I’m working on a rules set (or three) to be used for battles in a post apocalyptic setting with whatever minis you find suitable. Carrasco had a few Afghan militia minis he couldn’t find a game for so he donated them to to me and my game. They are originally produced by Eureka miniatures, but are now (due to some heavy modifications and converting) the upholders of good morale and postmodern philosophy – but mostly they roam the wasteland, shoot stooges, and take their shoes. I’d love to hear your opinions on what to name the crew and the individual models in the commentaries. The setting is the south of Sweden wasteland after the wars, the drought, and the salt storms… This is Rost och Röta – probably the last game in the world!
I also recently built and painted six camel riders for the same game! If you are interested in the rules I’ve written then you ought to check out the reviews and battlereports here and here!
Now enjoy these post apocalyptic warrior students!
As the fog of war clears and the fighting fades away, the campaign in Romania ends with the Axis and the Allies grinding each other to a draw. The Soviet team suffered an initial series of setbacks in Grupul de Nord, Grupul Central but were able to decisively defeat the Axis in Grupul de Sud. The big boost to the defending Axis was winning drawn areas. Not a fair rule, but it represented the need for the attacking force to punch trough quickly and avoid being tied down. It ain’t much of a victory otherwise.
The historical restrictions on force selection allowed for interesting army compositions. The fighting around Targu Frumos in 1944 saw the first use of the IS-2 and their dreaded impact of the IS-2 was keenly felt by the German players. The Soviet heavy tankers won all battles but one. The Axis brought heavy tanks of their own. I got to fight both Tigers and Panthers with my Strelkovy and their armor is tough to face without easy access to the 1945 arsenal. Tigers were especially bothersome as only specialist infantry can take them down.
IS-2s wrecking an SS Panther Company. Pilloried on the interwebs for their low RoF and high points cost, the IS-2s were keeping Team Red afloat by scoring victory after victory.
About 16 games were played over 5 sundays but considering 6 people signed up in the first week, that isn’t bad. Almost no whining from the players (remember that almost), so I am satisfied how it turned out. Even if it involved map making. The players enjoyed the pace of the escalation in the campaign, except for the first weeks of 750 point games. These were not fun as tanks could quickly dominate the game with impunity. What we missed was some kind of campaign finale, a collective ritual mourning of its passing so to speak. Hopefully this will be amended by a themed tournament I will be running later.
Momentum One thing that stood was how important momentum is in wargaming. As the crowd’s enthusiasm rises, it pays off to look for ways to draw upon it and convert it into something useful. This needs be looked at before the action starts. How much hobby time can the players get out of each round? A good feature of the ruleset is the lack of limited games during each round. And for the team to win an area, every game was is important. This lets hyped up players fight 3-4 battles during a day. As people would stay longer and fight during club meetings, beginners could come in and be shown the ropes. Some people came just to watch the battles.
I tend to focus on drawing people beyond the local scene by for example having one day only-events, but this has been hard without having a strong reliable gaming brand. Gamers are a conservative bunch and they tend to avoid travelling if they can. It is better to plan the campaign for the army of players you have, instead of the army you want.
Keeping things simple and in one place I tried a few channels to draw in players but it resulted in fragmented information and increased work load. While reaching out to potential FoW nerds is important, the essential information should be in one easy to find place. I intended for people to use the 15mm.se forum for reporting but almost nobody bothered.
Next time I will try handling everything from the blog and just pass links out in different places. As for keeping things simple, I wrote some brilliant extra rules trying to link games together but my genius writing was unappreciated. Probably because I failed to present them in a clear and accessible way. The extra Battle Skill rules were stashed on an uploaded document that had severe privacy settings. Putting those directly on the dedicated campaign page, ditching all the historical background, could solve the accessibility issue for next time. Or making sure printed copies are found at the club.
The map was a surprisingly helpful tool for explaining scoring and victory conditions. The campaign didn’t require people bringing a ton of extra shit to each game, an annoying flaw found in the Firestorm campaigns put out by Battlefront. So to conclude today’s sermon:
1. The campaign rules should be simple to find and understand. If there is a lot of them, consider using other modes of explanation besides walls of text. There is no need to re-invent the wheel, save yourself work by modifying an existing campaign system.
2. Make sure to eliminate bottlenecks so enthusiastic players can get a lot hobby time done during the campaign.
3. Pacing it is important as well as having a clear finish and an end. There should be some kind of finale to mark the campaign conclusion.
A short campaign AAR Soviet Guards Strelkovy (attacker) vs Panzergrenadiers (defender) – 1350 points – Pincer
The Heer Panzegrenadiers were supported by Panthers, Pak40s and a small platoon of mortars. I had two small Guards Strelkovy platoons, ZiS2s, SU85, Heavy Mortars and the 45mm obr 1942 guns. I had imited Sturmovik support on call, holding them off until the cats got in sight.
I deployed the guns in line abreast to see where reserves would come from. My infantry doubled towards the other flank once he declared his reserve arrival. Initially, there were problems attacking as my firepower failed and infantry got pinned in the worst places. However, the Strelkovy would refuse to leave the battle, regardless of losses. My opponent put his Panthers and Mortars in reserve. He also brought those souped up PaK43s guns from reserve.The worst part was when a single PaK40 took down all of the SU-85s. My opponent made two mistakes here by over extending his Infantry and Panthers. The Panzergrenadiers jumped out of their foxholes and assaulted Strelkovy in the open. The Panthers advanced north to provide support but got flanked by ZiS-2s. Without the Panthers, I overwhelmed the northern objective. Don’t mind the Soviet objective on the left corner. it’s just gaming debris.
A sweet victory for the red team. The army above was fun to play (fun for a Soviet Flames of War army). The hardest working proletarians were the ZiS-2s, they made an impact in every engagement. I also tried out the wretched SU-85, with its flimsy armor of 5 and no machineguns. Sending them against Tigers and Panthers was pointless so they spent most games hidden or shooting at infantry. I once tasked them with a real target: a pair of outflanked PaK40s. A fatal mistake as the guns rolled up and cut them to ribbons in 2 turns. Lame.
I finally picked up my brush and completed a 122mm Heavy Mortar battery. I find that 4 of them are enough to get the job done. While kicking them up to 6 gets that sweet re-rollable template, one stray bullet finding its mark and its all over. I try to mix up the colors when painting Soviet uniforms. A battalion with the same shade of mustard yellow gives Soviet factories far too much credit.
Are you making a mess everytime you need to mix up some pigment powders? Are you tired of spilling homebrew washes all over the palette when you’re weathering and shading models? Well then I’ve got the perfect hobby life hack that will make you spend an extra 10 minutes by the dairy products the next time you’re in the grocery store. In this short article I’ll share some tips on how to get free mixing pots whenever you go grocery shopping to cover your basic artistic needs.
The art of seeing things for what they are
I use a wide variety of washes and pigment powders when I paint and weather my miniatures. In order to stir the mixes and get the right consistency between medium and pigment I use a stainless steel mixing pot that I bought from an old art store in town. However if you’re not careful when cleaning your mixing pots you’ll end up leaving some pigments behind that can really mess up the tone of future mixes. To be able to spend my hard earned money on more miniatures rather than new pots, I therefore started to scavenge old pot-like containers to use whenever I need to mix washes in different colors. Enter the plastic bottle cap.
My collection of makeshift mixing pots. From left to right: 1. a plastic pastry container that used to hold some sort of pudding – perfect for when I work with water based decals. 2. a collection of plastic bottle caps from soda and juice bottles as well as milk cartons. 3. a plastic shot glass that are sold in packages of 20! 4. my old mixing pots in stainless steel.
Most dairy products and other beverage containers come with plastic bottle caps that are meant for recycling nowadays. I found that these caps make perfect one-use mixing pots although you can use them several times as long as you stick to the same tone. This way I can use separate pots for different colors and thereby avoid messing up my mixes with leftover pigments and residue. There’s no need to explain the rest as you probably get the point. So, instead of throwing away your old bottle caps clean them out thoroughly and use them for mixing colors and washes instead. They’re cheap (they’re almost free as long as your pay for the milk!) and they work perfect for mixing smaller batches of color.
Time to conclude the games played from the Flames of Cards event. My force was a simple German one that I borrowed from my good friend (the same guy who’s giving my Strelkovy a living hell). I really fancy the mobility of German infantry and their powerful weaponry but haven’t played them much in Late War. I took the opportunity to design a Grey Wolf German Grenadier company supported by 2 mobile units (Marders and StuGs). The Flames of Cards rule set emphasizes company level support, that is combat and weapons platoons, so I couldn’t load up on regimental and divisional support. I went with 3 combat platoons of Grenadiers and some mortars to form the core, they were supported by Nebelwerfers, vehicles and of course the very deadly PaK40s. Without restrictions, I would probably switch one Grenadier platoon for regimental Scouts.
It has a lot of vehicles for German Infantry Company but feels otherwise quite representative.
Game 1 – British Armored Recce (11th Division) – Dust Up
First game was against British Armored Recce from Market Garden. It had:
HQ (Confident/Trained)
2 Cromwell IV
Combat (Confident/Trained)
3 Cromwell IV+ 1 Challenger A30
3 Cromwell IV
3 Cromwell IV
2 Cromwell IV+ 1 Challenger A30
Support (Confident/Trained)
1 Daimler + 2 Dingo Scout Cars
4 Cromwell IV CS with Walter Luttrell
I don’t remember which card my opponent’s had, but I think he chose to deny me drawing a card if I won. I got the Fortified Position Card which gave my 2 minefields and either 2 HMG nests or 2 booby traps. I forgot to bring nests so I had to go with booby traps. The minefields meant I could properly seal of my flank from his reserves.
A view from the British deployment zone.I deployed Nebelwerfers, two Grenadier squads and PaK40s to secure the home objectives. With minefields protecting the right flank, I felt quite safe. StuGs, Marders and some infantry were to arrive from reserves.Cromwells IV taken out by the PaK40s, forcing most of the army to hide or shoot from longer ranges.British reserves arrive and they are about to move trough the minefields.But not before my reserves to sneak in and secure the objective. The objective is the tank close to the raised road.
In the battle my opponent didn’t defend his home objective properly. Any attempts on my objective were crushed by the PaK40s. As my reserves came in and moved towards his objective, he was too far away to save it. To my opponent’s defense he wasn’t really sure about the reserves rule. I messed up too by not reading my Battle Card properly (it said vehicle in reserves should come in last). This could have influenced the battle a lot because I probably would have put the StuGs on the table to support my reserves. Now that I think of it, a kind of scary card to play on this mission because of the “murder the reserves” tactic that people can do against you.
Result: Win for me. Victory points don’t count in Flames of Cards.
Game 2 – Tankovy Batalon (Red Army) – Surrounded
Arrayed against me was a real horde of older Soviet tanks. My opponent had borrowed his army too but unlike Grenadiers, Soviet tanks are not a user friendly company to run. Not a terrible effective army either but I think it can be powerful against infantry companies in surrounded. It had:
T-70s, T-34/76s and the HQ are deployed in one flank.A mix of T-34 76s and 85s supported by Dedov and Kv-1E, advance from the other flank. The KV-1Es destroy a Nebelwerfer with a lucky MG shot, this means I can’t punish the tanks when they move in close ranks. The battery was just too weak.
I didn’t get any cards for this one as my team mates needed them more. This was going to a tough one because StuGs were my heaviest tanks, yet they come with shitty side armor that can be exploited by attacking from two directions. This tankovy had a lot of tanks and I couldn’t really mass all my guns against one platoon because everything was too spread out. The T-34/85s rolled forward and shot up all my StuGs by rolling a ton of 6s. I think the StuGs and Marders knocked out 2-3 tanks during the entire game because of my dice (and maybe weak positioning). While I had some great woods to put infantry in, both the T-34/76s and the T-70s come with wide tracks. He split his tanks into two groups, the T70s attacked one grenadier platoon and the T-34/76s in the other.
The T-34/85s roll in and make a total mess of the StuGs. Return fire from PaK40s and Marders doesn’t do much to them either. Stalins steel is too strong.An overview of the table. KVs take out my unsupported Nebelwerfers. Note to self: don’t deploy artillery without direct fire capability unsupported.
So while my direct fire and artillery consistently failed, the battle hardened German Grenadiers rose to the occasion. My opponent was a bit sloppy when assaulting, he usually got way too few teams in range to fight (I probably should have helped him out here). I usually backad away when possible without handing over objectives completely. My plan was to back away, yet not too far and hope for kills in defensive fire. He was also incredibly unlucky when rolling to hit and there were repeated assault rounds where the trained tanks just didn’t hit anything. I could gang up on lone vehicles, avoid a lot of defensive fire and take them out. The Grenadiers fought tenaciously, refusing to flee even when taking massive casualties. I was afraid my opponent would attack the south objective in the open, but he looked totally committed the northern flank, so I pulled troops towards the middle woods from the lower objective. Storm trooper was incredibly useful to redeploy quickly.
The Grenadiers don’t disappoint and hold the line. My opponents atrocious rolling in close combat helps. I pull troops from the southern objective up to the middle. I try to keep a team close to the objective, but the Soviets are pushing me back.
While my opponent was incredibly unlucky in assaults, I think after handling the StuGs, he could have just sat back and shot until my morale broke. My direct fire wasn’t as effective as infantry in woods. Either way, it was a very difficult battle from the beginning to the end and I enjoyed it very much.
Result: A victory on time out but you know what? That counts too.
Game 3 – Armored Rifle Company (4th Armored) – Cauldron
Third game was against Americans. From memory:
2 Full strength Armored Rifle Platoons (Confident/Veteran)
3 M1 57mm Anti tank guns (Confident/Veteran)
4 Shermans (Confident/Veteran)
3 Priests (Confident/Veteran)
2 M10 Tank Destroyers (confident/trained)
A good army but without scouts (probably because of the army restrictions- no more support than combat and weapons platoons), it could face disasters in ambushes. However it has the numbers for very powerful assaults.
Good overview picture of the deployment taken by my opponent. Those trees up north give me a head ache. He can deploy really close to me because it blocks Line of Sight. PaK40s were deployed from immediate ambush.
My opponent basically went for reckless turn 1 assaults with practically everything. Armored rifles have so much integrated support that they can pin concealed veterans which was quite a nasty surprise. There was a really annoying wood close to an objective and he deployed this massive American Strelkovy Horde armed to teeth with LMGs and Bazookas within assault range of objectives.
Overview of the left flank. The Yankees prepare for a hard charge through the woods.
I had some bad luck like a Sherman platoon coming in from reserves, reducing the StuG platoon to half strength with one round of long range stabilizer fire. In the the next turn the Shermans assaulted and destroyed an entire Grenadier platoon with the 2iC in close combat. On the bright side, there was a critical moment where I beat back a second infantry assault with just 6 or 7 dice in defensive fire. This really turned the battle around, because it left both Armored Rifles pinned. My PaK40s, StuGs destroyed two trained M10s coming in from reserves, I then assaulted the Armored Rifle platoon that had pulled back. We kind of grinded each other down, but the Americans broke quicker than the Grenadiers. My Marders came in from reserves and together with the StuGs, Pak40s shot at the Shermans until their morale failed. I just had to bag another platoon to force company morale and I unleashed everything on the Priests until they broke. If I had failed my opponent would have won by taking the objectives.
A M7 Priest battery looking to blast some poor Germans. Even though I can be seen premeasuring with the template, it didn’t stop them from getting a good number of teams under bombardments.
I don’t really know what to make of this game. It was over after my turn 6 but after losing both of my objective guarding infantry platoons, things looked dark. My opponent attacked so hard I almost got the impression that he wanted the game to end as quickly as possible. We talked a bit about it and he misread the victory conditions. In this missions, the attacker cannot claim objectives before game turn 6. My opponent gambled and overextended himself resulting in a very short game.
Result: Victory for the Grenadiers!
A couple of lessons could be drawn. First is, I really need to calmly go through missions together with my opponents before the battle begins. People play a lot of different games and can’t remember everything. I had too many “no dude, you can’t do that so now you’re fucked” moments happening.
Secondly, German infantry are great fun! The army I played is quite easy to build from the Open Fire set and it is a very flexible and effective force on the table. The Grenadiers themselves are a bit frail and each casualty is felt. Since they are Rifle/MG teams with few stands, opponents will get into assaults. I did not get a a chance to attack infantry with them but I feel that they have barely enough infantry teams to get the job done. Picking the right support in right quantity is key I think, because the support needs to clear areas infantry will advance in and thin the attacking enemy out. That should prevent the opponent from causing too much attrition the Grenadiers too quickly.
The Grenadiers were a big contrast to my American Rifle Company, which can usually face a couple of shooting rounds from 1750 point armies without much problem. I probably need more games with Grenadiers before I indulge into more mansplaining. So long!
PS.
Please check out MacDees Blog for more great pictures. Most of the good ones above are stolen from him.
Or the weekend before to be truthful, but me and my friends have an annual tradition where gather at the club and play Flames of War. This year I had the great honor of creating a fun event. I took the opportunity to write up some interesting rules that I now want to share with fellow FoW enthusiasts. I will split this over two blog posts to make it digestible, first one is a presentation about the rules system I wanted to create, how the rules fared under the play test and what can be improved. The second post will be a traditional Battle Report of the 3 Flames of War games I played.
For our event, I decided to make a team based rule set that uses a standard french card deck. Players score points as teams and use these points to draw two different cards, one type of cards introduces effects that buff players and the other type of cards are used for Victory Points. The team with most Victory Points wins. If you are looking for a new way to play Flames of War and find this interesting then let’s get into the details. The rules can be downloaded here.
It’s more fun that it looks.
Why Flames of Cards?
Before I explain what it is, I’ve been feeling Flames of War is growing a bit stale. So why not spice it up with some homebrewed rules? The first thing I wanted to do was to get rid of victory points. Only wins and losses should count. Hopefully, this rewards balls to the walls aggression. But this can sometimes encourage people to forfeit games they feel can’t be won. To counter this, it was important to add a team element to the game. This can open up for cooperation between games but also for peer pressure to ensure games are played to conclusion.
The card idea was inspired my ardent gaming of Fantasy Flights, Lord of The Rings Card Game. I really like the tension where players draw something unexpected from a deck that affects their game. Flames of War has a lot of rules that aren’t used in normal games like river assaults, night fights, extreme weather, fortifications and so on, a good way to include those is by a deck mechanic. I also made some card effects up that buff the players army. Instead of making my own cards, I picked a regular french deck because of historicity and availability, WW2 soldiers used those to gamble and gamers should have one within reach.
The Luftwaffe were pioneers of card driven miniature war gaming.
So what is Flames of Cards?
It is a teambased way of playing Flames of War with where players cash in won games into two types of cards. The way I chose to implement all this was to have two standard decks, one red and one blue. The blue one for introducing special effects on a table, and a red ones which are worth Victory Points. The team with most Victory Points after a set number of games wins the campaign. To draw any of the cards, a players in a team must win games (except for the first game where every team is handed 2 cards per player). Each of the Blue Cards has a special effect based on its number, that is supposed to help the player who plays it. The number of Victory Points a Red Cards gives is dependent on the suit (heart, cub, diamonds and spades) and they are mixed into the Victory Points Deck in different numbers. Players cannot turn the face up on Victory Points Cards until the last game is finished. These two aspects mean players have incentives to keep playing when things look dark.
Drawing a 3 means an artillery strike and your opponent is in for some rough beats.
The Good
This can be run without a dedicated organizer as administration and book keeping is minimal. It is unusually fast paced for a war gaming campaign. The players will pick up the relevant cards, carry them around and do the scoring by themselves in the end, no need to record anything. This is excellent where the organizer wants to play himself and it doesn’t create any bottle necks where the players wait for some key thing to be done (like moving crap on a map – I hate maps). The teams have Generals on each side who can help with mundane things and offer an easy way to dispatch information.
The system also makes everyone invested in each others games, as the team tries to figure out the best way to use their cards. It introduces a fun team based moment to the game that doesn’t exist otherwise. The incentives to keep playing worked well too, as a lucky Victory Point card mechanics meant that a team with less victory cards could still take the lead.
SS Panzergrenadier preparing to unleash an hilariously broken combo on unsuspecting American tanks. Picture shamelessly stolen from this very nice blog.
The Bad
Team building becomes an important factor. Having the motivated and skilled players of the group, who use the right companies will impact on results and teams where the players are too casual to bother, will get significantly penalized as the campaign system goes on. During our play test the allied team (which had a larger portion of casual gamers) lost about 7 of 9 games. Another weakness of the system is the need to bring a lot of extra platoons along, something that easily forgotten and that impacts the coming games.
The game system has a high level of abstractness, it is detached from an actual military campaign and some nice graphics in the ruleset for flavor couldn’t hurt. However this is all very early stages of development. Another thing is the lack of maps. The players in my gaming group love maps but I resent them. The main reason is that map mechanics need to be very thought out and impact the games in a meaningful way, because administrating maps takes a lot of time. I haven’t seen a map based campaign that is more then a tedious book keeping exercise for the game organizer.
What the players thought I got mixed signals from talking to the players, some thought the cards didn’t matter and some thought they were too important. In my opinion the players usually obsess with briefings, unit stats and how to make each single game as perfectly balanced as possible. This balancing I believe is something impossible, it comes with the freedom of picking any Late War Breifing, depends on individual table layouts and on players who don’t know how to build and play their armies face players who do.
A quick word about the special rules
There are 3 special rules for the system. I will go through my ideas about each one. First up is Reinforced Company. I feel a restriction is in place to encourage players to field companies that look like companies. That is focus should be company and battalion level assets (combat and weapons platoons). The second restriction is American Tank Destroyers. In the type of tables we play, this unit with proper upgrades, kicks far and beyond its weight. I sense that outright banning certain units pisses people off so I tried to implement a simple penalty, if a Company contains one or a multiple of these units, that team loses one Victory Points Card during the scoring phase. The penalty is per offending army and not per unit. If your group find these units fine but other bothersome, feel free to mix things up.
The second one, Armored assault, is about mobile armies attacking less mobile ones. This has to do with my interpretation of warfare, that vehicles are offensive weapons. Even in Flames of War terms, a company with a lot of vehicles attached to it is better suited for it attacking. But I don’t want to encourage players to build static and boring armies.
The third rule, Reconnaissance in Force is about making team games more inclusive. The goal is to prevent Kingmakers and Pro Players from destroying the game. In each gaming group there is maybe one player who really sucks at Flames of War but wants to participate. With this rule, you can avoid having the other team milking points from him. Same thing where one player is very skilled and plays extremely competitive armies. The rule is simple, one player per team may forfeit using his player card to make the winner of the game draw one card less. The idea behind this rule is to prevent Those Guys™ from deciding the campaign on their own. Most people used this rule against me… make of that what you will.
Room for improvement Two things come to mind, first is a balance of power between the two card types and second, a way to link games together. Some tweaking is needed to the balance between the two types of cards. Both must seem equally valuable for players. Each team must face difficult choices between improving chances to win individual games and to actually score points. Worst case scenario is players going for scoring cards only, making effect cards unnecessary. That would mean in spite of 7 pages of extra rules, people are playing standard games of Flames of War.
Perhaps a good idea would be to redo the effect cards and make drawing them mandatory in the beginning of each game. The effect cards should in that case offer challenges and/or benefits to both players. So instead of being a way to buff one of te players, the cards would become an obstacle that has to be handled by each player. That would of course mean dropping or redoing the team based factor.
The other thing is a way to link games to form a campaign. I unfortunately ran out of time (and space) for this but how about something like the Boast system in Lion Rampant? The basic idea I had in mind, is that players select from a number pregame secret objective such as:
Having your HQ destroy opposing HQ.
Take out the most expensive platoon.
Ending the game with a platoon closer to your opponents table edge than his closest platoon.
If this secret objective is passed, the player gets a ability for the next games such as Outflanker (one platoon gets the Early War Polish Bypassed rule if accomplishing objective 3) or the HQ getting re rolling misses in assault (if accomplishing objective 1). The objectives could have some inclusive ones, like failing 3 pinning tests in a row, completing 3 Company Morale rolls in a row. The idea is to enable players to spice up their games by having a story unfold.
I am going to look for ways to improve this and I hope any of my readers find it interesting and fun.
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