By Tom Gall
This is the 3rd in our series of articles on Battlegroup: NORTHAG a set of Cold War gone hot rules set in 1983 published by the and written by Warwick Kinrade. In the prior two articles, and then . In this one, we’re going to play a game and see how it goes.
By Tom Burgess
My good friend Ed and I were very excited to acquire last month’s release of the 21st Panzer Division expansion books/cards for the D-Day Germans in Flames of War Version 4. We both have a lot of 21st Panzer Division kit in our collections, but only Ed had any of it done. So I rolled out my new US Sheman Company so we could get in a game with the new hotness.
by Matt Varnish
Here we go, myself and fellow No Dice No Glory contributor Scott ‘Obsidian23’ Roach, get in a game using the new British D-Day book. As always, the video of the game is linked at the end of the article.
We actually debated using the special D-Day missions in the book but they were either on 4ft by 4ft tables or Airlanding, so we opted to use the normal Battle Planner.. and wound up with Free-For-All. We WERE using the new Bocage rules, however, Bocage Hedgerows are Tall Terrain and provide Bulletproof Cover to gun and infantry teams shot through them. Looking at the above table Scott laid out, you can see that Line of Sight would be an issue for things like Achilles, 88s and Panthers.
D-Day +2, Monty’s forces have pushed past the beachheads and are heading towards Caen. In their way lies a German Recon Coy sitting in an outskirt called Herouville-St-Clair.by Dennis ‘Matt Varnish’ Campbell
Well, its not exactly your classic Team Yankee Match-Up: Hungarian People’s Army vs the Texas National Guard, but here it is. Scott ‘Obsidian23’ Roach has been busy over the holidays finishing off his Hungarians (plays as Soviets in terms of list used) and since he has Hungarians for Flames of War and Bolt Action, why not for Team Yankee as well?
We decided to play 120pts, which is the new North American tournament standard, as we have a semi-local event in April, and I will be using my M1 company that I’ve been working on over the holidays ().
By Tom Gall
The US Civil War (1861-1865) ushered in a new kind of naval warfare. Ships made of metal, powered by steam, ships pushed into service which were never quite made for the task. It was an amazing time and is a great period to game.
Neil Stokes of the St Paul Irregulars has authored a wonderful set of rules call Steam and Black Powder that do a great job capturing the challenges of battle in this era and make for a very fun time.
The rule book is 48 pages, with the first 14 pages comprising the rules and the rest made up of tables, ship stats and some historical actions to try out on the tabletop. It’s a fairly quick read and won’t take you much time to get up and running on the tabletop.
A turn is comprised of 5 steps with each side going at the same time, there is no activation system which 0n the one hand eliminates problems like last/firsting but also removes some amount of “drama” hoping you’ll get the drop on someone.
The game uses inches for movement and suggests 1/600 models. In my case I’m using 1/1200 since that is the hardware I have on hand. We didn’t experience any issues and I did not make any adjustments for scale. It just worked.
The new Late War books sparkled lots of interest here in Italy: old players from V3 dusted their armies buried at home and began to play back, while Mid War veterans found a reason to expand their WW2 legions. on NDNG, the new “balance” with tank costs almost halved creates a more mobile metagame, with lots of armoured vehicles going around on the wargaming table.
As a result, we’re going to have . The first one happened on October 6th and saw almost 20 players coming from all Northern Italy (and one from Switzerland!), while we are already accepting entries for the second one, on December 15th (99 points Late War Tournament).
By Tom Gall
Warcry is a skirmish level game by Games Workshop within the Age of Sigmar fantasy universe.
I’ve written about it before when it came out. It features a war band design where you have point costed figures that you build a small force to approx 1000 points and then set to battle.
The system includes terrain kits like the one pictured below which offer a great setting for the action. Need to be painted but they sure are pretty. Terrain kits run about $90.
By Paolo Paglianti
After years of Mid-War tournaments, finally we have some change. Thanks to the books Battlefront published this summer we can play Late War with full V4 rules and point system. Since I like to play with Allied forces, Mid War tournaments have always been on the “stay low” profile: with too many Tigers and Ferdies around (in Italy we saw the infamous list with 5 Ferdinands and the Italian L6 ally), Mid War US and British forces constantly faced tanks they can’t beat head to head, almost invulnerable armour that can only be avoided. In Late War, as we foresaw, things are going to change.
It has been one of the hottest summers ever for WW2 gamers. Battlefront deployed a full array of Late War books: the “transitional” Fortress Europe with all four armies on the Western/Russian front, the US D-Day and the incoming German Normandy focused one. At our club in Milan, we decided to play the D-Day scenarios in US D-Day book to “celebrate” both the 75th anniversary of that fateful day and the starting of the Late War FOW season.
by Dennis ‘Matt Varnish’ Campbell
Wait what? Ancients? Medievals?
I’ll be honest I had ZERO interest in wargaming this period until I started attending HMGS events a few years ago. Every single Cold Wars, Fall-In or Historicon had a lot of tables with ancients being played, and tournaments as well in scales such as 15mm, 25/28mm.
While my only games at the time were Flames of War and then later Team Yankee, I would still walk over and take a tonne of pictures and gawp at the nicely painted armies. What seemed crazy to me was that you could play just about anything and the rules covered it, for example you could have Egyptians vs the Ming Dynasty, Persians vs Aztecs.
As it turns out, my good friend Scott Roach (NDNG author Obsidian23) had boxes and boxes of ancients in his gaming basement, and a deal was struck. I would grab his 28mm Romans, and we could play Hail Caesar as we were already getting into Black Powder (both rulesets from Warlord Games). Then, however, he started talking about DBA, Impetus, To the Strongest, and at the HMGS events they were playing L’Art de La Guerre… Ugh.. what to pick?
