Battle Report/AAR

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 75^th 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?

 

After two years of mid-war battles and tournaments, we’re all pretty excited for the release of Fortress Europe: new lists, more powerful vehicles and new stats to give a new flavour to FOW V4. Now that the book is only a couple of weeks from hitting the shelves, it’s time to have battle with the new forces – and we can’t wait to see how the “new” games taste.

With my friend Stefano Grombi, a veteran both for FOW and wargaming in general, we had our first battle with Fortress Europe lists. Reading the book it’s one thing, playing a game with the new lists is another.

By Dennis “Matt Varnish” Campbell

Napoleon.   Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:   “Man takes over country, then takes over Europe, and has grand ideas of marching to Moscow, but is then thwarted by logistics and winter”

Scott’s place on a Saturday, with some Sharpe’s Rifles on the tele

Napoleonics? Why? Well, for me with my gaming background starting mainly with sci-fi and fantasy (Games Workshop) I had never really looked at historicals, and certainly not Napoleonics. I knew who Napoleon was, and the era, mainly from watching Sharpe’s Rifles, a series where A: Sean Bean’s character doesn’t die, and B: Has Elizabeth Hurley in it (see header pic)