Wednesday Wargaming - Team Yankee Dust Up

Hello Folks,

So time for another Team Yankee report. We played a huge game again, this time the mission was Dust Up. I set up the table differently this time and tried to make it annoying to get more of an effect from that.

I played mostly the same list, but I dropped the Warthogs and upgraded my artillery with all of the upgrades, but the copperhead laser guided munitions is the only one that really mattered. The Soviets had mostly the same list with more jets and less choppers I believe.

I got to be the attacker and rolled for a Night battle, which would give me a bit of an advantage due to having better thermal imaging, but we then immediately forgot about that! Oh well.

So here is the initial set up, this is one of the diagonal corner missions. I set up to hide in the woods, and the Russians tried to be sneaky. Both sides have half their stuff in reserve. For me that is 2 platoons of 3 Abrams, VADS, and cobras which I forgot about. I hopped to not have to go first to avoid planes on turn 1 and fire my laser guided munitions, but the dice did not agree.

So I just moved back my platoon for safety and passed a turn.

The Soviets then hid behind the rocky hill and entered the town. On my second turn I moved my platoon back to fire on the town T-72s, and set my ITV platoon way down around the hill to threaten the objectives and be annoying. In retrospect it is not a great idea to toss this small platoon away as it is actually a part of my formations instead of support. I also killed some BMPs with laser guided munitions, which was their only chance to fire as the FIST team was killed next turn.

The Russians then decided to man up and fight my HQ platoon of 2 Abrams, but accomplished not much, and the town T-72 blew up a ITV and the other failed morale and ran. Still no Frogfoots for them so there is that at least.

No reserves for me on turn 3 so I decided to try and kill the hill T-72s. But of course half of my tanks failed there 2+ test to cross terrain. Still did some decent damage thou. No Russian reserves or planes so they didn't get much done. At this point I am starting to feel confident about this game!

Turn 4 and I got to bring in both of my tank platoons. I figured between them and the 2 Abrams in my corner I could finish off the town T-72s, and the artillery which moved up to support. But the dice gods game me 2 handfuls of misses. I got all but 2 of the town T-72s but the last passed morale, none of the artillery! But did get the last of the hill T-72s.

The soviets did better with the return fire and along with some Hinds, 1 shot down to AA fire, reduced both platoons to 1 tank or 1 tank and 1 bailed tank, and they both failed morale and left! The next turn I brought on my VADS and along with the tanks killed more of the artillery. But in the process I bogged half my tanks in the woods again! Then of course the Russian jets picked this time to show up! I shot down one with a lucky AA shot which I was gifted but they killed the 1 tank in the open with ease and my third platoon of tanks failed morale and left! Then the Hind murdered my formation commander. So the next turn was an auto lose for me due to formation morale.

So there you have it another fun game of Team Yankee. I feel like I had this one in the bag but lost it to bad dice! But these things happen. I am increasingly convinced that air is not really worth it, and I probably would have been better off with another Abrams platoon on the table instead of the ITV, but that is hard to know. What I really need to do is paint my infantry platoon, but there are only so many hours in a day.

The last day of our campaign in Sunday so I probably will have another report then, but we will be doing something different next Wednesday!

Thanks;
Mike

Painting - Frostgrave

So I have started getting ready for Cangames for real now, so all kinds of painting for Frostgrave. This is going to continue for awhile as I get bits and pieces ready. The main thing is doing terrain for the two tables I now want to do, but I need to paint more soldier and monster and what not as well. Maybe some more treasure also will have to think about that.

Blighttown:

So first up here is that start of my second table which I am calling Blighttown and is based of a video game. Basically I want to have a bunch of wooden platforms that you can climb around on, in a swamp! The Games Workshop Goblin Town set seemed perfect for this to me, so I ordered up a 3'x3' swamp mat and got a Goblin Town set as a present. So here is the frist set painted up with the mat, I have ordered another as I really like how it turned out and you really need more then 1. Two probably should cover it but a third is possible hah.

Here is the thing on it's swamp mat, and some close ups.

It was very easy to put together with only a few parts, and now to bad to paint either, the bones took the longest, there is allot of them. My idea is to reduce line of sight so it doesn't feel as open, but have some fires to illuminate areas, stealing the light rule front he Batman game. I have some ideas for scatter terrain as well, so I think this will end up being pretty cool.

Archers:

Here are the first of the soldiers. These are ones I had put together to be in my original Chronomancer warband so I had special bases for them. Used the platforms for pictures since I had it there.

Theifs:

A few theifs, there are not allot of options for daggers in the box so I went with big swords. Thugs will have to go for axes and clubs but that is fine.

I think the theifs are my favorites of this set. They are popular in the game so we will need lots of them I guess. I gave a few of them big coils of rope so they can climb around and what not, there are lots of cool bits you can add on in the soldiers box.

Thugs:

Next up are the thugs. I struggled with these a bit, there are not as many options for arms without shields as I would prefer so you are a bit stuck.

The torch guy is trying to burt his face off it seems, and stabd someone with a club. Makes sense for thugs to be a bit dim?

Chronomancer Warband;

So that is all the guys I had originally planned for my Chronomancers warband so I thought I would do a picture of the group even thou I have kind of moved on from there.

Evil Djinn:

Next up some monster, so here is a close up of the Djinn from our last game that I had done.

Really like this model and the mission is a good laugh so long as he is killing someone elses soldiers!

Start of Table 1:

Finally I painted the first piece for the other table, which is a more classic frozen ruined city thing. I am again using some GW kits as I like them. So here is the statue from the Garden of Mor (cemetry) set.

I like the flowers and skulls, but otherwise it is a bit plane grey. I might add some blood or green or some kind of weathering. But maybe not.


So that is how I am doing on the Frostgrave fo cangames project!

I bought a bunch of new stuff at Cold Wars for various projects so that has kind of screwed my numbers. In particular a box of 48 plastic Hoplites, 48! come on that is to many for 1 box ugh.

Pledge Status 2016:
Bought: 141 (Greeks, plus some more By Fire and Sword)  
Painted: 77 
Total: -64 (ouch) 

Thanks;
Mike

Frostgrave at Fandom

Hello Folks, I had the opportunity to try a game of Frostgrave at Fandom on Thursday so here is a brief review of that. I decided to try out an Enchanter this time, but didn't have a new set of Wizards painted yet so used some Chronomancers as stand ins. Also since I had just finished painting my Djinn we decided to do the magic lamp mission. We kept rolling for oher monsters after he showed up as they make it more fun.

Ah it appears to me that these pictures are not super easy to see what is going on. There are a bunch of treasures basically down the middle line, and one in the circular tower, and one behind the plinth. I had my apprentice on the square tower with 2 crossbow guys to provide over watch, a theif to run up the spiral tower, and a main force above Buddha to walk into the ruins and cause trouble.

The Ratmen and their mage advance quickly to claim the treasure, but awaken the Djinn who immediately starts to cause fun problems. The big rat is a summoned bear who charges forward to get in my face and be interference.

My crossbows managed to shoot down a rat treasure hunter who was just about off with some loot, you can see the left over loot by the house bottom right. A demon had showed up on the rat side of the board and murdered their apprentice. I killed the big bear, but now a rat assassin has used a potion to teleport in and attack my wizard.

A zombie came and tried to block my thief from escaping with his treasure from the round tower and eventually killed him. Above Buddha I have brought my Templar and his now magic sword to save my wizzard, but they are both about to be killed by the rat! Never fear thou my crossbows get revenge. In the mean time my other thief is able to get off with the treasure from the spiral tower.

In the big ruins there is a bit of chaos with rat infantrymen and Djinns and people dieing. But one of my thugs is somehow able to grab a treasure and sneak off. A squad of rat monsters had arrived earlier and cleared a convenient path for me!

So there we have it good times with 2 treasures each, we had a time limit of 6 turns each so that is the abrupt end. But the store was soon to close. The Rats got the bonus for finding the Djinn and can sell his bottle.

All my guys past their recovery rolls including my Wizards, who got a fight increase. I as able to make some magic weapons permanent with embed as well so I thought it was a pretty good showing. I choose a Library for my Wizard lair and used the search action to find another treasure which turned out to be robes of arrow turning, pretty nice! Hopefully I will get to try another game soon.

Thanks;
Mike

Wednesday Wargaming - Team Yankee 130 Pts

Hello Folks, time for another Wednesday wargaming report. This week we decided to play a big game of Team Yankee with everything that is so far painted, which worked out to 130 points. I had to do a couple of extra tanks last week but no big deal.

I thought it would be fun to try out some missions from the new set they posted last week, so I selected Breakthrough which is one of my favorites, and Serge elected to defend with the Russians.

So the goal is for me to break through the Russian force and capture one of the objectives by turn 6 or later, with 1 reserve to come on from that area. Actually with the way Team Yankee works that is to long for the objectives to really matter it seems and I wonder why they didn't reduce the turns now that the game plays faster. I have the same thought about Forced Withdrawal, but we will see how things get on.

US List:

Abrams HQ
4x Abrams
4x Abrams
3x Abrams
2x ITV

4x VADS
2x Cobra
2x Warthog
3x Artillery

So here is the start point, I have 2 ITVs in reserve as the breakthrough, everything else on the table. I thought about what was the best approach, should I mass to one side or not. I decided to try and attack both forces at once. So my plan is to kill the main Russian AA so my air units are ok, and sacrifice my VADS to put a hurt on the Hinds as they have been troublesome in the past. Then everything can kill as many tanks as possible.

This was reasonably successful, half of the Hinds were shot down, along with both of the AA tanks and a good amount of tanks. That left the Russians with just 1 AA stand so I felt pretty safe.

The Soviets countered by placing their ambush to attack my platoon of 4 moving up the side and killed half of them plus a bail but I passed the morale test. All the missiles concentrated on the tanks around the fuel tanks. My self defense AA was able to kill the last 2 Hinds as they were put in a bad position, but the Frogfoot planes still did some good damage. So two of my main tank platoons were now severely damaged.

At this point it is very apparent to me that the key is to kill as many tanks as possible and win the war of attrition so I try to do that. I moved my tanks near the fuel tanks and town as best I could to limit fire from the other side and concentrated on the new tank platoons. No planes for me this time either, and it's pretty much impossible for the VADS to catch a frogfoot unless it is placed badly. But I got a good amount of kills so was happy that I was still keeping up the pressure.

Unfortunately the Russians brought in their artillery from reserve which can direct fire the same as a T72. So they gutted my last good platoon making things a bit of a pickle.

I moved my stuff for flanks and tried to make a last effort with the few tanks I had left. The one guy by the barn with the artillery managed to see off the Russian guns, but up by the town my luck left and I didn't kill much. Another guy or so with the Cobras so the Russians also were down to aruond 4 tanks! Getting close.

In the end the Russians killed my commander but he was able to jump in a VADS, so I got another turn out of it but no luck so wasn't able to do much. If I had gotten the warthogs to come back and a bit of luck it could have been possible to kill all the T72s! But no luck and then I broke next un of course.

So another fun game, a bit bigger this time on a big table, hope you liked it.

Thanks;
Mike

Cold Wars 2016 Part 2

So now the second part of my Cold Wars coverage! As previously discussed the main event for day 2 was the Saga tournament. I went with my Era of the Princes Rus army as previously discussed, with warlord, 16 warriors (units 12 and 4) 8 special hearthguard, and 12 levy archers. That gave me 6 saga dice but half my army is in the hearth guard so there is a bit of an all your eggs in one basket type thing.

Game 1: Sacred Ground Modified vs Britons 

The modification to the normal scenario is the same that used in the larger tournaments, rules can be found in the adepticon document (http://www.adepticon.org/wpfiles/2016/SagaGMSingles2016.pdf), but basically the amount of points you can score per turn is limited to the turn number. So 1 point turn 1 2 turn 2 ect.. This prevents one person from getting ahead to much to early. But it also makes it very difficult to recover even a single point. Finally it makes the scenario more about killing people and less about standing in certain places so some may find that bad or good. I played this with a guy I meet in the tournament every year and is usually one of the toughest opponets so I didn't start super confident.

Here we are after turn 1 of the battle for the hills. I got my hearthguard up into some terrain early to make sure and get that 1 point, the Britons stayed more in closed ranks. My plan was to put my big unit of warriors on the hill and let them stand there and use the mounted troops to chase down and kill the Britons who have a tendency to run all over.

The Britons made some good harassing attacks with javelins, and then I killed most of a unit of hearthguard. But lost allot of my good troops in the process. We are both getting max points every turn now without any issue. The foot troops are the Flemish mercenaries who get a bunch of bonuses if you attack them, but I figure I can eventually make them attack by having more points.

So things keep going that way, the Britons counter attack and kill most of my mounted troops, but one survived thankfully, so I can keep getting the Saga dice, and everyone in my army gets a fatigue if he dies. Both sides are starting to hurt of troops now, but I have a good advantage in Saga dice.

I moved my mounted guy towards the far terrain so he could get safe and scoring, and moved up my bows to harass the rest of the Briton mounted. Meanwhile the Flemish and Rus eyed each other accross the rocky hill.

Finally I decided to throw in my last mounted guy and try and rob the Britons of another dice, but I bounced and then they killed him. However the Flemish didn't achieve much either when they went in and so I was able to end the game a few points ahead. Both sides scoed lots of kills which is the tie breaker for the tournament. So that went pretty well.

Game 2: Clash of Warlords vs Crusaders

Game 2 was clash of warlords, so kill the enemy leader with no modifications. We even had to use the normal rules for choosing terrain. I was a bit lazy about that so I jsut choose the small hill from last time! The crusaders also had some Flemish along with knights both foot and mounted and some crossbows.

Here we are all set up for action, my 4 warriors in the back as usual to be safe and give me an extra die.

My plan this time is to chip away at the crusaders until a chance to kill the warlord arrives, I really want to keep my mounted troops alive as they are my main strike force, don't want to end up in the same situation as with Serge. So I am moving up the rest and chipping away at the crossbow unit with my bow shots from my mounted guys.

This goes on for a couple of turns and then the mounted troops move over to the left flank and crush my levy, and try to kill my unit of warriors with a charge including their warlord. But some how 2 are left alive and the crusader warlord ends up out of position away from his troops. I figure that there is no was for 2 warriors to kill a warlord but I toss them in anyway with as many bonuses as I can muster and get super lucky for the win! All 4 of my attacks hit and the crusaders only saved 2.

Game 3: Horde of Treasure vs Franks

This scenario is a custom one that is used at Cold Wars, basically there are 3 pieces of loot in the middle of the tables that you need to get off. You get points for holding them or escaping the table. This game was against the winner of the big Saga tournament at Adepticon so I figured it would be tough.

The 3 coins are the treasure

The Franks had a priest as their leader to add in Saga dice and took a tower for him to hang out in with a bard and 2 groups of warriors. This left 2 units of warriors and 2 units of mounted hearth guard to fight the battle.

Cool

The Franks got to go first due to better bible knowledge and moved up and set up all kinds of tricky Frankish plans. There board has allot of reaction type abilities which are interesting.

I moved up and tried to get my whole army in striking range of the treasure, and used parthian shot to get a few shots in on the Saxon warriors on the left, they are a bit like viking berserkers. But not to much effect due to Frankish defensive abilities.

The Franks moved around some mounted troops to strike into my levies and go for my small warrior unit. Then I attacked the Saxon unit and pushed them off the treasure and killed most of them.

The Saxons pulled back with the rest of the treasure and used sacrificial attacks to put fatigues on my mounted troops and pin them down preventing them from pursuing. I tried my best to get the foot unit to drop the treasure, there is a Rus ability that makes them fall back as if from a melee if I can kill someone. But between a few key mistakes and Frankish defensive abilities I wasn't able to pull it off.

A spoiling attack on my levy to get some kills and put fatigue on them sealed my chances at winning the scenario, so I decided to kill as much stuff as possible and preferably the Priest to hopefully get second place in the tournament. I was assuming allot of guys would have 2 wins.

This went alright I killed what I could including the bard, but the priest stubbornly refused to die! So a loss in my last game but lots of kill points.

In the end the chap I played here was kind of the tournament organizer so he decided I was the best other Saga player, and I had beat one of the other contenders round one and had a bunch of points so I was the winner and got first choice of prizes. I went for the Saxon plastic army set which was pretty cool. Really had a great time with this tournament as usual looking forward to it again. Might ahve to give Saxons a shot next year, but I will try out a different army for sure. Irish are really high up on my list as well, or maybe Byzantines?

Leipzig:

The last game I played was a Napoleonic battle again with the Hawks, I was just walking around taking pictures of cool stuff. But the organizer asked me if I want to play Leipzig, and I thought well I don't not want to play Leipzig. The rule set was Shako which apparently allot of guys in our club don't like for whatever reason but I found it fun.

I took over for a guy who had to leave for another game, they had already been playing for 3 hours. As commander of the French right flank I had to defend the town, with a polish division, play with the Russian cav with my cav division, and bring up another infantry division to support the town. I thought to swing out into a long line off the town and flank the advancing troops.

Which I did and started some cannon fire. A few charges with the cav were done to see  how it worked but the Russian commander wasn't much interested in battle. Around this time Nick dropped by to see how I was doing and fell for the same trap and ended up as the Russian commander.

Nick was absolutely interested in a cavalry battle it turned out, so they all charged crushed my guys and broke that division in short order. Meanwhile attacks on the town proved ineffective, and my one annoying cav unit delayed his other divisions assault across the river. Eventually I just charged and killed one unit before falling back to safety.

Things were looking bad but attacking the town was ineffective, and the big infantry division had orders to assault across the river, so that left my without a ton of trouble. But the Russian cav was coming for me.

At the end a Russian infantry battalion was broken so we were one for one, and my town was safe. The organizer declared it to be a win for the French, I guess we did well accross the River as well. But it felt like a tie to me. Anyway I found it good to try out some different Napelonic rules and have a bit of a laugh, always fun to play Nick.

Random Cool stuff:

As before here are some shot of random cool set ups:

Big Frostgrave table, I must steal their ideas!

Nice Town

Really cool Mad Max Fury road game the other guys were playing, this guy had some really nice trucks and such. I know I took more then one picture here, but my phone disagrees...

Anyway that was the con for me, hope you guys liked the coverage!

Thanks;
Mike