Battle Report - 18 Aug 2019 - "Bloody Omaha" at The Other Partizan

Loot haul - two blisters from Bad Squiddo Games (which are lovely and will see use soon!)

Spent most of the day (barring a couple of brief diversions) umpiring Bloody Omaha. An excellent day - one young gentlemen stayed pretty much all day and handled the bulk of the American attack.

We never got to wave 3, but by turn 8 the Americans had several breaches in the wire, having come under some pretty serious hammer early on - 2/3 of wave 1 was late, so the Germans had opportunity to concentrate their fire early on. The German artillery wasn't as effective as it could have been - partly Carl and I were swapping umpiring/running the Germans, and there was perhaps a lack of continuity for such things as 'are we walking the fire up the beach?'.

General Cota made it on in wave 2 (yes, I know he should be several beach sectors over, on Dog White, but Robert Mitchum in the rôle is a very iconic image and I couldn't resist :D) He led an advance up the western edge of the beach, almost directly at WN64 which was slow but being quite successful,..

Herewith a gallery with comments (largely me nitpicking, because the camera is unforgiving and it's my game and I can!):

All set up and ready to play. Newly watered marshes front and centre, as well as All The Beach Obstacles and some copious use of Woodland Scenics mid-green lichen. A no-prize if you can tell me what I forget to pack... (There are in fact two things.)

This is probably the one thing that really bugs me about the game that isn't fixable - the board joins. Sadly because of wear and tear and in some cases slightly out of tolerance boards, they can be very visible, even though we hide them with lichen and barbed wire, That said, the original plan was always a modular board (and we do reuse some of the hills in other games), so the square tiles and 'stepped' look are a deliberate design choice. Also, I need to glue the wire on to the barbed wire bases so it sits flatter on the ground.

Flames of War LCV(P) with passengers. I should retouch a couple of helmets but on the whole they've pretty evocative: I would very much like if Battlefront redid the castings when they announce the Higgins boat for the new late war range, as they are a bit scuzzy and a swine to get a brush in the gaps, even more so when you can't easily spot what's what on the casting!

Need to retouch the bases on the mine stakes tp match the shallows rather than the deeper water. Usefully it's AP Army Green, I think, so easy to match... 

An LCV(P) gets hit on its way in... Rob suggested a few floating body markers (and I thought I was obsessive!) :D  It's a good job I have two packs of those explosion markers as as far as I can tell neither of the folks I bought them from still make them! 

I love this shot - taken low over the hills at the back of the table, it almost hides the stepped contours of the board.  

A new addition for this game (in case you missed me rabbiting on about it) was photographer Robert Capa., who appears on wave 1 on one Higgins boat and must leave with one of the empty wave 3 boats. He's very much being portrayed here as the legend, rather than what might be the truth....

...customised from a PSC heavy weapons team guy...

He has a card in the deck. On an activation, he has three actions with which he can move 1d6 each, or use one or two to take a photograph (much like AFV fire in IABSM, a second action means he takes time to compose his shot...) We then roll 1d6, + 3 if aimed, plus 1-3 at the umpire's discretion for choice of subject (the player gets to say what he wants to photograph). Still tuning the numbers, but a total score of 50+ means he gets to keep his job, 100+ means he becomes a legend. -50 for missing the boat back to England (and thus his press deadline).

And just for giggles, we get an iPhone down to board level and 'take' the photo (and crop it and turn it B&W).

So, here's Capa's portfolio for the Magnum agency for Life magazine from The Other Partizan...  

We have the Capa version of this iconic shot on our banner for the game. Part of me is really tempted to have a Higgins boat modelled with its ramp down expressly for Capa... 

This is Capa's original... I also find myself wondering if I can find a small HD spy cam that would fit IN or on a 15mm Higgins boat :D And whether a backdrop behind the boards would look effective...

A BAR team from the Big Red One taking cover in the shallows. The team medic can be seen slightly out of focus right of centre. 

Big Red One rifle sections shelter under a ramp obstacle. 

German artillery plasters the beach - observe the elements of both the Big Red One and the 29th sheltering on the shingle below the sea wall while Capa himself takes cover behind a log ramp.

A mortar section of E company 16th RCT of the Big Red One takes cover behind a 'Czech hedgehog'.  Ahead, engineer elements of E company are attempting to breach the wire protecting the exit from the beach.

So there you go. Thank you to everyone who played, came and said hi, or said nice things, to Carl, Rod and Rob for helping run the game, AndyM (as ever) for scenery, Rich Clarke for the original scenario, and thank you to the Other Partizan folks for inviting us!

The economics of wargaming

In this case, specifically Flames of War.

I suspect a good few of my readers don't read WWPD, but this is a fascinating article.

More thoughts from me when I'm not quite so jet lagged. 

Battlefront "Colours of War" paint system

Looking at the behind the scenes article on the their website, I think Battlefront may have actually got this one right. I'll reserve judgement till I've seen the full range, but if it's there at Salute I'll be checking it out.

It includes:

• The Quartermaster's set. This time, it's not just black. white, the primary colours etc. It's also the colours that they wind up putting in multiple of the national/army paint sets, like flesh, khaki, gunmetal, canvas etc. so that there are no unnecessary double ups between the national sets.
• National paint sets. One for each army, except for the Germans who get one for infantry and one for vehicles.
• Large bottles (20ml) of the stuff you use all the time, smaller ones (12ml) of the paint you don't (e.g Para beret red!). 
• Washes in suitably matching colours as part of the range.
• A distinctive dropper bottle with a 'bullet' top, so you can identify the Colours of War paints - not necessary, but since they had to design their own bottles for the various sizes anyway...
• The Book. A painting reference for the four main counties (US, Britain, Germany, Russia) with a slight emphasis on late war but basically covering everything you need to know to paint your amy.

I'm very keen to see this in action - it sounds very well designed.

Flames of War WWI reviews

The first reviews of the Battlefront WW1 stuff are out, courtesy of WWPD (unsurprisingly) and Model Dads.

• WWPD Sneak Peek: Great War - The Overview...
• WWPD Sneak Peek: Great War - The Army Lists...
• the Model Dads' video review

Sadly, these reviews only cover the extra rules tweaks, but they do contain some nice pics of the figures, which do look promising. All I need now is to find a nice set of company-level WW1 rules.

Flames of War 2014 Tournament Objective

You won't see a title like that on a post in here very often, so make the most of it. :D

In the event that any of my Flames of War-playing readers happen to get their hands on a spare copy of the 2014 FoW tournament objective, please let me know how much you'd want for it.

For those of my non-FoW following readers wondering if I've taken leave of my senses...

Wanted - old style Flames of War bases

If anyone in the UK has old style, grey, Flames of War bases, I'll be willing to trade them for an equivalent number of the new brown ones with holes. Up to 40 of each of the small and the medium. Must be genuine Flames of War bases with the bevelled edges, though.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

I blame Ade

Well, someone's got to.

As we have an invite to bring the Bloody Omaha game to a 1940s weekend in Peterborough next month, I may have let slip that I was being a little keener in acquiring enough FoW 29th infantry NOT to have to reuse figures or festoon them with Post-Its.

Ade from Wyvern Wargames has taken it upon himself, the lovely man that he is, to point me at eBay auctions that might help with this... and some.. er... obliging person has... um... had a set already based but unpainted...

Normally, new boxes go for the neck end of £40. New boxes on ebay kick in around the £25 mark. Otherwise intact box that someone's already mounted on bases? £10.50. Result! Thanks, Ade!

Of course, now I have to work out how much pain there will be in getting them off the bases, since the odds are they've been based as per FoW section organisation, not the one I/Rich use for Bloody Omaha. Ah well. Worst case I might have to get ugly with a razor saw....

Battlefront, WW1

I note with interest that Battlefront have - I think the best phrase is snuck in, with as let little fanfare, an announcement for August for, wait for it...

... Flames of War "Great War".

Yes, really.

Reading between the lines, it does appear to suffer a little from Battlefront's desire to turn everything into a tank battle, but (as someone who probably owns more BF figures and vehicles - at a rough guess about 8-900 and 100 respectively, even if over half are unpainted - than most FoW gamers), I'm interested to see what the figures come out like.

The rules are coming out in the August Wargames Illustrated, and I'll certainly give them a once over, but if I do succumb to the figures, I'd be going for "Through The Mud And Blood" or Warhammer Historical's "Great War" rules.

And yes, this is post #750...

Battlefront 'Nam sale

[As a complete aside, I do think it's rather unsporting of the US to deprive me of another hour's sleep just when I've about got used to the timezone...]

A heads up for players of FoW 'Nam, Charlie Don't Surf, and anything else that suits itself to 15mm Vietnam-era minis. Battlefront are currently offering 40% off the entire FoW 'Nam range.... The sale starts on 13 March 2014, and ends at midnight on 31 March 2014.

"As many of you may know, the end of March marks the end of the fiscal year for many companies. Here at Battlefront, our taskmaster of an accountant has given us a mandate: Make my end of year Stock Takes easy!"

Battlefront claim they have at least some of all items in stock...

I'm quite intrigued by the fact that they feel the need to emphasise this, especially given the paucity of FoW stuff (from any period) that was available at Hammerhead - literally the only people with any stock were Caliver, and they were bemoaning the fact that it when stuff arrived from Battlefront seemed to be extremely random and at the mercy of, rather alarmingly, BF's cash-flow (regular readers can find examples in the past of retailers for whom that got very messy indeed). It's been a disturbing trend over the last year or so, in fact - at the Milton Keynes show last year, every single trader with FoW stuff was shifting what they had at a discount.

I admit? As far as the game goes, I'm not massively fussed. But I do probably own more painted and unpainted Battlefront 15mms than a lot of people, and while I welcome any chance to get them cheaper, I'm a little concerned....

Question is, do I pounce now for 'Nam forces... :D

Ranging in Artillery (via WWPD)

It's not often I link to WWPD, since they do tend to be somewhat unrepentant Flames of War fans (sorry guys :) ), but since a recent podcast on their network included a rather nice brief review of Chain of Command, never let it be said I'm not a reasonable man :D

One of the WWPD guest posters is ex-Royal Canadian Artillery, and he's just posted a very interesting piece on ranging-in artillery fire.

Of rules, mechanics, complexity and special cases

After two evenings of pleasant wargames chatter, one the club Christmas dinner, and one a club committee meeting, I've been thinking. Regular readers will be aware that this can be dangerous, but never mind - as my work colleague Dom says, crack on…

Harking back to some earlier thoughts about immersion, immediacy and other things, one thing I didn't cover in any detail is what makes rules playable. And for that matter, what defines 'playability' as a concept.

First off, let's look at what makes a rule mechanic playable - by a mechanic I mean the actual process by which one models an action/effect using dice. For an example, consider, the Warhammer family d6 to hit/wound/save in combat, or the Dreadballl throw/catch mechanic, or the Principles of War combat roll + table. There are two tradeoffs, essentially - first off how convincingly does it model the process, and second how easy is it to apply repeatedly during the course of a game?

from WWPD.net, used for
review purposes

Obviously, you can apply greater levels of complexity to your mechanic in an effort to represent the process more accurately, but you start to trade off against ease of use - as an example, check out the diagram on the right, which is the flowchart for the V3 Flames of War assault phase. Conversely, you can simplify, down to (for example) the Warhammer combat system, but you run the reverse risk of damaging the quality of your model.

Amusingly, it's possible to mess up both - Flames of War seems to do a brilliant job of having a pretty complex model which should, you'd think, have the potential to be at least fairly realistic…

The Holy Grail, though, seems to be to luck into or hit upon a fairly simple mechanic which models the process well - the current ones I really love are Op: Squad's interrupt system, the CoC patrol pre-game and Dreadball's throw/catch mechanic, all of which are childishly simple yet just plain work. This is why rules designers like Rich Clarke, Jake Thornton etc are precious and rare commodities, because while that sounds simple? it really isn't.

But even when you do that right, and some will argue, for example, that the Warhammer hit/wound/save mechanism is pretty close for the likes of WAB, it's still possible to mess it up. How?

Special cases.

Special case code is the bane of my life as a programmer: dealing with different means of applying postage in the UK and Germany, for example, makes me greyer and crazier every day.

It tends to rear its head in wargames with (but not exclusively) supplements - in order to distinguish force A from force B (and, as the cynics around here will no doubt be adding, sell more figures) there is the temptation to add a special rule for force B, or for one unit in force B. Note that this is subtly different from making elements of force B stronger or weaker using the stats that the games core mechanic is designed to work with: the distinction between (say) adding 1 to a DreadBall player's throwing skill and awarding them something like a Never Misses special rule which says they never miss a throw. You can do the former within the mechanic of the game. The latter is a special case.

"But that's fine," you say. "It's only one force." Except

• it never is, because once you've set the precedent you're doomed, and
• special case rules interact with each other

Let's suppose we have another DreadBall team whose Guards have exceptionally long arms, and give a minus to any throw passing within a hex. How does that interact with Never Miss? Which rule takes priority? Does 'any' throw include 'Never Miss' throws? It does say 'any' after all.

Sure, you can clarify that easy enough. But…

Let's move on a few years in the evolution of our game (and let's not call it DreadBall any more, because I'm sure you can think of at least two games I dislike that this next describes much better!). Your game's a major hit. Supplements galore, You have maybe a hundred special rules dotted through 10 books. Every special rule has the potential to interact with every other: there are 100 squared - 10,000 - possible interactions. Even if a percentage can't possibly interact, the number that can is proportional to the square of the number of special rules. In mathematics, it's an O(n²) problem (order n-squared). And the instant reaction of every programmer to an O(n²) problem is to want to make it go away very fast! But all you can do is desperately try and document every one, and outthink our enterprising player base.

Hello really annoying complexity. Good luck with that :D

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.

Of rules and miniatures

Partially revisiting my post on "the rules" from a few weeks back, and partly prompted by a comment in the Meeples and Miniatures Facebook group by Sigur Squrrl. Advance warning - this might be a bit stream of consciousness-y and rant-y :D

"[...] Wargaming is free to design and miniatures not necessarily attached to rules."

Some rules, clearly, exist to sell miniatures. The king above them all is, of course, Warhammer 40K, but if you cast your eyes around you can see countless other examples, many these days via Kickstarter, where someone's come up with a neat idea for a set of rules and a setting, and a range of miniatures to match.

The thing is, some of us are starting to get conditioned to this. We buy the rules, then we buy the figures because they're designed to work with the rules. Depending on how obscure and idiosyncratic the setting is, they may be our only choice. And then (naming no names), out comes Version 2 of the rules, or perhaps Codexes A to D, and we buy more figures, because...

Well.

We like to justify it as being because the new rules have given us new choices, and/or because the forces in Codex A are just super cool.

Is the truth perhaps actually that it's because at least in part we're happy sheep and we want to play against everyone else whe's doing the same thing? Not that this is of necessity bad: just.. y'know? Tie your figures to your rules, and the best way to sell more figures is to write more rules! (And then there's the sad knock on effect that this almost invariably results in the infamous codex creep, followed by a re-baselining of force balance in a new version of the rules, followed by new versions of the codices, both of which as previously mentioned cause more figures to be bought... Stop me if you've seen this before!)

Historical gamers have it a bit easier: our settings have a very important attribute, in that they're not anyone else's property. History is not going to get litigious (oo, good word) just because (for the sake of example) Artizan, Crusader, Warlord, Black Tree, First Corps, Foundry, West Wind, PSC, Wargames Factory and heaven knows who else all produce 28mm WW2 figures. (Even if Lucasfilm and TSR may or may not have tried to trademark "Nazi". :D) And, let's face it, this is, when it comes down to, why Warhammer Historical is no more. Because GW aren't a rules company. They admit it in as many words.

But yet, and perhaps bizarrely, we still do it. I'd be intrigued to know how many of the armies at Rushden Phoenix club's recent Bolt Action tournament (at which three members of our club came back with trophies - well done guys!) were made of nothing but Bolt Action figures, and how many of those players had even considered, or were perhaps even aware of, other ranges. I'm as guilty as the next guy - my Napoleon At War armies (ok, ok, I'll admit it - my several kilos of unpainted lead!) are entirely made by, you guessed it, Man At War. And I have no defence (well, except that they're cheap, they come in the right sizes, and they appeal to my OCD :) ).

Admittedly, tournament play can be different - companies can and have set restrictions on what figures you can use, and they are, like it or not, within their rights to do so. And I'm within my rights to choose whether or not to play as a result (and sometimes I do).

But...

Let's look at this the other way round, because (as Neil and Sigur Squrrl point out), just because A requires B doesn't mean B must perforce require A.

It's an obvious fallacy, but... it was quite scary hearing the reports of groups of people who were selling entire armies of 15mm Flames of War in order to play Bolt Action in 28mm, without, apparently, giving thought to the fact that the rules could, with little or no tweaking, be used with their, and their mates', existing figures.

I probably own more Battlefront lead than several of the Flames of War gamers at our club put together (six full infantry companies and most of a seventh). I own part of the contents of three Open Fire box sets. Why? Well, it sure as hell isn't to play Flames of War! I own a fair few GW LOTR figures - one's the most talkative character on this blog, and he's certainly not being used to play LOTR! :D One of my options for a general for my Palmyran army is a Hell Dorado figure.

And this sort of brings us back to the whole thing about the rules.

The very word 'rules' implies a certain degree of inflexibility. And yes, for tournament play, this is inevitable: unless you have an agreed common framework of rules, you have chaos, and you thus pretty much have to go by the book, or at best with clearly documented variations. And it's very easy to slip into the mentality that because the figures go with the rules, the rules mean you can only use the figures with the rules.

Nuts to that :D

There are some brilliant, brilliant figure sculptors, ranges and concepts out there. We're all intelligent and imaginative people. Rules are made to be broken, or at the very least, tweaked. Knock yourselves out!

Back from Campaign day 1

And man, my feet are killing me.

Getting up at 0630 to drive to Milton Keynes for 8ish would have been brilliant, were it not for the fact that at 0245 work's automated alert system decided to page me with a problem, that then proceeded to resolve itself but required me to watch it till 0330. To add insult to injury, I figured watching a couple of innings of the Twins/Orioles game on MLB.tv (yes, yes, I'm a Brit with an MLB.tv subscription who's a diehard Twins fan. Got a problem with that?) would keep me awake, and proceeded to watch the Twins throw away a 6 run lead. As you can guess, by 0630 I wasn't at my brightest :D

Campaign's a fun show - it's right in the open area in the middle of the centre:mk shopping mall, so we get the general public as well as wargamers, so our brand of cheap, cheerful, visual and fun participation game goes down really well. I'll report tomorrow with pictures of everything else that was there, but for now, just one slightly bemused observation.

There were three or four stalls there, including the Bring and Buy, which had brand-new, still-in-the-shrinkwrap, Flames of War minis. Without exception, they were all trying to shift all their stock at a discount (20%, 3 boxes for 2, that kind of thing) and, I'm pretty sure, weren't intending to restock.

I picked up about £130 of Battlefront stuff that I needed for Blenneville or Bust for a hair over £90.

Did I miss a memo somewhere?

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!

Battlefront backtrack

Having slated them for what I considered a dumb policy decision, I feel it's only fair to note that the general reaction HAS caused them to change their mind.

A bit.

And I quote:

"In the interests of compromise and fairness to everybody’s opinion we will change the word “all” to “majority” (meaning over half) in the tournament rules for the 2013 season."

To be applauded, I think. Although the hardened cynic in me wonders why they said 'for' not 'from' the 2013 season :D

Battlefront go all GW

From the Flames of War official site via the excellent Neil Shutt of Meeples and Miniatures (actually on the Facebook group). Empasis mine.

 "The final change we are making is that from the new season all the events we run with will be only allowing Battlefront miniatures to be used. This is bound to cause some debate, so let me be clear as to why we have chosen to go down this path. Joe, Gareth and our events cost a great deal of money to run: a little over a quarter of a million American dollars this year alone. And, although it seems childish to draw a line in the sand and say, “If you want to play at our events and support the FOW hobby, you should not be bringing other people’s models along,” it is absolutely that simple. Our business is a business and we want Flames Of War to grow; we intend to give it the best support we can, but this support has a cost." 

I wonder. Where have I seen that before? I already knew I disliked FoW, but this just takes the cake.

Why I don't like Flames of War

I'm pretty open about the fact that I really want to like Flames of War, but I don't and can't.

I really want to like it because I grew up on a cracking set of home-grown company level WW2 tank rules to which I contributed the air rules and IIRC helped with the infantry rules. To a large extent that, along with Napoleonics and 'cardboard' WRG Ancients, are my first loves in wargaming. Back in the day (turn of the '70s/'80s), we were restricted to what we could scare up from Messrs Airfix and Matchbox as regards AFVs, along with a few other obscure things (I still don't know where the lone 1/72 M4A3E8 HVSS Sherman or the JagdPanzer IV came from, although a little research suggests they might have been Hasegawa kits), so just simply the idea of the massive range of 15mm tanks and vehicles available from Battlefront is enough to make me drool, let alone the other manufacturers.

I really want to like it because there's a hell of a lot of decent people at club who play it, as well as a bunch of nice 15mm scenery: no shortage of opponents, no shortage of people who have and know the rules, have the supplements, etc. And I'm completely unashamed to admit that if I could like it, I'm the kind of person who'd be buying every book and add-on, and shedloads of vehicles and figures.

But I can't.

I've tried, but I can't.

I can't at least in part because they don't feel to me like rules that actually reflect the conflict they're representing. They seem to encourage things like massive blocks of on-table artillery that would, historically, have been about three more tables away, and infantry seems to be just a speed bump for tanks (as someone I recall reading put it).

I can't because the army lists seem to encourage mini-maxing down to the last point, and the rules seem to encourage fine-tuning the position of a piece to the last mm to get the best possible dice modifier. And knowing the rules seems to be more important then knowing the capabilities of the units the miniatures represent in real life. As I said in a previous post, it seems more like very complicated chess with model tanks than an actual simulation of warfare, and little or no simulation of 'friction'.

I can't because it has that ghastly system of plonking down an objective marker at some arbitrary point on the board, and that seems to be the sum total of its nod to any concept of larger scale situational awareness. And yes, I know Napoleon at War has that in its tournament rules, as well. I don't intend to use it!

I'm well aware that folks who do like Flames of War are going to tell me I'm wrong (heck, who knows, they may just ignore me completely), and I should point out that this post doesn't reflect on the folks down the club, or elsewhere among my readers, who do play it, and clearly enjoy it. It's just not for me, guys.