Bayonet and Ideology

 

One of the guys at the club suggested a game of the Peter Pig Bayonet and Ideology rules for the Spanish Civil War the other day. I have the rules, thanks to Ebay many years ago, so jumped at the chnace of a try out, especially as all the figures would be provided for play. It's something I've fancied doing for ages, so I may even get a small International Brigade or Anarchist Militia force together using the re-scuplted Peter Pig SCW range. It's an cross-over extension of my AK47 and interwar interests in many ways, so I may well get engrossed in a new period this year, assuming the rules hit the spot.

AK47 Summer Safari [3]

A bit of a **** day at work, so I thought I'd cheer myself up by sorting out the next unit for the AK47 Religious Movement army, not that I've actually finished the first one. Anyway,it's a regular unit of two clanky old BTR60 APC's, which can between them cart around four bases of regular small arms equipped troops, plus a couple of bases of RPG's, mortars or RCL's. I've really scraped the bottom of the lead barrel to put together the infantry bases for this lot but it does cover the extra points that might pop up in the fowcharts, just to be on the safe side. It should be fun to paint up, so roll on the weekend!

Air War C21 Earth Movers

I was really pleased to see this pop up on TMP yesterday, as it's a set of rules I've long been planning to try out, using my extensive stockpile of Tumbling Dice tiddly planes. Although my plans revolve around the Alto Cenepa War, I can still appreciate the need for some heavy ground pounders, especially as the proceeds go towards the restoration of a real life Avro Vulcan. If some rules for helicopters managed to appear, I'd be even more chuffed!

http://www.acig.org/artman/publish/article_164.shtml

BTH2 Channel Dash Game

The BTH2 game went well this evening, although it lacked a bit of something or other. The end result was a hard won but narrow victory for the RAF, which lost two Hurricanes shot down and a third with instrument damage, although the skilled pilot managed a successful landing back at Tangmere along with the other three survivors.

The Lufwaffe bomber force was mauled and ended up with four out of eight Dorniers in the drink. As a result, the RAF achieved their objective of shooting down half the bombers but the Luftwaffe failed in their attempt to save two thirds of their aircraft, while also failing in their secondary objective of destroying half of the RAF fighters....but only just.

I think I need to devise some tokens or markers for the various critical damage effects, as it was difficult to keep track of the things once the action picked up. The smoke markers worked well, though, so I may make some more with thinner pipe cleaners, if I can track some suitable ones down.

I'm taking a break from Bag the Hun for a while but will be back with more games later in the year.

Bag the Hun Channel Dash Cards

I've made a few changes to the scenario that I'll be running tomorrow at the club, so a new set of turn cards had to be sorted out. I've now adopted a very simple approach to this which makes it easy to churn out a whole set of cards without any hassle.

I've bought several boxes of slightly smaller than postcard sized visiting cards when I've been on holiday in France. The required deck of cards are produced in WORD using a basic template, printed in colour on paper, then cut out and stuck on to the standard sized visiting cards.

It's not very sophistcated but it does the job. I have laminated the end result in the past but now just use the cards as they are, which seems to work fine. It's great when you need to knock out a set for a particular game in a short space of time, then subsequently have to modify things when you realise that the scenario needs a bit of tweaking.

Anyway, I'll post some photos of the Channel Dash game tomorrow, when I get back from the club.

Once upon a Time in the West Indies

I was up in the loft this morning to find some camping kit for number one son, so took the opportunity to rummage in the wargames rules box that I have stashed up there. A quick bit of digging turned up an old copy of Pete Berry's Once Upon a Time in the West Indies pirate rules, which are a supplement for the similarly entitled '....West Country' skirmish rules for the English Civil War period.

What I had failed to appreciate and had completely forgotten is that the booklet contains a very simple set of pirate ship rules, which look exactly like the thing I've been looking for. The movement and firing system is based on a dot to dot grid marked out on the playing surface, which is pretty simple but doesn't include the effect of the wind. I would need to convert this to hex based movement and add in rules for wind but the basic idea is quite neat.

I'll add it to the list of potential rules and give it a try, once I've put together and painted a couple of the Peter Pig Pieces of Eight ships. This will happen at some point this year but I'm doing the AK47 army for the next six weeks or so, which means that any other things are on the ever expanding 'to do' list. When I do get round to it, I may well write my own set of rules using a card based turn sequence, hex based movement and lots of 'random events' to make it interesting.

Yo Ho Ho.

Build Your Own Stonehenge?

A bit of a wierd day. I had been volunteered by the Ministry of the Interior to help out with car parking at the local agricultural show, so spent the morning playing at traffic control in a field. It was actually quite good fun, although I'm now very sunburnt. It was all to raise some money for my son's scout troop, so well worth the effort, even if I now glow in the dark.

We also have some French guests staying for the weekend so it was off to Stonehenge in the afternoon for  some touristy sightseeing. It doesn't seem to have changed much since my last visit in 1973, as the concrete soviet style bunker visitor centre thing is still there in all it's post modernist glory. It's a bit embarrassing to be honest but the actual henge bit is still pretty impressive, once you peer over the assembled coach loads of people.

Anyway, to save something from an otherwise unproductive day, I bought a Build Your Own Stonehenge kit from the gift shop. I'm not sure what I'll do with it but it does have potential for Adventures in Jimland and Tusk, although some pre-historical suspension of dis-belief will be a pre-requisite. It's a nice little injection moulded kit, in what could be 6mm or 10mm at a push, so worth the £5.99 that I handed over for it?