Dr. Who Fest

 

This weekend was of course the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Who, with The Day of the Doctor being seen in something like 94 countries and umpty-ump number of cinemas around the globe.  I wrote about what I thought of the episode here.  This is me now writing about the experience of watching Dr. Who for the rest of the weekend.

We were sucked into watching the after show party that interviewed the actors and had loads of the old companions in attendance.  It was mindless fun.  A mere bagatelle of fluffy cotton candy, but we were in the mood for it.  Following that we watched an introduction to the monsters, Doctors and their companions, which was also light and fluff, but triggered waves of nostalgia.  So that was Saturday night gone.

Sunday we tracked down the documentary on iPlayer, of An Adventure in Space and Time having missed the Thursday night transmission.  It was wonderful and the ending was an emotional kick that made me cry.  I can't recommend this too highly, well worth watching.  After that we watched The Five (ish) Doctors, which was a wonderful spoof documentary about the previous actors who have played the Doctor wanting to be in the fiftieth anniversary show.  Very tongue in cheek and funny.  Then we rewatched The Day of the Doctor and both agreed it stood up to being watched a second time.

I'm not a fanatic of Dr. Who, for definitions of fanatic that mean I probably look like one to most non SF fans, in that I talk like one, can be a bit obsessive about the Daleks, and I have a deep fondness for the show, with many happy memories of watching it on TV.  So my favourite Doctor is usually the current one until I get fed up with them, but there are several I never became fed up watching.  William Hartnell, Patrick Toughton, Sylvester McCoy, Paul McGann, Chistopher Eccleston and John Hurt.  My favourite companions start with Jo Grant, Sarah Jane, Leela and Ace, Rose, Donna and Amy.  These are my favourites for the things they brought to the screen that I admired.  Monsters, well the Daleks, Cybermen, Ice Warriors and the Silurians.

Favourite episode, far too many to mention, but pretty much multiple stories from every incarnation of the Doctor.  So I say I'm not a fanatic, but as I said that very much depends on one's definition.
  

MechWarrior

Last weekend I visited my godson and his sister and played another game of MechWarrior, which is relatively easy to pick up and play even if one has not played for a while.

Compare to the two previous times the biggest change is in my godson who is now elven, nearly twelve and growing up.  These are the things that happy memories are made of.

 

Compare the above shots to these, here and here.  Oh yes, I've gone blond in my old age.

Pastry cat made by his mum.  Yum, yum.  Hungry work playing games you know.

  

Ogre 6th Designer Edition

For those of you who are not obsessed by giant cybertanks and SJGs Ogre/GEV game you may have missed the fact that this weekend was the official launch party for the game that weighs twenty-eight pounds.  All the excitement can viewed by clicking the link above.

The big announcements are four supplements called Assault Packs with new units to play with.  The Golem Ogre and the Chinese Dragon hybrid crewed Ogre being the biggies, the others include assault GEVs and missile GEVs.  Now all I have to do is cross my fingers and hope that they will make miniatures for these.

One of my two orders arrived this week, so I now have four super heavy tanks, eight Yankee light tanks and twelve Ranger heavy tanks to add to my North American Combine force.  Unfortunately, the parcel with the Mark 1 & 2 Ogres has not arrived.  I fear the worse has happened and the parcel has gotten lost in the post.
  

Risk Does Daleks

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.  Now if only the miniatures are halfway decent and a usable size for wargaming.  Even if not who can resist?  Resistance is futile.  Link here, list of contents as follows:

-5 different Daleks Armies to control (Classic Bronze, Silver, Black) and New Dalek (Yellow and Red)

-10 Mission Cards

-15 Power Cards

-42 Territory Cards

-1 Board (49cm x 75cm)

-1 16 page rules booklet

-5 Dice

-1 Clara Token

-1 TARDIS Piece

-315 Dalek pieces – each army has 42 small, 15 medium and 6 large

Three hundred and fifteen Daleks, they must be mine I tell you.  They will be mine.  With them I shall conquer the world and the Daleks will reign supreme.  Exterminate, exterminate.
  

SELWG 2013: Crystal Palace

    

It was that time of the year for me to go again and visit Crystal Palace, a grade two listed building, and take my friend Trevor and his son Oliver to SELWG on what turned out to be a rather wet day.  As you can see Oliver is now taller than his dad.  We bumped into Graham as we entered the show and had a natter, as one does, before diving in and see what the show had to offer this year.

The first game that caught my eye was this very nice 6mm Very British Civil War game battling for the control of Croydon Airport, which I believe was put on by a father and his two sons.

Wondering around the show it seemed less busy than last year, which I would put down to the appalling weather putting people off.  It was that or the economic recession, take your pick.  Nice to see youngsters in attendance too. 

Oh if only I had the time, money and room to play Napoleonic naval games at this scale.

I also spoke to Jon and Mel at GZG and Paul who came up and introduced himself as an occasional reader of my blog.  Hi Paul!  Anyway, Jon apologized for not having the new 6mm not VOTOMS cast up in time for this show, but promises me definitely by Salute.  I've promised him more conversions when he has got the first lot I did cast.  He also mentioned some not VOTOMS at 25mm for 15mm power armour, or robots etc.

Yes he is looking at me as I took this and saying don't put me in the picture, but relented when he saw it was me and the chance of fame and glory from appearing on my log.  Who am I kidding here?  Peter Pig demonstrating their new Vikings game called Longships: The Wrath of the Vikings.  I really like their rules and play AK47 from them, and his figures and exquisite.  Now all I've got to do is get around to painting the ones I bought several years ago.

Trevor and Oliver playing 7TV by Crooked Dice as the Federation bad guys, or something approximating Blake 7 bad guys, and losing to a couple of seven year old's.  Oh how we laughed.  Okay, how I laughed.  They took it well and had a fun game.  Oliver's only complaint was that there were no Zombie games being run this year.  He likes killing zombies, what can I say?

A Lace War's game put on by SEEMS: South East Essex Military Society, which I was a member of a long time ago.  They always put on a good looking table.

Finally, Oliver at home painting up his squad of miniatures for a game called Mercs that he had to assemble immediately we got in the door.   I think I can say a job well done and the another generation of wargaming ensured.
  

Gruntz

 

Last week I received in the mail a copy of Gruntz.  Some of my readers may remember I reported playing Gruntz at last years SELWG, which you read about here.  I enjoyed playing the game, helped by the fact that I won, and receiving the prize of the day and have been wanting to review the rules for Henry for some while.  So now that I have a copy of the rules in my grubby paws my plan is to start work on the review at the end of the month; this down to being in the middle of finishing a novel, which you can read about here, and wanting to play another game or two to refresh my memory of the rules next weekend at SELWG.  I've been following the development of Gruntz over the years (scroll down for picture) and have to say this is one fine looking rule book where I know for a fact has been extensively playtested and revised in light of feedback from the players.

Look, I'll let you into a little secret now.  Promise you won't tell anyone.  It's going to get a good review from me, so go buy a set now and then read my review later.  You'll be glad you did.

I will also be putting a game report and overview as a follow up on here, once the review has been published in Miniature Wargames, along the lines of my Heavy Gear review game I've played.  Though be warned, I will be playing my games using 10mm figures, because that is what I have, and to show that one can do crazy things like that.  So more to come.
  

Ogre Miniature Variants

Remember the above from here.  It's my unfinished sculpt of the Ogre Ninja.  There are lots of reasons, some good, some pretty lame why this little beauty has not been finished.  One reason is that an official miniature is now available from SJG.  The other is the amount of work required to finish it that I could spent doing other things.

I've made a decision to finish it, but not as a Ninja, but as a Mark-2 Scout variant based on some stats from Henry Cobb's page here.  Henry has to be one of the leading lights on Ogre stats and has a lot of useful stuff on his web page.  Check it out.

Anyway to quote from here; "However if the Ninja was produced without the Missile Rack at first (until it was proven on the Mark-IV) and simply had the rest of its armament then it's load factor would be less than the Mark-V. And then you could assume that stealth was also in development until 2087 or so. The cost for this Ninja-Minus would only be 74 VPs (2 missiles in tubes, 1 MB, 2 SB, 8 AP, 5 treads per hex times 4 hexes of move) and it could have been seen as a scout replacement for the Mark-II until the stealth and rack technologies were available. Then when the Mark-IV was deployed, the Ninja was obsolete as a pure scout and so redeveloped with stealth and missile rack."

So that's what I'm going to do with this model, because it makes it unique.  Thinking about this has also made me start imagining a NAC Mark 1 variant that would stylistically be a better fit with the classic Winchell Chung designs, mostly down to the fact that I don't like the current Mark 1 & 2 models.  By that I means they are perfectly nice models, but they look more like Pan European mini-Fencers than precursors of the classic Mark 3 & 5 designs.  YMMV.

More thoughts and pictures in due course.
  

Expanding My Ogre Combine Forces

   

It's been almost a year, a long time really, since I've looked to expand my Ogre/GEV forces.  I've been having a bit of a sabbatical from my miniature wargaming this year having been working on writing three novels, which you can read about here if you should so desire?

Anyway,  The above picture shows my next stage of expansion of my forces.  Last year I was very lucky to be able to purchase some more Combine miniatures from Daniel who was going over to Austin to be the new Ogre line developer.  Hence the unpainted models waiting to be assembled in due course.

As you can see I did somehow managed to paint the first colour on the North American Combine miniatures I had squirreled away in my maturing box that were previously shown here, you will need to scroll down to the bottom of the page.  As a reminder I've had these models sitting around waiting for me to do something with them for a very long time indeed.  How long?  Twenty years, which is a bit embarrassing really, except I do have the excuse of going off to train to be a nurse and working and other stuff like that.

The obvious observation is that miniatures don't paint themselves and it takes time to get an army together.  I've been looking through my notes on the number of armour units and infantry one needs to be able to play GEV scenarios and have identified a shortfall of miniatures in a number of areas.  However, getting these as a MiB is proving problematical as they are Warehouse 23 specials, and not generally available product, which means I'm not going to be able to realistically have enough miniatures to run GEV scenarios this year at Dragonmeet.  Next year, fingers crossed this situation will have changed.
  

Robot Fire Breathing Dragon

  

All it needs is frickin laser beams coming out of its eyes and the robot apocalypse can begin.

  

The Chains of Command

My copy of Chain of Command arrived earlier this week and has that lovely new book smell when I opened it to read.  Now some of you may well be asking why I bought a set of WW2 rules given that this is not one of periods that I play?  A good question indeed, and my answer is that I'm a rule junky.  I like to read wargame rules that challenge my preconceptions and stretch my imagination and Too Fat Lardies publish fascinating rule sets that do precisely that.

My intention is to use these rules for Inter War games say for the Spanish Civil War, which I do have an interest in, or adapting them for WW1 games, and even stealing the mechanisms for Vietnam era games.  Somewhere deep and dark I have an idea about using the command and control aspects of the game for a near future SF game involving power armour, drones and cybertanks etc.  Muwuhuhahaha!

Anyway, after reading these, watching some games being played and hanging around with disreputable people talking all things Lard, I recommend that you just go and order this set of rules today.  The book is just so chock full of ideas that it ought to have a waning label that says full of addictive fun rules that will make your head explode.