2nd edition Kings of War Review – Part 1

Posted on September 13, 2011 by Quirkworthy

This review is split into two parts for a couple of reasons. The first is that it will not be short, and the second is that it seems at present to be a different game depending on your style or level of play.

This first part is about how the game works for casual players who get together with a mate and play with whatever they’ve got. They play for fun and next time they meet they’ll probably use the same or very similar army because that’s what they have. The second part builds on this foundation and is a more in-depth look at specific details that affect more serious players who pore over army lists in detail and will tweak their armies to maximise their effectiveness. This includes tournament players, but is not restricted to them. For example, this is how I generally play.

The copy I have was given to me by Mantic. It will soon be available for free as a B&W pdf from their website as well as to buy if you fancy a copy in glorious colour.

It’s also perhaps worth me saying that I actually asked Ronnie if I could write the tabletop fantasy game for him, only to be told that Alessio was already writing this. Dwarf King’s Hold came out of that process, and the game I had in mind for Mantic was taken up by someone else and will be out next year. As I have mentioned elsewhere, nothing I design gets wasted. It’s all in a notebook somewhere and its time will come. As both Alessio and I were both writing the games at the same time, unbeknownst to each other, I personally find it intriguing to see which rule conundrums and choices we tackled the same way and where we parted course. I really look forward to reading someone’s comparison review when they’re both available. But back to Kings of War…

The Ethos

Kings of War is an unusual game in that it is not released in a finished form, but as a work in progress that has a predefined timeline. You are very much encouraged to play and comment, and your feedback will be listened to and incorporated where appropriate. You have a real opportunity to take part in the game’s development, which is cool. It is a 3-year plan, but why take my word for it. Here’s Ronnie to tell you all about it:

As this is a review of the 2nd edition I understand that the rules are not yet completely locked down or finished. However, even taking that into account, you need to be able to play something with them and they have had a year to mature already. So, with that at the back of our minds, how do the rules work?

The Rules

I won’t go through all the rules in detail as you can download a set for yourselves (I’ll link this to the 2010 edition for the moment, and try and remember to change it when the new one comes out in a fortnight). Let’s look at the basics though.

Kings of War is a tabletop fantasy battle game. This means that each player fields a force comprising units of infantry, cavalry and characters from a variety of possible races: Elf, Dwarf, Human, Twilight Kin (Dark Elf), Abyssal Dwarf (sort of Chaos Dwarf), Orcs, Goblins and Undead. In KOW a unit does not take casualties: it is either all present on the table or it is removed completely. It will, however, take damage which will need to be represented with tokens of some sort. This retention of whole units reminds me of the DBA family of games, and allows you to model the whole unit on a single giant base should you choose to.

The game is played in turns with a player moving, shooting and fighting with all of his army in his turn. The player turns are entirely separate and I wasn’t the only one who kept reaching for dice when my opponent attacked (so I could roll my saves –  many years of conditioning by Warhammer). In KOW the attacker rolls everything. Alessio has said that this is to avoid unscrupulous players wasting time in tournaments where they could deliberately drag their feet when it came to rolling stuff. It does mitigate that particular flavour of naughtiness, though I don’t believe for a second that it will stop cheats cheating. They’ll just move their nasty behaviour elsewhere.

A player turn has three steps: movement, shooting, melee.

Movement rules are pretty straightforward. You can move double, move single and turn or turn in place. Whether you move or not also impacts on shooting effectiveness. This is all pretty standard stuff and is clean and simple, though the fact that distances are sometimes measured from the nearest bit of the unit and sometimes from the champion of a unit could trip up the unwary. Terrain is the familiar half move for difficult, etc.

One particularly important rules here is that you may pre-measure. I’ll deal more with this in the second part, but for now be aware that you cannot, for example, have a failed charge as you can in Warhammer, or declare a shot that cannot reach. You can always check in advance.

Once you’ve moved all the units you want to then it’s time to shoot. Magic in Kings of War is perfunctory and pretty characterless. All magicians share the same spells (with the exception of Undead who get an extra one): Zap and Heal. No prizes for guessing what they do. Each is simply a case of rolling a given number of dice, and each one that is 4+ either causes or heals a point of damage. These two “spells” count as missile attacks, and so you can only use one a turn. Normal shooting has a couple of potential modifiers that you can easily memorise. Otherwise shooting is merely a case of rolling the number of dice your stat line tells you and trying to get the number given or better. For example, an Elf Bowmen regiment has 10 dice and needs 4+ to hit. Very easy. If you hit a unit then you roll a dice per hit to see if you damage them. If you damage a target then you roll a Nerve test for them to see how happy they are. I’ll cover this last bit in a moment.

After shooting, any of your units that has moved into contact gets to fight. Again, this is simply a case of rolling the number of dice you have on your stat line against the value listed. A lone Dwarf Warsmith would roll 2 dice, needing 4+ to hit. A horde of 20 human knights would roll 32 dice, needing 3+. Any dice that hit are rolled again to see if you can best the defence of the target, just as with shooting. After fighting you will roll a Nerve test for each unit you have damaged.

Nerve tests have been streamlined since 1st edition. Now they are listed as two numbers on the stat line. When you damage a unit you roll 2D6 and add the amount of cumulative damage on the unit. If you equal or beat the higher value then the unit routs and is removed from play. If you equal or beat the lower value then it wavers for a turn (unless it’s Undead), basically standing about doing very little except waiting to get hit again. Someone else will have to come and save it.

On top of this you have a handful of special rules that tweak the core rules to do the sorts of things you might expect. Really hitty units get to add to the rolls to damage things they hit, nippy units get extra movement, stuff with wings can Fly, and so on.

One word of caution about those of you that are driven by background colour rather than game play: there isn’t any. Well, that’s not strictly true, but it is limited to the odd sentence here and there rather than pages of colour text that you’ll see in Warmachine, Warhammer, etc. I think that’s slated to come in with the 3rd edition (though the Mantic website and Journal already has additional background text so you can get a sense of what’s on the way).

On the Table

The first time I played Kings of War I was not at all taken by the complete lack of interaction in the player turns. I am still not a big fan of this feature, though the game plays so fast that it is less of an issue than I had expected.

I doubt many casual players will bother with the chess clocks and timed turns (ostensibly the whole reason for the lack of player interaction), which is a pity as this is an interesting aspect and worth trying at least once. However, to give you an idea of how quickly KOW plays, we were experimenting with various timed games at the tournament and 30 minutes per player is reasonably tight for a 1,500 point game, but entirely possible. 45 minutes each is ample. This means that in a typical evening’s play I could easily fit in two whole games without being rushed.

The rules are simple, clearly written and easy to pick up. There are no mechanical surprises to speak of, so anyone with a bit of gaming experience should know what they’re doing by the end of their first game.

Anyone who has played a tabletop game will be familiar with the interplay of units, and the way infantry, cavalry and war engines interact is quite similar to games like Warhammer. Each arm does what you’d expect, which is good.

Conclusion – Casual Play

For casual play Kings of War should be very popular. It’s simple to pick up, fast to play and doesn’t require you to wade through a phone directory every 5 minutes to look things up.

If you already have a Warhammer army then I urge you to give it a go for yourself. If you’ve got a Mantic army, even better. It’s free, so what have you got to lose? Regardless of any gripes I may have, Kings of War is definitely worth a try.

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Kings of War Tournament – After Action Report

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Quirkworthy

So now I’ve had more than 5 minutes’ sleep and the experience has at least begun to digest, what do I think of the tournament? Well I think it was clearly a success from Mantic’s point of view. Their aim was to road test the game system under tournament conditions (using live gamers), and especially to get some feedback on the use of timed games using chess clocks, like this one:

The Kings of War rules showed that they are generally robust and play quickly, though they are still a work in progress (as Ronnie explains) with a couple of very broken units who were very exploited by veteran tourney players. Masters of Death (assassins) were the most egregious of these and the human captain that could give Vanguard to everyone (you get to advance units after both sides deploy) the next. Vanguard was nerfed after a couple of games so that chap came 4th overall, but the assassins remained as written throughout, and the 3 armies that focussed on them came in 1st, 2nd & 3rd place. No real surprise there as they were very, very broken.

A third aspect that Alessio considered overdone were the vampire units. I had used these as the focus of my army, but after 6 games I thought rather less of them and am not personally convinced they need toning down. They are powerful, to be sure, but have their vulnerabilities too and can be killed once you understand this. As they stand I now think (having actually played the game a bit) that I probably wouldn’t take them if I was being really competitive. I can get more punch for my points with other selections (even ignoring the aforementioned broken bits). There were also issues with nasty flying things, especially when they had the Nimble rule (extra turns during movement); allies probably won’t be allowed in “real” tournaments, and so on.

What this tournament allowed Mantic to do was to see the really horrible bits before they have a room full of a hundred paying customers. The tournament pack will be updated accordingly. So a big win for Mantic on that front.

The chess clocks will probably stay too. There was a bit of a technical hitch with several of the ones we had to hand being broken. However, we muddled by and played games at several different lengths to see what was easy and what was pressured. First game was 90 minutes each, the next was 60, then 45. On sunday we started with 30 minutes each and then went back to 45 each for the last two games. Alessio’s aim here was to try and introduce another element to manage in game: time. This was perhaps less successful, and I’m not convinced it really encourages the kind of armies Mantic want to see. For me, if I was picking another tourney army for a timed tournament I would think small numbers of units as the only people that had issues with the time were those with big armies to move. This seems to go against the grain of Mantic’s whole ethos, but it’s their call. Chess clocks work fine in chess tournaments as both sides have fixed and equal “armies”. When the armies are flexible then simply moving them in your turn becomes an issue, and impacts on your selection. Whilst this isn’t a problem as such, it seems to be an emergent result rather than a planned aim, and not one that entirely fits IMO. Couple this with what seems to be overpowered characters and the trend could be to smaller, more character-heavy armies – not so much the “Big armies, Huge battles” aim Mantic have as a by-line.

So that’s what it did for Mantic; how about me? Well I confess that I’m not really a tournament player. I find the whole atmosphere both artificial and overly competitive (I know – it’s supposed to be). Or something: it’s hard to define exactly why I don’t get on with them. I like the idea in some ways, but usually end up feeling rather ill by the end of the sunday. The fact that the venue was rather stuffy didn’t help – they have loads of fans, but not windows that opens so you get to push the gamer funk about rather than replace it. Anyway, I went along regardless to help out as they’d had loads of cancellations.

The players were a great bunch, and I’d happily play any of my opponents again. That in itself is an accolade, as that has not been true of a fair number of the people I have played against at tournaments in the past. If you’ve been following this you may recall that I mentioned Blood Bowl tournaments as being my favourite. This was, as expected, near that end of the spectrum, which is a real accolade. The “vibe” was very good.

Unfortunately the rather broken nature of many of the armies (my own included if you don’t know how to deal with vampires) didn’t make for very fun games. Note here that I mean the games themselves. They weren’t unpleasant to play, even when I was being obliterated (as it was hardly a surprise), and I hope it wasn’t too awful for the folks I killed on day 1. But all told, the games were all landslides, and these are not as fun as close games. I think I mentioned this yesterday. At other conventions I have had similar whitewashes some of the time, and in early rounds you might expect this as players of wildly different abilities meet in random draws. However, once the levels settle a bit in later rounds you would increasingly expect to get more balanced games between opponents of similar skill. Some of the other games in the tournament were balanced in this way, but not any of mine. You can get a vague idea which ones were by looking at the results here. The numbers in brackets at the end of each result are the points killed by each side – a crude guide to the closeness of the fight.

One of the things I do like about tournaments is the large selection of armies on show. Again, due to the rather rushed and experimental nature of this tourney there were less nice armies and a great many proxies. Among others we had Romans and even at once stage a Napoleonic army standing in for something. Many folk had some or all GW figures in their armies, and the werewolf army was a mixture of Rackham and Otherworld, which was cool. When I was considering taking a werewolf unit myself it was the Rackham Wolfen I was going to use.

There were some Mantic figures on show too. The first army I fought was Mantic Undead, the second Mantic Orcs and the third Mantic Elves (who were particularly nice), so it wasn’t all proxied by any means. GW used to be very strict about using only their models in their events, which is fine, but I rather liked the mixture of Mantic and not, especially as it allowed a deal of invention and a chance for players to see models they’d not come across before. Whilst Mantic is a business I hope they continue this line, which is good for the hobby in a wider sense IMO (as well as being more fun).

Would I go again? Probably not myself. As I said, I’m not really a tournament player. If I was? Well if I was into KOW I’d definitely consider it. The Mantic crew aren’t half bad at thinking of extra interesting things to do, bringing along some unreleased Warpath models to show off and having numerous Q&A sessions with Ronnie and Alessio. I’d expect full tourneys to have this sort of thing and more. If they can retain and build on the existing community spirit then that in itself is a good thing. Community spirit is of inestimable value for a company, and Mantic have some very enthusiastic, loyal and cheery fans. If KOW is part of your hobby then it’ll be worth trying at least once, and you never know – you may be bitten by the tournament bug.

Finally, I’ve just noticed that Mantic’s own blog has some more pictures of the event and the winners, plus news of the revised tournament pack going online soon, so you might want to check that out too!

PS: judging by the site stats not all of you have found the earlier posts with more commentary plus all the photos 🙂

KOW Tourney Day 1

Day 1 Musings

KOW Tourney Day 2

Posted in Events, Tabletop gaming | 6 Comments

KOW Tournament Day 2

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Quirkworthy

Some photos from today’s battles. As expected I had a worse day today; in fact, the complete flip side of yesterday’s efforts, getting wiped out (or all but) myself in every game. In my defence, my first two games were against the people who fought the final for top slot, and both of them had broken assassin based lists. The brokenness of assassins (masters of death I think is their proper name) was a major point of note over the weekend and in future events they will be fixed. The last game was against the Vanguard using cavalry horde. Apparently Vanguard (extra move forward after you deploy) wasn’t supposed to put you in a position to wipe out half of the enemy army with your heavy cavalry if you won the first turn, but as written that’s exactly what it does. It’s a risk because you have to win the dice roll for first turn, but predictably I rolled a 1 so it was less of a challenge than it might have been for him. He ended up in 4th place. Top 3 places went to assassin based lists with the Vanguard one taking 4th.

This is game 4 (against the eventual tourney winner). You will notice the lack of any troops from my army. I managed to kill one assassin.

Josh rumbled over into the corner I had set up in and butchered me in short order, assassins appearing behind units and characters and slaughtering them without a single thing I could do about it.

Bobo moving in his cavalry to slaughter mine. The unit on the left in the distance is being attacked by 4 assassins in the flank and is, predictably, unable to respond. In the centre I have advanced so we actually get fighting before his infantry wall arrives. He moves faster than I and you are allowed to pre-measure, so he won’t let me get the charge – one way or another I will get thumped, so we might as well get it over and hope I survive. I need a little luck here, but not loads. Naturally I have none at all.

Sorry, that’s not quite right. One of my army standard bearers proves perversely unkillable (on the far right), despite being repeatedly attacked by 2 assassins.

This is the last game against the Vanguarding horde. By this point he’s killed 2 of my cavalry units and I’ve destroyed one of his in return, but his flanking hero has snuck out of sight so I can do nothing but reposition so I take the next charge in the face instead of the flank. I’m just pushing things about here with no hope of actually achieving anything. In a practical sense it was all over when I lost the roll for the first turn.

Meanwhile, the “final” was being played out. Although the tournament doesn’t have a final as such, if Bobo won this game he would win the whole thing, and if Josh got at least a draw then he would be in top place. There are 7 assassins in total on the table here.

Bobo (on the right) has deployed with his back to the table edge so that Josh’s assassins can’t turn up behind him. Bobo’s own assassins are behind the ruined archway things in front of the chess clock at the edge of the board. Here’s the view from the other side at the same time.

Bobo’s line looks really dramatic in this formation. You’ll note that this is a rich man’s game with pound coins as objective markers 🙂

A few turns later the situation is getting very messy. Josh’s assassins are munching through Bobo’s line of foot troops, but Josh has lost his vampire knights and Bobo’s cavalry and assassins are in amongst Josh’s troops.

The final dissolved into a slogging match that was fairly evenly matched and very bloody. In the end it was a draw with little left on the table from either side.

The tournament was designed to iron out the wrinkles in the system so that when they run larger ones for paying customers it all goes smoothly. As such it was a success, but for me personally I can’t say the games were inspiring. I met some great folk, it’s just the rules got in the way of the games being as pleasant as the company. On the first day I slaughtered people whose armies simply could not cope with the slightly broken list I had. On the second day I was obliterated in turn by the majorly broken lists my opponents had. Landslides either way are rarely the best of games. What I really want to play is something with a bit of to and fro, where things might go either way and you feel like your efforts make a real difference. The best game in this respect was the one against the Elf missile line on day 1, where I got enveloped by enemy units, failed to break one of them on the charge and almost got swamped. In the end I wiped him out, but before the end of turn 3 you wouldn’t have guessed that would be the result, and it certainly didn’t feel like it at the time. On day 2 I don’t think any of my actions in any of the games was ever going to win me a game against the weight of the rules.

Having played 6 games this weekend and one last week, I’ll be writing a review of the Kings of War game soon, while it’s still fresh. Look out for that in the next couple of days.

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Musings on Day 1

Posted on September 11, 2011 by Quirkworthy

Before my immediate thoughts are buried by day 2’s events, I’d just like to jot down a few of them. It was an interesting day and provoked a number of broader points as well as points about the specific rules we were using.

Firstly there’s a whole long discussion on army composition (the antithesis to Elro’s comment on an earlier post). Secondly we could talk about in-game assessment: the ability to understand and dismantle your opponent’s force in real time. For example, I think my army has a very obvious weakness, but nobody has yet exploited it which is why I’ve wiped out my opponent in all 3 games so far for almost no loss. The army isn’t that amazing nor am I that good a player. I don’t deserve to be in top place and I would be amazed if I stayed there. My normal place in a tournament is about a third from the top, which suits me fine. Real tournament players, like Josh who I’m playing first thing today, take it all far more seriously and expect to be much higher. I suspect he will spot the weakness and do me rather more damage than I’ve taken to date, but we shall see.

I had some more thoughts, but they’ve flown for the moment. I’ll come back to them, I’m sure. Not enough sleep as usual, I’m afraid (which is why I can be posting at 1am and back typing before 7am) so feeling a bit fuzzy.

I’ll write a review of the rules after this too, which might be of interest. I’ve not seen many discussions on the net about King’s of War, and it deserves a mention regardless of your eventual verdict.

Anyway, off to battle now. Wish me luck!

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KOW Tournament – Day 1

Posted on September 10, 2011 by Quirkworthy

It’s been a hectic day at the front, with 3 games played and much happy banter, cursing of luck and other associated gaming nonsense. I’m a bit brain fried to write much sensible for the moment, so I’ll mostly be posting photos today and will comment more after the thing’s over tomorrow. To kick off, the obligatory room full of gamers pushing toys about:

Being a tournament there were a bunch of somewhat “competitive” armies there, and during the Q&As a couple of things were decreed by consensus to be a bit good for their points. Masters of Death (Assassins) were leader of the pack here. No pictures of these dealers of death as they’re too slippery.

There was also an all-werewolf army, which looked great and was fairly good at munching things from what I hear, though I haven’t fought him yet. It’s even more dangerous as the general actually seems to have a vague idea what he’s doing 🙂

The first game of the day was a warm-up and didn’t count. I fought against a large undead army with a mixed force that included something of everything.This is early on where most stuff is still on the table.

The things got a bit messy. The models beyond the last lot of trees at the top aren’t reinforcements – they’re casualties. My undead are fine, but the enemy’s are thinning out.

The second game had a similarly large enemy horde, but this time they were greenskins instead. By this point in the game I’ve piled over the table and am in among the mass of orcs. This was a Pillage scenario (the first one was Kill).

The last scenario was Kill & Pillage, and was fought against yet another different army – Elves. Naughty shooty people, Elves. Got to watch them. A very pretty army though with a  clean and unified paint scheme that I thought looked lovely on the tabletop. Here it is waiting to deploy:

And on the battlefield.

And because it’s so pretty, here is the Elf line from the other side.

This is the height of the main ruck, with one of my units charged by two Elf units, and another fighting three at once. The unfortunates in the centre are now getting the unwelcome attention of the Elf shootiness.

All told, 3 fun and exciting games with some tense moments. The chap who is kindly running all the admin smoothly so we can get on with the killing has put a blog up on the Mantic forums so you can see who’s playing what and what the ranking are. It seems that at the end of the day I’m in first place! That can’t last; not playing Josh and his assassin extravaganza first thing in a speed game (only 30 minutes per side). When I told Alessio that I was fighting Josh in the speed game he laughed for simply ages. He’s played him before…

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Trying Out Kings of War

Posted on September 9, 2011 by Quirkworthy

Had a go at Kings of War last night. I managed to persuade Bob to give up his evening so I could get at least a vague idea what was going to happen at the weekend. I shouldn’t really say yes to going only 3 days before it starts. I’d say “that’ll teach me”, but I know it won’t…

As you can see the game was all thrown together rather hastily, with several playtest armies being merged to produce a shambolic collection of models for each side, but few things were what they claimed. Liars all. The rulebook suggested playing with little terrain to start with, so I took that to the logical extreme and had none. Get the rules straight first, then worry about trees and stuff. I didn’t even bother getting the table toppers out and the grass mat as I was going for fast and dirty. This is a learning thing, not a pretty one. Speed is of the essence as I have to assemble a correct list and some models to represent it before first light tomorrow. Oops.

Note the chess clock in the background. The arms are Saint Bob’s, measuring out some artillery deviosty.

As an aside, this is a picture of Bob’s naughty Peter Pig dice. More Oink indeed. This roll is slightly atypical for them as they normally have lots more 6s (the only one that isn’t a 5 here is a 6 – it’s the PP logo). Luckly for me they ran out of batteries half way through or half the pips rubbed off. Either way, his luck was distinctly less awesome in the second half.

All in all it was a very useful practice session, and a demonstration of quite how simple the rules are. I think I’ve already got most of them in my head, and even if I haven’t then the rulebook is hardly a massive tome that will take ages to look things up in. Also, if you’ve ever played Warhammer then the similarity of concepts within the armies makes commanding the equivalent one a piece of cake.

Now, I must away to sort out some models.

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By Invitation Only

Posted on September 8, 2011 by Quirkworthy

Well I’ve decided to go to the Kings of War tournament this weekend. This is despite the fact that I’ve not played it since it was in the original Alpha well over a year ago, and then only once. One or other of my playtest armies is going to have to double as something KOW, though I’m not 100% sure which yet. I am, however, going to have a game tonight to try and get my head round the whole thing again.

Kings of War is a fairly simple game so (re)learning it isn’t a big challenge. However, it’s not one I’d really been drawn to because of its fanatically “i-go-u-go” turn sequence. I generally prefer some permutation of alternative activations, but there is a time and place for every rule. In either case, I managed to acquire myself a copy of the 2nd edition rules which aren’t officially out till the end of the month. I won’t be telling you all the Big Secrets, partly because I don’t want to annoy Ronnie, but mainly because I haven’t got a clue what they are 🙂

Still, it’ll be a learning curve, for sure. I’ve not been to a tournament for many years. They’re not really my thing. This one will hopefuly be a bit more relaxed than most as it’s really a testbed for “proper” tournaments (with serious people) later. We’re using chess clocks for the games, which will be an interesting additional challenge. If you’re anywhere near Maelstrom Games at the weekend why not pop over and cheer on my opponent? It’ll be fun.

I’ll try to remember to take a camera and keep you updated. Mind you, I fully expect to be playing Alessio on the bottom table by the end of Sunday afternoon 🙂

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Banking Rules

Posted on September 7, 2011 by Quirkworthy

While I was doing my usual morning round of feeding the menagerie and listening to the radio this morning I heard a rather intriguing report. It was about the lack of rationality in decision making within the banks. Apparently there has been some survey that says the bankers were driven by greed and recklessness, not rationality (what a surprise). As they kept going on about (banking) rules it was not a big jump for me to wonder about how this worked in games.

In terms of rationality, how many decisions do you make in a game that are carefully considered, and how many are impulsive, seat-of-the-pants and irrational? I know I intend to plan stuff, and sometimes I do, but not always by a long chalk. Particularly when I feel like I’m already winning, I’ll relax a bit and not be so careful in my moves. It’s only natural. The same goes for if I feel angry or stressed (often due to events outside the game): I’ll play more impulsively. Knowing this, can you exploit it?

I find this an idea worth pondering as it leads onto the subtleties of the mind games that you can play within any game. Playing the opponent rather than, or as well as, his army. Perhaps a simple statement of the objective for these mind games is to encourage irrationality (and therefore mistakes) by your opponent. One gamer I know is well known for this intentional badgering of opponents, purely to put them off their stride and confuse their thinking. For him this isn’t cheating, it’s simply part of the meta game. For me this is perhaps going a bit far, but it’s contextual too. It seems more widely accepted as reasonable in tournament environs where winning is more important. That too is understandable.

But is it right?

Posted in Metagame musings | 20 Comments

Partizan II

Posted on September 5, 2011 by Quirkworthy

I went to a wargame convention yesterday called Partizan II at nearby Kelham Hall. It’s a venerable old gent of the UK wargames calendar with many years under its belt, and at least 3 different events per year under different names and with differing foci. Partizan and Partizan II are historical, and Hammerhead mainly SF&F.

This is the entrance to the show and illustrates a little of the rather grand building it’s held in. It seems that the architect was very fond of brick arches, and made sterling use of the 3 colours of  brick that were evidently available at the time. I won’t bore you with lots of pictures of crowds; the following are to illustrate the splendid venue as much as the show itself.

There were many rooms full of chaps playing games and buying shiny new toys 🙂

A bit of wonky camerawork there, but it serves nicely to show you some of the details of the lovely Victorian (1863) building. I’ll stop going on about it now, other than to say that it’s a nice venue, and that Kelham Hall has its own website if you fancy looking at some better pics 🙂

Let the Games Begin!

So what was on offer? Well, the usual mix of demonstration and participation games as well as a load of traders with models, games, books and all manner of scenery, dice and other associated gubbins. I didn’t take pictures of traders per se as you can see little but banners, and that’s dull. If you’re interested a full list is on the Partizan site. I did, however, take some photos of a few of the games that were on offer. The one that most caught my eye was a snowy WWII scrap.

As you can see, this is a game of Rapid Fire, though I was just taken by the look of the thing. I have a real soft spot for nicely done snow battles. In the second pic you can see quite how unhappy the Americans are at this point.

The wall of German armour is just off shot to the right. This picture shows the American forces with the “Ronson” at the right, doing what Ronsons do best. The grey plumes of a slightly overshot artillery strike on the left remind the advancing GIs that the open field they’re in could be a bad place to stop. Best keep going, eh?

Looks very pretty.

Second up we have a very different game, set in much sunnier times.

Romans in various formations advance on a Celtic hill fort. Another very attractive table. The local centurion will have them on a charge though, as the tents haven’t got even the most basic palisade round them. Call that a marching camp!

Changing tack rather, this is a tiny scale Napoleonic (I think) battle. I do like the overall look of the board as it reminds me of an aerial photograph, which I think is the right sort of reference point for this scale. You can’t really see it in the photo, but the river snaking along the far side was rather nicely made too. The only thing I thought spoiled this was the bright red tiddly winks used to mark casualties (or whatever) on the unit bases. They stand out more than I like and rather spoil the effect for me.

After the tiny we go back to 28mm scale, and a game with more lovely scenery (though a bit fuzzy, I’m afraid). Looks like Napoleonic wars in the Peninsular to me – note the buildings at the back.

Smaller scale, bigger table and a grand sweep of battle below. The kind of thing I can’t do at home, but do feel inspired by (even if it might not actually be much fun to play).

There were other, possibly even better looking games about (including a medieval one that had Dave Andrews hanging about, so me may have been responsible for the lovely town at one end), but I didn’t get good enough photos of all of them. My bad there, though your bad too for not getting out to Partizan to see for yourself 😛

Finall, the participation games deserve a mention. There was one about Bricourt that my camera didn’t like, but which looked intriguing. As this action is used as an exemplary attack at West Point it would have been interesting to play, but time was against us.  I also rather liked the idea of the Wargames Development game about WWII Soviet officers pictured below, though I didn’t play that either. Fatalities did seem exceptionally high here (which seemed to be a major point), but with NKVD in charge that was always going to be likely.

What we did get to play was The Men From Del Monte. This was a brisk little game about the B17 missions flown by a squadron of American airmen who ended up flying out of the Del Monte pineapple plantation on Mindanao in the Philippines. It was a real Boy’s Own Adventure kind of story, and a fun little game that lasted only a few minutes. I managed to sneak in low and bomb the Japanese airfield from low altitude, dodging flak as I went and returned to the base with plenty of fuel to spare. It was lucky that I took the risk to bomb from low altitude and risk the flak as my dice rolls were so rubbish that I only just managed that, but manage I did. Bob took on the Japanese fleet instead and sank almost everything they had in the Pacific, though his plane came back with more bullet holes in and less fuel so I got to pretend I’d won even though it wasn’t competitive. An amusing little game, and though it isn’t something that I’d play regularly it was exactly the right sort of silly convention game that I personally think makes events worth going to in the first place. It was, incidentally, run by the Blues Bears, who I know little about and about whom can only find this. It’s a different game from the linked article, but certainly sounds like them. A fun pair. The photo below shows Bob (on the left with the ghost behind him) being told how badly pranged his B17 got when he was silly enough to let it get bounced by Zeros on the way to the fleet. Tsk, tsk.

Spoils

So did I buy anything? Silly question. To start with, as one of the first 500 through the door I got a free figure. The Partizan shows usually give a model away, and it’s often a little random. This was no exception as it was Mrs Wallis Simpson. Apparently the earlier Partizan figure had been King Edward, but as I didn’t go I don’t have him.

I seem to have managed only photos that make it look as if she has a goatee, which is not the case. She’s got a cigarette in a holder and a glass in one hand and something else in the other. Not sure what the something else is, but it could be gloves? A tiny pistol? I’m sure someone can tell me. It’s an OK model of the lady, though I don’t think I have an immediate use for her. Still, it’s free 🙂

The rest of my acquisitions ended up with a very distinctive theme, through no planning of my own. It’s just what caught my eye on the day. They come in two piles. First, books:

A careful selection of 5 WWII books, including the highly recommended It Never Snows in September, which has been on my list from some time. The other 4 I had not seen before, but were at a great price and are full of photos I hadn’t seen. When you have as many WWII reference books as I have, new photos have a great attraction, almost regardless of the text. Then we have the toys themselves:

These are all from the nice chaps at the Plastic Soldier Company, who I’ve seen online before but never in the flesh. The models look very nice up close, and are a good price too. You will note my usual problem in WWII gaming in that I have 2 different scales here. A rather scatter-shot selection as I wanted to get a cross section to see what they were like rather than dive in to a single theatre. I’ll review them in due course if anyone’s interested. Helpfully, as well as writing on the boxes what scale they are, they seem to have the idiot-proof system of red for 1:7nd and black for 15mm. A cunning plan indeed.

Derby Next!

I think the next show I’m likely to be at is the Nationals at Derby, if we can find the place. Derby has the world’s worst road network and last time we went it took twice as long to find the event as it did to get to Derby city in the first place. The real pain was we ended up driving past the old venue 3 times before we found the new one *sigh*. One of the locals we stopped to ask even told us that the one way system was abysmal, so it’s not just outsiders it foxes. Anyway, I’ll hire a native guide and see if I can get there.

 

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Highest Accolade in teh Wurldz for Dwarf King’s Hold

Posted on September 3, 2011 by Quirkworthy

Well I always knew cats were the most intelligent race on the planet, and now we have proof. They’ve awarded Dwarf King’s Hold: Dead Rising a prestigious accolade (as featured on Frontlinegamer’s site).

I always knew that extra tuna ration would pay off in the end…

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