First Outing of Space Marines and Necrons

Friday night, I put paint to figures for the first time in ... awhile and by Saturday afternoon I finally finished the three Necrons and two Scarabs I had been working on for ages.

I still have three Necrons to paint, but I decided to get a game in as motivation for painting (the way Norm at Battlefields and Warriors does).

The game was Fire Team. 

The first time my Blood Ravens have been deployed in anger!

The Space Marines charge to their left to claim an objective. The Necrons mirrored them to do the same at their end of the board.

Further into the game (I think this is turn 2), several Necrons were dropped this turn but wounds are piling up on the Blood Ravens (indeed they lost one almost immediately after I took this)

End game.

If you look at the above picture, both sides control one objective - 1 Victory Point each. However, the Space Marines won the day due to achieving one of their Target of Opportunity card objectives:

Honestly, it felt like a bit of a cheat for them to win that way (I play solo, so I win regardless).  That said, the cards are the luck of the draw, so well within regulation.

I'm not going to do a full discussion of the game - for a detailed treatment check out a post from Alex on  Up the Blue!: More Space Marine Adventures: "Fire Team" (upthebluefow.blogspot.com) That's the post that convinced me to buy the game.

I will say a few things:

• The Target of Opportunity cards remind of the cards you use in Blitz Bowl to score points outside of a touch down - I find both equally difficult to achieve! I do like the added challenges though.
• As a learning game there was a bit of rulebook checking, but after the first tun, it was all pretty straightforward.
• There are a LOT of counters - not atypical in a board game, but difficult to manage with the miniatures (they don't balance on the stacks easily every time) and if you don't put them under the figure you have to be careful when multiple figures are in adjacent hexes, each with multiple counters.

It definitely has me excited to get painting on the last three Necrons!

Nutcracker Commando Raid

 Decided to put a non-canonical game on the table while I work out campaign rules for a first North Pole ‘42 campaign. In this case the scenario idea was taken from Sci-fi Skirmish Scenarios: Small-unit Missions For Use With Your Favourite Wargaming Rules by John Lambshead. Not coincidentally I used his One Hour Skirmish Wargames (OHSW) to play it.

The good guys are a crack commando unit - and so were given a Leader(3) (two actually - Clara and the Rat King), a Motivation of 4, and all had the Lucky trait (meaning they had a 75% chance of recovery if the were knocked down). Their goal was to silence the German 88 harassing a vital supply line for the main army.

The opposing force is supposed to be lower quality troops, so I gave the Germans a single Leader(2) and a Motivation of 2.  They don't want to be there - it's cold, it's the middle of nowhere, and their supplies are limited to what was on the ship they arrived on.

*****

Rat King took his Rattenkriegers to the right while Clara led a squad on loan from Frosty’s Fighters on the left (they are armed with bolt action rifles, I just haven't made them yet).

The forces arrayed at the start, with defenders as per the suggested scenario deployment.

It was a bit of a slog at first as our heroes struggled to make any dent in the the dug-in German front-line defenses.

Rattenkriegers

On the left, Clara and the snowfolk had difficulty getting much started, faced as they were by the German tripod MG and they were pinned down in the hill top woods

Eventually, on the right, the defenses were breached, giving the Rat King the opportunity he was waiting for. His rats gave a fine accounting of themselves.

A plucky rat spies the German rifleman in the second-floor window.

As the rats surged forward, the tide began to turn on their left. A snowfolk soldier sent a German defender into the snow, and Clara seized the opportunity to charge, brandishing her candy cane staff. She dispatched the German before he could stand. 

Clara set her sites on the machine gun and the German leader with them.

The German line begins to crumble.

The rat swarm continued their relentless push towards the German back-line positions, with Rat King, sword waving above his head, encouraging his soldiers to finish the job.

Rat-Attack!

Moments later, Clara engaged the German leader in close combat - he was no match for the peppermint princess. The rats begin firing on the 88's crew - armed only with pistols, returning fire wasn't an option. 

Before the gun crew could turn the 88 on the attackers, the German 2nd-in-command ordered his men to abandon the field.

Victory for the North Pole forces.

*****

The Germans actually broke when they failed a morale check after their leader had been knocked out of the fight and 2nd-in-command was down. This rarely happens when I play OHSW so it's definitely noteworthy.

The other observation I had was that the usual 5-turn limit of the scenarios included in OHSW would not fly here. With so much cover for both sides, the decks were chewed up fast and furious - meaning Jokers came up rather quickly. I didn't track turns but I think it was near 12 turns before the Germans broke.

The scenario however is not turn-based (unlike many of the scenarios in Sci-fi Skirmish Scenarios) but rather based on whether you concede the battle or not. I didn't have to as the Germans caved first.

I was so inspired by the game, I got out the remainder of my Christmas forces from the holiday bin and put them in a toy soldiers bin so they can be used in future encounters. In addition to the snowfolk needing rifles, some of the robot wooden soldiers need repair, as does King Moonracer. Storage was not kind to them.

A Little Update (Pun 100% Intended)

I am not feeling painting at all lately, but I continue to pick sections to read in Tony Bath's and Henry Hyde's campaign books. I am enjoying the process of coming up with campaign rules for North Pole '42 (they need to be absolutely simple as I cannot be bothered with extensive record keeping - I'm leaning towards something like wilderness travel in Basic/Expert D&D) and also thinking about how I want to approach the Italian invasion (attempted invasion?) of France in June, 1940. 

Oh and I'm having fun coming up with a map, city names, personality names, etc. for a simple campaign between my lizard folk and my medieval Deetail figures.

However, one glaring point came to the fore in all of this, and that was my lack of LMGs and HMGs for France and Italy. To the interwebz! Specifically BrickWarriors.com

The French are outfitted with outdated, yet distinctly French, Chauchat LMGs, The HMG is difficult to place (for me) but I'll assume it's also outdated.

Nobody seems to sell a minifigure Italian HMG/MMG, so this US one will have to do. The Italian LMGs look the part, but I don't know what model they represent.

 

You might notice I don't know a whole lot about the equipment of either army. That's intentional. The more I know about a period, the less I enjoy games played in it, unless the rules factor in the things I know. This way I can be happy with rules that just feel right, without my usual worrying obsessing about if they are accurate reflections of the material I've read/watched. 

Idiosyncratic? Probably.

Both sides had their first outing with the new kit last night (no pictures, sorry, part of my policy to play more games without thinking about blog posts). 

The Italians - a platoon of three 5-man squads, 1 mortar and an L3 - attacked a French village defended by two squads, a medium howitzer, and HMG. The French ultimately were overrun. Rules used were 1BC Toy Soldiers mostly as written.