SAGA and AWI

After showing my dark age miniatures I decided that perhaps I would enjoy a solo game of SAGA. After buying a nice mat and setting up the game table I discovered I no longer had the faction dice. I had forgotten I had give them away. So I followed this advice and retrofitted a load of D6 dice and the Viking and Welsh faction boards.

I played a few games. I didn't really enjoy them. I'm not an experienced solo gamer and so that was a factor. What really bothered me was the scale, ie the sweep of the game. The 28mm figures and terrain on a 6'x4' table was visually congested, and the game play had no satisfying built-up or peak. Most faction units were in melee within a few turns and the outcome was obvious. It felt flat. Perhaps if I had been able to extract a story from the encounters and ensuing battles I would have enjoyed them more. (Bloodbaths are not stories.)

I have recently been reading Henry Hyde's Shot, Steel, and Stone rules, and listening to his podcast and that of the Yarkshire gamer. Their advocacy for the large wargame has definitely affected me. Next year is the 250th anniversary of the American War of Independence. The battles are smaller than Napoleon's so it seems practical to have enough figures and landscape to make it feel authentic and not gamey. Gaming the 165ish significant battles, some quite local to my home, on a large table full of 10mm units seems wonderful.

Wednesday Gamers

A decade ago I was invited to join the "Wednesday Gamers." This was a small group who had been playing miniature wargames together every Wednesday for decades. It was a rare gift to be in the company of these older men who had gone through life's joys and troubles, remained friends, patient with each's foibles, and continued to have a genuine enthusiasm for the hobby. Within a few years, as each retired, their situations fundamentally changed and the Wednesday gaming sessions stopped. I will forever be grateful to Al, Maurice, Leo, Kim, and Kevin.

MSCHF's “Not Wheels” and Osprey's Gaslands

I recently saw MSCHF's “Not Wheels” and it reminded me of Osprey Publishing's Gaslands, a tabletop post-apocalypse vehicle combat game. Even if you don't play the game, getting some matchbox cars, salvaging greeblies from the inside of defunct printers, superglue, and some paint is a lot of fun for the whole family (well, some members of the family).

Inspiration and ingenuity

Sometimes all you need is inspiration and ingenuity for your tabletop space wargames.

The path to annihilation is lead by amateurs

I had hoped to see Oppenheimer in 70mm at the local IMAX, but it seems to be sold out until December 7th. With the clarity of hindsight, I seem to have prepared for this by this weekend watching Threads, the 1984 BBC docudrama of nuclear war over Sheffield, England. (Thank you Wyrd Britain for the link.) It is unrelentingly depressing and, to this viewer, an unambiguous portrayal of the actual end-times. Which begs the question, how did we come to accept national politicians to be any more prepared for existential decisions than the local school board or town council? By definition they are all amateurs. God help us.

Warhammer 40k: I don't really like the game

I have enjoyed my time with Warhammer 40k. The Games Workshop plastic models are very well produced and a joy to assemble and paint. The background lore is deep and some of its retelling is masterfully done in the Black Library publications. I particularly like the Horus Heresy stories even if they are set 10,000 years before the world I am playing in. Unfortunately, I don't really like the game for the simple reason that there are far too many stats. There are stats from the individual weapons, to figures, to units, and so on all the way up to the whole army. This makes for a great variety of play as every game truly is a unique combinatorial experience. But, I can't play a game like that. I don't have the inclination or, frankly, the time to dedicate to learning not only my faction's specifics, but also those of my opponent's army. An opponent whose army can be made up from many dozens of races.

I have decided to keep the figures. I had intended on selling them, but, the figures are very nice and perhaps I will play the One Page Grimdark Future Rules one day.

Waste Wars

I was reading the New York Times last year and came across an article about the hazardous working conditions of private waste management companies. The work is hard, the pay too little, and the time pressures too great. I don't mean to make little of this horrible situation, but, later, my mind wandered, as it often does, to Terry Gilliam’s movie Brazil and the gorilla plumber. I have always been intrigued by the plumber’s statement that plumbing was the last radical trade in the near distant future. What if garbage collection was too? Could its work be made into a game?

"The year 2017 saw the rise of the litteral cut-throat waste management companies. Their goal was to grow their business by any means possible. By 2027 waste management had become paramilitarised." Waste Wars

I never completed the game development. What I have developed is more, I think, a source of ideas for an actual game developer or for repurposing an existing game.

Gluing Warhammer 40k Space Marines

Started to glue together my Warhammer 40,000 Space Marine models. I am not fond of the aesthetic of their uniforms, but the modelmakers have made good use of it whereby each successive layer can be used used to hide the mistakes made underneath.

I don't know if other hobbyists do this, but after assembly I give all the surfaces where I scraped off the mold lines a light wash of plastic glue, aka acetone. For these models this seems to further help hide the mold lines. Will know more once they are primed.

Update: Is it just mine or are all 40k space marines right handed and turning towards the left?

Update: I should not have put them on bases and attached the guns before painting them!

Update: Awaiting the enemy ...

Craig Forbes' Tuckbox Generator

I wanted a simple and inexpensive way to store my X Wing miniatures. In the process of looking at how others had solved this problem I found Craig Forbes' Tuckbox Generator. Use this to create custom boxes for each miniature. See microhangers. Having many little boxes is too fiddly for my general use, but I am very glad someone wrote a bit of software to create box templates.

Gaming with Alexa

I am an armchair tabletop wargame and broadgame geek. I say armchair as I mostly seem to read and speculate about games far more than I play them. In part this is due to available opponents and in part to simply not making the time. Nevertheless, I persist. 

When my children were very young I noticed that they would spend long periods of time studying the details of intricate pictures. This was their "dinosaur period" and so it was mostly illustrations of Jurassic flora and fauna. I had the notion of a game set on a large rug sized illustration they could scamper around on. The rug was pressure sensitive so the children's location was known. The rug would speak and listen. The children would respond to its directions either alone or in small groups. They could be the hunters, the hunted, the treasure seekers, the jungle veterinarians, etc.

The game remained speculative, but the ideas of location aware game boards, audio interaction, and physical game pieces has continued to interest me. I explored using old school pen digitizers, old school touch screens that used infrared interference for locating, magnets and mechanical switches, RFID, image pattern recognition with and without QR-codes or colored dot markers, etc. 

Gaming in wild came under scrutiny. How would LARPing or scavenger hunts change with augmented reality? What about audio only games? What would a naval or starship strategy game require from a driver stuck in commuter traffic? How much of the map or simple orientation could the player keep in their head? Clearly, these would not be realtime games or there would be high likelihood of distracting the driver into actual vehicular combat.

When Amazon's Alexa was introduced I read the SDK documentation with excitement. Amazon had done the hard work of creating a conversational model for audio interaction. I think a small, jet fighter combat oriented over the driver's car roof is a game well within the skills of even a moderately skill programmer. Now to make the time.

Slack and "Operation Crossfire aftermath"

I was watching Operation Crossfire aftermath and another use for Slack came to mind. Lindybeige was coordinating a miniatures wargame with several dozen people, across the world, over a 4 hour period using email. It was a logistical nightmare trying to keep track of each conversion and the materials needed to be gotten and sent to each participant -- half of whom were called "Steve"! As I watched it occurred to me that had Lindybeige instead used Slack and created, for example, a channel for each participant and a channel or two for general purpose it would have been logistically much easier. Channels in bold have unread messages, messages are organized chronologically, messages could include maps or command and control documents, messages can be pinned for easier reference, etc. Lindybeige still would have been exhausted by the effort, but, hopefully, in good spirits throughout.

I should note that using Slack in this way is not the same as using a messaging platform such as Skype, IRC, etc. In a messaging platform you are talking with an individual within the context of the rest of their life's conversions. Instead, a Slack workspace is being using to gather individuals for a shared purpose. The rest of their life happens outside of the workspace. When the individual is in the workspace they are, for all intents and purposes, the character they are playing. This is reinforce by their communicating via the named channel. I am no long Andrew Gilmartin, but instead I am #Second Lieutenant Anderson.

[1] This is a follow up to Slack for One.
[2] I know next to nothing about who is Lindybeige. I do enjoy his YouTube channel.

Four at a time

My miniature painting has not gone well. I am deep in guilt. A fellow gamer gave me all his 28mm dark age armies when he decided that he was not going to play that period any more. It was a very generous gift and I am grateful. I did not like his Norman army's painting, however, and so decided to repaint them. I stripped 27 figures and primed them. I used a priming method I had not used before on the advice of another gamer I trusted. The primer is a mixture of black gesso and a medium used for painting on glass. My results were not so good. I am sure it was my fault. The consequence was that the figures sat on the worktable for months. My guilt set in. I had made the gift useless.

Months later I was reading about primers, as you do, and was inspired by the article on using Krylon ColorMaster ultra flat black primer. I stripped all 27 of the figures again and applied the primer. My results were not so good. I am sure it was my fault. Again, the figures sat on the worktable in limbo. My guilt grew heavier.

This weekend I stripped all 27 figures again. They are, as I write this, sitting in a second round of stripper. Each of my successive primings seems to have actually added tooth to the figure's surface and so has made cleaning them more difficult!

I have learned a few useful lessons form this experience. The small lesson is that the primer I have used for years works and I really don't need to experiment. The big lesson is I can't work on so many figures at once. If I had only worked on 4 figures at a time then by the end of each week I would have 4 painted figures. Within two months all the figures would have been painted and have been on the table killing the Anglo-Saxons.

When the second round of stripper has eaten away at the bond between primer and figure I am going to pack them away. Too much bad karma has enveloped them. I and they need to rest. Instead, I am going to paint some old Warhammer 40K space marines. 4 at a time.

Computer assisted support for historical wargames will happen if...

My favorite wargames podcast is Meaples & miniatures. The hosts are all wargaming butterflies, and I mean this kindly, and so there is a good amount of new and old discussed and compared. Their 250th episode is their last of the Summer as they take a break to, well, rest and renew like the rest of the northern hemisphere. For this episode they are answering questions from their audience. I've not finished listening yet, but felt the need to bring a different perspective to one of their answers.

The question was whether or not an assistant computer application would be used in historical wargaming? Apps are appearing more regularly now for boardgames. Some of these boardgames have game mechanics and parts that are very close to those of miniature wargames. Even the forthcoming X Wing 2 is supposed to be app assisted. So, there is a trend in apps and there is a trend in wargames to be more like boardgames (in their initial costs and time commitments). An overlap is inevitable.

The hosts' common answer was one having to do with implementation rather than game play. They discussed how an app is dependent upon a general device, and a large networking and computing infrastructure. The general device being your phone which, for all practical purposes, you own but have little control over its OS or applications suite. The infrastructure being mostly the publisher's backend servers in data centers that run the core of the game programming; which, again, you have no practical control over. The hosts see these dependencies as the achilles heal of apps. They suggest that only large publishers have the money to continue to support a game that has passed its peek sales and so must sustain the game's implementation on smaller, incremental sales. While not said, and I expect that the hosts would agree, that it is optimistic to expect that any publisher would continue to support a game beyond its suitable profitability; ie, if profitability is too small then the company is better of discontinuing the game and use the freed-up resources on higher profit games. So apps are doomed!

Not so. There are implementations that do not require the publisher's continued support. First, some assumptions.

1. A phone or tablet is cheap enough to have a single, specialized use. The device is the game and it is the "rule book." Rule books are around US $15 to $50 these days. The device would be the same. The device will never be upgraded so the apps on it will continue working baring mechanical failure.

2. The device needs access to a messaging network. The messaging network is one where every device has a unique address and that a message can be sent to that address. If players are not colocated then a wide area network would be needed. The Simple Message System (SMS, ie texting) is one such network. There are others, but SMS is by far the most common, well supported, and almost future-proof given the world's telecoms commitment to it.

In many ways, the Kindle with 3G is an archetypal example of this device and network.

With such a device and network you can implement a multiplayer game very successfully. All the algorithms needed, eg peer to peer and modular co-operating services, are battle tested and open. The device's computational and storage requirements are minimal. The networking bandwidth needed is small, eg a few kilobytes, irregularly sent around to all player devices [1]. Embedded systems manufacturers have been designing and massively deploying just this kind of environment for years.

So, if you consider this different implementation of computer assisted support for historical wargames then the answer is yes, just as soon as gaming companies have lead engineers and architects that have a broader view of the devices and their communication. Now the real and important question can be asked, is historical wargames game play enhanced by having this assistant?

See my earlier posting $0.43 for Psychotherapist Barbie services about funding backend servers for toys.

[1] MMOs, massive multiplayer, online games, is a different beast. These systems do need a central or federated infrastructure.

Too much kit

I have been reading and thinking about Sam Mustafa's new game rules Freejumper, spaceship combat, and Aurelian, the crisis in 3rd century Rome. They are both very interesting and likely make for enjoyable play. They both use game-specific cards for activation and (almost) no dice. In my mind they are both boardgames without a board and with figures. I have nothing against games that use card activation, resource management, or other game mechanics. I really enjoy playing SAGA, for instance, and it is also a boardgame without a board and with figures.

I think what bothers me about these games is that there are too many parts that must be had. To play a dark ages games using the SAGA rules each player must have the faction's "battle board" and their customized dice. To play an ancients game using the Aurelian rules each player needs to have its deck of cards and the unique tokens. These kit are not cheap. For SAGA the rules are $30 and 2 sets of dice are $36 for a total of $66 before playing the first game. For Aurelian the rules are $29 (PDF) and 2 sets of cards are $40 (or, if you print them yourself, $20 in inkjet ink and $10 in sleeves) for a total of $69 (or $59) before playing the first game.

I don't think my aversion is to the cost, our hobby is expensive, but there is ample difference between a high entry cost vs a moderate ongoing cost. Clearly that is where my mind is. I believe that to play a wargame it must be enough to simply have a copy of the rules, figures for both sides, a few rulers, several generic dice, and some generic tokens.

Paint Shaker

To have the itch to paint miniatures again. My paints have been sitting unused for much of a year and many have the pigment separated from the medium. It would take me only a few minutes to shake them all, but this needs a tool! So I built this paint shaker from parts I had on-hand.

It really does not work as well as I had hoped, but it does help. A ball-bearing in the paint container would, I suspect, greatly help stir up the pigment. The kids absconded with all that I had and so I will need to get more.

Viking and Anglo-Saxon army painting saga concludes

If you had any interest in my 6mm Viking and Anglo-Saxon army painting saga then, well, first, you need to get out more and meet people, but, second, I sold them to a nice chap in Australia. Who then sent them to a nice chap in Scotland to paint them! Perhaps I should have done that.

What scale are scale buildings?

In response to the question "When gaming a city fight, do you all try to match the scale/size of the scenery to your miniature troops:"

A true scale creates overpowering buildings and the combatants are very greatly diminished. So a smaller scale for buildings with regard to their volume, but not their floor plan, removes this diminishment. I have not tried this, but you could use the Disney World trick of reducing the height of each floor above the ground floor. See Forced Perspective.

Why are tires so expensive?

Where can you buy 15mm and 28mm wheels for military vehicles? I looked around today and found several suppliers, but with outrageous prices at ~$2/tire. Langley Models have better prices, but still high. For some reason I had expected to be able to buy a 100 for $10.

"Flat" terrain feature example

I like adding features to an otherwise flat terrain board. This includes features like swales, outcroppings, or a bunch of logs. Anything that might get in the way of gameplay's terrain is put at the edges of the game board. Here is constructive set of photographs showing the progression of a flagstone and well terrain feature by Firedragon Games

How to start gaming a scenario?

I am working on a scenario and I am looking for advise. I have imagined a setting in the future where inadequate water supplies has lead to national governments and international corporations buying land in other countries to claim water rights. The water is then transported back home -- as water or as foods, eg wheat, rice, etc -- or sell it to the highest bidder. This lead to armed insurrection by the locals even though the water claims are legal. The insurrections have now devolved into multi-party factional/clan warfare. All factions have advanced military equipment (mechs!), but some factions have better supply lines and maintenance facilities than others.

The environment is harsh. Dust storms of national and global scale have made long distance wireless communications unreliable. So, despite the advanced equipment the factions continue to rely on scouting (human and autonomous drones) and runners to convey situation awareness and instructions between units. Even long range targeting and retargeting takes significant time, but once established is accurate. Some factions rely on well planned actions with strict adherence to the plan by the discrete units. Other factions rely on discrete units making local decisions stemming from the unit's overall purpose.

The scenario I am working on is a tanker truck needs to be driven to the coast (ie, off board) by its corporate owners. A rival faction wants to divert the trunk to its own facilities for local distribution (ie, driven off the other side of the board). It is a stalemate to have the trunk not reach either of these destinations before N rounds of play. It is a defeat for both sides if the tanker trunk is destroyed.

My initial plan was to use the Horizon Wars rules as I played an early edition of them from a few years ago. The rules are basic, but do make for a quick game. However, I am not wedded to them so am open to suggestions for other suitable rules.

My first question is how to start gaming a scenario? Is there an approach to determining the units needed? Or is it ad hoc, ie just play a game with a guess at unit composition and respond to the results? Or something else all together?

Update: The working document for this is at "A setting for near-future wargames."