Alpha strike

This past weekend I was invited to P's house to play a game of Alpha strike.  Alpha strike is a quicker variant of Battletech, which instead of hexes has more of a traditional miniatures game feel.  Models have free movement in inches, and line of sight is closer to "real" from the model's point of view.  The basic game play is much like battletech where you determine a target number and then want to meet or exceed it to hit, and you are often fishing for criticals.  It also reduces the complexity of a battle 'mech from a full sheet of information down to a card, where a single mech has just a few stats.

Here is a Griffin (model GRF-1N) as a point of comparison.  The Alpha Strike card has five lines of information, and then a little critical hit chart.  Movement is a fixed 10 inches and is marked "j" to indicate that it can be jumping. Shooting is reduced to a Short/Medium/Long range output of 1/2/2. (and all range bands are the same for all mechs)

Simple

By comparison, the Battletech record sheet for that same unit has three modes of movement, and each of two weapons has heat/damage/Minimum/short/medium/long range stat.  (and most mechs have a lot more weapons than this Griffin)  Damage is not  limited to five little bubbles, but has a whole mech body to bubble in before you start getting to the good stuff on the inside. 

Detailed

In any case the main allure of Alpha Strike vs. Battletech is that in the same amount of time you can play games which are more than four times larger, more easily incorporate combined arms, and since they are not hex based, you can use more common terrain, so it looks a lot more "real" than Battletech can.  

In preparation for the game, I read the quick start rules, put together a small army from some existing figures, and gave some more details to some partly painted figures which were going to be a couple of mercenary lances.  I went mech only, and had this Marik Militia unit supported by two mixed lances of mercenaries. 

The real heroes of the day (mercenary scum not shown)

P has a LOT of battletech stuff from the kickstarters, so he had a more combined arms force, with power armored infantry, LRM carriers, tanks, and then a number of heavy mechs.  His were not painted, so we joked that they were the "Grey Death" (an in universe unit).  In the pictures that follow, his forces are predominantly on the left, and mine are on the right.  In the mission we selected, the attacker (me) had to scan each of the buildings to find six that were targets, and then escape with the information. 

Turn 1

Grey Death to the left, Marik to the right screened by the ridge, Mercenaries top right in the forest.  I ended up deploying the heavies on the bottom and top of the map, with mediums and lights in the middle, with the idea that they would zip in and scan the buildings. 

Turn 2

During the first turn, the forces engaged in long range speculative fire (mostly indirect), and the attackers were pressing in a bit.  Little fast mechs zoomed around the board and missed each other. Some damage was dealt, and the helicopter was shot down. 

Turn 3

By the start of the third turn, the Grey Death tanks and heavy units shuffled around to get more cover, the lighter units and infantry skirmished with the mercenaries, and the Marik heavies advanced to get into medium range for more damage. (potentially, you have to hit stuff for that to work)

Turn 4

At the start of turn 4, we tried some close combat... light mechs do more damage shooting than they do stomping on infantry (2 instead of 1, since close combat is based on size), and stomping on a tank seems to do a lot less than you would imagine.  None of the Grey Death heavies got killed, but a couple of them were pretty close, where as the Marik heavies had the damage spread out more evenly. 

We ended up playing through four complete turns, which took around an hour each.  Further play would be somewhat faster, as we did spend a lot of time looking things up.  The basic rules themselves were very easy to grasp, but there were some unusual interactions and a few areas that were not very clear.  The game would also have been a lot faster if we did not roll like crap for most of the game!  "Looks like I need to roll an 8 here, <rolls a 7>".  Mechs only go boom IF you hit them...

P was an excellent host, and after we finished the game we discussed playing again... maybe a game with Stew, if he can get away from the family for an afternoon.  I do after all have two companies of painted mechs, and a lot of random figures that could become mercenaries... 

Quick 40k Game #2

 Last month I played 10th edition 40k for the first time. 

The kid and I returned to battle this weekend with effectively the same forces, and tried to incorporate more of the various layers of special rules. 

The Kid had a Space Marine Vanguard force (light scouty sorts) and I had an Eldar force.  This time I remembered to take a picture of the mission cards, so I can report to you that we had a Sweeping Engagement set up, a primary mission of Take and Hold, and a mission rule of Supply Lines.  That means that we deployed diagonally, with five somewhat offset objectives, and the supply lines mission rule meant that we generated an extra CP if we held onto our home objective. 

This time I actually remembered most of my special abilities, but I still spent a lot of time shuffling through printouts comparing various rules.

Initial set up

In this initial setup picture you can see that the Eldar are on the bottom, mostly centered on the left.  I remembered to set up the guardians on the objective.  Swooping hawks are off board ready to... swoop.  Rangers infiltrated into the forest on the top left.  The large group of marines near the center was shrouded by the librarian, so I could not shoot them.

Wraith blades vs. scout dreadnaught

The dread is a real beast, since it has three heavy weapons, two heavy stubbers, a rocket pod, power fist, and as a vehicle can tank shock... it killed off the wraith blades before finally getting killed by the wraith guard. 

Reivers and a lieutenant drop in to assassinate the Farseer

The Reivers popped in to assassinate my Farseer (the warlock had just been sniped), which they did very successfully.  Then they kill d a few guardians, who then turned left and blasted them off the board.  The lieutenant unfortunately lived.  I feel less bad about my unpainted farseer base when the reiver in the back left has no head... 

Final positioning

Two wraith guard left alive, five guardians, and four swooping hawks left at the start of turn four.  Swooping hawks now toss a TON of dice, so they managed to blast the lieutenant away before getting killed.  Somehow I ended up with seven figures left on the board, but a major win on points?  40k is weird. 

Playing games with painted miniatures is fun, the 40k universe is fun, but I am not convinced that 10th edition is fun, since there is a lot of "game-y" interaction between piles of special rules that hurt my head.  Never-the-less, we are going to play some more soon(-ish, now that school has started up again). 

Quick 40k Game

For my birthday, the main thing that the kid wanted to do was play 40k with me.  You would think that what I wanted would have primacy on a day that is supposed to be about me, but not the case.

We set up the game mat that I made a few years ago, and a couple of small armies.  The kid took an Ultramarine scouting unit, which had a pseudo-dreadnaught, snipers, two squads of guys (one deepstriking) and a small squad of flying guys with autocannon.  I can never remember new marine squad names.  I played Eldar, and took one squad of guardians, two of wraithguard, a farseer, and a squad of rangers. The farseer was shamefully on an unpainted base AND was only about 80% painted, but somehow he did not get killed? 

Board setup, with objectives which garnered points for camping on them

marines being hacked to death by robots piloted by ghosts, and then shot by more robots piloted by ghosts.  Eldar are cool. 

As usual, I forgot to take many pictures, and we ran out of time to finish before my parents came over for dinner, but it was a fun game, even if I did have to ask for clarification about the interaction of CP/Army/Detachment/unit rules with the opposing army CP/Army/Detachment/unit rules about 100 times. 

It did get me painting more units, or rather finishing more units I started last year.  So maybe that is a good thing? 

Quar-Tastic

This past weekend the most excellent Stew of the blog A Terrible Loss of Lead and Wealth had me round for a game of This Quar's War: Clash of Ryfles with the Quar he has been painting. 

Quar, for those of you who do not know, are belligerent little round anteaters with pseudo-Welsh names, and sort of diesel punk/Interwar level technology, who have been warring amongst themselves for hundreds of years. They are the new hotness in some circles, despite being out for years in metal, because there is a new boxed set of plastic figures, dice, rules, etc. all in one ready to go package. 

Ok, so on to the game. Clash of Ryfles (hence forth CoR in this post)is a skirmish level game, where roughly a platoon of figures fight on a small board to accomplish various scenario goals. Play alternates between sides, with some friction entering into it because you have a mystery number of activations 3-5 determined by a secret card draw.  Some actions take more than one activation, so no grand charges, and reacting to what your opponent does can be tricky.  Each figure activates individually, but officers can spend two activation to drag others around with them. 

For far more information about the game rules, here is Stew's post.

Stew had the board laid when I arrived, and was using his AWI/Civil war terrain for this skirmish.  Clearly this is a previously untouched battle field! I chose to play the Croftyran royalists, rather than the perfidious Crusaders. The objective was to have fewer of your Quar die, and to have more units across the midline.  Looking at the board as set, I decided to take the side with the barn and move to the side with the stone walls.  In retrospect, this was a mistake, as the paucity of activations means that moving in groups is difficult, and the barn blocked a number of my figures from supporting the rest on the other side.  Hopping all those fences cost me precious movement inches too.  It did look pretty though. 

My idea was to split my 15 guys into roughly three groups and advance two of them, while the LMG and the sniper formed a firebase. However, the inability to move as a group (I had misread the officer's ability to mean 5 quar at 2 inches, and not 2 quar at 5 inches) and a few bad reactions at the outset meant that only one group was very successful in their advance, and the LMG got wiped out early. 

Near the start of the game with my sergeant dragging a few ryflers with him over the fence. To the left are a light machine gun and sniper with a few ordinary ryflers.  On the other side of the barn are my officer and a few more ordinary ryflers. 

Later in the game, where my lieutenant guards a rail fence, and two ryflers take cover by a stone well.  When a light machine gun shoots at you, supported by more rifles, a fence is hardly enough cover. 

The only close combat we got up to had my poor officer bayoneted to death while he crouched by a fence, and then the ryfler to the bottom left of the picture avenged his officer by shooting the crusader in the head.  Again, this was a mistake on my part, as the officer was much better suited to charging into combat than waiting to get killed. He should have gathered up some supporters and gotten stuck in.

As always, I got rather more occupied playing the game than with taking pictures.  Stew has a ton more to explain the rules, and show in a very patient manner how he won, which he did (although not by as much as it appeared near the end as I had a run of luck shooting his quar)

So would I play CoR again?  Yes!  While it was not the most intuitive, it did produce a good game, and I suspect the full rule set smooths out some of the issues that we had in play.  The main factor of course was lovely miniatures, on great terrain, and with Stew as the host pretty much anything would be fun.  Would I buy quar figures?  Probably also yes, as they are fun without all the baggage of "real" 20th century conflicts.  And there are two more plastic armies and tanks coming out this year... 

Summer 2024

So uh, wow, have not posted for a while.  Usual excuses of being busy with summer and not wanting to post because it is too darn hot to do anything (over 40 degrees for what felt like weeks), PLUS one of my kid's teams made it to the Junior Olympics for water polo, so that was a ton more practice and an additional week away from the house. 

I do have some things to post about, which I will schedule for this week... then it will at least look like I have been doing some hobby.  Which I have!  Just not blogging about it, or finishing anything to make it feel like it was worth blogging about. 

How has your summer been? (or Winter if you are on the other side of the planet) 

And just so this has SOME hobby content, here is my birthday loot for the year:

Hobby clipper two pack, an Eldar Spirit Seer, Dune: a game of Conquest, Diplomacy & Betrayal, and coincidentally a Reaper Bones Great worm. (there are something like 100 Dune games out right now, so you have to specify which with a subtitle or it gets confusing)  I also got $50 at Barnes and Noble from my Mother-in-Law, which might turn itself into a couple of games too, we will see.