After action report: 5150 Star Army

A large group turned out last week to try out 5150: Star Army, the latest revamped release from Two Hour Wargames. Our club had tried out 5150 (previous edition) earlier this year with mixed results, mostly owing to the fact that we weren't sure if we were playing the game correctly.

This go-round was much, much cleaner. We organized two side-by-side games on Karl's excellent desert wastelands table. I refereed (and played in) a 2-vs-1 game pitting two Free Company mercenary commanders against a single Star Army commander.

As is the spirit of 5150, we eyeballed the opposing forces and tried to come up with balanced armies. The two Free Company players each brought 15-20 figures to the table, organized in two squads each with one or two support weapons per squad. The Star Army player brought three squads with support. As this was a demo game meant to show off the rules engine, we didn't bother with a scenario. All future games will use scenarios, though, because it's more fun that way!

Anyway, the game played smoothly. As the referee, I had no problem at all leading the players through the various reaction tests as they maneuvered their guys around the table. The open-ended nature of the reactions meant that some turns were quite brisk while others turned into epic back-and-forth firefights. This was exciting for me, but the other Free Company player didn't seem to enjoy it as much.

Here's a photo of how our game shaped up. The Free Company squads are on the left side of the photo, approaching under the cover of some boulders and trees. The Star Army, on the right, is scaling the rocky hill in the center of the table.

They seized the high ground early on, which allowed the Star Army support weapons (rocket launcher and grenade launcher, mostly) to rain death down on our approaching troops. We got to learn A LOT about the outgunned rule while fleeing from these weapons. At one point two opposing squads were perched on opposite sides of the hilltop lobbing grenades at each other!

The game itself was a glorious meatgrinder, which was of course the whole idea in the first place. Nothing helps you learn a game like dishing out (and absorbing) heavy casualties.

In this pic, the Star Army player presses the attack with his badly mauled squads.

By the end of the game we had a good grasp of the rules. What's more, I had learned quite a bit about the differences between the various army reaction tables. Star Army is much more apt to shoot accurately under pressure, while Free Company is liable to panic and snap-fire an entire magazine.

Rebased MechWarrior clix in action

For Karl's birthday last week, we got together to play Armor Grid: Mech Attack!, a fast-play skirmish wargame for sci-fi wargames featuring — you guessed it — BattleMechs, along with assorted infantry and tanks. The game is designed for paper miniatures, but you can just as easily use classic BattleTech figures, Reaper CAV models, or in our case a bunch of re-based MechWarrior clix.

Karl has amassed an impressive collection of MechWarrior clix (infantry, vehicles and mechs) specifically for this game. These are prepainted figures from the WizKids game, and most of them look quite nice on the tabletop — especially when removed from the clicky base and put onto a proper miniatures base, complete with drybrushed desert sand.

At 13 pages, Mech Attack is most definitely rules-lite. Like the other skirmish games that our group regularly plays — including Song of Blades & Heroes and Wastelands — Mech Attack is designed to be played with anywhere from 5 to 15 models, depending on the size of game. We played two games, the first being five mechs vs. five mechs, the second being combined arms with light mechs, a vehicle and a couple infantry squads.

Both games were a lot of fun. Players take turns moving mechs and firing their weapons, which include lasers, cannons, machineguns and missile launchers. But be careful — moving and firing generates heat, which can cause your mech to overheat if you try to do too much in a turn. I never played classic BattleTech, but I understand that heat and heat dissipation was a big part of that game. As it was, heat is certainly a unique mechanic in Mech Attack, and it really forces players to carefully consider how they use their mechs on the battlefield.

The most innovative part of Mech Attack is the armor grid (from whence came the publisher's name, no doubt). Picture a big grid of boxes, with each vertical column numbered 1-10. Each type of weapon (cannon, laser, missile, etc) does a different damage "shape" (I'm talking Tetris pieces here) that is applied to the armor grid based on a dice roll. In this way, you gradually fill up the armor grid columns by dealing damage. Once filled, these columns force critical damage, which in turn causes the mech or vehicle to lose weapons or get destroyed outright.

Anyway, the armor grid was far and away the most interesting part of the game. Some weapons are good in combination with others, combining their shapes to create devastating damage patterns on the armor grid. Infantry weapons are applied to the armor grid as well, giving infantry a real chance of harming mechs by peppering them with relentless small arms fire. In the picture below, an Ocelot mech tried to assault a dug-in unit of light infantry, only to be destroyed by a lucky critical result on the following turn. (That made the game for me right there — I heart games where infantry has a valid role to play on the battlefield.)

Overall, Mech Attack looks to be a great excuse to fiddle around with bucketloads of prepainted MechWarrior clix. For a slightly more strategic gaming experience, I'm planning to use these same re-based MechWarrior figures to try out Future War Commander (which has plenty of reference points for classic BattleTech players).

Battle report for Wastelands, the post-apocalyptic skirmish game

My regular wargaming group got together last week to try out Wastelands, a skirmish miniatures game set in a post-apocalyptic world. The rules are philosophically similar to Song of Blades & Heroes — meaning they're simple, customizable and packed with RPG-like flavor — so we knew this would be an easy game to pick up and play. Plus, the game is generic enough to support all manner of post-apocalyptic scenarios and factions: Road Warrior-style highway raiders, Terminator machines, 40k-style shock troopers and everything in between. Games generally include anywhere from 3 to 10 figures, plus maybe a vehicle or two.

Karl, one of the players in the group, had a fantastic desert board set up at his place, and we were able to get in two games, each lasting just over an hour or so. Each game was a three-way slugfest; we avoided crafting a specific scenario because we really just wanted to see how the game would play.


The games were a lot of fun, but the suggested point value for each team (300 points) offered some wildly disparate teams. For example, 300 points got 6 Mad Max-style gangers, or 3 tricked-out shock trooper commandos, or 3 nomadic survivors plus a rustbucket police cruiser.

The 3 armored shock troopers proved to be the most potent fighting force on the board that evening, owing mostly to their bitchin' body armor. They didn't have numerical superiority, but they were able to walk all over the nomadic survivors and the Terminator-style robot infantry, as seen in these photos.


We all agreed that, despite the prowess of the shock troopers, it's just not that much fun to have a team consisting of only 3 guys, so we are definitely going to raise the point cap a bit higher next time we play, maybe up to 500 points or so. I mean, the point of playing miniatures wargames is to get fun toys on the table, right?


Also, the lone vehicle didn't really perform as we hoped it would. I didn't buy a gun for it, so all it was able to do was lurch back and forth, attempting to ram various enemies. It looked cool on the table, but it ultimately killed no one and was itself destroyed piecemeal in both games. I think the game will play much better with several vehicles zipping around on the board, rather than one big moving target that everyone shoots at each turn.


Lastly, Wastelands had its share of inconsistencies and muddled rules. We ended up houseruling more than a few key things over the course of two games. This wasn't a big deal, and I understand that Wastelands is a DIY release that probably didn't benefit from an outside editor, but it's worth mentioning. I'm sure we'll codify our Wastelands notes in some sort of house rules addendum that we can all share.

Pretty terrain for a Song of Blades & Heroes

I met up with my regular miniatures group (well, just the one guy this time) to play Song of Blades & Heroes. The folks at the game shop had recently built some gorgeous new fall scenery pieces, so we whipped up a quick battlefield featuring an autumn forest leading up to a brooding manor house.


My barbarians were assaulting the manor house, which was defended by Karl's humans and elves. I expected him to sit tight behind the walls and wait for me to venture forth — but Karl denied me such satisfaction and instead sallied forth to meet my forces with a rain of arrows from his three archers.


We got to try out the group shooting rules, and they proved to be quite effective. In fact, that seems to be the best way to use archers in SBH: in groups of 2-3, rather than as single shooters. Combined, the elven archers felled my barbarian leader, which wreaked havoc on my loose formation of attackers. Some fled, others plunged into the forest to escape the steel-tipped storm.

The game carried on, but I was on the ropes from the second turn. In retrospect, the attacker probably should have had more points than the defender.

But damn! The game was so PRETTY! The autumn tree clumps looked just right with my marauding fighters mixed in there. And the defenders' keep was cool, too. It had working doors and everything. Overall, we were definitely able to stay faithful to the old adage of miniature wargaming: getting cool toys on the table.

My ever-changing gaming interests

It's been months since I've run a roleplaying game, mainly because I've been spending lots of time painting miniatures — and consequently I've been gravitating toward games that will give me an opportunity to actually use those painted miniatures!

Lately I've found a group of guys in Chicago who play Song of Blades & Heroes, the excellent little fantasy skirmish game that I discovered earlier this year. We've been meeting twice a month, or thereabouts, to talk trash and move our little fantasy figures around the table. It doesn't hurt that the game shop where we meet is just 4 blocks from my apartment in Chicago!

The thing with Song of Blades & Heroes is that it's almost a roleplaying game. You can choose unique-looking miniatures, name your characters, send them on specific tasks, etc. The game mechanic is simple enough that it can be adapted to handle typical roleplaying tasks.


For our most recent game, we set up some dungeon blocks to create a full-on tabletop labyrinth, and then we rolled up a "quest for the magic item" scenario that pitted a squad of dark elves against a marauding crew of gladiators and a patrol of evil snakemen. Badass!

Since GenCon, I've become enamored with sci-fi miniatures gaming — starships in particular, probably a direct result of me sitting in on an excellent demo of War Rocket, the pulp sci-fi starship game from Hydra Miniatures.

During the drive back to Chicago, I realized that I loved the War Rocket ruleset, but I decided to collect a more "generic" looking set of starships, so I could potentially use them for Full Thrust, Starmada or any of the other fleet-action rulesets out there. Full Thrust, by the way, is available for free on the web from Ground Zero Games.

I'm just a week or so away from trying out my first game of Full Thrust (or War Rocket, depending on the group). For now, I'm trying to create my own sci-fi milieu, rather than use a published setting. (Aside: Starship minis games seem to have this disturbing tendency to make all their factions into fascimiles of political blocs that exist today on Earth. So we have space Russians, space Japanese, space Germans, space Americans, etc. Weird, that. How about some aliens?)

I'm also deliberately building my starship fleets using a variety of models from different manufacturers. This is explicitly encouraged in Full Thrust, much to my delight. So far, I'm using models from Silent Death, Firestorm Armada, Star Fleet Battles and AeroTech. Check back for photos soon!

My sci-fi bug hasn't stopped with starships, though...I'm contemplating getting some old MechWarrior click-base figures to rebase and use with Future War Commander or Dirtside. I priced out some pieces last night, and it looks like I can get two armies for $30 or so. And of course, they're prepainted...

Play report: Song of Blades & Heroes

I downloaded Ganesha Games' Song of Blades & Heroes last month with much anticipation. Here, I thought, was the miniatures game I was looking for: fast, rules-lite and beholden to no particular manufacturer of miniatures. I could paw through my miniatures collection, scrape together a motley handful and create a warband in 10 minutes flat.

All these expectation were exceeded in my first game, which took place last weekend at Chicagoland Games. I met up with Brian, a friend and fellow player in ChicagoWiz's Dark Ages AD&D game. Brian was in the same boat as me: he wanted a super casual minis game that retained a bit of tactical appeal. Like me, he had tried Mordheim but found it lacking.

Anyway, we were joined by Tim, who had actually played Song of Blades & Heroes before (and boasted some keen custom miniatures to boot). We played two games: the first with about 8 models per side, the second with about 15 models per side (it was a two-vs-one game where Brian and I teamed up to take on Tim).


In the game, players take turns activating miniatures one at a time, generally using them to move, shoot and attack where appropriate. To activate a figure, players roll between 1 and 3d6. Each dice that rolls at or higher than the figure's Quality value (one of only two stats for each figure! simplicity!) grants one action. BUT if a player ever rolls two failures on a single activation, his turn is over. This means that if you get greedy and try to squeeze too many actions out of a low Quality figure, your turn can end prematurely — leaving one whole flank exposed, as happened in my game against Brian.


So there's some risk — and some tactical decision-making — that goes along with activating your troops. Do you roll three dice for your lizardman warchief, knowing that if he fails your turn will be over? Or do you play it safe and roll one dice, knowing that you will only be able to do one thing with your guy?

Beyond activation, combat is a simple d6 roll with each figure's combat score added to the result. A few other modifiers get thrown in as well, stuff that's pretty familiar to anyone who's ever played D&D 3.x. If you double your opponent's score, he dies. If you beat him without doubling, a couple other cool effects can happen.

In any case, the sheer speed of the game and the fact that you can use a huge variety of miniatures won me over. I daresay this game would be an excellent wargame option for folks seeking to add a little strategy into their D&D campaigns. And it's perfect for my beer and pretzels miniatures crowd.

[Chicagoland gamers] Unload your leftover stuff at the Warchest

I just got wind of a miniatures swap meet that's going down June 12 at Trinity College in Deerfield, Ill., just outside Chicago. Check out the details here. Admission is free, and if you happen to be a wargamer with a basement full of stuff to sell, you can rent a table for $20 and sell your wares all day long.

I'll stop by to browse — not that I need any more miniatures or anything.