Collectors Battlefield Wargame System: A Short Review

I want to apologize for the long hiatus in publishing anything on this blog.  My Mother was gravely ill and is doing better.  My father-in-law is in the last stages of a terminal illness and I have had some health issues, which have been resolved for the time being. Now onto the main event.

 We play tested this new rule set on Saturday.  Our group consisted of

from left to right, Gene, Ted and Jim.

And me, Jim felt the photo needed a little tilt, not sure if I agree.

Jim is going to run a scenario at Advance The Colors using a new rule set.  The rule set is

I presume that a lot of you have seen their ads in Wargame Illustrated.  They also feature prepainted figures and vehicles in 28mm.  I cannot comment on their vehicles or vehicles, because we have plenty of miniatures.

We played a skirmish game of Americans verses Germans.  We had rifle squads, sub-machine squad BAR team and two LMG teams.  We also had a Sherman and a Stug.  We were playing in order to determine the game mechanics, nothing very fancy. 

I am not to go turn by turn.  It was a meeting engagement and the objective was to hold the majority of the houses on the crossroads.  Two of the houses were stone and gave heavy cover.  The other two were wood and gave light cover.

Some photos of the table.

The Americans(Jim and Myself) and ze Germans(Ted and Gene) advanced towards the crossroads  Each unit gets an action, move, fire, stabilize wounded are among some of the actions.   There are warriors/leaders that can help a unit take two actions.  Again I am not going to go turn by turn , but there were casualties on each side.  Combat resolution uses six sided dice.  Each rifleman gets 1 D6, a supported LMG receives 6 D6 and the defender gets a saving throw with appropriate bonuses for cover.  Then if the rounds actually hit, the attacker rolls to determine if it is a kill or a wound.  

 


 We really enjoyed playing this game.  We liked how the rules dealt with wounded members of a team.  A wounded member will slow you down a lot and if two members on a team get wounded, not good.  In a lot of rules there are moral checks, but  those rule do not take into account the wounded.  Wounded in this game cannot take offensive fire, but can defend in a close assault. 

The downside to this Collector's Battlefield Wargaming rule set is the editing.  The rule set can be very vague and there are a lot of typos.

We will be playing this more and if you are attending Advance the Colors miniature convention, you can have a chance to play it.

One last thing, I always include some new project that Ted is working on.  He is a machine when it comes to painting.

Thank you for reading.

Mike

A short review of Sails of Glory.

I am going to give a quick review Sails of Glory is a games made by Ares Games. I am not going to go through every turn of our first battle, we did a few things incorrectly and as always you learn a little more with every play through.   The games components are of a very high standard.  The starter kit comes with four ships.

There are also add on ships that one can buy.  The add on ships come with a base, stat cards and maneuver cards.

The above photo shows your damage track, your actions, what sail your are under(Full/Half /Battle/Anchor) and whether you are loading or have loaded guns.  Each ship receives a certain number of actions denoted by the hands along the top of  the card and as your ship takes damage.  The ship has less actions available as the ship receives damage.  One can see the damage on the following photo. 

The following photo shows what actions that are available.

There are raise sail and lower sail actions.  One can shoot Ball, Double shot, Grape Shot and Chain Shot just to name a few.  One pre-plots maneuvers two turns in advance.  There are three sets of maneuver cards, one for no damage to your ship's mast, one for having a mast/masts down and for heading into the wind.

Here are some photos of the game, the only thing Ted did to the miniatures was to put a wash on the sails to bring out some of the detail.

Now for my impressions, it was a blast.  The rules are straight forward and one can choose how detailed they want the game to be.  With plotting your maneuver cards in advance, it makes one really think a bit.  The British players actually struck one another.   One has to decide what actions your are going to do.   And at the beginning of one turn, Ted the owner of the game plotted the port side guns to fire, oops.  His partner Gene in the other ship had maneuvered onto Ted's port-side between Ted and a British ship.  Gene's ship got a shot of double ball, ouch.  It really is a lot of fun.  We played the game in a couple of hours and it felt as if we had played for twenty minutes.  When time passes that quickly, that is a pretty good indication that it was a fun game.  I also believe that it would be a great convention game.   Each player getting one ship which would move the game along.  It takes a while for a ship to get whittled down to being ineffective so a convention player would not be done in a half hour.

Thank You for Reading.

Mike

Flickr Site




 

A little Game of CY 6 on Sunday.

Three of us got together on Sunday and played a game of Check Your Six.  It was just a pickup game.  The Luftwaffe was trying to get their bombers off the map. The forces are as follows, 6 Heinkel 111 (Falcon Miniatures), 2 Bf-109 (Raiden), 2 Hurricanes (Raiden) and 2 Spitfires(Raiden).

I am not going to go through every turn, however it was not a good day to be a British pilot.  The two Spitfires had three special damages between the two of them.  One was destroyed by two consecutive critical damages and the other had on critical damage that put him out of the game.  The two Hurricanes had only one critical, but it failed it's robustness roll twice.


The Germans on the other hand.  The Bf-109s were not very successful either.   Only one fired one shot, the other one never got into a position to fire.  All the damage to the British pilots were caused by light machine gun fire.  The only damage that the Luftwaffe took was a engine dame on one of the Heinkels.

Thank you for reading and if you want to see more photos of my painted miniatures, here is a link to my Flickr site.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/33016873@N06/sets 

Mike

A funny thing happened in my TOG or OUCH

I have had my TOG only for a day and Jingles is right.  The TOG is a lot of fun, but it is not a very good tank,.  Though I am having a blast playing it.  One of the first games today and I was on Westfield.  Advancing as one would do if they are attacking and not being a pot-licking camper..

A Lee, a tank that is just the opposite of the TOG (it is unpleasant),  crests the hill.

He takes a couple of shots and they bounce, he must be thinking, "Maybe if I move and get a different angle my shots will penetrate."

The Lee must be very frustrated now with all the bounced shots.  He must be thinking, "What can I do to damage this TOG?"  A brilliant idea flashes before his very eyes.

The Lee driver just has to build up a little speed.

Well maybe he should have thought this one out a little bit better.

Thank you for reading.  Have a great day.

Mike