... And Another One

Another Fury Road -Style Car

I'm presently away on vacation, but I brought enough of my hobby stuff with me that I would be able to work on some hot wheels cars. I found a couple of good ones, and modified this one last night, and painted it this morning.

I added the exhausts out the sides, the front fender, the screens in the windows, and the lances.

Next up is this one, which I modelled on the harpoon trucks with the drag-plows from the movie. Not sure what color I'll paint this one yet.

Fury Road - Inspired Car

I'm not going to post a review of Mad Max: Fury Road here, but I will say that I saw it twice in the theatre (unheard of for me, I am not a fan of going to the theatre), and I think it's easily one of the best action movies I've ever seen. And the vehicles in the film are, as you would expect, crazy and amazing.

I have played quite a few games of Axles & Alloys, but I only have one modified Hot Wheels car I can call my own. After seeing the cars of Fury Road, I was inspired to get a few more and paint them up to look appropriately post-apocalyptic. Here's the first one.

Post-Apocalypse gang!

Months ago I ordered some Viking miniatures from Khurasan, and decided on a whim to add two packs of post-apocalyptic gangers to my order. The original idea I had was to use them as obstacles/scenery/danger-areas for Axles & Alloys, but I never got around to painting them while we were still doing A&A a lot. Dave, though, recently started running Other Dust, a post-apocalypse role playing game, for our group, so opportunity knocked again. I don't know if we'll be using them a lot, but they were a ton of fun to paint and I think they are really cool figures, so I'm not too worried.

Also included is a figure kit-bashed and painted by Bryan - it's the one with the different base. He needed a different miniature because his character is a horrendously ugly mutant with a sort of sluggy body. 

Trumpeter Salute 2015

I had a blast this year again at the Trumpeter Society's Salute convention! Huge kudos and thanks are due to the volunteers, game hosts, and vendors who work so hard to put the convention on every year - their efforts really show. We had a full roster of games and healthy attendance, so there were a lot of happy and satisfied gamers at the show this weekend.

I was able to attend the Friday night session and all day Saturday, which means 4 game sessions. I only missed out on Sunday. There were a lot of games registered in which I was interested, but after so much on Friday and Saturday I needed Sunday to recover.

Friday Night

Friday night, Grace and I participated in an All Things Zombie game that took place during the Russian revolution.I was keen to play a game of ATZ, because I've heard about the rules many times and there are other Two Hour Wargames games that I would like to check out sometime, so this was a good 'taster' for the rules.

Kommisar Burnovich and his obedient bodyguards.

Each player had control of three characters, except one (one of the hosts who was participating in the game) who had a light tank. We all started on one side of the table and approached a village that was suspected of harboring a team of rogue scientists working on some secret project.

With six players, plus programmed zombies, the game was a bit slow-moving. Most of the slowness comes down to the rules themselves, which are so chart-heavy they are in danger of collapsing under their own mass into a chart singularity. My only experience with a THW ruleset was when I tried playing Nuts! several years ago, which ended in pure frustration. After having played ATZ, I feel a bit better about being unable to puzzle out the finer points of Nuts - even the hosts seemed to struggle to figure out what the rules mandated in certain circumstances.

Clunky rules aside, the hosts did a great job of providing a fun game, and we managed to clean up most of the zombies - though having a noisy tank rumbling around in the village didn't help.

At one point we encountered a band of Whites. As a Kommissar of the reds, they were my political and ideological enemies, but I was the one who discovered them, and I had a chance to form an alliance of convenience so that we could work together to control the zombies. Unfortunately for the cause of peace, one of the attributes I rolled for my Kommissar at the beginning was 'Dim', so I decided to role-play him appropriately and opened fire on the Whites. At this point I had left my sole bodyguard behind (the other one had been bitten and had to be euthanized for the good of the Party), and when they returned fire I had to duck back into some nearby bushes.

By the end of the scenario, we had searched all of the buildings except the church, but things were looking pretty good for the humans, so the hosts declared it a victory for the living.

Huge thanks to Martin, Tony, and Brian for setting up the game and helping us noobs along!

Saturday Morning and Afternoon

Like last year, I hosted two games. This time it was two sessions of Saga, using the 2x2 terrain board I built last summer and the scenario I developed to go with it, during the Saturday morning and afternoon sessions. The game was well received, and I had full rosters for both sessions with people on the waiting lists, as well as lots of people who came by to check it out. I also won Best In Show for the Saturday morning session, which provided me with a certificate to spend at the Imperial Hobbies booth - more on that later.

I took some photos during the session, but I can't do better than the battle report that David wrote after the second game. You can find it at his blog - Google Translate does a good job, if you don't speak French.

All of the players did a great job and were very gracious and patient in learning a rule set that doesn't lend itself very well to just picking up and playing, and Grace was a huge help in offering rules clarifications and advice to the players through both sessions.

At the end of the day there was a great deal of courage, cowardice, carnage, and arson, of which great Sagas are made.

Saturday Evening

I had hoped to return to Brian's Russian Revolution table on Saturday to try out Chain Of Command, I ruleset I own but which I have never yet played, but the roster was already full by the time I finished packing up my Saga game and eating dinner. So I decided to join Dave and Bryan at their Axles & Alloys game, a set of rules with which I'm pretty familiar. Grace even brought the school bus I painted for A&A to play with - I just used the cars that Dave and Bryan had available.

Axles & Alloys is a ton of chaotic, ridiculous fun, and this game was true to form. Dave and Bryan had it set up as a rolling tournament, where if your car was destroyed, you either picked a new one or kept the same one and brought it on again at the start of the next turn. There was a leader board to show who had the most points (kills were worth 2, assists were worth 1), and who had died the most times.

Our table was probably the noisiest, even out-shouting the chariot game next door. I managed to get one or two kills and only died once before I had to get up and cash out my bring-and-buy stuff. It seemed like everybody had a great time smashing and shooting each other to bits.

Other Stuff

Salute again featured a Bring-N-Buy area, where people could unload some of their unwanted gaming gear. I was able to clear out some stuff of mine that I don't think I will ever use, and I made enough money by doing so that I was able to load up on the always-amazing Pulp Figures miniatures - my Pulp Alley games may see reinforcements from German Zeppelin troopers, Gasmask Cultists, and even more She-Wolves Of The SS. I also bought one of Bob Murch's Breadfruit Queens, which is a figure he's selling by donation to plant breadfruit trees in areas that need them, and I got one of the forthcoming Huron figures in my grab-bag.

As I mentioned earlier, I won a gift certificate to Imperial Hobbies. Imperial is always a great sponsor of the club and the convention, and very involved in the gaming scene. My prize was sufficient to get me a copy of Dead Man's Hand, a set of Western miniatures rules. I have enough figures to do a game, I've just never had rules to play with. I think it would be a lot of fun to do a Western-themed Quar game in the future too!

Axles & Alloys - 5-person game

I had another game of Axles & Alloys yesterday, this time with five people. I was driving the school bus, Bryan was driving the van with the buzz saws, Dave had the fire truck (which he equipped with a flame thrower... fire truck indeed), Mattie had her little convertible with the bat wings, and Ryan had his crazy evil hot rod.

The game took a lot longer with this many people, but it was still fun and it didn't feel like it was dragging at any point. Mattie had never played any sort of miniatures game before, and she was the last one to die. There were some epic and exciting moments, with multiple crashes, cars zooming around on fire, people machine-gunning each other left and right, and traps laid all over the table.

One turn in, everybody has just left their starting positions.

Ryan's hot rod faces down Bryan's buzzsaw van.

The School Bus, delivering a load of hot napalm to the townspeople.

Things start to heat up in the centre of the table

The buzzsaw van takes a bad hit and is the first to break down.

Dave's firetruck is next, but not before he manages to lay a path of spikes. Above you can see the napalm I sprayed on the ground to trap Ryan, but he managed to put out the fire with no damage done.

The end of the game. I rammed the hot rod to death, and at the end of the same turn Mattie's convertible finally succumbed to the fire started by one of my napalm traps.

Axles And Alloys: first vehicle

My game buddy Brian found a free set of rules for post-apocalyptic car battles called Axles And Alloys. We had two games a couple of weekends ago, and it is really fun, with lots of high-speed mayhem, guns, rams, and drifting around the table. I bought a few Matchbox cars to convert, and Bryan gave me a school bus. Last night I had a go at converting the bus, and here's the result:

It still needs some work - more dirt, spikes, armor plates, and some guns - but I think it's a good start.