Wastelands Meltdown: Post-apocalyptic miniatures gaming goodness

Though this blog went totally silent through much of the summer, plenty of gaming was going on. Actually, I rediscovered Magic and have been enjoying the heck of out that game lately. I also took a break from miniatures for a few months ... until GenCon, that is. That got me revved up again, as it always does.

Anyway, on to the substance of this blog post. Last weekend I went to Karl's house to play Wastelands Meltdown, the latest iteration of quick-play post-apocalyptic skirmish rules. We've enjoyed Wastelands v1.2, but this edition promised some upgrades and clarifications.

Of course, the rules took a backseat to the spectacle of gaming on Karl's excellent desert table. We set up a quick scenario — a supply stop for one of my wastelands traders, who was escorted by several heavily armed mercenaries. Karl's raiders (each outfitted with a souped-up mutant vehicle) were split into two groups, which both entered opposite table corners to ambush my merchant and his retinue.

Here's my setup in the center of the battlefield. Karl's terrain looked just smashing when we got it all out on the table.



Karl's objective was to disable 2 of the 3 vehicles that I had clustered around my trading post in the center of the table. My goal was to break Karl's warband by inflicting enough casualties. Here's the table before the game started; Karl's forces will arrive on the top left and top right of the board.


The game was a bit of a bloodbath for Karl. In a foolhardy attempt to try out the vehicle rules (including accelerating and colliding) we both drove our two heavily armed trucks directly at each other, building up quite a head of steam before slamming into each other on one flank of the table. My truck was beefier so I survived; Karl's truck exploded and incinerated most of his survivors, though one chaingunner piled out unscathed.



After that it was just wetwork by my power armored infantry. I had two on the table, and they were the toughest single figures in the game. Of course, they cost about double the points of a typical wasteland raider.

A few highlights from the end of the game follow, with photos.

Karl's truck rammed (and killed) my mercenary commander.


As part of the escape, this gnarly cargo hauler motored up and over a small ridge before running down some hapless wastelands raiders.


Bill the Tracker, armed with his hunting rifle, seized the high ground and spent the entire game taking potshots on any raider brave enough to venture close enough to his position.

Auditioning for a sci-fi skirmish rule set

There's a reason my local miniatures club is called Chicago Skirmish Wargames — it's because we like collecting small, unique groups of cool miniatures rather than vast, homogeneous armies that take eons to deploy onto the table.

As a result, we've been drawn to small, skirmish-scale rulesets for various genres. We've got fantasy covered with Song of Blades & Heroes, but sci-fi has been a bit more troublesome. The club has spent the last half a year trying out many different sci-fi rulesets, with varying degrees of success and failure. What follows here are my own thoughts (not the club's! I don't speak for everyone) about the rulesets we've sampled, what works and what doesn't.

The ground rules: we were only interested in games that encouraged us to use generic, non-brand-specific miniatures. So, Necromunda (despite being an alright game) was out.

Flying Lead — Published by Ganesha Games (the folks behind Song of Blades & Heroes) this game adds another level of complexity onto its super-simple game engine. Unfortunately, this added complexity proved to be a turnoff to me. The beauty of SBH was that it required virtually no rulebook-flipping once you understood how your warband worked. Flying Lead required considerably more cross referencing, plus we needed to use little counters or tokens to mark the condition of a particular figure (prone, fallen down, etc). I don't like tokens — they clutter up the battlefield and must be removed prior to taking glorious game photos. It's also worth noting that Flying Lead isn't really a sci-fi game — it's more of a modern combat game, with assault rifles and grenades and whatnot. Trying to graft it onto a sci-fi setting might have been our first mistake.

Wastelands — This free PDF is sort of a stripped-down RPG where you assemble a squad of dudes, trick them out with all sorts of equipment and weaponry and send them into battle against each other. The game system itself is functional and decently generic, but not particularly innovative. The best part of this game is that although it's nominally a game about post-apocalyptic battles, you can easily adapt it to a variety of sci-fi settings and genres. We've played this game quite a bit over the last year or so.

5150 — Two Hour Wargames' sci-fi title is pretty well-known, and we were excited to give it a try. As expected, the game played out differently than any other system we'd yet encountered. Basically, your little guys don't always do what you want them to do, and sometimes they flat-out disobey you. It was refreshing, in a way, and of course this sort of ruleset lends itself well to solo play. My only gripe is that 5150's point system is a bit wonky — veteran players will just tell you to play scenarios, which is all well and good, but I need a starting point of some sort.

WarEngine — This is the rules engine that powered the now-defunct game ShockForce, which was first published back in the 1990s. It's a strong, generic system that's been lovingly husbanded by its original creator, Aaron Overton, over the years. It lives on now as a thriving wiki (!) and is 100% free. Of all the games we've auditioned, this one felt the most like what I was after: a true wargame experience that took me back to the halcyon days of playing 40k in high school, but presented in a fully updated, fully supported website that's easy to navigate and totally free of charge. The game itself lets you build units from the ground up using generic statistics and game effects, which really juices my imagination. Once you've got your units built, the engine also has ways to create balanced army composition lists so you can pit your forces against your opponent.

If I had a gripe, it would be that this game seems designed for slightly larger battles than we've played lately. WarEngine games don't feel like much unless you have at least 3-4 maneuver elements (squads, characters, etc) and squads should really be 5+ models to get the full command & control stuff going. So you're looking at 20-40 models — that's almost a 40k army! Right now my club prefers games with 6-12 models per side, but I'm sure we can scale up as needed. Part of that is because we want to keep the buy-in threshold low for new players who might wander over when we're playing at our local store. "Sure, you can play, and if you want your own guys you only need to buy one box of miniatures." That sort of thing.

But still — after many months of discussing, planning and playing, I'm very excited to have found WarEngine. It's the game that I'm most excited about playing right now.

April pledge: painted Predators

"If it bleeds, we can kill it." — Dutch

Looking back on this month's painting pledge, a theme emerged: I painted sci-fi miniatures inspired by action movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Last week I posted pics of four Terminator-style robots from EM-4 miniatures. Today I've got photos of four newly painted "Hunter Aliens" from Copplestone Castings — of course, we all know them better as Predators.

These guys were a lot of fun to paint up. After much thought, I painted their skin the same spotted yellow color (inspired by a pic I saw on the interweb) and made their armor look slightly different. These miniatures look a bit shinier in these photos than in real life, but that's OK. They'll hit the table soon, ready to deal death and destruction to future governors, action movie stars and hapless space marines around the galaxy.

And now, a bonus: this was the sci-fi lizard dude I picked up at the paint-and-take table at Little Wars last weekend. I can't remember the minis line he comes from, but he's really cool — he's got a laser rifle slung over his back and a vibro-sword in his hand, ready to plunge through the jungle after his prey. What's that in his left hand? Whatever it is, I painted it red, so it's probably a bit of flesh or something. Again, he's much less shiny in real life.

Painting up this lizard guy has inspired me to do a mercenary squad of oddball sci-ci miniatures to use in multiple game systems.

Song of Blades & Heroes play report from Little Wars 2011

At the height of the fun at Little Wars last weekend, our game table was full of players rolling dice, moving miniatures and generally having a great time. Our local club hosted an introductory scenario for Song of Blades & Heroes, and we had a packed house — all spots were taken, and we briefly had a waiting list of players who wanted to jump in.

As we had hoped, the simplicity of Song of Blades & Heroes meant we spent about 10 minutes explaining the basic rules before turning the players loose to battle each other. The factions were the Forces of Good (Knights, Gladiators and Celts) versus the Forces of Evil (Orcs, Undead and Mycenoid Mushroom-Men).


As you can see from the photos, we had some young players at our table. This was by design — we intentionally listed our event in the "Parent and Child" section of the Little Wars convention program, in an attempt to attract some younger players. And they showed up! Maverick, age 5, got some help from his father Matthew, but guys like Aaron (pictured above) mastered the rules with virtually no assistance!

The game was a wonderful success. Big thanks to David, Aaron, Adam, Maverick, Matthew, Robert, Claire and Liam for coming out to play!


Tim's ruined church proved to be a wonderful centerpiece for our table.


Here's the group shot: 6 players plus onlookers, all battling it out on our fantasy tabletop.

Ryan (red shirt, but not a redshirt) officiates a game taking place in a small medieval town.

We're already brainstorming ideas of games to run at other conventions. Personally I'd like to do some sci-fi skirmish, as I think that particular sub-genre doesn't get a lot of representation at conventions. Generally, it's either 40k-style big games, or nothing at all. So a game of 5150 might work, or Wastelands, or WarEngine, or some other fun ruleset we've yet to try out.

First blood (literally) for these freshly painted miniatures

It's always awesome to see new miniatures hit the table, especially if they've been painted by folks new to the miniatures hobby. Two players at last night's Song of Blades & Heroes game fielded their own hand-painted warbands, the product of hours of painting, modeling and finessing. Congratulations to Ryan and Chris! I remember painting my very first miniatures back in 1997, and the thrill of placing them on the tabletop (followed by the heartbreak when they got blown to pieces by a plasma gun or a sword thrust or whatever).

Anyway, Chris' Dwarves tangled with Ryan's Lizardmen twice last night, with the Dwarves winning out both times. These photos show the Dwarves, advancing in a tight cluster across the table, being slowly surrounded by the numerically inferior Lizardmen. The color palette for last night's game was particularly attractive, with a dusty red tabletop mat and some autumn-colored trees for scenery. Game on!

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.