Sunday, October 9, 2016

Distractions

My fantasy project is coming along well - I now have 2 units of Evil cavalry and an Evil leader painted. I just need to finish the Anarendor cavalry and leader; then I will be able to field 2 armies. Each army consists of 4 levy/horde, 2 cavalry, 2 infantry, and 2 shooters, which allows me to field any random unit selection using the One Hour Wargame rules. I have ideas for additional armies, but I'm putting those on hold for now.

But, as is typical, I find myself getting distracted with other projects. It started when I was cleaning my garage so I could get my patio furniture stored before Hurricane Matthew passed by. My miniatures were scattered in various sized boxes around the garage. I decided to organize them, so after the storm I picked up a set of plastic drawers from Wal Mart.


I also picked up some smaller boxes and moved my miniatures into them.


As I was doing this, I noticed that I never finished my spaceship project. I'd like to add another cruiser and a couple more destroyers per fleet. I also need a red battleship and carrier.

Sci-fi forces
Ground troops in top row
Shops in bottom row (+ a carrier on top of a battleship in the middle)
Then I started thinking of getting my scratch-built, sci-fi ground forces back into action.

Which led me to using my nook to shop for sci-fi rules. I came across, and ultimately purchased, Horizon Wars.


I read some reviews and even checked out this video playthrough. Some of the mechanics are not to my liking, but I am interested in the army set-up - a low number of small-scale figures featuring infantry, tanks, and big, stompy robots. I ended up buying the rules for the army lists / army creation rules. I'm now tempted to order some of the Oddzial Osmy 3mm troops.

To come full circle, I had planned to play a small game this morning using my newly painted Evil cavalry. One of my cats had other ideas. He decided he wanted to nap right next to me. If I got up to prepare a game, it would disturb him. Like many cat guardians, I chose not to move.

Ollie napping
(The picture is from another day. I didn't dare get up today)

3 comments:

  1. To an extent, given that you've bought the book, I could say "my work here is done". But as I'm always developing new rules and have plans for an "advanced rules" expansion that will make the game a good deal crunchier, I'd be interested in hearing which of the rules weren't to your liking and why.

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  2. "Not to my liking" is meant as a criticism of the rules. I've read through them now and think the mechanisms are well-thought out and would give a good game. Also, I prefer abstract so I wouldn't want anything crunchier. However, the rules just don't meet some of my admittedly idiosyncratic preferences, such as:

    1. I like D6s. I have a bunch lying around. I don't want to have to buy a bunch of D12s.
    2. I prefer using a small (usually 12" x 18") board, which is much smaller than HW's recommended board sizes. Normally, I would just halve the measurements, but HW's combat system is intrinsically tied to range.
    3. I also prefer a gridded board (usually using 2 inch squares). This further exacerbates the range issue.

    I could probably work around these issues, but I'm lazy and I have a core set of rules that I enjoy. I'm thinking of tweaking them for sci-fi ground combat.

    Still, I enjoy HW. It has inspired me to order some sci-fi forces using Germy's 2mm range. I also think that I'll be able to use the HW unit stats as a baseline for statting out units for my rules.

    Anyway, congratulations on your publication, and all the best to your endeavors!

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  3. Well, I can't help you with the gridded board. HW just wasn't written to be a boardgame! But as for D6s and smaller scales, you can solve both problems quite easily. Switch inches for centimetres to halve the size of your table, then use d6s and double the results of each die (1=2, 2=4 etc).

    It will make Defence doubly effective, but you'll also get twice as many critical hits, so it about evens out.

    However, the d12 is a wonderful polygon. They roll beautifully, are easy to read and provide a more interesting range of results. I bought some more from Brigade Models the other day, and theirs are lovely.

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