Archive for October, 2004

Using the Force

Wednesday, October 27th, 2004

I’ve been playing a whole variety of different games at the Guildford Club over the last few weeks and last Monday we tried out the Star Wars:Rebel Storm collectable miniatures game from WOTC. I’ve never played a collectable game and none of the previous offerings have really appealed. I was interested in the heroclix figures but they really weren’t that well-painted or sculpted.

The Star Wars figures are an improvement and are not bad 25mm figures which come prepainted and on a normal plastic base, meaning you could use them for normal wargames.

We played through the first two scenarios in the Star Wars Battle magazine which cover the Imperial attack on the rebel craft at the start of the first Star Wars film and yes, I still think of it as the first film despite it being renumbered as number four!).

We used some very nice pre-painted resin scenery from Dwarven Forge for the corridors and the whole game looked really nice.

The system is pretty simple, with a figure able to move 6 squares and attack, attack and move 6 squares or move 12 squares in a straight line. Initiative is rolled for at the start of the turn and then each player activates 2 of their figures in turn until all the figures have moved or fired.

There is quite a lot of subtlety in the order in which you activate your figures, whether you move to pin the enemy, use of combined fire, etc. Both the games were very close and a lot of fun. I’m very tempted to pick up a starter set and a couple of boosters for the system.

Black Hat Miniatures is still chugging along. The figures are now at the stage of production moulding and the first castings should be arriving in the next week (fingers crossed). The Martian Empires rules need some more playtesting, but are looking good and I have been working on background material for a Martian Empires website to back up the figures.

We have received a lot of interest in the range and a good set of pre-orders, so I’m hoping that it will build up over the next year or so into a good selling range and a fun game to play.

I’ve really enjoyed finding my way through setting up a company and have found everyone else in the industry very helpful and very happy to offer advice.

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Still Alive

Monday, October 11th, 2004

I’ve been very busy the last few weeks and haven’t had much chance to update this site. Hopefully I’ll put up some more regular updates from now on.

It has been fairly quiet on the gaming front, though we did have a couple of big games at the club over the last few weeks.

The first of these was a large 4,000 points a side “bring a battle” Wars of the Roses refight of Barnet using the Warhammer Ancient Battles rules. I ended up as Hastings, massively overlapped on the left flank of the Yorkist line.

The game was fun but there were a lot of beginner WAB players and we decided that an 8-player, 4,000 pointer was overly ambitious for a first try-out of the rules. It was good to see all that painted lead on the table though and it gives us a good impetus to start our KingMaker based WOTR campaign.

We also had a Saturday game again featuring Marlburian with a 20 foot long table, 10 players and 2,500 25mm figures on the table. I took the cavalry reserve which I had to throw into the action almost immediately to counter a flank threat and eventually had to watch my entire brigade flee from the table. We use the Wargames Holiday Centre Marlburian rules slightly modified an these provide a very quick, very fast game which most people can pick up within a couple of moves.

We were playing the British and by the time we reached 4pm, it was obvious that we had lost and failed to stop the French advance. At the other end of the table Eugene and the Austrians were rolling up the French flank and there was a look of complete horror on the Austrian player’s face when he was told that Marlborough had surrendered to the French! Very funny and good illustration of how on a large table one flank can have very little influence on or even be aware of the other.

Black Hat Miniatures is coming along very well. I am sitting here waiting for the postman to bring the sample packs for our first release which are now available for pre-order at Fighting15s . The production figures will be available in mid-November. The reception to this range has been very good - far better than I imagined - there seem to be a lot of people who have been waiting for a 15mm Victorian SF range.

We now have over 150 people on the >Martian Empires Yahoo Group for the rules, so I am hoping that we will get a good breadth of play-testing over the next few months to iron out any wrinkles. The games I’ve played so far have been fast an fun, which is the aim of the system.

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