Nostalgia Thursday - Chainmail (1971)

Just last week, the offspring of the authors of Chainmail (1971) got together at Lake Geneva Games to play the classic Battle for the Brown Hills scenario.

The description from Board Game Geek is as follows:

Chainmail is a medieval miniatures wargame created by Gary Gygax and fellow Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association (LGTSA) member Jeff Perren, a hobby-shop owner with whom Gygax had become friendly. The game was first published in 1971 by Guidon Games. That first edition also included a fantasy supplement, and is one of the oldest sets of rules for fantasy miniature wargaming.

Nathan Lyke (who took the first two photos) ran a Chainmail game last Friday at the Lake Geneva Games store with the Son of Gygax (Ernie) and Daughter of Perren (Victoria) in attendance, along with Tom Wham and some other friends playing. This is the 45th anniversary of the rules being published and what better place to play than Lake Geneva, birthplace of D&D which was guided by these minis rules!

Nostalgia Thursday on MFWARS.com 

Focusing on the roots of current tabletop gaming
with an eye toward the last century and before.

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Wargaming Wednesday - HPB Finds

I found a few wargames at the Brookfield, WI, Half Price Books when I was up that way yesterday.  I'll blog about them individually at some point in the future.  The first is a game from Games Workshop from the turn of the century called Warmaster (2000).  I've had a copy of the Ancient Armies supplement for this wargame for a while now and have been watching for the chance to grab a copy of the main rulebook to go with it.  I'm not sure if I will ever put a 6mm to 10mm army together on stands to try it out in full but I might make due with some labeled counters just to give it a whirl.  From Board Game Geek (BGG): "The command mechanism in Warmaster is simple but evocative. Each leader model has a Command factor. To issue a command, such as 'move forward' to a unit, two dice must be rolled against that target command factor. For every subsequent order attempted the target number becomes more difficult to achieve. As a consequence, despite being on the surface a move-counter move system, the turns are variable length and each player may not have the full opportunity to achieve everything they may want to. This simple mechanism introduces enjoyable tension into what is otherwise a largely conventional set of wargame rules."

Also, among the boxed games, they had a copy of Hibernia (2008) by Eric B. Vogel from Closet Nerd Games.  I read about this one a few years ago and had it on my list of games to keep an eye out for.  When I spotted it yesterday, after having already found some other goodies, I felt very pleased.  From BGG: "Set in Iron Age Ireland, Hibernia is a fast, simple wargame with strong European-style mechanics. It depends on well-balanced and clever play rather than pure aggression. Die rolls restrict when players can attack or reinforce their positions, and a unique scoring mechanism changes the resources which players need to score points each turn, keeping player positions dynamic."

Finally, another Vogel game called Cambria (2009) from the same publisher.  I became aware of this game around the same time as Hibernia and put it on my mental list as well.  From BGG: "It is 400 AD and the Roman occupation of Britannia is drawing to a close. Most of the Legions have been withdrawn. The system of Roman fortresses and roads is only thinly defended, particularly in Cambria. Across the sea, Hibernian warriors prepare to invade… Cambria is a fast and aggressive game of siege combat. To win, the players must make skillful use of their die rolls to surround and capture Roman fortresses. Cambria combines the simple, clever mechanics of a European-style game with the direct player conflict of an American-style game."

Wargaming Wednesday on MFWARS.com 

A closer examination of board and miniatures Wargaming.

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Minis & Modeling Monday - Surcoat Evil Army

I was doing some work over the last couple of weeks gathering the forces of evil to fight against the other Surcoat units I had put together.  More about those simple Surcoat minis can be found here.  Here are some pictures I took of the figures on their bases.

As I was looking around for some inexpensive 54 mm minis to stand in as evil guys, I ran across some bags of skeletons on Amazon that were less than $7 at the time.  I added them to my cart and watched the price fluctuate until they were down below $5, then I snagged six bags of them.

They're nothing special but with 30 in a bag, they will help bulk out an evil army on the cheap.  These will generally be Medium troops, easy to kill with no morale checks required.

They had a decent selection of models/poses in the bag though the distribution was lousy.  Out of 120 figures (122, actually), there were 29 with the double axe, 20 with the overhead scimitar, 19 with the sword & shield, 20 with the spear & shield, 6 with the mace, and 28 archers.  I set the maces aside with some of the double axe wielders and took the remaining double axe wielders, the scimitar wielders, and the sword & shield fellas and based up 20 units, three to a base, mixed up in various combinations.

The spear & shield will get their own units, though I am not yet sure if three to a base is the way to go with them.  I will definitely have ten bases of archers, two to a base, somewhere down the road.  The remainder will be filler pieces for repairs and such.

I had a Pirates of the Caribbean figure I snagged at a garage sale for $0.10 laying around and waiting to be part of a 54 mm Surcoat army, so I busted him out and slapped him on a base of his own to be a "leader" unit.  I also based up a lot of the Dragon Strike minis I had gathered up some time back from American Science and Surplus in Chicago.  They had some sprues of the teal and grey figures and I bought up what I could in bulk.  Above, the trolls base up in pairs and make for good Heavy units.

The Dragon Strike "Bugbears" above are a bit small for the 54 mm, so I go with three to a base, call them Medium-ish units, and refer to them as Hobgoblins (or they could stand in for Orcs easily enough).  The dragon Strike "Orcs" below work out as good 54 mm Goblins, IMO, and with the handheld crossbows, act as good Light units with ranged weapons.

Finally, I also wanted to share an adhesive chart I saw posted elsewhere.  I move some of the graphics around on it, to tighten it up a bit, but the logo and whatnot are all still included.

Minis & Modeling Monday on MFWARS.com 

A look at prepping and painting Miniatures,
crafting buildings and paper Models,
and other non-terrain stuff for the tabletop.

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Wargaming Wednesday - Surcoat (2016)

We wound down the weekend with a game of Surcoat (2016) at Lake Geneva Games in wonderful southern Wisconsin.  I grabbed some pics of the action.  We added a table and two teams of two squared off against one another.  Floyd and Keith, neither of whom we had seen since the Fall, came up from Wheeling to roll some dice.  They're regular wargamers though they tend to play mostly skirmish level games like Bolt Action, though Floyd has played more than his share of Warhammer.  We split them onto teams with Will and Norm respectively, since they had played before, and John was only able to stop in as he had a work shift this week, unfortunately.  Our friend Nancy even popped in to check out the action toward the end of the evening.

It's a pretty simple set up.

Two teams, with teammates on opposite corners.

The idea is that two converging generals have caught

an opposing general on the wrong side of a border wall.

That errant general does have allied support on the wall.

The teams have to decide the best way to deal with the other.

In this engagement, two of the armies clashed away

from the wall while two fought on it.

While attempting to breech the wall . . .

That lost catapult might have made the difference.

But the wall was being overrun.

And in the scrum on the other side . . .

The opposing catapult was lost as well.

It was a close match decided by a few points!

Wargaming Wednesday on MFWARS.com 

A closer examination of board and miniatures Wargaming.

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Wargaming Wednesday - Surcoat (2016)

In a recent post on the Surcoat (2016) Medieval Fantasy Wargame System here, I outlined some of the many influences on me while wargaming for more than forty years and working on these rules over the last decade and a half.  As said then, "My goal is to produce a rather simple, straightforward set of unit-to-unit Medieval Fantasy wargaming rules that can scale nicely to handle combat for very large armies utilizing a d20 as the primary resolution method and which players can buy in for almost nothing more than their time and imagination."

Additionally, the intention is for someone to be able to use these rules seamlessly alongside an RPG to handle conflict beyond the one-figure-equals-one-individual level.  To my way of thinking, most skirmish level combat rules aren't much different from the combat rules embedded within many RPGs.  With little to no modification, an RPG combat system should be able to handle skirmish level battles.  However, once one scales up to army level combats where a unit represents ten, fifty, or even one hundred individuals, it takes a different type of rule set to do this effectively.

From what I have seen over the forty-five years I have been a avid tabletop gamer (first of wargames then RPGs when they were invented in the mid-1970s), when an army level wargame rule set is designed to work in tandem with an RPG, it seems awkward.  In some areas, abstractions are made or assumed while in other areas, skirmish level rules are substituted so that individual characters can be shoehorned into the action.  This tends to be where such systems breakdown.  They fail to recognize that in the grand scheme of things, individuals cannot make a huge difference on army level combats except as generals and leaders of units.  I'm hoping that Surcoat is seen as a way of smoothing out that awkwardness and manifests as a system that can be integrated into RPGs of many stripes.  We will see.

Wargaming Wednesday on MFWARS.com 

A closer examination of board and miniatures Wargaming.

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Wargaming Wednesday - Surcoat (2016)

Surcoat (2016)is a set of Medieval Fantasy Miniatures Wargaming rules written by me and that I have been playtesting for close to a decade and a half.  They incorporate influences as far flung as Chainmail (1971) which I played in the early 1970s to Warhammer (1983) to Hordes of the Things (1991) (based on De Bellis Antiquitatis (1990) which I should include here as an influence in its own right as well as De Bellis Multitudinis (1993)) to Field of Glory (2008) as well as many more minis wargames old and new that shaped my thinking on such systems up to today.  The name, of course, is a homage to the first Medieval Fantasy minis wargaming rules I played, the aforementioned Chainmail.  I recently ran a slot of Surcoat at Gary Con VIII, pictured below, which was well received and I have a couple more games planned at upcoming events in the area.

When I am asked why after four and a half decades of playing minis wargames I am writing one of my own, why I haven't before, and why after starting playtesting so long ago I haven't released it yet, it gives me pause for thought.  Truth is, I love the games I have played and am not looking to publish to replace any of them.  I don't feel there is necessarily any deficiency in the market, as such.  I also don't think that what I will eventually publish is going to feel particularly groundbreaking though they might seem somewhat innovative.  Others will be the judge of that.  This just feels like something I want to do though I haven't felt rushed to meet any sort of outside or financial deadline.  I've been lucky in that regard and I do think the rules are about ready for widespread release.

My goal is to produce a rather simple, straightforward set of unit-to-unit Medieval Fantasy wargaming rules that can scale nicely to handle combat for very large armies utilizing a d20 as the primary resolution method and which players can buy in for almost nothing more than their time and imagination.  I'm not looking to sell a minis line along side these rules nor to pile up quarterly supplements that must be purchased to keep up with a manufactured arms race though I would like to put out a few army list books tied to my Grymwald setting at some point (but they won't be required reading to use the rules).  So, Keep Rolling and Game On and watch for near-future developments on Surcoat!

Wargaming Wednesday on MFWARS.com 

A closer examination of board and miniatures Wargaming.

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Terrain Tuesday - RPG Genius, Fairyland, & the Marmoreal Tomb

Over on etsy.com, check out the terrain from RPG Genius here.

Also, on io9.gizmodo.com, they tell us "This 1917 Map of Fairyland Is Like A Where's Waldo of Fantasy Easter Eggs" here.

Finally, on the Benoist Poiré YouTube channel, GP Adventures shares "The Third Dimension in the Marmoreal Tomb dungeon maps."  Enjoy!

Terrain Tuesday on MFWARS.com 

For purposes here, the term Terrain is used broadly
to cover 3D and 2D maps, foam, felt, and such.

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Terrain Tuesday - Water Effects, Accurate Maps, & Tourney Terrain

Over on cheatinsteve.blogspot.com, he gives us a "Water Effect Follow-Up" here.

Also, on discovermagazine.com, they discuss "The Mystery of Extraordinarily Accurate Medieval Maps" here.

Finally, on the GreenLeaf Terrain YouTube channel, they shared a video with a "Showcase: Tournament Terrain."  Enjoy!

Terrain Tuesday on MFWARS.com 

For purposes here, the term Terrain is used broadly
to cover 3D and 2D maps, foam, felt, and such.

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Nostalgia Thursday - Ancient, Medieval, & Viking Games

Over on mentalfloss.com, they share "11 Ancient Board Games" here.

Also, on medievalists.net, they tell us of "Five Medieval Games to Get You Through Long Winter Nights" here.

Finally, on tafl.cyningstan.com, they look at the "Four Schools of Hnefatafl" here.

Nostalgia Thursday on MFWARS.com 

Focusing on the roots of current tabletop gaming

with an eye toward the last century and before.

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Nostalgia Thursday - Ancient Chinese Die & Ivory Vikings

Over on cnet.com, they recently told us about a "Lost board game found in 2,300-year-old tomb" which uses a 14-sided die.  Learn more here.

Also, on livescience.com, they tell us a bit more about the aforementioned game and the tomb in which it was found here.

Finally, on medievalists.net, as part of their "Book Talk" series, they discuss "Ivory Vikings by Nancy Marie Brown" here.

Nostalgia Thursday on MFWARS.com 

Focusing on the roots of current tabletop gaming

with an eye toward the last century and before.

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Systems Saturday - Town Watch, City Gates, & the Sword Coast

Over on blackgate.com, they recently posted "An Adventurer’s Guide to the Middle Ages: Town Watch? Where?"  Discover more here.

Also, on ragingswan.com, Creighton Broadhurst gave us "20 Things to See at the City Gate" here.

Finally, on merricb.com, a recent familiar essay and review is "On the Sword Coast Adventurer’s Guide" here.

Systems Saturday on MFWARS.com 

A look under the hood of various Games, Rules and Systems.

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Minis & Modeling Monday - True Heroes, True Legends, & Scrolls and Books

If you don't mind going with a non-standard size for minis, like 54 mm, you can get quite a deal on a lot of standard figures in cheap plastic by the bucket.  These can be particularly useful for floor games and introductory wargames for youngsters.  One example is the "True Heroes Medieval Bucket" which can be found here.

Also, check out the "True Legends Mythical Warrior Bucket Playset" here.

Finally, on the Wyloch's Crafting Vids YouTube channel, have a look at "021 - Scrolls and Books."  Enjoy!

Minis & Modeling Monday on MFWARS.com 

A look at prepping and painting Miniatures,
crafting buildings and paper Models,
and other non-terrain stuff for the tabletop.

Please Like, Share, Plus, Tweet, Follow, and Comment!