The Joy of Calais

As Sheffield just began to get over the hump of the recent hot weather, a few hundred wargamers descended upon the multi-room sauna that is Sheffield Hallam University for the annual Joy of Six event. Despite the thermal discomfort it was a really enjoyable day and I was delighted to meet new people and introduce them to the TacWWII rules.

As regulars here will know, this year the Cold War Commanders group were putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road, a scenario depicting events on 23rd May 1940, just prior to the start of the siege of Calais.

Early in the planning it looked like the rest of the group fancied a year off from staging a game.  Accordingly I planned to do what I fancied, thinking I'd be running the whole thing myself. This at least had the advantage of speeding up the decision-making process and allowed me to develop the game across most of the preceding twelve months.

A couple of months into the planning period, though, a plan to wargame a 1980s Soviet invasion of Iceland emerged so a two table, two-rule-system offer was planned for. Until, that was, our terrain maestro Richard P suffered a serious health set-back and suddenly we were back to a single game. Get well soon Richard!

Among the innovations I wanted to try were a couple of Keynote (I'm a confirmed Mac user) presentations. One of these was running continuously covering the background to the battle, forces orders and organisations, and telling people how to get the rules and engage with the on-line community.

The other presentation was advanced as needed and served as a turn-by-turn progress display and a reminder of scheduled events such as the arrival of reinforcements.

In the end, the TacWWII Calais scenario happened with sterling help from Andy T and Ian S. They set up the Germans and British respectively before we were joined by show attendees and new friends Ian F (for 1st Panzer Division's Aufklärungs Abteilung) and Les H (for 3RTR).

The area bounded by Windmill Hill, Fréthun station and Nielles-lès-Calais would be where the British forces began to muster for the fight.

With the two sides almost bumping into each other this isn't a scenario where the action is delayed by long approach marches. To reflect the confusion of the unexpected collision, only one company on each side can dice to change Mode on game turn 1. 

Point of Contact!

Andy (before Ian F's arrival) had elected to have the Kradschützen (motorcycle infantry) company lead down the road and with British tanks to their front, they rapidly got out of the way and tried to outflank them along the road to Nielles.

This left an armoured car company in the front window. As reported previously, I'd distinguished the cannon-armed armoured cars from their machine-gun-only compatriots by use of air-recognition flags. This worked well for players not familiar with my model collection.

B Squadron 3RTR at the level crossing.
Regt HQ in the field.

The lead armoured car company managed to get into Deliberate Attack Mode.

Early on, a strafing run by a Hurricane took out the German engineers' Opel Blitz.

By game turn 3 a complex melee was in progress.

Les looks confident as 2pdr rounds make short
work of thinly armoured German machines

Things looked bad for the Kradschützen as two squadrons on British tanks converged on them.

They would, however, take out one troop of Cruiser tanks before being destroyed in fighting between the Fréthun road and the railway.

A few British reinforcements were scheduled. Unlike their German opponents, they would arrive automatically, selected by card draw. I did this because they were very much there for historical flavour rather than fighting power. On game turn three a RASC petrol convoy arrived, its drivers dismounting to form single rifle platoon, and on turn 6 a searchlight battery (commanded by Lt Airey Neave) deployed behind a roadblock in Nielles.

The Germans, however, had to roll each turn to see if reinforcements arrived. This they proved sadly unable to do to any useful degree. Turn after turn the reinforcements failed to appear at all or if they did turn up, it was in the form of two companies of truck-borne infantry: not ideal against tanks.

Even a Stuka strike proved ineffective.

With a regular trickle of casualties causing Company Morale Tests it was inevitable that bad rolls would come along sooner or later and although the British had one company flee entirely, it was the Germans who failed a Battalion Test. The Aufklärungs Abteilung received a Halt result. 

Although division HQ got an order through to restart their attack, and a light tank company with Panzers III and II arrived on the penultimate game turn, it was clearly not going to be possible to clear the Calais road in the time allotted.

We therefore agreed a British victory with 3RTR still holding the line at Windmill Hill.

I was very pleased with how the game went and owe hearty thanks to our recruits to the cause of resurrecting TacWWII:

Left to right: Andy, your host, Les, Ian S and Ian F

Now on to packing for next weekend's West Mid Lards event (after a much-needed beer!)

 

More Joy of Six prep

I've tweaked the Calais game mat with the addition of green edges to the roads and completed a few more village modules as well as creating some signs to identify the villages to onlookers.

I haven't used the "fill in mix" I created recently at this stage as I want to keep it available for use on the day.

I'm increasingly more satisfied with how this is going to look but I've every confidence that I'll come up with some kind of tweak, probably late on Saturday!

A bit of nostalgia

Forty years ago I was hanging around Sheffield wondering what to do with the rest of my life and combining the roles of magazine editor and librarian of NODDSoc, the University of Sheffield's role-playing society. 

The library consisted of a grey-painted steel cabinet somewhere in the bowels of the Octagon Centre, the university's recently completed conference and performance venue. I don't have a hugely clear memory of what games were in there but randomly I recall a copy of the almost-unplayably-complex Aftermath, the Thieves' World boxed campaign setting, and Village of Twilight, a scenario for a long-forgotten horror RPG called Chill. Oh and probably a copy of the Borderlands campaign pack for Runequest.

Anyway, in the course of my society duties I would host a taster session at the Student Union's Freshers' Fair. One of the players was a cute young blonde who had never tried RPGs before. My game-mastering skills must have done something to impress her because we've now been married for 36 years. We have three grown-up kids, two of whom have since attended Sheffield and become NODDSoc members. 

Our daughter has since become a member of the society's committee (and she's not the only second-generation committee member) and recently, after bit of a cock-up on the logistics front, I was delighted to find that the current incarnation of the NODDSoc library was residing in the back of her car until she could get access to its new home.

There's some really old stuff in there; some of which might well have been under my care in the 1980s!

I've completely moved on from RPGs but it was pleasant to wallow in a bit of nostalgia.

Prepping for Joy of Six

At the end of this month the Cold War Commanders are putting on Calais: Encounter on the St Omer Road using the TacWWII rules. 

I've created the game board by airbrushing the road network onto a suitably sized green cloth.  Although I've dusted on some yellows and paler greens to break up the overall colour, I decided it needed some of my field modules to give the proper Pas-de-Calais countryside look.

A shot from the first run-through of the game
with just a few fields

On Monday I decided to do another terrain test, with a larger number of fields present. This looked better but there's a strong sense of "these are terrain pieces sitting on a cloth" rather than actual countryside.

Then I was reminded of Al Seward's game at Ebor Lard a few years back and how he blended together individual terrain pieces to form a unified built-up area.

I decided to experiment with various flock and clump foliage recipes to disguise the boundaries of the terrain pieces. The starting position looked like this:

Here we see three field units butted up against each other and the edge of the table. They do rather stand out as separate pieces.

I've had some mixed brown flock stored in an old Lyle's Golden Syrup tin for years as well as a small amount of mixed green flock previously used on figure bases. I tried sprinkling them both into the gaps between fields.

Okay but not quite what I want. How about using tiny pieces of torn-up clump foliage?

Possibly better but this isn't Normandy; I didn't want to give the impression of hedge-lined fields.

In the end I settled upon a mix of all three:

and made up a batch that can travel to Joy of Six and be sprinkled into the joints and probably around the boundaries of terrain pieces on the day.

Here's the full table with all but one of the villages in place:

And here's the village after a couple of hours' painting and matching base shapes to the previously painted road network:

I'm now more happy with the look of the battlefield but I think I may experiment with adding brighter green verges to the sides of the roads outside the villages. That'll help them stand out better. As some of the pictures above show, they tend to disappear in certain lighting conditions.

Gangs of Rome - Episode 1, Wagons Roll!

Yesterday I finally managed to kick off the Gangs of Rome campaign. Gus, Graham, Jamie and Ron were able to visit Stately Counterpane Manor for what will hopefully be the first of six episodes (seven if you include episode 0, which was more of a learning/teaching exercise).

Jamie and Ron were already established as Green gang members so Gus and Graham were signed up to represent the Blues.

Each of the two street gangs has a list of six objectives that will need to be fulfilled over the course of the six-game campaign. The two lists are not the same and each side chooses a mission for each episode. Thus, at the start of the campaign even I as the umpire have no idea what each scenario will entail.

In this case the Blue gang of Tarquinius Caerulius elected to "dispose of a body". This saw them having to get a body to one of two manhole covers and chuck it into the cloaca maxima (Rome's main sewer). To add complications, they had to do this while no-one was in line of sight! At the start of the game the body was in a raeda, a four-wheeled, ox-drawn carriage.

Meanwhile the Green gang of Spurius Verdius had to escort a wagon-load of wine to the gates of the Spurius townhouse.  

With both sides driving wheeled vehicles this had to be a night-time scenario as they are banned from the city during the day. I created a new Action for the driver of each wagon. Drive would allow a wagon to be moved four inches. A given vehicle could only be subject to a Drive Action once per turn. Obviously the Fail State for the Drive Action is "The vehicle doesn't move, Activation ends here."

Junius encourages the oxen forward

My creative input to the process is in deciding on the detail of the objectives, such that conflict is at least reasonable if not actually required! In this case the Greens had to cross the table diagonally and the Blues had to get to a location near the centre of the table so a clash was likely.

And a clash there soon was. The action opened with Maximinus (of the Blue gang) shooting an arrow at Plinius. He missed and to add insult to injury his bowstring broke! Almost immediately further injury was added as his target closed the range and beat him unconscious.  First blood to the Greens!

Maximinus (top right) shoots at Plinius (off camera)

Things continued well for the Greens as Laetius shot Januarius and took him too out of the fight.

The Blues, given a choice of two manholes down which they might dispose of their incriminating cargo, elected to move to the one nearer the centre of the table rather than the one nearer their opponents' deployment area. In retrospect this was the wrong choice but with limited intelligence as to the Green gang's mission this was definitely forgivable. They reached the manhole but with both Greens and vigiles milling about, there was never a quiet moment to ditch the body.

The raeda has just crossed the manhole
but the vigiles are nosing around

The German slave siblings Clovis and Arminius fought fiercely for the Greens, Arminius mostly against the vigiles and Clovis against a series of Blues.  In the end Clovis was stabbed by Pomponius and breathed his last just outside the temple of Minerva. 

Pomponius (in the purple tunic) prepares to stab
bare-chested Clovis as Musca and Titus look on

Arminius holds his own against the vigiles

In the meantime Junius of the Greens had got the wine most of the way to the Spurius mansion.

For a while it looked like Balbus might have a go at interfering with the delivery of the wine as he lurked behind one of Spurius Viridius's ornamental trees,

but in the end, with the law on the scene, he decided to withdraw.

In the event, with time moving on we decided that the Greens were close enough to the mansion to claim victory and that the Blues, who had finally decided to try the other, now deserted, manhole would be able to dispose of the corpse.  

Both sides were therefore awarded three points for achieving their main objectives. In addition, both sides had put out of action two of the opposing side (one of them permanently). They each therefore received a further two points. The campaign score is therefore now as follows:

Blue Gang - started with six VP, spent one to make sure we were playing a nighttime scenario, gained five this time around, new total = 10 Victory Points.

Green Gang - started with one VP, spent none, gained five this time, new total = 6 Victory Points.

Several gang members came away with injuries. For the Blues, Maximinius has a sprained ankle and will be unable to benefit from his personal ability for episodes 2 and 3, while Januarius has a head wound and won't benefit from any re-rolls for the rest of the campaign. 

For the Greens, Plinius has severe lacerations and will be limited to three Actions per activation for the rest of the campaign whereas the unfortunate Clovis has gone to feast with his ancestors. Doubtless his brother Arminius will be out for revenge next time!

-o0o-

I was slightly disappointed with some aspects of how the game went. The rules for using vigiles in a night-time scenario are unclear to me. I need to do some more reading of the rules and perhaps ask a few questions on the dedicated Facebook group. Whatever, I'm confident that we can come up with an acceptable solution, even if it means house-ruling the situation.

Thanks are due to those who contributed to the planning stage and to playing the scenario. Watch out for the next episode soon!

 

Gangs of Rome - the Patrons

With Episode 1 of our Gangs of Rome campaign coming up this weekend, I knew that sooner or later I'd need miniatures to represent the patrons of our two gangs. The way the campaign is organised, there's always the possibility that one side or the other may have to deploy their patron on the table during an episode.

What luck, then, that issue 462 of Wargames Illustrated, out this week, provides just the minis I need! As a promo for a gladiatorial combat game called Blood on the Sands, WI this month includes a cut-down version of the rules and a sprue of suitable figures from Wargames Atlantic. 

The sprue provides the parts to build two gladiators (a murillo and a thraex) as well as these two:

They're intended to represent a pair of lanistae (owners/trainers of gladiators) and as that pretty neatly reflects the day job of our two gang-patrons, it was a no-brainer to pick up a copy.

They've had a fairly rushed paint job because I wanted them ready for the weekend. The basing is designed to work in either the arena or on the streets of the city.

-o0o-

Because a rule of the campaign is that player characters don't appear if their player is unavailable, I needed a few more gang members. A quick rebase of the servi castrensi from my Polybian Roman army gave me some useful additions:

Secundinus the Assassin

Plinius, who thinks the blood
of a snake can cure poison

Titus, who prefers camel meat
to pork or chicken

Maximinus, who only uses
arrows with barbed heads

Iovianus, born half a world away

and Balbus, who once killed
his landlord with the leg of a chair

Sharp Practice terrain sources

On Friday Baroness Counterpane and I were at Welbeck Abbey in Nottinghamshire to see our daughter give a talk about the history of the estate's private fire brigade. 

The talk, a ticketed affair, took place in the Harley Gallery and while we were waiting for it to start, my eye was taken by a seventeenth century oil painting.

Apparently 'View of Antwerp' has been attributed to a number of artists including the elder Breughel and Peter Paul Rubens. What caught my eye, though, was the foreground detail.

When building terrain for northern European Sharp Practice games this kind of thing is gold dust.

This one, for example, has a nice old cottage with washing drying on the grass outside, a field of enormous cabbages, and a couple of fence lines overgrown with long grass...

While this one has a wonderfully tumbledown fence...

...as well as a nice little chapel.

Finally this one shows an interestingly wide street as well as a nice selection of outbuildings.  

Worth noting by the way that at least one of the horses towing the wagon in that last section is hitched centrally. That's going to be pretty typical. It's my belief that the country lane we're familiar with today, with its central strip of grass between two channels of bare earth, is an artefact of the internal combustion engine. It shouldn't be seen in horse-and-musket-era or earlier terrain.