Hammerhead 2019

Off down the M6 and across the A50 to Newark Showground, for the first show of the year (for me). Last year's show was cancelled because of a blizzard on the day, and I missed 2017 because of some clash of diaries, so this was the first time I have attended since the show has been split across two halls. This seemed to work well, with plenty of room for the games and traders but no gaping holes. As usual at this show every game was designated as a participation event (apart from those in the DBA tournament). I didn't try out any of these, so I can't comment on their quality, but there seemed to be a fair amount of activity around most of the tables.

I had some specific targets, mostly around the game Rangers of Shadow Deep, which I have recently picked up. This is by Joe McCullough, the creator of Frostgrave and Ghost Archipelago. I find those settings rather specific, whereas RoSD allows you to use much more generic fantasy characters - rangers obviously, and knights, conjurors, rogues and so on. It's main strength is the scenarios which are put out, each with interesting challenges and different mechanics.

My first purchase was a bunch of dungeon dressing - treasure piles, tables, rubble and so on. These came from a vendor called Miniature Vault, which means, according to the packaging, that they are bulk purchased from Reaper Bones and repackaged for sale at conventions.

After a turn around the first haul, and a bit of lunch (pie and chips) I walked over to the George Stephenson Hall, which is the hall where the show used to be held in total. I got some more dungeon stuff from Ainsty - more substantial items like walls, pillars and doors. From 4Ground I picked up a couple of Dark Ages Anglo-Danish houses/huts - they should fit into the generic fantasy background. I also got a couple of packs of clear plastic circular bases (25mm diameter) which I now use for all my 28mm figures.

The final purchase was the biggest, a board game. I had hoped to find Pavlov's House, a solo game of defending a building over many days during the Stalingrad battle. However the only vendor there, Magister Militum, didn't have it with them, and I was quite happy to pick up one of the COIN (Counterinsurgency) series. I dithered between A Distant Plain (Afghanistan modern) and Cuba Libre (Castro's revolution) - in the endI opted for the latter, and I am looking forward to seeing how it plays - like all the COIN series it is designed from the outset for full solitaire play (though you can have up to three other players).

Back to the North West, the trip only spoiled slightly by Blackpool's progressive collapse to a 4-0 defeat at Bristol Rovers. Quite a bit of painting to do now, but also some rules reading.

The booty

Gambassi's Warehouse

My biggest birthday present was a 4Ground building in their Chicago Way series - the Gambassi Warehouse. This is the biggest building in the range, and the most expensive - £90-00. It is a very complicated kit, with many layers of different kinds to make up the walls. In the most extreme case there were five layers - a central core layer, then red brick layers either side, and then on top of the bricks very thin layers representing crumbling plaster. You have the option to remove some of the plaster areas, to reveal the bricks underneath - you can remove more or less, depending on how dilapidated you want the building to be.

All the windows are glazed, with clear acetate sheets and mdf grids to which you stick the acetate and then trim it before gluing it into the window spaces in the walls. There are many doors and trapdoors which all open and close, with careful construction. The upper storey and the roof can both be removed for access to the interior, and it is also possible to construct it as a single storey building by leaving the upper layer out. The stairs can be removed in this case, and replaced with a trapdoor to a dummy basement level. So there is a lot of detail and a lot of thought has gone into the design of this building. Fully recommended.

More Chicago

I built the two 4Ground Chicago Way models I picked up at FIASCO last weekend - the Shotgun House and the Garage. As always with this supplier the models are really nice and solid, double thickness on all the main walls so you get a sound structure and surface detail on both sides. The house is pretty simple, a straightforward rectangular building with one interior dividing wall with door, and a porch/veranda at each end. The garage was more substantial and complicated, with an internal office with its own flat roof, and then a large space accessed by double doors which would be the workshop, presumably. There's nice glazing for the windows, including signs for the front ones, and a long covered walkway going out to one side. All pre-painted, plus signs and posters to stick on when you're finished. I have five buildings in this series now, as well as other suitable city buildings; I am looking for appropriate mats or the like.

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.

Apache Dawn

As promised I had a go at a few little fights with Six Gun Sound, and enjoyed them. They are from Two Hour Wargames, and share an initiative system with a lot of their titles - perhaps the best-known being NUTS. This means that when someone comes into sight, the sighter has a "Got a Shot" initative roll, and he may fire, or the moving figure may fire first - they exchange shots until one is hit or steps back, then the move continues. A different take, and I like the feel of it for gunfights - some details were obscure but after discussions on the THW forum I downloaded their (free) Chain Reaction 3.1 rules. These have an updated version of the reaction system which clarifies it well.

Six Gun Sound has a career campaign mode, and I started on with a Gunfighter character. The very first encounter I rolled, he is escorting some wagons when Indians attack. After Salute I bought various western figures, including a pack of Apaches from Foundry - and guess which pack I have not yet painted. So the campaign was on hold until I could give the Indians their warpaint. Also, over Christmas I got a couple of 4Ground kits - a Stagecoach and a building. I built the stagecoach, though the ambush is of dull wagons, but it's quite a nice kit. No driver or passengers yet, but Dixon have an order right now to fill that gap.

Law of the Gun

At Salute in the spring I picked up a copy of the Dead Man's Hand rules for the Wild West, and also a couple of the very nice 4Ground buildings released to match the rule set. I played a few games with these rules, but I never quite felt happy with them. The card-driven play is very clever, but there are too many special cases, it feels as if it is all chrome; also there isn't a very strong campaign/career mode - the Schemes mechanism from Legends is again quite clever, but it just didn't do it for me.

The buildings, on the other hand, are excellent. They are the pre-coloured laser cut mdf style which is increasingly popular. 4Ground have a wide variety of ranges, different scales, periods and genres, and I have made a few 15mm WW2, but I think this material really works best with Wild West buildings. It is after all wood, which is exactly what these buildings are made of. The mdf isn't quite convincing for brick, concrete or steel structures, but for wooden planks it's perfect. I also very much enjoy the process of actually building the models - they are very detailed, and the way they have been designed to use the pre-coloured mdf is very ingenious. There are lots of little features - opening doors and windows, options to build models with or without damage (or even adaptable during a game), pictures, notices and posters. The instructions are very detailed and clear, and while it is PVA glue I was reminded very much of making Airfix models many decades ago.

I came back from Salute and bought a 3' x 2' board, and landscaped it to form the base of a small Western town - one rough road and a T junction, a small pool and various bits of scrub. It was nice to do some realistic terrain for a change - for most wargaming I tend towards the representational, since the terrain is never in scale with the figures. However for 1-1 skirmish games it is different, what you see on the table is what's actually there - a house is a house, a tree (or a cactus) is a tree or a cactus.

So I was looking for some rules to use for encounters in my small but growing hamlet (Sick Dog's Paw). At Fiasco in October I had bought Chris Peers' rules, Law of the Gun, and I decided to get them out and have a go. I have to say I wasn't terribly excited with the actual games - reading them through they seemed quite promising, but in play they didn't quite work. The key mechanism for activation, shooting and a number of other things is rolling a certain number of D6s and trying to score 6s. A group of up to four figures rolls 3 (Townsfolk) 4 (Fighters) or 5 (Gunfighters) dice, and they all get an action for every 6. One problem here is that nearly half the time, four D6s will produce no scores of 6. And then all the members of that group can do nothing except fire wildly. Even professionals with 5 D6 will fail to get an action 40% of the time. And having a whole group acting, or not acting, all at the same time seems a bit unnatural in a 1-1 skirmish game. Maybe this would work better with slightly larger sides, with several groups there would be less chance of several turns going by with nothing happening.

I ran a small test fight, with a gang of four fighters on each side. I made an error with one gang, leaving the rifleman back to shoot while the other three moved forward - that meant the gang lost one D6, and they found it even harder to take an action. The two sides shuffled forward and met on either side of a corral, where they blazed away for some time. Eventually two guys ran forward round a corner in the open, weren't hit, and then got a gut shot on an opponent, killing him. At this point the enemy gang broke morale, and fled.

Chris Peers is a very experienced rules writer, and I am sure that for the right sort of fight these would work well, but they did not give me the feel I was looking for. After a bit of reading around the forums, I lighted on Six Gun Sound: Blaze of Glory by Two Hour Wargames. I have heard a lot about these people - I guess Nuts is their best-known product - but I have never bought any of their rules. Thanks to the glory of the internet, $10 through Paypal meant that I had a pdf of the rules in my hand within minutes. They look very interesting - lots of content (well over 100 pages), a very different turn and initiative sequence, and plenty of opportunities for careers, character development and so on. I'm going to give them a go soon to see how they work for me.

The Green gang - Jed, Jake, Josh and Jim

The Reds - Tex, Ted, Tyrone and Tony

An overview of Sick Dog's Paw

View down the main street from the east...

And the west

The corral where most of the action took place

The Red gang strung out to keep within 6" of each other

The Greens have bunched up to have a better chance of rolling an Action

In the distance Tyrone lies dead, while the rest of the Reds head for the hills

The final scene at the corral