On the Workbench - terrain

I've been lax about posting here of late. I try to get two posts in each week but i've not been meeting that frequency.  However, that does't mean I haven't been making progress.  Here are a few terrain items I've finished in the last couple of weeks:

These three lengths of fencing are from a box of plastic bits I picked up a year ago at Vapnartak.  The tree is part of a ridiculously cheap batch I got from a Chinese company via eBay.

The following are intended as Jump Off Point markers for Chain of Command.  The signs are from the Airfix Command Post set.  Additions from various sources including the aforementioned Vapnartak bits box.  The piece in the foreground features a wooden bow containing a Panzerscheck rocket. It came with some German AT troops I picked up second hand at Gauntlet.  Sorry, I don't know the manufacturer.

Next we have an updating of my old Hovels medieval houses.  For along time I'd been dissatisfied with towns that consisted of buildings plonked onto the plain battlefield cloth so I created a base with some yards at the rear.  The base is from hardboard and I've added a couple of spare, resin dry-stone walls.  The rest of the detail is scratch-built.

I'm particularly pleased with the cobbled pavement.  The cobblestones are red lentils!

And finally, some more of those Chinese trees.  Just right for placing alongside a road.  Some nice shade for marching troops.

Defending the Indefensible

No, nothing to do with a certain Saturday morning Radio 5 show; rather another game of Lion Rampant.

Andy came over on Monday evening for a last game before he goes into the usual two months' of political campaigning.  I'm pleased to say he'll enter the fray invigorated by a fine and crushing victory.  We swapped sides this time with Andy taking the Burgundians and me the Swiss.

I had 10 points of troops in the centre guarding the bombard (the game's "indefensible" objective).  The pikes (expert foot serjeants) formed the main strength and they were backed up by two units of bidowers; the Swiss hand gunners and the Italian mercenary crossbowmen.  The latter had switched sides since the last game.

We set up the table on the assumption that the Burgundians had somehow found their way behind the Swiss lines around a besieged town.  The rest of the Swiss force was coming back from beneath the walls to oppose this surprise move.

This game saw a first opportunity to use my new Swiss mounted crossbowmen.  Needless to say, their first foray would not be glorious.

Below we see the Burgundian force as it sweeps past and through part of the Swiss Camp.

The game began with most of Andy's forces advancing...

Though the mounted men at arms proved reluctant to move.

The Irish kern advanced on the right flank.

While the coustilliers moved up quickly on the left and the longbowmen advanced in the centre.

The coustilliers took early casualties in the crossfire from two units of bidowers while the pikes were soon battered by the highly effective long-range shooting of the Burgundian longbowmen.  As it happened we forgot to apply -1 for shooting over 12" range. The discarded heater shield beside the bombard is one of my homemade "battered" status markers.

The bidowers kept up a fierce fire...

...but to no avail.  The coustilliers charged in and quickly routed the weakened, battered pikes.  

On the next turn they moved into contact and Andy had won the game and 3.5 points of Glory (he gained half a point extra as his retinue was two points under-strength).

And what, I hear you ask, of the rest of the Swiss force?  What indeed!  I managed to roll 3 on my first pair of dice so moved no elements on turn one.  On turn two I moved one unit of bidowers before  rolling a second 3.  After that things got moving but it was too late.  None of the rest of my force got close to the action!

Despite that, I really enjoyed the game.  I'm still inspired by Lion Rampant and would like to produce more terrain items to give the table a more medieval look.

Archers' Stakes

I always try to have at least one new terrain item whenever I put on a game.  I knew that Andy and I were playing the Defending the Indefensible scenario from Lion Rampant on Monday evening.  The object to be defended was to be a Swiss bombard so I thought siege lines was an appropriate setting for the game.  Saturday I happened upon some off-cuts of hardboard so I thought I'd have a go at making some defensive stakes.

By Sunday evening these were finished:

A couple of hours' work spread over the weekend with bamboo skewers, tile grout and paint.

Pics of Monday's game will follow shortly.

On a roll with the Swiss

My Swiss retinue for Lion Rampant is now up to 22 points (24 if you count the Italian mercenary crossbowmen) with the completion of this unit of mounted crossbowmen.  They are in the yellow and black colours of Uri canton.

As with previous attempts, I'm happier with them in the flesh than in the photographs where my subtle shading seems all but invisible.  I probably need to spend longer setting up my photo shoots.

Their appearance on the table means that I have completed the whole box of Perry Miniatures light cavalry I bought in mid-January. My pile of unpainted Perry figures is down to six mounted men-at-arms and a single billman or longbowman.

Trying some more CoC

Fellow wargamer Geoff Taylor mentioned that he'd had a fun game teaching Bolt Action with two Shermans and an M8 against a Tiger in a built-up area.  I decided to use a similar approach as part of my on-going efforts to learn Chain of Command.

In fact for the first game I dispensed with the Shermans and just fielded the M8 Greyhound!

Most of the buildings are some rough ruins that Ian Shaw knocked up when we needed them in a hurry for last year's CrIsis Point.

The game, played solo, was great fun.  Over the course of an hour (I was looking up rules as I went) the M8 stalked around the table trying to get a flank or rear shot on the Tiger.

The flank shot was achieved and the Tiger took engine damage.  It maybe shouldn't have done so, though, as I missed the "Heavy Armour" rule which mean the Tiger is pretty much as tough from the side as it is from the front.  Then again, the M8 did roll very well!

In the end, role-playing a bit, I decided the German tank commander was frustrated enough to try and ram the damned Ami.  This gave me a chance to try out the driving-through-buildings rule and the ramming rule.  The latter turns out to be tremendously risky and I shouldn't have tried it really.

The Tiger managed to crash through the ruin without getting stuck but, amazingly given the disparate weight of the two vehicles and the disparate number of dice being rolled, bounced off the M8 leaving both crews stunned for a phase.

The M8's commander was the first to recover his wits and he made a mad dash for safety at full speed.  Sadly this only made him an easy target for the Tiger....

I'm fairly happy with the armour rules.  They seem to have a reasonable level of complexity given the small number of tanks likely to be used in a game.

A Bit of Flocking

Having thrown together a couple of platoons to try Chain of Command, I became aware of how my basing style has changed slightly over the years even since I standardised on pennies as bases for 20mm figures.

So I grabbed some PVA, some blended static grass and some Scenic Effects fine grass mix and set to.

The effect is pleasing.  Figures painted years, even decades apart are brought together by the consistent basing style.

Sunday Evening CoC

Whilst out walking the puppy on Sunday afternoon I decided that I'd spend part of the evening trying out Chain of Command.  What follows is some notes of a partial play through of the rules.

I plonked down some semi-random terrain, aiming at a vague feel of somewhere in the Low Countries, late in the war.

I then randomised for arrival side (British left, Germans right) and, because I was using the Patrol scenario, starting point (British near third, Germans central third).

The forces were regular infantry platoons (for the British I chose a dismounted motor platoon rather than a leg infantry platoon).  This meant that the Germans had a slightly higher value force and the Brits should have had reinforcements.  I didn't want to introduce such a complication so I simply rolled two sides' Force Morale values and allocated the higher one to the British.

To be honest I didn't plan to carry this through to a conclusion anyway - I tend to play new rules until the accumulation of rules queries I'm not sure about has reached a critical mass.  I'll then abandon the test and go and check through the rules with the advantage of a short play behind me.

So the game starts off with a Patrol Phase.  This is effectively a game-within-a-game in which both sides advance a chain of Patrol Markers (I used different coins) across the board to establish where their respective front lines end and no-man's-land begins.

Eventually, these Patrol Markers become locked down by proximity to enemy markers.  When all of one or both sides' markers are locked down, we move on to determining each side's Jump Off Points. These are locations around which troops can be deployed onto the table.  Their positions are somewhere in the rear of the Parol Markers depending on the terrain. In my flat, open Dutch farm country at least one of the Jump Off Points ended up being moved all the way back to the table edge for want of any intervening terrain.

I marked Jump Off Points with some bases I already had that carried fuel drums, ammo boxes etc.

I suspect the Patrol Phase will prove to have a lot of subtleties of play that I haven't twigged to yet.

The game then began with the British (they had the higher Force Morale - 10 as shown on the two purple dice in the corner of the pic below) rolling five dice to determine what they could do in phase one.

Multiple sixes would have retained the initiative for the British but one is not enough.  The two fives start me accumulating points on a Chain of Command die (the big black one).  The three allows me to deploy a junior leader (an NCO) with his accompanying section. The two does much the same (but in some circumstances could be less flexible).

One section deploys near the large house.

Whilst the other would eventually make its way to a nice position behind the hedge on the hill.

We then see the Germans' first roll.  Again the six is ignored and two fives start a Chain of Command die counting.  The one allows the deployment of a single team and I deploy an LMG team behind a hedge.  The four activates the German's only senior leader (the platoon commander).  I choose to pass on deploying him at this stage. Edit:  This proved to be a good idea on further reading of the rules. If you have no Senior Leaders off-table your troops are harder to bring on.

Play then alternates between sides unless one of them rolls more than a single six.  After a few phases, the Germans have two squads in the woods advancing towards the British left flank.

The British, meanwhile, have occupied the semi-detached cottages.

As the Germans approach... 

Some other random pics as casualties begin to mount...

Interestingly by this stage we were still on the first game turn!  Neither side had rolled the three sixes necessary to end a turn so I decided to use the Germans' option to end the turn by spending a Chain of Command dice that had reached six pips.  

Actually, in this case ending the turn made no difference.  I decided at this point to pack away and review what I'd learned so far:

• Chain of Command seems to have good period feel
• It will play pretty quickly when I get the hang of the rules
• I think the command choices are likely to be comparable to those facing a platoon commander at the sharp end
• I need to think more about how they can be made to work with e.g. the Skirmish Campaigns scenarios
• I want to tidy up the appearance of my WW2 infantry who've been accumulated over many years.