)

WWI Italy vs Austria

Lancieri are in a separate box this container is not deep enough for cavalry.

Admittedly, these are not complete games in a box - there's no rules, dice, rulers, playing surface, or terrain. The latter at least is stored in two small-ish bins. One of which contains everything I need for most of my favorite One Hour Wargames scenarios.

Now you might be thinking, "Surely, that cannot be enough figures for more than a skirmish. " To which I say, "Don't call me, Shirley!"

If we're talking 1:1, I concede you are correct. However, on a grid or on a sabot, they work quite well for "bigger battles" (with less figures, ironically).

I rather like the simple clean look of Alan's (Duchy of Tradgardland ) games on his potting bench (such as this one), and Maudlin Jack Tar's grid games on Projects and Procrastinations (such as this one). My own experiment with just two-figure units on a grid was a revelation and suits my preferred aesthetic - that of toys and games, not serious modeling or simulation.

Here are figures on a grid:

Below is the same grid, but figures on steel bases. These work well on a grid or on surfaces without a grid. At 3"wide, they are half the maximum size recommended for One Hour Wargames, but it's easy enough to resize the paying area downwards - no bad thing in my opinion.

The plan is to check-in in 3 months time (end of January 2024) and see which made it do the table and which did not, and which in storage is calling to me for an outing on the table.

I should add, in full disclosure, the following will also be out and available for use:

• 28mm Fantasy - We use these mostly for D&D so they are not going into the storage closet. They have the advantage that my son is willing to play Age of Fantasy: Skirmish with them.
  
• Blitz Bowl (28mm fantasy football) - I really feel like this is a board game. It literally has a board.
• Wings of Glory - Who doesn't love the little bi-planes?

In addition to all of the above, I'm clearing my paint table, For the remainder of the year, I'll purposely try to limit myself to painting the following:

• 54mm Lancieri (converting and painting two or three)
• 28mm fantasy figures (including Blitz Bowl) - no particular figures or number - save the Nurgle Blighters. Otherwise, just whatever seems like it'd be fun to paint.
  
• Weston WWII British infantry - 10 figures.
  
• 54mm "Shiny Happy Grimdark" - an idea that has been percolating in my brain (first seen here)  and which Mark, Man of Tin, kicked into overdrive with some of his recent posts. I have three chibi space nuns and a fair number of plastic knights to paint convert, plus three or four modern/future-ish tanks.
  

As I am still under my figure purchase moratorium  (austerity measures) through the end of the year,  no new unpainted figures will be added to the pile.

Will I get more games in with less indecision? Will the games played be the kind I most enjoy playing? Will I dread painting less? Will I feel like I have more time for and more enjoyment from my figures or will I find something lacking?

We'll find out!

Escape the Monster Apocalypse

Sunday was our annual Family Fall Festival - a holiday my son's mom invented when he was born. I don't recall the rationale, but here we are 12 years later and we still celebrate it with friends and family.

Three years ago, I suggested I could run a Halloween themed game for the party. And then again last year. Which meant I had inadvertently started a tradition. To the point that, a few weeks ago I was asked if I was going to run a game for the Festival. 

And so, somewhat last minute, I dug through my supplies and decided that, since the previous Festival games had featured Legos, so would this one. However, unlike previous years, I made use primarily of my existing collection and supplemented by raiding my son's massive tub of Legos to make the buildings for this game (and to provide player characters).

Rather than stop the zombie plague, the players would have to gather parts to repair an escape vehicle (represented by four Jack O' Lanterns around the board), while fending off zombies, skeletons, and boss monsters, and to do it all before the government nuked the town to end the monster apocalypse.

Fun, as they say, was had by all. Although my son was quite sleepy by the end.

For rules, I used One Page Rules Age of Fantasy: Skirmish, with army lists from both Fantasy and Grimdark (the players - because firearms are part of Grimdark). The players were all Hero types, which is unusual for OPR, and of course were essentially seven armies of 1, while the monsters were a much larger, but single, army. 

In play tests, the game lasted near two hours. In the event it was closer to four and as we had gotten a late start due to a delayed dinner, it was near 8pm when we started(so, a midnight finish!).

I had failed to account for the amount of discussion that would take place between the players around tactical choices - choices that I had purposely selected to add interest to the game!

Each player character had a trait that benefited them only, and another trait that benefited the party as a whole - under certain conditions (within 12", only if charging, in cover, that sort of thing). It was coordinating those for max effect that I believe had the greatest impact on total run time.

Next time, I aim for a one hour game.

And next time, will be the annual Christmas game (apparently another tradition I inadvertently started).