Last week saw a sudden surge of activity as I tried to get my WW2 figures ready for a game of PBI 2 scheduled for last Monday. Andrew Fisher had suggested trying out PBI2 and I had blithely said that I had enough figures painted. It was only when I checked force sizes, etc on the web that realised that didn’t have anywhere enough stuff painted or based.
I had already decided that I was probably going to base most of my WW2 stuff for Battlefront WWII and Crossfire and had already settled on 3cm square bases (which PBI2 uses). After looking at the figures I had I decided that I’d rebase all my single based figures as well and just use casualty markers if I played Rapid Fire or other single figure games.
I recently bought a job lot of plastic ww2 figures from the bring and buy on wargames.co.uk for around 7p each. The figures are already painted in a toy soldier style with clothing and hat in the main colour, flesh on face and hands and everything else painted black. The figures are also highly glossed.
Treating this as a base coat, I gave the british a wash of chestnut ink to shade and dull down the khaki colour and then painted their equipment, hats and rifles. The germans I painted hats, trousers (to distinguish them as early war) and rifles, etc. I then varnished them with Coat D’Arms matt varnish, which is the best flat varnish I have found. I think they look pretty good
Then I had to rebase them all and flock the bases. I did the latter whilst watching the extended Lord of the Rings DVD and it took me until the escape from the Mines of Moria to finish them! But they are done, at last, and show one of the big advantages of belonging to a club - it makes you get your figures painted!
PBI2 is one of Peter Pig’s Rules for the Common Man sets which use a grid based system where the table is broken up into 6-inch squares. We used tile separators to mark the edges of the squares.
The game starts with a reconnaissance phase to determine which forces meet on the tabletop and who is attacking or defending. This is basically a game of battleships and the number of enemy forces you spot determines the strength you attack with.
Once this is decided, the defender lays out the terrain, selects a side to start and deploys. The attacker then deploys their initial forces and moves first.
To move or fire something, the commander (platoon or tank) must first activate it, this being more difficult the further away it is. Once activated, a D6 is rolled for number of PIPs, which apply, to every stand within that square. The unit then uses a different number of PIPs to move from square to square (depending on the cover in the square you are leaving), to fire, etc.
The use of the grid makes the game very fast and it certainly flowed along with us finishing a game in 2 hours including the initial “battleships” game and terrain setup. I was a little uncertain about the victory conditions being variable by number of dice rolled though. In the end I managed to destroy a lot of germans and all his anti-tank forces with 6 of my tanks on the field. Yet, I lost because of failing to gain objectives and rolling quite low dice for my victory points.
I also found the grid system spoiled the look of the battlefield (though there are ways of making it less obvious) and felt a bit too artificial to me. I think I would try the rules again but I wasn’t very taken with them..