Bone Griffons – Dead Whaling – Yarr This Blows!

Howdy.  So we’ve been playing some Uncharted Seas and I have had the pleasure of squaring off against the Bone Griffons.  Now I didn’t really mind the experience too much, but I don’t think the BGs are sustainable in their current form.  They really have the potential to wreck an otherwise very good game.  Why?  Not because they are overpowered, not because I like to /cry but because playing against them can be so boring.  It seems there is one tactic alone with these zombies.  Equip trebuchets, drop anchor and bomb your opponent.  Yawn.

As Paul McCartney sang in ‘The Frog Chorus’ – Bomb, bomb, bomb.  If you are feeling particularily feisty, maybe attempt a boarding action with your ridiculous numbers of crew.  So why is this boring I hear you cry?  Lobbing office blocks around sounds awesome, until you try playing against it.  Facing Bone Griffons you have but one option.  Frontal assault.  No cunning flanking manouvering.  No sneaky formations.  Just head on into the enemy.  Any other tactic is doomed.  Now if BG players actually equipped broadsides things would get a bit more exciting, but I can’t see that happening, especially in tournament play.  The anchor and shoot trebuchet tactic is far too easy.  We’ll keep fighting them though.  Sink or swim.  One thing is certain, we’ll never give in!

Uncharted Seas – The Bone Griffons Review

Following on from the first post regarding the Imperial Navy I thought I’d branch out and continue onwards with a brief review and discussion of the first fleet that I actually bought. I’ve enjoyed no more success with these guys than my Imperial Fleet (lost both games played with this fleet so far) but I can at least give you a run down of things.

First of all, no other fleet has brought about as much controversy as the Bone Griffons have. They were one of two new fleets released a while after the original batch (the other being Shroud Mages but I’ll leave Servitob the opportunity to wax lyrical about the evil stunties). However, they are also the only fleet that has the option to customise the weapons load out of their Cruisers and Battleship. This along is not the cause of the furor over their ships, it is the weapons themselves that are the cause of much disharmony among a very passionate community.

The Bone Griffons are Undead, a people long thought consigned to the history books after they were cursed by a virulent plague and their society sunk beneath the waves. Many generations later they return to wreak havoc upon the world, due to their time playing Atlantis their ships are a little “behind the times” technologically. Their Frigates comprise Undead Whales, possibly one of the coolest things going in the game as far as I am concerned, you may have guns but I’m going to slam several tonnes of pestilent Orca down your throat. They don’t have any guns on them which you’d expect but can cause damage via ramming and their nasty Krill breath! The Cruisers and Battleship both come with choices, they can be armed with a typical array of broadsides or the far more rage-inducing Trebuchets. Each cruiser in a squadron can have one of either, so you end up with a squadron normally composed of all Broadsides or all Trebuchets. The Battleship has three “hard-points” that you can equip with either a Broadside or Trebuchet, however, taking less than a full load out of either kind of gimps your ship horribly so normally you’ll just go all one way or the other.

In Uncharted Seas, as I have already mentioned, gun ranges are measured in 8″ bands up to range band 4. With all fleets firepower increases the closer you get to the target, after all, cannon balls lose power the further they go. Now, the Trebuchets on the other hand are designed purely around chucking lumps of masonry huge distances, this means that the fleet has immense long range firepower, you effectively have the same power at range band 4 as most fleets get when at range band 1. Due to the fact that the Battleship has oars it can anchor and then swivel on the spot to keep their 45 degree fire arc focussed on the enemy. No other fleet can do this once anchored. Also, Trebuchets do not require line of sight to fire, although they will scatter if you fire indirectly like this, again, no other fleet can do this. You can’t fire cannon through an island but you can, apparently, chuck stuff over it. This ability to load out on long range firepower has led to claims of the fleet being overpowered as you can plink away at the approaching enemy, reducing their effectiveness before they get close in when you lose all your advantage of range. It has also been noted that a player that sits back and just launches projectiles the size of Churches at you is boring to play against. I could point to many armies in other games that use just the same kind of tactics and are just as derisively talked about though. If you get up close and personal with a Trebuchet fleet they have no firepower at all with which to fight back so they are not without their weaknesses. Many players consider the Bone Griffons unbeatable, as I have already stated I have lost both my games, the first was down to poor planning on my part and the second was a lot of luck to my opponent. Yet I don’t consider them to be unbeatable neither do some of the other players. But putting this issue aside, let’s look at the fleet itself and how it’s made up.

As with all starter fleets you get 2 squadrons of 3 Frigates, 1 squadron of 3 Cruisers and 1 Battleship. You get enough parts to arm your Cruisers and Battleship with Trebs or Sails for Cruisers or Broadside decks for the Battleship. More than any other fleet this one has a plethora of special rules to go with it. All the ships have their own rules regarding some aspects of their operation. Due to their configurability they will play differently depending on your weapons load out.

Orcus (Frigates) ignore command radius rules, have no ranged weapons but can submerge and travel underwater. They pass under all obstacles like this but are also then harder to hit and slower than any other Frigate in the game. Even when on the surface they only move 9″ and are still among the slowest of all Frigates. You want to keep them close to your other ships to support them with rams, you can link their ramming in the same way that you can link fire from a squadron when firing. They also have a red ram rating meaning that any damage becomes a critical hit. However, due to the fact they are ramming it is more than likely they will be taking damage themselves so don’t expect them to last all that long. The Cruisers are affected by the wind, however, if you use Trebuchets or use Oars instead you can move 7″ rather than the usual 9″. The Battleship always moves 6″ but ignores wind, this gives your fleet an incredible manoeuverability. Not as fast as Elves nor as tough as the Dwarves they aren’t a push over either.

Bone Griffons also have the highest Crew ratings of any ships in the game, this lends them towards a policy of ramming and boarding other vessels, now, if you’re armed with Trebuchets this seems counter intuitive but it helps to think of softening the target up at range before closing in and trying to board them while weathering some of their return fire. Due to the customisation of the fleet it is possible to change your strategy and tactics quite extensively though.

In support the card deck lacks any of the big spells that some other fleets get, this may be down to compensating for the extreme range that you can get out of the Bone Griffons stadium lobbing gun decks, but you do get a lot of support spells. You won’t get any magic attack spells and there are very few counter cards, but normally you will find a card that makes something you do better in some way. You can improve your shooting (setting that flung masonry on fire), or power up your boarding actions. There are also a couple of cards to replenish lost crew and repair your ships. Your cards benefit you more than hurt your opponent which again makes them stand out as a bit different to the other fleets.

I have yet to try out a pure broadsides fleets and I haven’t tried Trebuchets on the Cruisers, all I know is that at least one of my opponents doesn’t like Trebuchets as it makes the game “boring”. Personally I think it adds an interesting dynamic to the game that makes everyone have to think a bit harder but understand that in certain scenarios they can be a little over the top.

The Legend of The Girl Gamer

Once upon a time, when mud was fashionable and petrol was cheap there was a girl gamer.  Nah, just kidding, petrol has never been cheap.  Come to think of it, has there ever been a proper girl gamer?  I don’t really know.  By proper I don’t just mean someone who games occasionally, or is in the business due to other family members.  I mean my wife has gamed and painted stuff but I would never call her a gamer.  When I get excited about games she gives me a little patronizing ‘That’s nice dear’ and lets me get on with it.  She’s even been into a few Games Workshop stores but that still doesn’t make her a gamer.  A gamer is probably someone who actually has a big bunch of models strewn about the place and would combust (as the theory goes) if they ever actually got them all painted.

Now in the past I have seen some of these elusive girl gamers.  I have even been in clubs who have female members.  One of them was actually very good at gaming.  If you go to any of the big tournaments you will always see the odd one or two in amongst the beer guts and sweaty neckbeards.  It is still a massively male dominated hobby.

Now I have some ideas as to why that may be…  Young boys often get given some military themed dolls as toys.  Toy plastic soldiers, GI Joes, and Action Man (who could pwn all the GI Joes with his badass scars, buzzcut and one glance of his moving eagle eye stare).  Naturally these toys lend themselves well to playing war.  Get a stick, hide in some mud, put a headband on and spend the day pretending you are Rambo deep behind enemy lines.  Avoiding your neighbours (the enemy) until you and your mates are in position to complete your dangerous mission of stuffing grass into the washing on the line in number 3’s garden without being seen or taken prisoner.  Other popular toys for boys include model kits.  No other toy has the anarchic possibilities of a Revell Mirage 2000 jet fighter.  Firstly, there’s glue that makes you dizzy if you sniff it.  You can stick things to other things, curtains, carpets, the dog.  You can stick your fingers together and spend hours of fun peeling it off.  Then theres the paint.  Paint your jet, and your face, and your door.  Practise your mad graffitti skills before you are old enough to buy spray paint.  Once your model is complete you can spend hours running around going ‘Neeeeaaaaaaawwwwwwooooooooo’, jet in hand as you buzz your mum and practise strafing runs on your sister’s Barbie dolls.

Anyway, boys grow up, they get jobs and disposable income, but are too old to run around outside and too respectable to make machine gun noises while pointing a stick at next door’s cat.  So they combine all of their childhood hobbies and begin gaming.  Many people begin gaming in their childhood, but the difference I’ve found as an adult gamer is that when I get beaten by a twelve year old I can simply just buy an upgrade for my force, new model or whatever, and continue to do so until victory is mine.  Take that, youngsters.

So how do girls get into gaming?  Why do they do it and are there truly any hardcore girl gamers?

Conventions in Gaming – The Female of the Species

This was always going to be something that came up, however, we may not be discussing what you think we are. I could also start by saying that all three authors here at 6 Inch Move are involved with members of the opposite sex, two of us being married for a number of years. My intent here today is not to discuss the abject look of horror that crosses most ladies faces if they have to step foot in their local Games Workshop while every face stares at them in confusion as to what this figure is that has invaded their sacrosanct domain. No, more about the way in which the female form is represented through various mediums in game terms. We’re going to touch on stereotypes for sure, it would be difficult not to considering the genre and the male bias that our hobby most definitely caters for.

As you are more than likely aware if you check out any of the plethora of Fantasy movies that came out during the 80s (to be honest, probably the only good things to come out of the 80s were a lot of sci-fi/fantasy movies) women are portrayed in one of only a couple of ways. These include; being draped over some (no doubt well paying) gent, a girl who has no idea of the outside world and is therefore completely dependant on the hero (normally she’ll end up naked at some point too) and the warrior women that can kick anybody’s butt and normally does it while half naked and without getting so much as a scratch on her. OK, I’ll admit that Conan doesn’t wear much but if you read Howard’s work it fits the background, although in most of the stories the chicks are the second type listed and they pretty much are all naked half the time.

You may notice a theme developing here, this is no doubt down to the fact that products in the Fantasy realm are normally aimed at the male half of the population and are also created in the majority by those men. Now, I’m not dumb enough to postulate that these characters fulfill the whims and lusts of the creators who have a lack of experience in dealing with the female half… I don’t think that’s it at all, even though we can all picture a stereotypical gamer locked in his parents basement fantasising about conquests with amazingly hot women. We’ve all been teenagers after all. Yet, being in my third decade upon God’s Earth I obviously have different sensibilities than when I was younger and still, even though I know a large portion of gamers exists these days that are not in their teens, many have even left the confines of parental subterranean domiciles, we find that a large proportion of models showing females are less protected than might otherwise be reasonably expected. Whether this is a mere continuation of something that has existed since gaming first crept from the fiery chasm whence it came or a deliberate design philosophy is not something I am in a position to declare, but in Fantasy in particular, this theme occurs again and again. I know of a great many companies that make astoundingly detailed models and yet when you get down to representations of women, well, they must spend a lot of the time a little on the chilly side. My wife tends to be cold when we set our central heating to “African Summer” so I can only imagine what these poor model ladies go through if their physiology matches that of my wife and other ladies I know.

In Sci-fi things get a little better. The Sisters of Battle for 40k are equipped in the same kind of armour that protects perennial GW favourites the Space Marines, but even here we have a unit of silk shrouded lunatic chainsaw-wielders in the form of the Sisters Repentia. Filling a stereotypical need? Maybe, the models are good but the rules suck so you don’t often see them. Privateer Presses Iron Kingdoms universe with its Steampunk theme also means that we get women who wear a little more, however, as anyone who plays Cryx knows, that doesn’t hold true for all factions. Most of the Cryxian Warcasters are a little less armoured than other factions and we even have a triumvirate of teenagers with side-boob capacity the envy of women twice their age.

Is it purely down to male flights of fancy that all these female figures are defined by a pretty standard set of guidelines. They are invariably thing with large chests, many of these bosoms on display as part of the model, sometimes even fully exposed rather than just a prodigious cleavage. Is there a need for it? I don’t think so, I am sure that sales of female figures would not dramatically decrease if we suddenly saw a reduction in the output of such things. Do we want to see fat chicks modelled? Well, probably not, we play in a stylised environment that is heavily male dominated. Male figures with wang all over the place would not be nearly as endearing to the female audience as busty beauties are to men. We use these games as an escape from our humdrum every day lives and therefore having scantily clad babes all over the place caters to the most base of male instincts. It’s amusing that a hobby that has matured over the years still sticks with those themes that may have piqued the interests of those of us who still play during those formative teenage years. Things probably haven’t changed to entice a new generation of players. It amuses me though that we can still stick to these things that inevitably draw criticism from other quarters regarding the portrayal of these characters. Now, it may be that women in the universes we play in are happy with their lot but if we want to encourage ladies to engage in our hobby and not feel objectified as soon as they step into a store perhaps we need to change how they are portrayed upon the tabletop?

Conventions In Gaming – Sportsmanship

You can’t really discuss gaming without, at some point, ending up talking about what this post is all aboot. (See what I did thar?) This topic can bring up  a lot of disagreement as well as a lot of sagely nodding of heads and “hear hears” from those of us who have been around long enough to think of our gaming groups in a similar vein to gentleman’s clubs, just without the sitting around in silk smoking jackets with a cigar in one hand and a brandy in the other.

So, if this topic can bring up interesting debate, from what angle am I going to approach writing this post? Exactly the same way I approach all my posts, with reference to my own history and those people that I choose to spend my time gaming with. But we should perhaps try and start with a definition of sportsmanship, to avoid confusion let’s copy/pasta an official definition;

sportsman

(or sportswoman)

• noun 1 a person who takes part in a sport, especially as a professional. 2 a person who behaves sportingly.

— DERIVATIVES sportsmanlike adjective sportsmanship noun.

Hmmm, still  leaves a lot open to interpretation doesn’t it? So, let’s try again;

sporting

• adjective 1 connected with or interested in sport. 2 fair and generous in one’s behaviour.

— DERIVATIVES sportingly adverb.

That certainly helps to clear things up, when we play games we should be “fair and generous” in our behaviour. My own personal definition relating to Sportsmanship is that players on both sides of the table should both be able to have an enjoyable game whereby both parties profit from the experience and time spent together. Slightly different but nonetheless a valid extension of the official definition. Why is this aspect of gaming important? Well, if both players are not sporting then normally the game ends up with at least one of the players feeling like they’ve wasted their time and could have better spent it doing something else. Games are meant to be fun for both players and no-one wants to spend a couple of hours with their opponent bad mouthing them or telling them just how much fail their army list is composed of because they have taken sub-optimal units. Tournaments even tend towards having a Sportsmanship award these days to encourage people to be more sporting. Yet, if this behaviour is encouraged, what are some examples of sporting behaviour? Let’s have a look and then go on into a further discussion about how I see Sportsmanship, how I apply it in games I play and how I see it being applied.

Obvious examples of sporting behaviour is reminding your opponent that he forgot something, for instance “are you sure you want to move that unit before you declare charges?” or “I know you have no shooting but do you really want to go straight to the combat phase before casting any spells?” Both are mistakes I have made in the past few months, what can I say? I get excited when things get up close and personal. This isn’t the only aspect of it though, I am sure we have all been there when a unit has charged into combat to come up a millimetre short, in these cases it should be easy enough to let them charge on in anyway rather than failing. I have a comical image in my head related to this as I imagine this rampaging group of barbarians throwing themselves at an enemy just to stop within axe swinging distance and then having to walk back a few feet because their charge didn’t quite reach. I know that’s a rather simplistic view of the way the rules for Warhammer Fantasy are (after all each turn is just a segment of time) but I think it highlights the point I am trying to make.

Yet, should this be our behaviour all the time? I am not a tournament player and I can imagine a situation whereby a failed charge (even by that millimetre) could allow you a counter charge in your next turn that could turn a disadvantageous situation into an advantageous one. In real battle capitalizing on your opponent’s mistakes is going to help to achieve victory and simulated battles are no different. I reckon that all players, like myself, can come up with a lot of stories whereby they have achieved victory through a mistake an opponent has made, knowingly or unwittingly, but surely, by the letter of a sporting behaviour law we should offer advice and assistance to let them know what is going on?

This leads me to how I deal with Sportsmanship in my own games and with my friends. For me, it all depends on how familiar we are with the game. I have an abhorrence of cheating, it devalues a game for all that play it and getting one up on someone through playing outside the rules, well, you might as well not even bother playing the game in my opinion. Yet, when I am learning a new game it is inevitable that mistakes creep in as we familiarise ourselves with the rules, I normally kick myself after such games where I’ve done something wrong after going over the game in my head or even when I’ve forgotten something that could have saved my bacon. So, when we are learning something new (like Space Hulk and Uncharted Seas at the moment) I give and expect to be given some leeway in how we do things and a less rigid application of the ruleset as we get used to things. This is of course vastly different to how Gribblin and I play our Fantasy games. We have gotten to the point now where if I forget to declare a charge I have to live with it, if I skip a phase, that’s my error and the same is applied. This means our games probably come over as a little more competitive and they are, but regardless of the outcome we both enjoy ourselves and also end up having to remember and learn from the mistakes we make so that we do not make them again.

There is also normally some good natured trash talking going on during the game and always once we are finished we will review each other’s performances and offer suggestions on what went well and what didn’t, where we went wrong and how we could have done things differently. Normally, one of us blames some dodgy dice (me more than anyone else at the moment). I cannot recall any bitterness coming out of any of our games and therefore I feel that we have a pretty sporting thing going on. We all enjoy ourselves even come the points when we lose, if everyone has fun then it’s a win all around really. So I believe that you can still be sporting without giving your opponent free advice, sure if they are new then you’re going to give them some leeway and be helpful during a game, crushing someone who has their first game against you isn’t going to endear them to the hobby nor the people that play. However, any of us old hands can take things a bit more seriously and still find ourselves having fun, sporting and competitive games.

Uncharted Seas – The Imperial Navy Review

Over the weekend was my third game of Uncharted Seas and my third loss. The encouragement is that in the past two games it has been the lack of grace from Lady Luck that has been my undoing. I am probably not nearly as gracious in defeat as I should be either…

My purpose today is to give an overview of one of the Fleets that is available in the game, but before I do that I’ll give an overview of the game world so that you can get a feel for things. This game is a fleet based naval combat game, you roll initiative each turn and then whoever wins gets to move a ship or squadron of ships and fire with them before the opponent does the same, this goes back and forth until everything has been used and another initiative roll is made for the next turn. The rulebook has scenarios in it and we are currently just playing the “I am going to kill you” one while we learn the rules. I can see all kinds of interesting campaign play and scenearios in the future though as the game is a solid system. Everything works off D6’s and the line of sight system is easy to understand. As we are using broadsides, Cannon in most instances but some races have magical weapons, this being a fantasy setting after all, most attacks get more potent the closer you get to the enemy. Everything is of a Galleon style but you have the traditional fantasy races fulfilling their stereotypes here;

Humans are loaded with guns all over. Orcs want to get up close and personal. Dwarves (both kinds) have tough steam ships brimming with guns. Elves are lightning quick. Bone Griffins (Undead) are slow but tough to kill. Dragon Lords are a kind of Human/Elf cross though.

You roll an amount of dice that varies with how far you are away from your target in range bands that are 8″ each, anything further than range band 4 (32″) is out of range, most ships don’t have weapons that will reach that far anyway. Wind can slow anyone that sails into it by half their speed, but this doesn’t play too much of a role in the game and it just something else that you have to consider, some fleets by their nature ignore the wind and therefore end up with a slight tactical advantage although this also tends to mean that they are slower than anything powered by sails.

So, the Human fleet, I played it on Saturday so what’s it all about?

Well, I suppose the best way to start is to say that the Humans are really kind of middle of the road. They have attacks available in almost all of their fire arcs with the number of attack dice increasing in line with the size of the vessel. Getting up close with the Imperial Navy Battleship is not something to be taken on lightly as they chuck out a horrendous amount of firepower up close which can often be supported by cards in their deck that provide bonuses to these attacks. They are also effective out to Range Band 3. The Humans are not long range, nor are they short range masters, they are very capable at both and this is where their strength lies. No matter what is coming at you the starter set you play with (2 * 3 Frigates, 1 * 3 Cruisers and 1 Battleship) gives you enough to counter whatever come across at you. The Cruisers are very capable of putting out some hurt as they close in, softening targets for the Battleship.

Playing as Humans you’re also not faster or slower than anyone else. Outmaneuvering is not really going to be something you’re going to achieve very well but this is compensated again by the amount of guns you have. Also, you will not want to be doing any ramming as the ships are not built for it, neither in the strength of their hulls nor the number of crew on board to fight in boarding actions. Yet, anyone wanting to ram you is going to have to brave a hail of fire as they try to close, meaning the potential for lost crew that will make that subsequent boarding action even less effective.

The card deck that accompanies the fleet is fairly mundane also, you have a number of damage repair and shooting buffs/debuffs. The two standout signature cards are a ranged 8AD (8 attack dice) attack that can hit any ship on the table and my own personal favourite “From Hell’s Heart I Stab at Thee”. The first card can be used to soften a target before you really let rip, the latter is used to changed the result of a sinking. All ships in the game have two ratings, a Damage Rating and a Critical Rating. When you attack a ship you roll the dice and count up how many hits there are, if you beat the Damage Rating then the ship suffers one hull point of damage, if you beat the Critical Rating you roll on the Critical table and this will see at least two hull points of damage caused but normally you will get a secondary effect that will hinder the ship. The Critical Chart has number from 2 to 12 and everyone normally hopes for a 2. If this happens the ship’s magazine has been hit and the whole thing goes nuclear spraying an 8″ area with flaming debris, normally meaning you can take the enemy with you as the most effective gun fire normally takes place inside 8″ as you’re at Range Band 1. Your ship doesn’t have to be destroyed by a critical though, once it has lost its last hull point down it goes. Cruisers and Battleships of all fleets are classed as Capital ships, what the aforementioned card allows you to do is when a Capital ship is destroyed it has the same effect as if that double 1 had been rolled on the critical table. If you have this in your hand (as I did on Saturday) this makes the destruction of any of your more powerful ships a potential issue for your opponent. Now, as this was the first game I had played with this fleet this was an unexpected trick that came out, the only problem being that the 16AD it generated meant I only hit the enemy’s Battleship three or four times… way lower than averages would declare and that pretty much sealed my fate, his battered Cruiser squadron sank though as did a Frigate squadron of my own.

The Human fleet therefore is pretty dependable, you know what you’re going to get out of them. Being sail ships they are affected by the wind and you need to account for this but you’re going to be chucking out firepower on the way in to soften up your targets before unleashing hell once things are up close and personal. Also, just because someone manages to sink you doesn’t mean you are out of options for striking back. They are a solid fleet and I had some fun playing with them. I just need to go ahead and finish their construction and add them to my painting schedule.

They should be ready sometime around 2064.

Conventions in Gaming – Terrain

Sun Tzu in his critically acclaimed, nobel peace prize winning, magnum opus “The Art of War” espouses that the greatest of Generals use terrain to their advantage in order to win battles and by doing this it is possible to win a battle against a more numerous enemy. We’ve all seem movies or documentaries from the ancient world whereby Phalanxes line up opposite each other and then go at it, but even in battles of yore such as the famed Thermopylae terrain was used to great effect to reduce the impact that the Persians outnumbered the Greek forces opposing them.

So it is with our tabletop games, whereas there are those armies that would love to have a battlefield devoid of any terrain in order to have charge/fire lanes available to them it is not only unrealistic but actually takes a lot of fun out of the game. Even games like Uncharted Seas which take place on the oceans are not devoid of terrain, an island or peninsula can dramatically alter the ebb and flow of a game as well as increasing the number of strategic options available to a General. How you utilise the terrain in order to provide cover or interrupt line of sight can have a large impact on how emerges the victor once the dust of combat has settled.

However, just as good terrain placement can produce an interesting and fun game, so the opposite is also true, a game with bad terrain placement can actually decide a battle before the first turn starts and can mean that one side, if not both, end up playing something that is dull and boring. Something along the lines of you’d rather spend the time you just played by volunteering to be the patient for a Dental student’s first root canal and they’ve run out of anaesthetic. I’d like to give specific proof of this for a game I had around three years ago that still sticks in my memory for all the wrong reasons. OK, this wasn’t a typical game, but still, things could have gone better. It was around the time when Hordes was coming up for release. We already had some stuff for Warmachine in our gaming circle and decided to take a two Warpack starters from Hordes up against one appropriately sized force from Warmachine. So it was that me trying out Legion alongside Trolls went up against a sizeable Khador force. I can’t remember the details behind how we went about setting up the terrain but I remember that our Khadoran opponent just placed a line of building that separated the battlefield in two halves with a small gap in the centre. We were playing a caster kill game and I know that I wasn’t happy when I saw the terrain, it very favourably suited the Khador stuff and I know that I should have said, “no, we can’t play like this, the game will be purely dictated by how that terrain is placed to the detriment of the game.” However, I held my tongue and we played the game, and yup, we got spanked. Not because we were bad players but because the terrain was that horrible the game ran exactly how I knew it would and nothing we could do compensated for that. I know that real life battles aren’t always fought over ideal terrain, one side normally has an advantage, but we’re not talking real combat here, we are talking about a game that is supposed to be fun for all players, this wasn’t.

Therefore, whenever I set up terrain before a game, or when I setup during a game opposite my opponent I always try and make the placement fair for both sides. I actually have pretty good luck in ending up on the side of the battlefield that I want but still, I don’t want the odds stacked in my favour before the first dice has been rolled. In Warhammer 40,000 I like a decent amount of cover to protect my Orks approach (to be honest though there are enough bodies in those units to provide a kind of cover all their own) while Servitob’s Space Marines love nice open fields where they can see and shoot anything approaching them. A balance between the two provides us both with options in how we deploy and move our forces and advantages that we can exploit in bringing the armies to bear.

Games like Warmachine and Hordes also have spells and actions that allow you to create your own terrain, this is when you can obviously try to stack those odds in your favour, but these things don’t tend to stick around the entire game and are therefore carefully balanced. Usually you also have things to counter those kinds of abilities in some flavour.

We use terrain to give variety to the otherwise bland tables we fight across, they add colour and extra options that we need to factor into our plans. They also add to the fun of the game and if you are the one that uses the terrain to your advantage, so much the better. Just as Sun Tzu taught that terrain use is a major aspect of battles, so it should be with us, whether home-made or bought from a store using terrain to spice up the fields or setup specific venues is a great way to keep the hobby fresh and interesting. I’ve been fortunate enough to have bought a lot of terrain recently. The new stuff that Games Workshop is producing is of really good quality and I have a 64 litre storage box full of the stuff with more on the assembly line. As the possibility of a Planetstrike 40k game looms for Saturday I will tonight be putting the finishing touches to my Skyshield Landing Platform, I then have a Bastion to assembled that I want to convert with all manner of Orkiness. It’s having little things like this that helps to motivate me while playing. Terrain is something I feel I can never have enough of (that and Ork Boyz) and I am always willing to fork out some green on pieces I like the look of. We should never take our terrain for granted, nor see it as a necessary evil. Properly used terrain is as much a part of the game as the models in our army and in fact, if you really plan out your battles, terrain is another unit in your army if used correctly, in most cases though it won’t deep strike and lay waste to stuff!

Hopefully the next time you stare across a war torn battlefield, before or after a game, you can have a new found appreciation for those hills, craters, fences, ruins or whatever you have. Things would be a lot more boring without them.

MMOs Vs Tabletop – The Battle for Gaming

I was born at the tail end of the 70’s and therefore grew up during the age in which computers really took off as well as in the hey day of AD&D. Now, being a little young and in the wrong crowd for D&D I ended up firmly in the group who grew up with BBCs, Acorns and their ilk. As I got older I got into tabletop games and these both ran alongside each other as the hobbies that really would take a lot of my time especially as the 90’s hit and I had my own disposable income to chuck away.

Now, computer gaming really was quite a solitary thing, OK, you may have had a mate round to play Duck Hunt or something but that really was it, there wasn’t a huge multiplayer market unless you had two joysticks… Tabletop gaming is much more social in my mind, whether you’ve spent time in a store surrounded by the heady odour of unwashed men or surrounded yourself with better hygiened companions in the safety of your own boudoir, tabletop lends itself to a crowd. OK, you can enjoy a game with a close friend and enjoy it being just the two of you but often when I play there is at least 3 of us.

Nowadays however there is a (not so) new kid on the block. The MMORPG, a game genre that seeks to unite thousands if not millions of people globally into the same environment, some have even made the transition from tabletop to Internetz, and some vice versa. They seek to entice all people to enjoy their fruits and (after playing more than my fair share) I find them to be useful diversions that allow a bit of escapism, I’ve even been fortunate enough to play with real life friends in these adventures and have forged at least one lasting friendship through someone met in one of these games. However, both MMOs and tabletop gaming are very different, you obviously have a much more selective play group if you’re involved in a tabletop community, even if you are a regular tournament attendee, then we have the perennial stumbling block that miniatures are seen as nerdy and the age old image of computer gamers being sweaty old men living in their parents basement is becoming a stereotype more and more consigned to the past.

A hobby only survives long term with an injection of fresh blood and I don’t really have any numbers to throw around here but with the easy accessibility of computer games and the social aspects of MMOs, does this mean that we will see a slow decline in the number of people who take up the tabletop hobby? After all, there are no really immediate results from miniatures, you normally have to assemble them first and then there is the option of painting them too. MMOs you just pays your dollar and dives right in, you can see yourself getting rewards in terms of money, XP and loot a much more immediate gratification and your house doesn’t end up looking like the set from the Death Star trench run.

Yet, no matter how much MMOs may try to entice, even with games like Warhammer Online, I cannot see them replacing a hobby that I love. Would you be enticed into Warhammer Online to sample the Intellectual Property or rather try actually playing a proper game where you command entire regiments on the table rather than a single avatar in the game? Are we going to see more and more kids that may have been willing to try out tabletop going down the road of MMOs because they require a smaller investment up front and quicker rewards? Or do you feel that our beloved hobby will be able to endure against the continuing encroachment of virtual treats?

I don’t have the answers and I look forward to the day that I can pass on my geekiness to any legacy that may be forthcoming, but no matter how social gaming may become, standing around talking trash with friends in my living room will always be something I treasure.

THOSE models!

Yesterday afternoon before being carted away to the in-laws I got some time to sit down and assemble some of those models I’ve been Twittering about for what seems like an age. Kind of needed to at least make a start as it looks like this weekend is going to produce some gaming, not least of which is the Fantasy grudge-match between the Vampire Counts and my Daemons. I’ll be talking more of a concept in this post as well as providing specific examples, the reason behind this may get posted after things have appeared on Saturday as I don’t want to give away too much before the big day, so to speak.

Now, I’m sure everyone out there that has been involved in making models for their games is about to give one of those knowledgable bobs of the head confirming their consent to what I am about to speak about, you know what they are, THOSE models. These models you have glanced at, either in glossy magazines or on the pages of the geeky depths of the Intarwebz and declared that you must own it. Either due to its amazing quality of craftsmanship or its unbridled power on the tabletop. We all have models we really love and the sculptor obviously took his time when putting it together. However, when the manufacturer took decisions on how to break it down in order to be packaged and then assembled by you or I that person seems to have had an overwhelming case of the brain farts! I’ll give you a specific example as a starter for ten, the Tomb Kings Screaming Skull Catapult, in game terms it’s pretty evil and the model it decent too, however, trying to put that thrice-cursed model together is an exercise in futility. Now matter how much glue or green stuff you chuck at that thing you still need about four additional sets of hands to hold it together and it’s quite a substantial size of model,

I’ve also heard things about Mortenebra from Warmachine, she has loads of little spider legs that go (or don’t go as the case may be) around her base. Problem is that these things are tiny, therefore not conducive to being pinned and with a very small contact area for any glue to hold. I was assembling a new model over the weekend that fell into just this kind of category, not matter which way you choose to build it the pose and bulk of the model make it hard to hold together, this gets even worse when some of the parts are ill-fitting and are going to need a lot of green stuff later on to plug the holes before I get around to painting it. If the model looks good (or at least should when it’s finished) I find this adds even more frustration to the process of trying to get the damned thing to stick together.

I know lots of techniques, pinning, adding a small blob of greenstuff into the join, cleaning the parts first, scoring each side of the join to give the glue a better surface to grip to, but still, this thing almost got thrown across the living room. Bits fell off at various points even after vigorous attempts to get it to hold. What really gets my goat are joints where all the weight is at the other end of the piece, thus naturally the parts try to snap the bond you are trying to create, I just know that if this thing is unfortunate enough to ever have a brief relationship with the floor that I’ll be picking up the individual parts again even once I have filled in all the gaps with green putty. I thought therefore I’d add here my own list (in no particular order) of some of the most evil models I’ve ever had the misfortune of trying to assemble. Please feel free to comment and add your own;

1. Any Warmachine Cryx spiderjack, those legs are evil and they don’t ever stick to their base.
2. Witch Coven Egregore, not so much of a problem to put together but mine is no longer attached to the base as the whole ball is supported on a stick thin piece of bendy white metal.
3. The aforementioned Screaming Skull Catapult
4. The new contender from yesterday….
5. Pink Horrors, one piece models that get incredibly annoying when they come with horns or extra arms that need attaching…
6. Obliterators, stupidly fiddly little weapons that need gluing into their fists… &*£%!@* annoying I tell you.

I am sure there are others but these are the ones that stick out in my mind as the royal pains in the lower back!

Gaming vs Simulation

So we play games. And more games. And if our wives will let us, will will do it while eating KFC and drinking Dr Pepper. Life can be good like that sometimes, relaxing with the mates, throwing dice and generally ganging up on the tyranid player whenever possible.

But here’s an angle I feel has slowly been sliding out of gaming in the last few years. And it’s actually due to gaming systems becoming better. Back in days of old when your average gamer thought chunky knitwear, beards and smoking pipes were the height of glamour, games were generally an excuse to push your finely painted (albeit with a roller soaked in blue humbrol enamel) model Frenchmen around a table; while your friend pushed around some equally dazzlingly detailed Redcoats that looked like they had been cast by the teletubbies on a gas hob with lead stolen from their grandmother’s bathroom.

Rules weren’t really that important. What was important was the detailed historical ‘debates’ about how the Redcoats were better shots because this happened at this battle, and how the French artillery was better organised because of this event blah blah blah. Overall it was a good excuse to have a lively debate about common interests while the wife was busy curtain twitching.

The games therefore were based somewhat in history… which meant they were nearly always simulations. No battle ever fought in the history of the world ever was balanced, and the sock and sandal wearing gamers of old knew this and incorporated it into their games. Then came the sweeping reformations of decent games (popularised largely by Games Workshop), and slowly games became, well, more game like. Slowly, games becamed balanced, akin to chess. No longer were battles fought and won by daring generals who out-manovered a much larger force.

What we now play then, with the likes of Warhammer 40,000 is the super refined, super condensed ‘arcade’ version of battles. It matters not that your army is highly mobile, or that it excels at long range combat – you are going to end up slugging it out in a meeting engagement on a tiny 6×4 battlefield. There is no opportunity on a table of that size for fast units such as landspeeders to actually use their speed to their full potential and outmanouver slow formations. You know they are gonna get crumped in close combat by about turn two, which to me seems daft. A unit like that would harass slow moving infantry indefinitely, much like horse archers from ancient history. They wouldn’t harass the infantry for a bit, then run out of table, then get crumped by an ork with a power klaw. Similar story for some of the massive artillery available. Having a tank with a massive cannon ending up with melta bombs in its exhaust after turn three seems unreaslistic. What the heck was happening before the armies closed to point blank range and the battle began?

Then there is the issue of balance. Games are now balanced so armies can fairly fight each other. This is also taking into account that the battle will be fought on a miniscule field. Makes sense from a fun perspective, but life is never fair.

I hope you can see the point I am making. Modern wargames are essentially games with fairness, speed and fun in mind, and are not true representations of battles fought. If you want a more realistic experience, then hark back to the days of our chunky knitwearing forbears. Make the playing field as big as you can. Set up one side in defense for a change. Let the defenders set up all the terrain (good real-life generals will pick where to fight). Make sure the armies do not in the slightest bit balance. Make up some kind of scenario (battles always had an objective). Most importantly, enjoy the experience.  Let me know how your games fare!

Remember, you will have more excuses when you lose!