Crisis 2018 coming up

Coming weekend will be CRISIS 2018 - the highlight of our wargaming year. Our little gaming group will stage a game for the 22nd consecutive year. This year our game will feature 25mm Napoleonics in the battle of Landshut.

There's a funny thing about convention games. They never really turn out the way you imagine them. Perhaps it's because we like to talk other attendees and friends too much, such that the game never really progresses. Perhaps it's because sometimes our participation games are too successful and end up with a bunch of fanatics around the table. Sometimes it's because the game is only so-so and we also lose interest ourselves in the game after the first 30 minutes. But let's be realistic. The purpose of a convention game is not the game itself. The game is only there to serve as a starting point to talk to fellow wargamers and have an enjoyable day. And yes, I know this is different from the American convention scene, but at most European conventions, games are there as focal points to have lively conversation, not necessarily to play all day long (although that sometimes happens as well).

I've been attending gaming conventions since the late eighties and I have seen some changes over those 30 years.

1. There is a trend that conventions become more about shopping, and less about socializing. This has been pointed out by many people on various forums before, so it's not a new observation. Whether this is a good or bad thing I don't know, but I do miss a bit of the camaraderie that was more prevalent during my early gaming days. But perhaps I am wearing rose-tinted glasses.
2. There is more diversification in games than ever before. I don't think that at a large con such as CRISIS, with over 50 games, you will find 2 games that feature exactly the same period with exactly the same rules and exactly the same line of miniatures. That used to be different. I still remember cons in which half the games were Warhammer (has almost disappeared completely from the general cons), or DBx, just to mention a few household names.
3. The standard of games goes up every year. We had our fair share of awards for our games over the years, but the games we displayed 20 years ago (some won a "Best of Show"), would not even receive a minute of attention these days. On the one hand, that's a good thing, but on the other hand, it's putting the bar very high for any new blood in the hobby. Also, I feel many of the excellent showgames are more about visual spectacle, and less about the game itself. I always felt that wargaming should be a blend of visuals and mechanics, but mechanics are much harder to show off when people walk by your table and don't take the effort to look more closely, because they have to spend their time shopping :-)
4. Many years ago, conventions were still covering many aspects of the "gaming hobby", along with some peripheral activities. I really enjoyed conventions were you had roleplaying games, classic hex-and-counter wargames, miniature games, along with a few LARPers, some re-enactors, and the local Tolkien fan club thrown in for good measure. Perhaps this was because gaming was still a small niche back then, and most gamers were interested in many things, but it seems gaming has balkanized in many different subniches, which each have their own conventions, and don't mingle anymore. Again, this might be good or bad. I certainly was not interested in all of these things (I still think LARPing is silly, don't get me started ;-) ), but it provided an eclectic mélange of related interests.

Now, don't get me wrong! I still enjoy conventions very much, and I'm certainly looking forward to this weekend.

And here's an unrelated picture, me in front of the famous mosaic of Alexander the Great in the Archeological Museum in Napoli, which I visited a few weeks ago:

Lazy Sunday Morning

A lazy Sunday morning ...

ACW game: A fickle flanking force

It had been a long time since we played our last ACW game, but we managed to play one this week. We used our house rules, but with the modification of trying out a new mechanism for activating units, as decribed in this blogpost.

The new command mechanism worked quite well, and both players (Eddy and Graham, I was umpire) seemed to like it, so I will include it in the rules sheet in due time.

As for the scenario, we used the "A fickle flanking force" scenario published in WSS 95.

Without much further ado, here are the pictures. All pictures were taken by Eddy using a smartphone, and are unedited.

Initial deployment. Confederates are defending the ridge (bottom), the Union (top) has to attack the ridge. Reinforcements on the left side of the river will try to outflank the Union, but are ambushed. Graham obviously is not paying attention :-)

Reinforcements on the Confederate left flank, ambushed by Union units.

Overview of the right flank.

Reinforcement column slowly crawling forwards.

Defensive line.

Action on the left flank.

Action on the right flank.

The first Union units have reached the ridgeline.

Final action of the game.

And some more photos, covering the same game of course, taken by me:

Strontium Dog

Warlord has released its new game, Strontium Dog. Strontium Dog has always been one of my favourite 2000AD comics. It always had the right blend of good storylines, nerdy and quirky humour, and a good scifi setting. Along with Rogue Trooper, it was obviously one of the main influences for the original Warhammer 40K Rogue Trader game.

My Rogue Trooper and Strontium Dog volumes in my personal library.

Other than Judge Dredd, probably the most famous 2000AD character, I think Strontium Dog lends itself very well to a miniatures game. Actually, our own Antares 2401 campaign was started with the Strontium Dog universe in mind. Strontium Dog has always been very much mission and adventure oriented. We once tried the Judge Dredd roleplaying game back in the 90s. It was not a success - everyone was using Judge Dredd quotes all the time. That was it. No plot, no game, and I still feel bad for the GM who was a huge Judge Dredd fan at the time. It might be different in the combat-oriented Strontium Dog universe.

So, will I be getting this game? Hell yeah! If not to play it, just for haves. I'll probably buy a box and some other stuff at Crisis 2018.

3D Dungeon

Since I started this hobby using fantasy miniatures and Warhammer 1st edition (and only switched to historicals later), I still have a huge soft spot for fantasy games.

One of my friends asked whether I could stage a fantasy game now and then. Okay, not a problem, and I thought this was the perfect opportunity to bring out my Hirst Arts 3D Dungeon again.

No game has materialized yet, but I was thinking of using the Frostgrave engine to stage a few dungeon explorations, just like in the old days.

Overview of the dungeon

Some old Citadel figures

NSFW miniature

An old Citadel Fishman in the pond

More old Citadel goblins roaming the dungeon

A room with some Grendel scenery elements

Another overview

And a last picture ...

Dice!

Over the decades, as a boardgamer/roleplayer/wargamer ... you tend to amass a lot of dice. Dice come out of nowhere, from gaming boxes long forgotten, from special sets bought at conventions, from games plundered for components.

I have a drawer in my wargaming room that contains only dice and coloured markers. Some years ago, I also invested in same-coloured dice for each of the major die types. Miniature wargaming is a visual hobby, and I think the visual appeal should show in the peripheral tools as well. I abhor a rag-tag collection of dice on the battlefield. Your dice should be visually coherent and pleasing to the eye!

So, here's a picture of the drawer containing the dice. The top row contains all sorts of specialty dice. The middle row lots of coloured markers, and also 30+ black D6's. The bottom row has polyhedral dice - not all in the same colour - but enough of the same colour to use in games that need it: green for D12, orange or red for D10, yellow for D8, blue for D4. This colour coding is also important for our skirmish games in which we use opposed die rolling and shifting die types, as explained in this post on our Wargaming Mechanics blog.

So, what happens to all other dice that I also still have (mostly D6's, I admit)? I keep them in an old-fashioned candy jar. The jar itself is a nice object to decorate the wargaming room with, and whenever a nephew comes over for a game, he can choose a die from the jar to take home. Sometimes they "steal" a second one, but who's counting?

3 books added

I added 3 Featherstone books to the index: Battle Notes, Wargaming Ancient and Medieval Periods, Wargaming Pike-and-Shot. These are books that describe a specific historic scenario in each chapter, so I felt it useful to include them.

 I also keep adding old issues of Miniature Wargaming. Currently there are more than 4400 entries.

Hundred Years War vignettes (2)

All flocked. The green flocked base is a tradition I started over 30 years ago when I did my fantasy miniatures that way. I still do it for fantasy/medievals. I feel that now I cannot revert to another basing scheme ;-)

Computer-assisted Miniature Wargaming?

The latest issue of Miniature Wargames (issue 425, September 2018) has an article on Computer-Assisted Wargaming, as an interview with Arofan Gregory (check out his website Wargaming Machines). Computer-Assisted Wargaming (or CAW) provides tools to help the miniature wargaming go more smoothly, by outsourcing a number of procedures (combat resolution, hidden troops, obfuscating information, campaign management, ...) to the software.

Although I fully understand the desires and motivation of some wargamers to do so, and although I also agree that smartphones and tablets are easy to use around the wargaming the table as opposed to a laptop or an old-fashioned desktop, I think that using digital technology *during* the game misses the point of what miniature wargaming is about. Of course, we all use computers for peripheral wargaming activities outside the actual games: writing blogs, purchasing wares, reading rules, keeping track of our collections, writing campaign diaries ... all of these activities have been digitized. But using a computer during the game? I'm not so sure ...

One of the functions that is often digitized is combat resolution. Instead of rolling dice, looking up results in tables etc., the computer can do that work for us. That is a true statement. But why would we want the computer to do that for us? There is a joy in rolling the dice and reading the results. Why use a sterile digital mechanism instead? One of the reasons often mentioned is that combat resolution - or other mechanisms - are too complex. They involve rolling too many dice, looking up too many modifiers, looking up results in too many tables. That is certainly a problem in some rulesets. But the answer is not too digitize those procedures, but rather make them simpler and easier to use. In other words, make them more elegant and design them better. A badly designed procedure remains a badly procedure when digitized. The bad design is simply hidden from the user, but the design still sucks.

For me, miniature wargaming is foremost an analogue and tactile experience. The quintessential element of the medium is handling and moving toy soldiers, and should be preserved at all times. Moreover, I also think that the "helper" devices such as dice, rulers, cards, ... should be analogue as well. I am not saying a wargaming should always use dice or rulers - there are good designs that do without those - but whatever you use to play the game, should be in line with the tactile activity of handling the toy soldiers themselves. At least for me, all these elements should form a coherent whole. No hybrid game formats in *my* wargaming! But of course, you can do in your wargaming whatever you want :-)

In the past, I have compared using computers in miniature wargaming as using advanced technology in other analogue hobbies such as painting landscapes. Why not use a digital camera instead, or even 3-D print your painting as is possible these days? That will surely give you a much more accurate rendition of the landscape ... ? Because the point is not to recreate the visual image of the landscape, but creating an image using paints and brushes ...

Now, I am not a luddite opposed to anything digital. I am a computer scientist, teach computer science, and do research in computer graphics. But perhaps that's another reason I want to keep digital devices out of my wargaming. Having to work with computers and staring at screens all day, I want my hobby to be clear from bits and bytes.

So, instead of putting my creativity into writing programs for wargaming, I will keep them focused on designing better analogue gaming mechanics. Because I believe that's where the soul of miniature wargaming really is.

Hundred Years War vignettes

Today I worked on some figures I bought 18 years ago. The "Tax collector" and "Knight Arming" from Wargames Foundry, still available in their HYW range. I used their painted examples as an inspiration for my own colour scheme.

I steel need to work on the base, but that should be relatively easy.

Another thing I noticed is that I might need new glasses. Focusing my eyesight on 25mm figures is less easy than it used to be.