AE Bounty second game.

Following our first game on a planet surface we wanted to try a new one inside a star ship, so we set a random Space Hulk map and after designing our crews we rolled at random for mission, second objective which we both forgot during the game, and to see who was going attacker or defender.

Having in mind that we were going to fight inside a star ship I designed my crew with few and good members, picking two Old Guard units plus a veteran Sergeant Hero Marksman (oh yeah!). The five men wearing heavy armour and LRF Particle guns as in the ship there are not cover nor long distances, so I chose the maximum protection and rate of powerful fire at short distances.

Pics clickable.

My buddy chose his same pirate crew from our previous game and gave them the same weapons as me but no armour at all.

We rolled the mission get to the escape pods and me as attacker and having to reach those escape pods. Though luck as all my men were slow due to their heavy armours and I had only eight turns to do it.

I started in one extreme opposed to the escape pods, and the defender in a chamber in the middle of the board. As soon as I activated, I started to rush forward with the enemy melee specialists with mono blades waiting for me.

Fortunately I gained initiative again and managed to blast away two of three devils from that unit. The survivor charged my forward man who lost the melee but was saved by his armour. My sergeant aimed and shot down this last pirate during the melee.

Here my buddy complained and moaned that I had designed a very cheesy crew and that it was impossible to him to kill me, but he did not have to kill me, just delay me to stop me reaching the escape pods in eight turns.

My buddy a bit demoralised, fell back with the rest of his crew and waited for me to come. The environmental conditions of the ship together with my inability to sprint due to the heavy armour plus a couple of suppressions I suffered, made me lost six turns to get near the escape pods.

Almost at the exit the pirate crew revolved and attacked me throwing some frag grenades that killed one full Old Guard unit and wounded my sergeant.
The other unit was too far away to change the course of the action and we quit the game on turn seven as it was pretty obvious that I was not going to reach my objective on time.

Definitely fun game and totally different to our first one. We liked it and now we are seriously thinking about starting a campaign, but there are so many different game to play.

Foundry Vikings for SAGA

As many people are doing lately, here I present my Viking warband for SAGA. I have a lot of Foundry Vikings that I painted years ago for WAB, but as never got to paint berserkers and as I need some for SAGA, I painted the berserker personalities blister that I had in a dark and forgotten back corner of my wardrobe.

Pics clickable.

Now I have enough variety and quantity of Vikings to play SAGA.

Regretfully, although I pre ordered the ruleset to Maelstrom Games on August, I cannot play the game yet as they sent me the rules without the four colour laminated battle sheets necessary to play it.

After four emails I finally received answer saying they were sorry and would send them ASAP, without further explanations.
I am still waiting for them and I am afraid I will have to wait quite more as I suppose that ASAP means as soon they are printed again and they restock.
I will think it twice before ordering to Maelstrom again.

Another project :P

I ordered an EIR army to Baccus and it arrived in no time and so, before I had time to regret having spent some money in the hobby again, I was cleaning and painting these little bugs.

They are very well sculpted and easy to paint for being 6 mm, but as they are literally hundreds, I thought about a fast method to paint them and so I did a test.
What you have here is my first test and I am quite happy with the result in quality and speed, so I will probably paint the whole army this way.

Pics clickable.



The recipe is priming in white, then spraying them with Tamiya TS-42 Light Gun Metal, after that block painting red for tunics, flesh and leather, and finally covering them with a home made magic wash and lastly some lights where needed.

The decals are really tiny and need some finesse. You can notice that my first are the ones to the left.

AE Bounty first game.

Today we finally tried the ruleset AE Bounty by Darkson Designs, the Mordheim game set in sci-fi context.
The best part of this ruleset is the designing of a warband or crew. For this first occasion I wen for a simple group with few models (only six) and all of them human and with similar gears. One sergeant hero unkillable, 2 Old Guard veterans, one hitter with rocket launcher and two regular hired guns, all armed with a variety of range weapons to experiment with.
My buddy chose a bit more exotic pirate crew with half of their members specialized in hand to hand combat.

We played the unplanned scenario Ambush with me being the attacker. I deployed his troops in the middle and then deployed mine on the right border and a unit behind the bunker's wall in hidden deployment thanks to the dirty trick Scout.

My buddy thought range weapons were not so deadly at long range and risked all his hand to hand troops in the open, which resulted into a slaughter. None of his hand to hand troops reached melee, but the rest wearing medium armour killed most of my men. In the end there were only left my sergeant against his captain. The game was a bit boring as the objective was simply to kill or rout each other.

It was our first game and lasted about one hour, so we decided to play a new scenario called Hostage situation (there are 18 scenarios plus 12 secondary objectives). This time I was defender with three hostages (innocent nuns) that I had to take out of the table whereas my buddy had to stopped me from doing it. The game lasted six turns and I started in the centre of the table.

As the hostages could escape if nobody within six inches was to controlled them, I chose to put my toughest unit next to them, my Sergeant. Again I surprised my opponent with my Old Guard veteran squad with three activations, who blasted away all his melee troops. The rest were too slow to catch me and although I suffered a few casualties I could easily escape with the hostages and win the game.

This time there was a more specific objective and the game was fun, and faster. Generally speaking, we liked the game as it is easy and fast to play yet it has a lot of flavour. It has many many possibilities in order to design your crew, a good number of scenarios, experience and rewards and campaigns, some inside starships as well!

Next weekend we will run a few games inside a starship and see how it goes.

Destroy that cruiser!

Today I am only testing bombers, torpedoes and attacking Capital ships. I decided to confront two light fighters and two bombers armed with two torpedoes each, attacking a Battle Cruiser Capital ship.

The cruiser must reach the buoy to hyper-jump and escape. The game begins with the attacking flight sighting the cruiser coming out from an asteroid field. They activate first and all hit Afterburners; the cruiser start to accelerate and launches two light fighters.

On turn two the light fighters hit Afterburners again and fire all their weapons and missiles, destroying one enemy light fighter and making the other one to use his Afterburners to avoid destruction. The bombers move normally towards the cruiser and reduce speed to star locking on torpedoes next turn.

Now fighters are in the cruiser's Flak defensive fire range and one of the bomber is forced to chance course. The cruiser launches his last two light fighters.

A fierce dogfight ensues and one bomber launches his torpedo towards the cruiser.

Another enemy light cruiser is down and the other bomber launches another torpedo while the fighter locks on a FF missile on the cruiser as well. The pilot of one of the attacking light fighters fall unconscious by enemy fire and the ship drifts forward uncontrolled.

Enemy fighters tail drifting ship and blow it away with a Heat Seeker missile, but then another enemy fighter is down and the cruiser receives another torpedo hit, with the bridge being smashed!

A third torpedo hits home and the heavily damaged cruiser is rendered without shields. He then fires all his Flak turrets against one bomber who reacts firing back with all his guns, hitting several times the unprotected cruiser and destroying it.

The explosion of the ship catches one of the bombers and destroys it as well while the enemy light fighter and the two remaining attacking ships go unscathed. In the end the Capital ship resulted destroyed by gunfire after three torpedoes making impact.

Many corrections had to be taken as usual but the game is running smooth in general. Although after talking to Joey Beutel I am thinking of changing the normal THW activation order, but this is something I still have to think about and test.

Micro Mythic Greece

This morning I felt in the mood and painted some more 10mm. miniatures for my project of adventuring in the mythic Greece. The Centaurs are from Pendraken and the Harpies from GW's Warmaster range. I have not found yet nothing so good in that scale as some of the Warmaster ranges; a pity they never made something similar with Historics.

Pics clickable as usual.

The Harpies are not individually based because I will probably based them in the future for Warmaster.

DBN 2.1

We bought the rules in 2008 but until today we did not have the opportunity to try them, thanks to a friend who based his old H&R Napoleonics in DBX bases. So we hastily assembled one French and one Russian armies of 12 points each and started a game using the rules of Attrition.

The game first already started and with the French HC having suffered one hit by the Russian artillery

On this occasion I commanded the French and easily beat my Russian opponent by finishing all his cavalry one by one (I was a bit lucky).

End of the game, with several units damaged.

In the end the game was a bit boring and disappointing, and we felt the attrition rules added nothing really interesting to the game. Also, my friend was totally against the rules and role the authors gave to light infantry, stating they had no idea about it.

For the second game I commanded the Russians as attackers, this time without the attrition rules, and the game was faster, more tactical and fun. Actually, the more the game closed to its original form (DBA) the better it was.

Initial deployment with Russians at the bottom

My cunning plan of attack was ruined by a series of catastrophic rolls and I lose miserably to the French.

Russian forces about to charge French line.

Two things we liked of the rules were the compulsory move of the attacker and the two extra pips it has in the first turn. I did not find the ruleset so bad as my two friends did, but I liked much more DBA than DBN for sure.

In the end I was happy with this result as it saved me of buying and painting a Napoleonic army! :D