Sunday 29 October 2017

Fiasco 2017

Over to Leeds today for Fiasco at the Royal Armouries. This is my third or fourth year - it is not too far to drive, a bit over the hour, and it's also well timed as there's not a lot of other shows going on right now. I parked up and had a quick look around, then went looking for lunch. The docks area around the Armouries is very smart, all big new buildings or modern conversions of original warehouses - but it's a bit soulless. I walked over the Ayre and up into the older part of Leeds. I found a bar/club called Revolution - no doubt very trendy at night, but for a rack of ribs and apint on Sunday lunchtime, just perfect.

Back to the show along the Ayre - someday we might come over on the narrowboat and moor close by. But that is well in the future. For this year's show I had a few specific items on the list, and I got them all. The first target was some Old West buildings from Leven - I have an idea to create a western town as a sort of diorama. I'd like to try playing a gunfighter game at 6mm, but so far I am struggling to find suitable figures, and I had no more luck today. While I was at Leven's stand I als picked up an extra building, as I often do, just because I liked the look of it. In this case it was a big British pub, called The Push, apparently based on a real building in Beverley.

After that I wanted some more Chicago buildings in 28mm, having built a couple last week. I found some 4Ground kits at Colonel Bill's stall, and I got a garage and a shotgun shack. I was tempted by a large warehouse, but at £80 it was just a little too much.

My other targets were smaller. I got a pack of gangsters from Pulp Figures - Bugs Malarchy's Mob - who will obviously be fighting around the new buildings. And I went to Baccus and picked up the Fallschirmjager Nebelwerfers - they had sold out at Salute, and I didn't get to Joy of Six, so I wanted to get hold of it, though I am not currently painting WW2.

I got away after three, and home by about half four - it was a lovely day for the first day of winter, so the drive was no problem - a good day out all told.

Chicago Shops

For a bit of a change from painting 6mm I decided to build a couple of 4Ground models I have had for a while, possibly since Salute and perhaps longer. They are for Chicago in the gangster era, two small retail premises. One is a tobacconist, with suitable posters and flyers stuck all over it, and the other is a jeweller's, a little bit more sober with stone pillar work and solid-looking doors.

4Ground do good kits, with plenty of detail, and pre-painted. For some reason I am very happy to get pre-painted terrain, especially at this larger scale, while I am very keen to paint my own figures. These models have glazed windows, with painted lettering for the large display panes; I think these are the first models in this range with glazing.








Tuesday 24 October 2017

Labyrinth

When we were down in London last month I visited the Orcs Nest (just off Cambridge Circus) and bought Labyrinth, War On Terror 2001 - ? from GMT games. (In practice ? is around 2010). I also got the expansion, Awakening, which covers the Arab Spring and beyond, so taking you from 2011 onwards.

So far I have only played the base game, and I am impressed. It is very asymmetric, between the US and the Jihadist forces, but it seems well balanced. There is a bot to play the Jihadist side, so I have been playing the US, and it works very well. It is a proper challenge, with none of the "trying to fool yourself" that happens when you are playing a normal game solo. The expansion has a US bot, so a solo player can take the Jihadist side, and it also improves the Jihadist bot at the same time. I am looking forward to trying that out, from both sides.

As a solo game I like this because you have a reasonably constrained set of choices, and the challenge is to choose the best way to use your limited resources. Many games leave you facing a vast expanse of possibilities, and you struggle to know where to start. A good example is The US Civil War, a boardgame I bought a few months ago. It is very impressive, and has been very well reviewed, and I set it up and read through the rules. But I simply couldn't get started - the sheer scale and breadth of choice was too daunting. Maybe if I had had a live opponent, especially one who had played before, I would have had the incentive to press on regardless, but playing solo I just couldn't start to climb the cliff. Labyrinth gives you a much narrower path to follow, though you do have to make key choices - just from a much smaller palette.


Hold your horses

More Baccus ACW troops, this time dismounted cavalry for the Confederates. I assume that these would all have been skirmish troops, and that is backed up by the way the figures are arranged in their strips. Baccus supply line infantry in rows, side by side, so you can mount them without splitting them up. Skirmish troops (and others, such as command units) come in a line, one behind the other like a queue, so you have to cut them apart and base them singly. That's how these troops came, so they made up into eight skirmish bases, two of which were command. You also get two strips with a horse holder and three empty horses, so I mounted these on circular bases (2p pieces); I expect them to come in useful as markers if nothing else.





Wednesday 4 October 2017

Grey Guns

Onwards and upwards with the Baccus 6mm ACW. This time the Confederate artillery, just five guns in the Confederate Army pack which Baccus do, and which I bought at Salute back in April. I have probably painted a third of the figure I bought that day, and let me tell you that is pretty good going for me.