Hereward Wargames Show Bolt Action tournament...

In the luxury of our upstairs tournament area at Hereward, our dedicated team of tournament-putter-onners have arranged that there will be a Bolt Action tournament, "Operation Watchtower"

Details are available here. Admission is the usual £10, including entrance to the show.

Kickstarter Watch - 28mm L'Armee du Levant

There's more than a few Kickstarters around at the moment - this one is another 'obscure theatre of WW2 in 28mm' one, not, you understand that this is a bad thing.

So - what do we have here? To quote the blurb:

The goal is to create a range of 28mm Colonial French figures for the 2nd World War which are suitable for use in a wide variety of settings. The basic goal is to get 10 metal figures with a set of differing detached heads into production, allowing them to be made as regular colonial troops with either an Adrian or sun helmet, as French Foreign Legion in Kepis or as Senegalese Tirrallieurs in chéchia.

Laudable aim, if the concept floats your boat - I know there are quite a few people out there who enjoy WW2 theatres that aren't the obvious. £60 will get you a platoon of rather nice looking sculpts with your choice of separately moulded head. It's currently targeting £4500, and stands at just under a grand with 22 days to go (May 1): Kicktraq reckons it's going to fall a hair short, so I figure some more publicity won't hurt.

Scaling up

I'm moved to ponder (which regulars will know is always dangerous, and new readers can discover for themselves by checking out posts tagged with 'thoughts' on here) by several threads and discussions here and there in the past couple of months on Big Games.

What do I mean by Big Games?

In this context, that moment down the club or wherever where you decide that you want to take a system you love on your usual 6'x4' table, and do something more epic on 8'x6' or 10'x6' or bigger, so you can get masses of figures on a table and Make It Look Totally Awesome...

And it never... quite... works. Moreso with some systems than others, granted, but...

Why not?

It's kind of the inverse of the 'will <X> work with <Y> scale figures' question that you hear asked so often. (To which, in case anyone is still in doubt, the answer is YES OF COURSE, possibly given a little scale tweaking). Yes, games are often designed with a particular figure scale in mind, but... much more importantly, games are designed with a particular force size in mind. And in general, the rules will creak far more if you step outside the designer's idea of typical force size than they will figure size or table size. The latter are merely issues of ground scale, which you can fix with a calculator, spreadsheet, custom-marked ruler or swapping from cm to inches.

Admittedly, some work better than others: you can, for example, push most of the Warhammer-based systems (40K, Fantasy, WAB, Bolt Action) a bit more than you can, say, Chain of Command. Even so, though, you will get to the point where the granularity of the rules starts to break down in the face of more and more figures to move and interact.

So what do you do?

Actually, it hit me after a couple of comments from Rich on the TFL Yahoo! Group re large games of Chain of Command.

You're actually using the wrong rules to achieve what you want. If, for example you want a big, sprawling, company level WW2 game in 28mm on a 12'x6' table with a 1:1 figure scale? Don't use Chain of Command or Bolt Action, however much you might want to. Use IABSM/FoW/Battlegroup and nudge the ground scale up a bit. Think about it: you wouldn't generally use IABSM for a platoon level action, you'd use CoC or Bolt Action.

Just a (possibly controversial) thought.

Ch...ch...ch....changes...

I've been back in wargaming for about three years now. It's quite interesting to look at the things that have changed in that time.

First up, from my viewpoint, the demise of Warhammer Historical (and specifically WAB) as an entry point to non-fantasy/SF wargaming, is a biggie. I've gone on enough about this and the policy decisions round it that I don't need to do so again, but if any of my newer readers want to give me more page views by catching up on my opinions, do feel free :D

GW's confessed business model - to sell figures - isn't actually that dumb, if you step back and take a look at it. Rules are a one-off purchase (unless you go with the 40K approach): if you're a full-time business, the real money is in enticing people to get their lead and plastic pile from you.

There have been a couple of attempts to replace WAB, of which the obvious three are Clash of Empires, War and Conquest, and Hail Caesar. None of them have really taken off as much, as far as I can tell, as WAB did in its heyday. I find the first too close to WAB with the serials filed off, from the couple of games I've played. I'd like to get a better look at WAC, as it's probably the closest in spirit to what WAB 3.0 could have become, and the army lists are pretty comprehensive.

Hail Caesar has the advantage that WAB had, only in spades: not only do a major games company (Warlord) back it, they actually produce figure ranges for it! My issues with it, though, are twofold: it seems to generally require rather more figures than a corresponding game of WAB, and I still find the command activation system slightly flawed.

Next up, the rise of Dark Ages gaming. Specifically, obviously, SAGA, which has been a flash of genius on the part of Gripping Beast and their partners since they've got figures to go with the rules. I still find it a bit beer-and-pretzels: it's a great game, but it's not exactly a simulation (Mike Hobbs and I are recording another podcast with Neil tonight: that should give him a chance to have a go at me :D). But of course, in addition to that, there's the Duxes (or perhaps, the Duces?) Britanniarum and Bellorum, which set out to do different things and both do them pretty well (you know where my preferences lie, though :D).

In WW2, we seem to have seen the steady fall of one big ruleset backed by a massive range of figures, and the rise of another in a different scale, while smart rule makers happily ride in on the availability of minis in both scales. Man at War tried to emulate the former in the Napoleonic period... the jury's kind of still out on that one: they're still going but slowly.

Then there's the (re-) rise of games at the skirmish/RPG-lite scale (I could give you a list, but I don't have all day :D) The likes of Judge Dredd, In Her Majesty's Name spring to mind.  They do sort of hark back to Mordheim/Necromunda, but they do seem to be growing in popularity as a ... if you like, form-factor... for gaming. These do seem to come as 'rules with figures' packages - brilliant if the setting and the rules work, and the figures are up to scratch.

The real biggie, though? Kickstarter. I mean, just... wow. Things are happening in the gaming world that just weren't possible before as a result. As long as people can get their heads round the concept that Kickstarter's raison d'être is advance funding and a clearer idea of the market for the vendor, and not purely loads of cool free swag RIGHT NOW for the buyer, we're in with a shout of some great things coming through it. But it's clear from a couple of notable events such as the withdrawal of the Beyond the Gates of Antares Kickstarter, that not everyone seems to 'get' how best to use it.

That said: wargames? The hobby's rockin', man, as the guitarist in a band I used to be in would say. I can't wait to see what happens next.

Commission Miniatures Kickstarter

I don't normally re-plug Kickstarters, but the rather superb one for modular buildings and ruins I mentioned a while back has four days left to run and is a couple of grand shy of its target.

If you or your club are into Bolt Action, FoW, IABSM, the Lardies' new Chain of Command or anything else that lends itself to WW2-era city fights, you owe it to yourself to grab a deal here, be it in 15, 20 or 28mm. This one deserves to succeed, IMO: there are club deals at £200 if you want to club together, in all scales.

Next New Things

A topic I was pondering on a while back, when a thread on the TFL Yahoo! group [I'm sorry, it's an ingrained reaction: I used to work for Yahoo! and my fingers just find the exclamation mark without conscious thought!] tonight, in a strange case of parallel evolution, prompted me to actually type up some of my thoughts. This is something of a disjointed train of thought, but hey - it's late (even if this won't get posted till tomorrow) - if it makes sense to you, some of the credit definitely goes to the Lardies list, and if you aren't on it, go! It's full of people who talk more sense than I do.

Now, I know I'm a bit of a latecomer to this hobby, this time around, but it does seem to me that lately we've been through a phase of a whole bunch of Next New Things. Every few months something else pops up that everyone gets excited about, and we all play it and post about it for a while and then it all dies down a bit. Examples that spring to mind? SAGA, Operation: Squad, Napoleon at War, for a few that I've come across, and I'm sure that there are others. The latest? I guess Bolt Action, Dux B (both Dux B's!), Dreadball...

I guess this is in some ways, human nature. We're a paradoxical bunch - at the same time we're resistant to change (witness the outcry when, say, a new edition of 40K tweaks your favourite rule/army list) and  we embrace the new and get bored by the old if it doesn't have that mythical concept of replay value.

Maybe our eagerness to embrace the Next New Thing is also about an indirect quest for replay value - trying things that break us out of a rut and we hope will be the one to hold our interest. And of course, the problem with the wargames rules business is that even the most perfect set of wargames rules, the ones with huge replay value, only sell one copy per interested gamer. So... you know how it goes. Supplements. New editions. Relaunches...  And if you're also a figure manufacturer, supplements mean... new figures. And that's where the real money is.

Apparently the Next New Thing in the Flames of War world is US Tank Destroyers: one can only assume that this is some inherent imbalance in the relevant game supplement, since everyone and his dog is throwing money at Battlefront to buy the latest winning army. One has to wonder how long it'll be before the next supplement comes out with another list that tops it...

If I were more of a cynic, I'd almost wonder if they did it on purpose.

Personally? Yay Battlefront for producing various 15mm WW2 figures that no-one else does, and the new plastic set looks like a really handy way of getting a bunch of figures and vehicles.... but you still won't catch me playing it.

I've seen reports from folks on the Lardies list of other people selling all their 15mm WW2 stuff to buy 28mm to play Bolt Action because apparently you can't play it in 15mm...

HUH?

Colour me boggled. But, full marks to Warlord, it would appear, for a superb marketing campaign: and, as above, if it gets me a wider range of figures and vehicles in 28mm to add to my already extant collection, great.

I dunno, maybe I'm either just more rational or less well-off!