More Grand Fleets and some Nuts!

After reading through the rulebook for Grand Fleets I decided to pick up the first supplement King and Kaiser. 

For a 64 page supplement it's a little light on the scenarios, only having 6, but it does have around 10 pages of introductory material before all the scenarios that would allow players to expand on the scenarios presented.  To be fair though most scenarios are quite large with anything from 20-60 ships on the table so most scenarios will take up an evening.  So around 6 evenings worth of play for $11AUS is pretty good value if you ask me.  The rest of the book is 26 pages of ship data cards which makes the scenarios easier to just print and play.

Conclusion
I'm pretty happy with what I got.  Production quality is right where you want it with a pdf, nice layout and photos where needed but nothing that will hurt your printer.

My second purchase (third actually as I haven't got More Drums and Shakos in my inbox yet) was the Nuts! supplement The Big Hurt.

For $14US you get around 47 pages (the pdf comes with the maps in a seperate file) and contains 21 linked scenarios.  The book is intended for you to play the US forces and use the Nuts! system to manage the Germans.  However it does make note of how to play both sides if you so wish.  The book follows an unnamed US squad from September 1944 through to February 1945 during their attempt to take and secure the Hϋrtgen forest.  The layout is pretty much what you'd expect from any of the newer Two Hour Wargames publications, the books look sparse and the lack of artwork does make the book a bit of a drudge to read.  But!  The the important thing to remember here is that it's a scenario book.  You read it once and refer to it often.  More importantly is that it's printer friendly.

As for the scenarios themselves they are friendly to 28mm gamers with most scenarios only requiring a few squads aside.  The ctach here though is the reinforcements and the fact that most if not all of the German forces are determined randomly.  My only concern here is that I don't own a lot of vehicles and in the US case alone there is a 50% chance of a vehicle being rolled when determining reinforcements.  I can see a lot of proxies being used in these games.

The maps are probably where this scenario book improves over many of the books I've seen.  They're laid out on a grid and the terrain is labeled... thank you Darby, thank you.  There is nothing more frustrating than having to flip back to a map legend to work out what "white circles on a black background" represents on a map.

Conclusion
Another great Nuts! supplement that I'll be playing for sure.  Well... as soon as I finish my terrain, and finish painting the Germans... and start painting the US troops.  OK it'll probably be a while before I get this on the table.  But if you do have the miniatures painted then I'd recommend you pick this up.  Especially if you're a solo wargamer.

Nuts Second Edition Is Here... Almost

Just ordered Nuts Second Edition from Two Hour Wargames, it's not out until Wednesday so I have a little bit of a wait. I'm really keen to give it a go this weekend but I still haven't managed to get much scenery sorted. So unless Nuts 2 is less lethal than the first edition, very unlikley, then terrain and lot's of it is needed.

So Ed, is it Wednesday over there yet? Is it... huh?

Em4 Tokens and Dice

I found my order from Em4 waiting for me in the mailbox tonight. These should be rather useful for Bag the Hun and the reaction based games from Two Hour Wargames (Nuts!, Six Gun Sound and so on).

The 7mm blue dice will be rather used as altitude markers in Bag the Hun.


The coloured tokens are also the right size to be used as a reputation marker in the Two Hour Wargames systems. This should make games of Nuts pretty much record sheet free.

Also some of the coloured discs will be used for Bag the Hun as squadron markers.

I just need to find a case/caddy big enough to sort these out, another trip to the thrift/hardware store methinks.

Tiddlywhatsits and Teeny Tiny Dice

I just ordered around 240 odd of these things from EM4 Miniatures . The idea is to use them under the clear base of my flight stands for Bag the Hun and they, at 22mm, should fit nicely under the base of my 28mm minis for Nuts! and Six Gun Sound. The concept is to use colours to mark flights/schwarms in Bag the Hun and for Nuts!/Six Gun Sound the colours will represent the reputation value of the miniature (eg none for rep 3, White for 4, Red for 5 and Yellow for 6).

I also ordered 40 7mm six sided dice to use as altitude markers in Bag the Hun. Should stop them getting mixed up with the hand fulls of combat dice getting thrown around. At that size they could possibly stuck on the base with be blutac.

It's all great in theory... more info and photos after they arrive, which fingers crossed, if before

Nuts! AAR

The scenario was simple enough, the British were to defend the two house "village" from theattacking Germans. Two 10 man squads a piece with 2 Brens for the British and 4 Mp-42's for the Germans.

I forgot to take photos of the setup and the first two turns but you can see below is the game as of turn three. A German squad with 2 MG-42 have moved into the woods in the top left of the photo and a team in the woods to the top right. Another team is about to come over the hill to the middle right.

Half of the first British squad on the left has already fallen to the MG42's in the treeline. The rectangles in the middle of the table are fields and the remaining British are making an attempt to come around them and get the LMG's within SMG range.



It didn't turn out too well.




No sooner than we would hit the gunner than another would take his place. There's no official rule in Nuts (at least that I could find in the rulebook) for someone to take over as the gunner of a LMG/MMG but we later found some in the Pieper At The Gates supplement.

This is what was left of the British after 3 LMG's and a squad came over the hill. The Bren gun stationed at the corner of the field did an excellent job outgunning and pushing most of the Germans back over the hill but the damage had already been done.

This team spent most of the game getting knocked down, standing up, knocked down, standi... you get the idea.

After this photo was taken the British laid down their weapons and waved the white flag.

Two hours of gaming (and chatting) from start to finish so the rules live up their companies name. To be fair we spent a little bit of time looking for rules (some that weren't actually in the book) and towards the end of the game we were referring to the QRS only sparingly.

A few things we learned from this game:

• LMG's have just as much potential in controlling the enemies movement than they do as outright killing machines.
• Terrain... you need lot's of it in a Nuts! game. Open areas like you see in the photos above are difficult if not impossible to cross without casualties.
• Anyone in cover is dang hard to take down by a Rep 3 with a rifle (read that as not possible), I'll believe the guys on the Yahoo group have addressed this so I'll have to look that up.
• You need a good scenario to keep things moving. In our battle it would have made no sense for the Germans to leave the saftey of the woods unless there was a strong motivation to do so. Eg take the town by tun 5. Simple scenarios like I'm defending and you're attacking isn't really enough. A quick flip through Peiper At The Gates just shows how a game can be enriched with a little background fluff and some key objectives.

I don't know if we'll play Peiper as is but we're going to use it as the watermark by which we play all our future games. Although it probably won't be too hard to just substitute US troops for British and play as is.

I'm very curious to see if the "Focus" test from Chain Reaction 3 makes it's way into the new Nuts! rulebook. Not being able to just pick the most tactically advantageous target every turn will make the games way more interesting and unpredictable. And let's face it: that's why we play Nuts! right? Otherwise we'd just play some *cough*hammer based system.

Going Nuts! Again Tonight

I've got a game or two of Nuts! lined up tonight at BADGA and I'm madly painting and building to get everything ready in time. I don't think the tanks will have much time but with the basecoat they look table ready (for our club at least).

I'll get some photos up of the freshly painted forces before I leave tonight and this time I'll remember to take some shots of the game in progress... maybe if I'm really organised (not likely) then I'll take notes for an AAR.

Going to borrow a few ideas from other games tonight, such as blinds in IABSM and TW&T. I think we'll also make sure there's at least one guy on each side with Rep6 to stop the whole army standstill, that cost the British dearly last game... that and the MP40's.

Troops, Weapons and Tactics

For a while now Nuts! from Two Hour Wargames has been my rules of choice when it comes to platoon level skirmish games, and they still are. But what I'm finding is that the scale of the games keep growing and growing as I paint more of my slowly diminishing lead mountain. Nuts! plays nice and fast with around a platoon a side but can get very dice heavy with more squads, especially of there is a situation where a lot of units converge. I know there are option rules that allow for insight tests to be made at a group level but an all or none pass feels a little awkward compared to how well the smaller games flow. So I think Nuts! is best suited for the smaller games, maybe a platoon and a couple support options each.

For the really big games I have I Ain't Been Shot Mum (IABSM) which is a company level game but can be used for smaller engagements with no changes to the rules. The effect of this is roughly the same as the streamlined Nuts! system. Combat is over quickly and the action feels very stop-start, IABSM really needs a few figures on the table to flow well.

The answer, I'm hopeful, comes in the form of Too Fat Lardie's Troops, Weapons and Tactics (TW&T).


TW&T originated from the IABSM ruleset and even refers to itself as "Son of IABSM". The rules are similar and anyone who has played IABSM will feel right at home with TW&T. The structure of the game is pretty much the same:

• Card based activation system.
• Initiative dice are used to perform actions such as spotting or shooting.
• Command and control is implemented by the use of "big men".

Where the two systems differ actually can make a big difference to how you play the game. The biggest change I can see is that in TW&T a unit can only move if ordered to do so by a big man. Units using their unit initiative dice can only spot, take cover or fire. That is fantastic, I can see this causing players to really think their tactics through. Yeah sure you can just put the Lieutenant with a couple fire teams and send them off down the table but you had better look after him or you could find your troops hunkered down waiting for orders.

The rest of the rules look similar to what I've seen in the IABSM rulebook but I'm sure Rich and the guys at Lard Island have a few surprise nuances thrown in there that I haven't seen yet. At £10 it's one of the more expensive rulesets from the Lardies but it's worth every penny... I mean cent.

Like most (all?) of the Too Fat Lardies games TW&T uses a card based activation system. I've mentioned before in discussions about Bag the Hun that I hated the idea but loved the implementation. What can make or break the game though is the cards themselves. To keep the game going nice and smoothly you either need to memorise the rulebook or put the rules on the cards (or at least have page references on the cards).

I had a lot of fun making the cards for Bag the Hun so I'm taking my time with these ones and I'm trying to make something that is functional yet has that wow factor. So far I'm very happy with the results. I'll post the complete set here once I've got them all finished.

Sometimes We All Go A Little Nuts!

Nuts! is probably the best skirmish level WW2 game I've come across in recent times that actively breaks away from the tired and true (that's not a typo folks) IGO-UGO system and does it well. I had the privilege of indoctrinating a fellow gaming into the Nuts! fellowship and I think Mick liked what he saw.

I did have plans of taking photos and having a nice detailed AAR but I've head a heck of a head cold for the last few days and it tool everything I could muster just to sit at the table and remember the rules.

Two squads of British infantry squared off against two squads of Huns and in the end the British didn't fare very well. I did to a lot of silly things just to show the mechanics of the game... honestly now would I do something as silly as walking... hmm maybe, but I would never jump out of cover into the line of fire of a... ok ok Mick had me out gunned and out tac-tic-ified...

Bottom line is that he enjoyed the game immensely and we're looking forward to playing again soon. With more cover this time, and I'll have snipers... and mortars, not to mention a MMG or two.

We're actually thinking of "borrowing" a few ideas from some other games in an attempt to make a game "with all the cool things we like". The use of blinds from the Too Fat Lardies range of games is just a simple and elegant way to add to the fog of war. And also the use of a target dice, I can't recall the name of the game Mick said it was from, but basically it's rolled with your dice for determining your target: and odd result you get to pick the target as normal and an even result means the other player chooses the target. An interesting mechanic that adds to the chaos of the battlefield.

So for that game I'll make sure I get photos and an AAR up on the blog.

Getting Ready To Go Nuts!

I have a game of Nuts! lined up for Thursday night with Mick and I realised that I hadn't even gotten past basing my Germans. My British are in a better state and so I can probably spend and hour or so and get a squad or two table ready but none of the Germans have even seen an undercoat. Well I started to remedy that tonight.

Tomorrow night I'll try to sort out a scenario, at the moment I'm thinking of using something from the Too Fat Lardies Calais supplement. Basically a whole lot of Germans attacking a smaller but well dug in British force.

Battlelands 15mm Scenics

I picked up a copy of the Battlelands 15mm Normandy Scenics from Micro Tactics. As the title suggests the buildings are all in 15mm scale but it was a simple matter of printing them out on A3 at 183% of the original size and voila 28mm scenery... almost. The doors are still a little too small so maybe a simple 200% increase was really in order.



The variety of buildings in the set is nice and has everything from farm houses, barns to churches and street cafes. Pretty much everything that a Normandy wargame table would need. I was hoping to get a couple of these built tonight but I got sidetracked with an idea I had (you never saw that coming did you)...

I have a cunning plan M'Lord... yes yes dangerous I know, and after the "Hex Incident" I too didn't expect too much from this. The idea was to laminate the building pieces and then score the edges that needed to bend just like you would a piece of cardstock. And the results weren't that bad at all.


I've only glued the two opposite corners of the building below so the shape is a little out at the moment. Once I glue it to an MDF base the building should square up.


As I mentioned earlier the doors are a little small but I'll experiment with the scale on the next one too see what works best.

I think that all in all the experiment worked... enough to try another one or two. The shininess of the laminate doesn't bother me too much, and it's probably nothing a quick spray of matt varnish couldn't solve. So some further investigation and experimentation should give me some nice looking buildings that are sturdy enough to withstand anything the gaming table can throw at them.

Flames of What?!

All kidding aside, I want to play Flames of War. Really I do but right now I'm completely hooked on this game by Two Hour Wargames (THW).

The reaction system which makes up the core of this game is simply amazing. I can see this being my game of choice for quite some time to come. Best of all is the game has solo play and it works incredibly well. The game itself focuses mainly on the late war period but it wouldn't be that hard to plug in your own army lists and play. On the topic of army lists, Nuts! has gone down a fairly simplistic approach to both unit and weapon stats but I can tell you it works. The game is fast and fairly straight forward to play.

The only thing that bothered me initially is that the rulebook isn't laid out as well as it could have been. This seems to have been addressed in the newer rules that have come out of THW, besides there is a Yahoo group that supports the game that has to be seen to be believed. Questions are answered fast and usually by the game designers too.

I can see myself playing Flames of War... it's an inevitable evolutionary part of being a wargamer right? But right now I'm happy playing skirmish games and Nuts! is about the best there is.

Timbo