15mm Gladiators

The other day I finished another batch of painting - some 15mm gladiators. I started these last year but lost momentum on them. In the end it took under an hour to finish them, which just goes to show.

They are mostly Museum Miniatures, with one exception. I bought them years ago (back when I lived in the UK in fact). I just thought that it might be fun to have some 15mm figures for smaller more portable games. And that's still the plan now.

I painted one of each of the basic gladiator types from Blood, Sweat and Cheers, bar the Cestus. I have two figures for those and will complete them as a pair at some stage. In my games I tend to use the Cestus type for lightly-armed gladiators, but I couldn't find a suitable 15mm equivalent figure. 

Anyway, here'd the gladiators in  more detail. First the Veles (listed by Museum as a Gaetulian) and what I'm using as a Crupellarius. The latter is a Murmillo of some type but I added a bit of milliput armour.

Next is the Murmillo and the Hoplomachus.

Retiarius and Secutor.

Finally the Sagittarius, Thraex and Dimachaerus. The former is a spare Chariot Miniatures Nubian archer.

They aren't great figures, but there aren't many 15mm options (or there weren't when I bought these). As yet these chaps don't have names. 

Simple ECW Rules

A couple of years ago I had a go at the very simple two-page rules in 'Wargame The English Civil war' (which I assume were , like the more detailed rules, written by Andy Callan). They gave a quite fun and quick game and I liked some of the mechanisms. However they are very limited in their scope, and they are designed to simply introduce the idea of wargaming - moving troops, fighting, shooting and morale - to beginners. They have no rules for terrain, the troop types are limited and (obviously) there's a number of situations you can get that aren't covered by the rules as written.

The other day I got the rules out, had another read-through and scribbled a few ideas into them for some terrain effects, as well as adding in dragoons (which are the main missing troop type).

I set up an uneven battle as well. The basic game gives each side one gun, four foot and four horse units. In my game I gave Parliament and extra horse and foot unit, whilst the Royalists substituted a dragoon for one of their horse but also has some hedgerows and a hill on which to base a defensive position.

Parliament advances, whilst the Royalist dragoons take the hedgerows that link the Royalist centre to its right wing.

Parliament had superiority in horse on both flanks, but the Royalists still got stuck in. Actually there's no advantage in teh rules for initiating the attack aside from deciding where the fight will take place.

Puffs of smoke represent units that have fired. This happens before movement and units which fire can't move.

In the foreground you can see where the Parliamentarian horse has attacked the Royalists.

As Parliament's troops got closer to the Royalist positions there was a lot more shooting.

You need a 6 to hit in this game, and most units roll two or three dice when shooting or in melee. If at long range or in other sub-optimal circumstances you need to confirm any hits made as well. So hits are hard to score. However the Royalist dragoons managed to get two hits on an advancing Parliamentarian foot unit.

Hits cause a morale test at the end of the turn. This is on a single D6, and can cause a rout even on one hit. Units are very fickle when it comes to morale. A unit of Parliamentarian horse ran away.

But then the Royalist horse did as well.

On both flanks.

On the Royalist right one horse unit was now outnumbered two to one (a situation the rules don't cover and which I still haven't resolved to my satisfaction), whilst on their left Parliament's horse had free-reign.

Parliament assaulted the hedge-line, and the dragoons ran straight away.

The surviving Royalist horse also gave up at this point.

A side loses when they have lost half of their units (discounting artillery). So those loss of three horse and the dragoons saw the Royalist army give up. Their foot was still looking strong, but both flanks were compromised. 

Parliament would have broken on five units lost, and in fact lost two horse and a foot unit. They were also suffering badly in the centre, and could well have lost a couple of units in the next turn or so, so if the Royalists had hung on for a little longer they may have scraped a victory.

I scribbled lots of notes in the rules, and now need to go back and work through each section. There's a lot of things I want to play around with. I'm still not clear exactly how leader benefits work, for example, and may scrap what's written in favour of something easier to follow and more intuitive. But the core of the rules seem pretty solid and I very much enjoyed the game. 

Maschinen Krieger

Maschinen Krieger (Ma.K) is a science-fiction world created in the 1980s by artist Kow Yokoyama. It has a retro-future vibe, with the kit - initially battle-suits but then walkers, grav-tanks and aircraft - being based around components from plastic model kits. Ma.K has seen a range of kits and action figures, a comic and even a film or two.

There's a full history HERE.

Anyway, Slave 2 Gaming have the licence to produce miniatures for Ma.K in 15mm. And, to go with them, they are developing a set of rules. Last night Drew put on a game of Ma.K so that we could try out the latest iteration of the rules and have a look at some of the lovely figures.

Four of us played each running a force of infantry in battlesuits and a few support weapons and vehicles. Darren and I faced Ross and Drew.

I had a splendidly big tank that saw off one of Ross's units before it left the baseline. Combat is pretty simple and done with a single 2D6 roll. You determine a hit number, based on the attacker's quality, range, target size and cover, then look to roll over it. Excess pips over the roll add to teh damage you cause, and all damage in excess of the target's armour rating is recorded as hits. On a big thing like a tank that just whittles down hit-points. On squads you remove figures. It's similar to the Rampant idea of reduced model units.

Here's some of my units on the baseline. I had two squads of regular armoured suit guys, plus a support team, one squad of very heavily armoured suit guys, the big tank and a couple of floating drone things (like the probe in 'Empire Strikes Back), one armed with a rocket-launcher and the other a magnificent laser-pointer, which did no damage but made anything targetted a lot easier to hit.

Here's some action on the other flank where Darren and Drew were fighting it out in some ruins.

Here's my heavily armoured suit unit emerging from behind a wood to have a pop at some of Ross's troops. They also turned out to be heavily armoured, requiring us to get either very lucky or to close the range to get any effective hits.

Some of Darren's troops.

A floating drone. I'm not sure what this one was armed with.

One of the walkers.

The token next to the unit shows that it has activated; the rules use a Bolt Action activation system, with tokens being drawn from a bag to show who gets to activate a unit. Units can take two or three actions, depending on type, but no more than two actions of a type. So, for example, a unit cannot move three times, but it could move once, shoot and then move again.

You can engage in close combat. That's what I tried to do with my tank, in an attempt to overrun some of Ross's infantry. 

The reality; the tank is operated by an AI and was damaged. So it had to make a malfunction check before it moved and, typically, failed, so sputtered to a halt halfway to the target.

Some close quarter fighting in the ruins.

A walker skulks on the edge of some ruins.

You'll notice that I haven't posted much of a narrative. With four players and initiative switching from unit to unit it was hard to keep track of the overall flow of the battle, especially as it was a head to head encounter. We advanced, shot at the enemy and then tended to fall back as counter-strikes reduced the attacking units. Combat can be pretty brutal, and units retire if they hit half-strength. They can rally, and come back, but fight with less effect

It was an enjoyable game with a wonderful aesthetic; I like the big clunky Ma.K. battlesuits a lot. The rules were easy to follow, although we suggested a few tweaks. Certainly keen to give them another go, maybe in more of a mission-based scenario next time.

Extra Dinosaurs

I've done a little more painting over the past couple of days. First up are these Coelophysis from QRF that I bought last year and then promptly forgot about.

I'mm be using them as a pack of raptors in Palaeo Diet.

And to add to my Giant Herbivore collection - an Ankylosaurus.

 

This is another plastic toy that I measured up and found to be pretty much the correct scale for use with 15mm figures.

To be honest it's not the best looking Ankylosaurus in the world in terms of how the armour is portrayed, but I like its active, upright posture compared to the other, more squat, models I have.

If You Go Down To The Woods Today.

I have been putting together a few more figures for Palaeo Diet: Pulp this week. These are the two most recent - a warlock and a wood golem. The former is to be run as a Witch Doctor, whilst the latter is a Giant Biped with a Bulk of 5 (essentially the 'King Kong' from the alternative version of the 'To Kill A King' scenario).

And, indeed, I used them both to play an alternate version of 'To Kill A King'. In this game the adventurers are after a giant humanoid monster that has appeared in their territory.

It's almost certainly part of the machinations of an evil warlock that is plaguing the colony. He is hanging around in the vicinity of the monster.

The adventurers advancing towards the monster. One again they are led by Ahab (from the rear, though, thanks to his terrible activation rolls). Job and Isaac are there as well, with their muskets. However Joseph and Ezekiel stayed at home for this one; instead we had Old Moses with his axe and swordsman Aaron. As before,  each musketeer was teamed with a melee specialist to take the brunt of any charges.

The group provoked the warlock early on and he summoned a wolf to harry them.

The party blundered across the board with a series of terrible activations, but eventually Job got within range and took a shot. It had no effect.

Isaac had a go, and also missed.

Old Moses charged in, but didn't get a chance to hack at the creature before it attacked and wounded him.

The hunters backed off and the creature let out a series of roars and bellows.

The first hit was a scored by Job.

A second was scored by Isaac, who held his ground as the monster charged.

Old Moses finally got back into action and hacked a third hit onto the creature.

By now two of the adventurers were wounded and Aaron was cursed by the warlock (which meant he had to use stressed dice for all of his activations).

The creature attacked him as he bumbled around on the edge of some woods.

Another roar saw some of the adventurers fall back, and Isaac left the hunt altogether. This was the group's first loss.

Aaron attracted more attention from the warlock, who wounded him in a hand-to-hand fight, but who was wounded in return.

Ahab finally got properly involved. He'd been late into the fight because of poor activations and had then been driven back by the creature's roars. He drew the creature to within pistol range, and inflicted a wound. Only one more was needed to down it once and for all. 

The pistol shot caused the summoned wolf to react, and it moved towards and attacked the creature, scoring the final hit on it.

The monster was downed, in eight of the allotted twelve turns.

All of the hunters were wounded and Isaac was lost (I'm sure he will be back). So it was a fairly desperate fight.

It was fun trying a new mix of creature reactions. I'd only used Witch-Doctor once before, and it's quite fun, with summoning and curses creating issues for the group. The Great Biped profile gives some interesting attack reactions too, including the ranged attack, pelt and the potentially dangerous Flail attack.

There are more strange encounters waiting in the wings (once I've painted them).