Wargames @ MindSay

For a couple of years, I've been trying to get a few WWII naval miniatures to use with the game General Quarters.  Well, I'm not that serious about naval wargaming, and I didn't want to get into some of the really "fiddly" GHQ models, but neither did I want to get those super-tiny 1:6000 scale ships.  A destroyer only a centimeter long or so is just too short!

It turns out there's a company called "Panzerschiffe" (German for Armored Ships) that makes 1:1200 scale ships in "Battleship Gray" resin.  They're not very expensive, VERY sturdy and ready to use as-is.  Panzerschiffe recently added a PayPal shopping cart to their site, so I grabbed a few ships.

I got the Admiral Graf Spee and its foes Ajax, Exeter and Achilles for the "Battle of the River Plate" (a classic match up of a "pocket battlecruiser" and 3 smaller ships).  I also picked up Bismarc, Hood, and the other ships that took part in their battle.

The ships have nice, clean lines and enough detail to recognize them and what guns they are toting, though they won't please any serious naval modeller.  But as I said, I'm looking for GAME pieces, not display pieces, and as such they're perfect!

I've played the River Plate scenario a few times with GQ using blocks of wood, and it's a fun and fast battle.  I can't wait to try it with the actual ships.  I really hope I can get Christy to play, but I know she doesn't believe me that a naval game can be fun, so we'll have to see what happens.  Who knows?  Maybe I just need to find the right game.  GQ is a great game though, and at over 30 years old, it's stood the test of time.  Most games of that vintage are so dated that they're unplayable to the modern gamer, but GQ was really ahead of its time in many ways.  We'll see.

I've been milling around Harshman Memorial during the special gala celebration of Car Wars's 25th anniversary.  The crowds have been absolutely tremendous here-- this could be a sign that autodueling is returning as the top televised sport in America.  Many of them are here to see such relics as Crazy Joe Harshman's Chevy and what's left of Mike Montgomery's Navigator.

I had particularly good seats during a demonstration match this afternoon.  Here's a close-up of a Hotshot just after getting nailed by three Laser shots from a team consisting of an Intimidator and a Security Six:

Note the piles of debris in the Hotshot's wake....

The driver of the Intimidator kindly gave me this read-out from his targeting computer:

Finally, here's a shot from the helicopter cam of the entire furball.

I'll stick around the arena here for the full slate of events and keep you posted on any news of note!  Adios for now....

We see here a Killer Kart executing a Moderate skid at 30 mph just a few seconds into an event at Harshman Memorial.  (The Rotation Formula comes in handy if you're trying to implement those tricky bends and fishtails, by the way....  Yeah, as if you ever wondered why it's so important to get a good solid grounding in Trigonometry while you were still in highschool!  Right.)

Click here for an uncropped 800x600 resolution image.

More pictures to follow in the days ahead.... 

Just a quick note about my post from a few months ago regarding my nephew's renewed interest in the LOTR battle game.

I decided to give him my painted Lurz miniature to command his Uruk Hai battle force.  I'm hanging on to the berserkers and archers for now.

That's all.

Dimension Demons

1980

Metagaming

I dug this one out last night and was pleasantly surprised by how good it was.  Looking at the game over the years I couldn't imagine how the game could work: the units available just seemed so limited!  Of course, it turns out each unit is balanced to fit into the setting... and the Demon player can get along just fine without heavy or fast units because of his happenin' transportation powers.

The game utilizes a split map.  Demons transport to the human colony mapside and attack it.  They only hang around for a single turn and pop back to their corresponding hex neighborhood after a brief moment of mayhem.  If they can enter a city hex, they build a transport on the human side... which allows them both to hang around indefinitely unless they get more than 5 hexes away from it.  A transport built on the human side also allows the Demons to bring a Breeder slug over... and the Breeder will produce a new permanent Demon on the human side once per turn if it stays within 5 hexes of that transport.

The human player has mostly infantry units-- which are much tougher to kill if they are in their cities.  He also has Thumper and Slider armor units... and his roads give him high mobility.  Demons have volcanoes on their side of the map... volcanoes that will kill them if they accidently pop back on them!  Yay.

The game play breaks down to a clear opening, middle game, and end game.  In the opening, the Demon player sends Demons over for hit and run raids.  He can also opt for a hit and die raid: if he teleports onto another unit, both are destroyed.  (This is a good way to get rid of those pesky Thumpers....)  The Demon player is inlikely to get killed unless he lands on a unit or city by accident....  And it takes at least two demons operating together to get even a small chance to kill an infantry in a city.  The human player must remain spread out because the Demon can attack anywhere at any moment.  The demon player has fewer units, though, and cannot afford to exchange units very many times.

In the middle game, the Demons are attempting to take and hold a city.  They concentrate to the weakest area of the human colony and dig in.  If things don't look good they can opt not to build a transport, pop back, and try again somewhere else.  But if they commit to holding the city, they will send the breeders over and hope to survive long enough to produce some serious Demon power.  Note that the Humans can possibly take over a Demon transport and make a counter attack to the weaker Demon world.

In the end game, the Demons and Humans fight to the death... or if the Demons were repulsed from their city... they regroup and try again.  At this point, both sides are seriously reduced in the number of units they can field.  Every lucky hit and accident counts big time here and tension can be really great.

In our game, I was quite lucky in the opening.  I terrorized the humans taking very few losses... and exchanged 3 Demons for 1 Thumper and 2 Sliders.  In the middle game, I sent 4 demons to attack one double-city.  We took it, and the following turn I sent in two Warrior-Breeder pairs over.  One of the pairs teleported onto an infantry counter!  I also failed to defend my cities well and my human side transport was destroyed.  I built another in an undefended city, but my breeder was delayed in producing new Demon Warriors.  The terrible accident combined with the tactical failure cost me the game.  I simply did not have enough material to mount another major attack.  I did manage to terrorize my opponent for a few more turns, taking out an infantry unit or two before one of my last remaining demons popped back into a volcano....

All and all, this was a surprising and unusual game.  The luck factor will probably annoy modern players as several turns can go by with the Demons teleporting and neither taking nor giving any casualties.  There are tactics that reduce the luck factor, but in the heat of battle they can easily be forgotten.  Once the middle game is reached, a quick and bloody battle will ensue that has an entirely different flavor than the hit and run segment.  It took us an hour to read the rules and set up... and about two hours to play our first game.  Of course, you can't truly understand a new game until you've played it 5 times at least... but we were intrigued enough to want to invest the time to do that.  (Next time I play the Human Freefeet colonists....  I suspect my opponent has some nasty tactics to spring on me... slagging key cities with his teleport accidents so that my mobility is undermined and such like....)

Bravo, Metagaming... we miss you.