So, as I’ve already mentioned, I’ve recently had a first game of Xenos Rampant, the new sci-fi skirmish rules by Dan Mersey and Richard Cowen. They follow the successful “rampant” format, which I like, so I had some hopes that they might rekindle my interest in sci-fi gaming.
I dug out my 15mm collection, set up a small colony settlement and off we went. It really was a fun game, with the consequence that I plunged into my 15mm sci-fi lead pile and fished out some stuff I wanted to paint up for a very long time. The first was this little spacecraft:
Someone on Facebook told me it’s a craft form an old Gerry Anderson puppet show, which never made it to Austria. I like its quaint and whimsical retro-look.
The whole thing also gave me the idea for a simple campaign. I’ve been fleshing out a sci-fi background for a while now (some of it went into my Traveller RPG campaign), so I have a lot of ideas floating around. Let’s see if we actually play it. But it’s fun to paint a couple of sci-fi figures, and it’s also satisfying to finally finish things that have been lying around for a long time.
Another year ended, another end of the year report. The first thing that comes to mind is that I didn’t blog as much as I would have liked, but this is about my gaming year, not my blogging year. So what have I played? Let’s have a look at the Boardgamegeek statistic.
Top of the list is Travellerwith 21 plays. The remote RPG group has become a real mainstay of my gaming. We meet pretty regularly, which means that we could finish the sci-fi campaign this year. We did a number of one-shots with other systems and will now start a new campaign, with Martin as GM running Call of Cthulhu. I’ve already made a character – a rare books dealer – and I’m very much looking forward to it! There was also a bit of face-to-face role-playing, most memorably Cthulhu Dark and Fiasco. I definitely want to try out more story-telling games in the vein of those two in 2024.
Summer event 2023 – an outdoor game of What a Cowboy!
Miniature wargaming wise, this was definitely the year of What A Cowboy. The rules were released in April and I played my first game at the beginning of March. From then on, I played a number of single games with different people as well as two campaigns remotely with Stephan in Sweden and Martin. WaC was also the game of choice for our yearly summer event, which was one of the highlights of 2023. This time, we not only had guests from France (Manu brought this nephews), but also a spontaneous appearance by my nephew, which made me especially happy as I haven’t played with him for ages. The only downer was that Christoph was missing this year… hopefully, he will be back in 2024!
The battle at the Head of Passes.
Among the top three on the BGG list, you will also spot a game with the unattractive name Unpublished Prototype. This is the BGG placeholder for games that are not yet published and therefore not in the database. In my case, it refers to my American Civil War naval rules. I’ve been thinking about those for a couple of years now and in summer, I suddenly got the urge to finally wrap them up. I did a lot of playtesting, but also printed, modeled and painted numerous ships. By October, the game felt like it was finally finished – feedback from different players was pretty good, I had most of the rules text and was playing around with the layout. Then, I was hit by a wave of self-doubt and began to dismantle everything I’ve designed and written so far, with the idea of starting anew from scratch. Fortunately, I realised what was happening and pulled the emergency brake in time. With the plan to take a step back and have a short break from the design process, I decided to occupy myself with something else for a time.
Somewhere in the East Indies…
Along came Mad for War. I’ve been following Barry Hilton’s progress via Facebook for a while and always found it very inspiring, so I decided to take the plunge. The rulebooks really is gorgeous and the rules are fun. I painted a couple of 1/2400 ships from Tumbling Dice, which are lovely, and started to read about the period. I got especially interested in the early colonial actions involving ships from the Dutch East Indies Company in the early part of the 17th century. I also tinkered with David Manley’s Far Distant Ships, a great set of rules which I have adapted to the early 17th century by completely changing the command and control mechanics. Then I had the idea that a campaign with combined land operations would be fun, as I remembered my mate Sigur’s huge collection of 10mm 30 Years War figures – couldn’t they be used for the European troops? We played a test game of Irregular Wars, a set of rules specifically designed for small colonial battles in the 16th and 17th centuries, and I liked to so much that I placed an order with Pendraken for 10mm Indians to represent the small Sultanates of the various East Indian islands.
Trying out Irregular Wars.
I also played a number of other miniatures wargames. Christoph ran 7TV Fantasy, which has some really interesting mechanics.
7TV.
I did get in a couple of games of Sharp Practice at the beginning of the year, with the large birthday game covering the skirmish at Eferding in 1809 being another highlight of 2023. I also had a fun game of Song of Drums and Shakoswith parts of Sigur’s splendid 28mm napoleonic collection (see his blog for an AAR) and also had another go at big battle napoleonics using my 6mm collection. This time, I tried Drums and Shakos Large Battle, but again it was not what I’m looking for.
Speaking of napoleonics, another of the year’s highlights was touring the battlefield of Wagram and visiting the local museum. This was not only a great day out, but also very insightful and something that I definitely want to do more often.
As always, I also played a rather eclectic range of boardgames. The highlights among them were Undaunted: North Africa, which I bought last year, and Gettysburg (125th Anniversary Edition), a very old game of which I finally found a well-priced second hand copy. It’s a hex and counter game, which I don’t normally like, but it has simple mechanics and a tidy look (no stacks!). Most important of all, it creates a dramatic narrative. In our game of the first day’s battle, with me playing the Union, Schurz’s division made a heroic stand defending the town of Gettysburg itself. If you know how much of a fan of the XI Corps and Schurz’s division specifically I am, you can imagine my delight!
Other noteable boardgames were Spirit Island, which is a favourite of my wife’s, revisiting Lords of Waterdeep, which is the most fun eurogame I know (and probably the only one I really like) and our perennial favourite Race for the Galaxy, for some inexcplicable reasons a game I win more often than not.
Oh, and a couple of days ago I had a game of Xenos Rampant, which rekindled my interest in sci-fi miniatures gaming. Maybe there will be more action for my 15mm sci-fi collection in 2024…
Xenos not yet rampant.
As always, I’m a bit surprised by the number of games I got in, especially considering that this year had a number of unpleasant events, including health issues and a (planned) hospital stay which knocked me out for a while. It is all the more gratifying to see the place gaming has in my life and I’m very grateful to all of my gaming partners for providing joy even if so-called real-life events sometimes make things difficult.
I don’t do plans, so there’s not much I can say about 2024. I’d like to keep up the gaming, as this is the most important thing about the hobby for me. Miniatures wise, I feel that I’m still not finished with naval stuff, so there’ll probably be more ships. After the Xenos Rampant game, I rummaged through my lead mountain and started to paint a couple of sci-fi vehicles. Hopefully, I’ll finish my ACW rules. A campaign combining 17th century naval and land actions would be cool. RPG wise, I’m lucky to have two thing to look forward to: Call of Cthulhu in our remote group and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which Christoph wants to run next year. For boardgames, I’ll let myself be surprised what’s coming up. And as always, I’d like to blog more…
I hope you also had a good year. I wish all of you a Happy New Year and the best for 2024. Happy gaming!
The pandemic situation is worsening again in Austria and face-to-face gaming with my friends once again comes to a halt. This really is annoying and mentally draining, especially since it could have been avoided if the government would have listened to the experts. This time, the situation taxes even my life-long honed and highly developed skills of escapism.
So, I decided to spontaneously treat myself to something I had my eye on since it came out: Namely the new edition of Ivan Sorensen’s Five Parsecs from Home. Around this time last year, I gave the old version, which was published by Nordic Weasel Games, a try. It was not exactly what I was looking for, so I modified it beyond recognition for my Tanit’s Talons solo campaign (which is documented on this blog).
However, this time I am more in the mood for a story that centres on the classical small group of misfits, canonized by books and TV shows like Firefly and The Expanse. Also, I have to say that I was attracted by the nice look of the 3rd edition book, which was published by Modiphius. Yes, I am that shallow, but I do like pretty books.
K. also showed interest in the game, so we started by creating a crew. This takes a little while, as it involves a lot of dice rolling, but it’s great fun to see the crew come to life with backgrounds and motivations. We ended with the crew of the star ship Black Cat, a worn colony ship, making their way through the galaxy.
As we are in debt, we wanted to take an opportunity mission, but old pirate rivals of us turned up to teach us a lesson. Fortunately, we managed to turn the tables around and taught them a lesson they won’t forget so fast, as they decided to leave us in peace for good. This was a pretty successful first game and it did provide us with some money to buy new equipment.
The campaign system really is the heart of the game. The rules for tabletop combat are quick and fun. They work very well and offer plenty of opportunities for tactics. But the driving force is the campaign system, which tasks you with managing the career of your little band. The game has been called an RPG lite, and Ivan himself states that the Traveller RPG was a huge influence, but if you expect something like Rangers of Shadowdeep, where you follow a storyline that has been established by the author, you will be disappointed. There are RPG elements, mainly in regard to managing the crew’s resources, but as a whole, it is more akin to a story generator. There are many tables to roll for events, meaning there is a lot of randomness. Now K. and I like this, as for us, this randomness creates a story and gives us the bones to add our own narrative. However, it might not be for everybody. For the individual scenarios played on the tabletop, the randomness is mitigated by several mechanisms, such as Luck Points, Story Points and Stars of the Story cards.
Five Parsecs from Home is a great game if you are in the mood for some solo or cooperative sci-fi action. It even motivated me to paint a couple of figures – a welcome change from ten months of painting napoleonics!
Maybe you won’t believe it, but I did something else besides playing Sharp Practice! (Truth be told, I do play other games, but I usually don’t write about them on the blog…).
Soon after What a Tanker! was released, Virago started talking about making a variant for Battlemechs instead of tanks. I always liked the idea of Battletech – the German edition of the boxed set was my first hobby boardgame and I read a number of novels.
This box was my first “hobby” boardgame!
However, the original game is rather unplayable, especially nowadays, when I’m much too old for long-winded, extremely detailed and convoluted rules. What a Tanker!, on the other hand, is a great fast-paced game I like very much, even if I’m not interested in tanks at all.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, Virago announced that he was ready for some What a Mecher! action (incidentally, WaM is a working title…). He had put down some ideas on how to convert WaT to the Battletech setting, which basically means replacing tanks with giant robots. Which is much cooler in my opinion.
So far, we had a couple of games which worked really well. Sigur has written detailed reports here and here, so I’m not going to repeat myself and just show you some images from our games.
The game has everything a Battletech game needs. Virago, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of Battletech lore, has devised very clever mechanics for heat management, which is one of the core mechanics of the original Battletech and also features prominently in the novels. There are also rules for different kinds of weapons and mechs and of course for close combat – what would giant robots be without punching each other up?
The game is great fun and I really enjoy playtesting it!
The Raft 