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!

Asteroid defense stations for Full Thrust

After this past weekend's Full Thrust game, I finally made good on my intent to scratch-build a couple orbital defense stations for use in our games.

I used lava rocks straight out of the bag, no repainting, and glued various Mechwarrior bits and bobs to the craggy surface (no repainting of the MW bits either...so the colors you see are from the original unit paintjob). Both took about 20 minutes to create, and that included sifting through my bits box for appropriately shaped stuff.

I really like the idea of a space navy towing hollowed-out asteroids into orbit around various strategic planets, then filling them with power plants and weapons and gun crews to defend the system. I tried to point the guns and missile launchers in various directions, rather than all straight horizontal, since these defense stations will be engaging targets all around them. Hopefully we'll game with them soon!

Future War Commander with rebased MechWarrior clix

After a few very successful online trades, Karl and I found ourselves with a surplus of MechWarrior clix. Maybe surplus is too generous — we each snagged hundreds of mechs, tanks and infantry for the mostly-defunct game. Our plans are to rebase them as "proper" miniatures and play Future War Commander, the excellent mass battle game from the publisher of Blitzkrieg Commander, and we tried our hand doing that very thing last night.

I've played plenty of Blitzkrieg Commander, so there wasn't a learning curve at all for FWC. Karl picked up the game after just a few turns too.

We played the Surgical Strike scenario, with two 2,000-point armies. I used the Reaper/CAV army lists to create both of our armies; this list, while not expressly designed for MechWarrior units, was nonetheless full of ideal surrogates for the tanks and mechs that we pushed around the tabletop. A MechWarrior Marksman M1 tank was easily statted up as a CAV Wolverine tank, for example. There are also several fan-made BattleTech lists floating around on the web for use with FWC.

For the scenario, we set up two installations — Forward Hangar JX-7 and the Noonien Astrophysics Laboratory — as the objectives. I was the attacker; it was my job to push onto the table and infiltrate the two facilities using my infantry units. As the defender, Karl was allowed to deploy a small force near each installation while the bulk of his army deployed near his table edge.

As the photos show, the two facilities were positioned on opposite ends of the table, with several built-up city blocks separating them. The buildings are actually superb paper models from Dream Pod 9 (perfectly in scale at 10mm), assembled by me and Karl and mounted on vinyl tiles to add stability. They're cheap, modular and stackable, so you can create multiple stories and entire city blocks with ease.

I moved onto the table with my infantry-heavy force and immediately sent the bulk of my forces toward the Noonien Astrophysics Laboratory. For the remainder of the game, this sector of the table saw the fiercest fighting, although a few firefights erupted near Forward Hangar JX-7 on the opposite flank.

I scored two lucky shots early in the game and destroyed two of Karl's three battle tanks. Behind a heavy mech and a tank bristling with weapons, 6 squads of my infantry advanced steadily on the Noonien Astrophysics Laboratory, led by an elite unit mounted in an infantry fighting vehicle.

This spearhead surged forward under heavy fire, delivering its squad of battle-armored soldiers to the laboratory entrance — where they were met with a withering hail of fire from the defenders of the installation. My elite infantry was forced to fall back in the face of the entrenched defenders.

But it was only a matter of time before I overwhelmed the Noonien defenders with sheer weight of numbers. Moreover, a lopsided turn of point-blank shooting by my armored vehicles on the opposite flank had crushed Karl's defenses, leaving behind two burning tanks and a flaming mech wreck. Unopposed, my remaining infantry raced toward Forward Hangar JX-7.

By turn 7 I had moved four squads of infantry into the Noonien Astrophysics Laboratory, thereby allowing me to roll on a cool chart to see if my guys were able to carry out their mission. Indeed they were! Charges were set and the lab exploded while my soldiers evacuated to safety.

It was a very fun game, and a good reminder of why I like the "Commander" series of games. Unit statistics are abstracted a bit, but the focus on command units ensures that players remain "in the game" turn after turn. Both Karl and I agreed that we could easily scale our game up to 4,000 points (or more) per side. We definitely have the miniatures to do that!

Invading the solar system with Full Thrust

Tim and I found ourselves with a random weeknight free, so we got together for a game of Full Thrust. A couple months ago Tim picked up a fleet of Cold Navy ships at an auction, and this was his first outing with his newly painted fleets. They ended up being two separate factions: the brown/yellow asteroid pirates and the green/blue...somethings. Yeah, we haven't done much with the backstory yet.

I managed to come up with names for my fleet of blue-and-gray ships — all Scandinavian names from various cultures throughout history. I have this idea that they're a quasi-Germanic far-future federation that's exploring the stars, etc. I definitely had a lot of fun saying stuff like "OK, the Rensselaer is going to open up with its laser batteries while the Gothenburg II tries a torpedo run."

Tim had been on a planet-making bender over the last couple of weeks...he literally showed up with a dozen painted planets, so we put about half of them on the table and came up with a quick scenario: the invasion of an alien solar system. Our two fleets would compete to land ground forces on the planets in an attempt to conquer and subjugate them. To land a strike team, a ship (any ship, we said) had to enter orbit around the planet and spend a turn orbiting it to drop sufficient troops and supplies. We came up with some fast-and-dirty rules to accomplish this, based around the Full Thrust framework, and then went at it.

My kitchen table is large and square, but it's only 5x3, whereas my space hex mat is 6x4. So we were playing on a slightly smaller area than our previous game. In retrospect, we could have compensated by changing all measurements from inches to centimeters, but we realized that midway through the game. Oh well — it just meant that our two fleets crashed together one or two turns ahead of schedule.

Tim sent his smaller ships to the planets nearest his side of the table, and I did the same on my side. Our largest battleships all converged on each other in an attempt to engage and destroy the most dangerous ships in the opposing fleets. Thus there developed a huge scrum between battleships in the center of the table, with little support ships flitting around on the fringes, landing troops and supplies in the middle of a huge firefight.

This proved to be my undoing. I was doing fine at mauling his big ships, but I had trouble getting my smaller ships into orbit to land strike teams. In the end, both of our fleets were hurting badly — note the raging inferno engulfing the bridge of the battleship Ostrogoth in the pic below — but he had claimed a decisive victory by occupying 4 planets to my 2.

Interestingly, one of those planets was occupied by one of his strike teams and one of mine. Full Thrust dovetails nicely with Dirtside and Stargrunt, two other sci-fi games published by Ground Zero Games, so it's possible that we could play out the fight between the two landing parties at a later date using either of those two other systems. Both include rules for orbital bombardment, which could definitely be interesting considering we both had ships in the vicinity of the planet when the game ended...

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).

Full Thrust, the way it was meant to be played

At GenCon last summer, I got bitten big-time by the spaceship wargaming bug. I demoed War Rocket and had a blast, but the pulp sci-fi setting didn't really resonate with me. I wanted more of a deep-space naval experience, kind of like Star Wars/Trek but without the added burden of a well-developed setting.

Enter Full Thrust, the granddaddy of spaceship wargames that's still going strong almost two decades after it was first published. The game is officially in its second edition (free on the Web) but a fan-made, creator-sanctioned PDF offers an updated representation of the game. It's called Full Thrust: Cross Dimensions, and it's also available as a free download.

The best part about Full Thrust is that players are explicitly encouraged to use any miniatures they want to assemble their fleets. There's an established universe for the game, and the publisher sells miniatures to go with this setting, but it's not essential for the playing experience. The creator notes several times in the rules that the game can be grafted onto any number sci-fi settings, including (of course) homebrew universes.

So, in true Full Thrust fashion, I assembled two mishmash fleets using miniatures from 4 different game lines and manufacturers. For smaller escort ships, I'm using the starfighters from Silent Death. For medium-sized destroyers and light cruisers, I'm using a handful of BattleTech/AeroTech miniatures. Heavy cruisers and battleships were drawn from Starfleet Battles and Firestorm Armada, both of which have some beefy, cool-looking ships.

To a casual player who's more familiar with branded miniatures games, my fleets might look like a mess. But to me they're a perfect example of the Full Thrust ideal: generic fleets composed of the various miniatures, painted up and ready to hit the battlefield (er, space-field?).

I'll make a little universe one day to go along with my fleets, but right now they're just the Gray Fleet and the Green Fleet. Original, huh?

We played our first game of Full Thrust the other night. Thankfully my opponent had played the game a time or two before, so between the two of us we were able to get up to speed quickly.


In Full Thrust, players plot each ship's movement on a piece of paper at the start of each turn. Then, all ships are moved at once. This puts players in the interesting position of trying to anticipate their opponents' maneuvers, and react accordingly. It's also possible that your ships will find themselves with nothing to shoot at because of your opponent's maneuvers. It took some getting used to, but by the second game I was really enjoying the movement system.

Combat is fairly simple, with most ships mounting huge banks of beam weapons, or various missile/torpedo systems. I'm told the combat resolution system inspired similar systems in Uncharted Seas and Firestorm Armada.

The deep space felt mat in these photos is from Hotz ArtWorks. It was a custom job, like almost all of his products, and it took about a month and a half to get to me in Chicago. But the wait was worth it...while playing at our local game store, about a dozen gamers wandered over throughout the evening to ask about our game, drawn solely by the gorgeous spectacle of two fleets exchanging volleys on the pretty felt mat.

The asteroids were pieces of lava rock mounted on flying bases, and the planet was a decorative bamboo ball I snagged from a hobby store. It looked great as a storm-wracked gas giant looming in the middle of the battlefield!

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.