Monday, December 31, 2012

Wrapping up the year

Despite the demands of holiday travel, I managed to cram a couple more games into 2012. Last Friday, a number of HAWKs gathered at one of members' abode for a traditional post-Christmas pre-New Year's game. This year it was Germans vs. British using Battles by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T, a favorite set of Victorian Science Fiction rules, featuring a plethora of ponderous and less-than-reliable steam-powered vehicles. (Given that the year was 1910, I suppose it should technically be more like Edwardian Science Fiction, but for some reason that has less of a ring to it...)

German lancers, supported by the ill-fated Panzerkreuzschlüsselspaziergänger

British troops advance on the town.

Dreibeinigenkaffeedose overruns British field gun.

My poor spider-walker inched its way into position only to be blown up by a single shot from a massive British steam tank. When I brought my artillery up to retaliate, I thought I had exacted my revenge when the tank rolled a '20' on its save (a critical failure in G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T). Unfortunately, a roll on the results table determined that I merely set off the tank's main gun--not at all the intended effect! Despite the poor showing on my part the game ended as a draw, as the British only managed to capture one of their two objectives.

The second game of the Holiday Interstitial Period took place on Sunday, when four of my college friends came down for a game day. In between some bouts of Settlers of Catan and Cosmic Encounter, we set up a four-player Hordes of the Things game using some of my 20mm armies, with myself serving as gamemaster/mostly-impartial referee. (At least two of my players had some prior HotT experience, so I put them on opposite sides. Strangely, it was my "experienced" players who seemed to rack up the bulk of the casualties...)

One side took the Antediluvians and their usual foes the Dinotopians; the other side took the Mongols and a "Last Alliance of Elves & Men" mix of medievals with a small contingent of elvish archers. The Antediluvians and the Dinotopians were on the defense, and managed to hold off their opponents--though the Dinotopians had somewhat mixed luck against the medievals, the Antediluvian pikes proved more than a match for the Mongols' yakatheriums, as an attempted outflanking maneuver by the Mongols foundered for lack of command points.

Commanders consider their initial deployment.

Some early maneuvering.

 The knights pursued the retreating spinosaur... and were promptly destroyed.

Thursday, December 20, 2012

The December dispatch

December has been a pretty busy month, what with one thing and another--bad for blogging, but not for painting. Last night, I put the finishing touches on the last of my squadron of Wachovian cuirassiers, which I have been working on diligently all month. Heavy cavalry has been a long-standing weakness of Wachovia, so hopefully these guys will help to close that gap.

The whole squadron

From the other side


A couple of views of the officer

I did manage to find time for one other little NQSYW project: updating the regimental flag for the 1st infantry regiment. Having recently settled on a Wachovian national flag, I decided that the regimental flags should share a unified motif, and besides which, the old one was not quite up to my current standards. (No pun intended there.) I stopped short of repainting the figure himself, though he's seen better days as well.


The new flag is stage one (or perhaps two or three, depending on how one is counting them) of my rather grandiose plans for Wachovian military expansion, the extent of which is hinted at by this sketch from a couple of weeks back:

As of now, only three of those seven units have any basis in reality, and the Cuirassier Guards are still too few in number to warrant a flag. However, this does provide a potential roadmap for a couple of years' worth of work, should I choose to follow through on it. The addition of at least a second infantry regiment has been part of my ambition for a while now, and having done one squadron of cuirassiers, I intend to expand them to a full regiment. Beyond that, we shall see. If I were to maintain my current painting speed of about one figure every two days, then this would keep me going until mid-2014...

(My other big project this December has been Christmas cookie-baking, which has also proceeded apace:


The color similarity between the Empire Biscuits and the cuirassiers' uniforms is totally a coincidence, I swear!)