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Grimdark Future at C3 GameCon

Posted by Comrade on March 7, 2023

Posted in: Posts. Tagged: club, convention, game night, grimdark, majestic gamers, skirmish, wargames. 2 Comments

I ran a game of Grimdark Future Firefight at C3 GameCon last month! I’ve run many convention games before, and it’s always a real joy to welcome new players to the table and give them a glimpse at this wonderful hobby that has brought so much happiness and creativity to my life.

For this game, I selected Grimdark Future Firefight because I wanted to get my gorgeous infected city terrain onto the battlefield. This was a batch of terrain that I commissioned from Morti5 Studios a couple years ago … my pandemic splurge, as I recall. It’s a big setup, and I haven’t had very many opportunities to get it all onto the table at the same time. That changed last month!

The best advice I can give to anyone who is considering running a convention game is this: “Focus on the spectacle.” Get your best terrain and your most impressive painted miniatures onto the table. You want to attract peoples’ attention, to have them walk across the room to inspect your little miniature world, and have them say “What IS that?!” in a breathless tone of voice. If they do that, you’ve won before a single die has been rolled.

Pick a game that’s simple to teach and explain, and then strip out all the superfluous content. Don’t worry too much about game balance. Toss out special rules and anything that slows down gameplay. A convention game is not the time for flipping through a rulebook. Make sure each player has some cool figures that perform exactly like they’re modeled to behave – the guy with the big gun goes boom, the rogue in the cloak is good at sneaking around, the barbarian charges into battle. Just aim to give the players a taste of the general gameplay and provide a few opportunities for them to explore deeper strategies. If they like the game, they’ll do all the additional research on their own.

Anyway, my game had four players with some basic background in tabletop RPGs, but none had played Grimdark Future Firefight. No problem! I provided printouts of the 2-page rules document as well as prepared teams of commando operatives for each player.

The scenario pitted the four players against two GMs (me and my buddy Daniel). We’d be managing a city full of plague zombies, and they would be running the infiltration teams tasked with killing the zombies and retrieving the data cores from deep inside the infected city.

The game unfolded exactly as I’d hoped, with the players whispering about strategy as they warily eyed the roaming hordes of plague zombies arrayed against them. Who’s gonna take the left flank? What about that bunker full of zombies? Grimdark Future Firefight is a pretty simple game, and after a short explanation they were chucking dice and pushing plastic around the table.

The scenario (players against the GM) is one I’d definitely recommend for future convention games. It was structured so the players couldn’t lose – the only question was how badly they would beat up the zombies before we hit our turn limit and the game ended. This led to lots of high fives and backslaps as the players laid waste to the zombies and generally felt awesome. Again, this is a key goal of a convention game: make your players feel like they’re capable and in control.

We got plenty of onlookers as the game progressed, due in large part to the impressive terrain setup. At the end, to no one’s surprise, the players emerged victorious – though we all agreed that it was a pyrrhic victory, and that the commandos were almost certain to be slaughtered once night fell and the zombies regrouped.

Once again Grimdark Future Firefight gave a great game that was perfect for newcomers. After the game, each player received their very own custom purple dice emblazoned with our game group’s logo – the Majestic Gamers. You can see a pile of them in the lower right in the pic above.

As I was packing up, two other guys from my game group (Lawrence and Paul) were arriving to set up the next session – an introduction to WarCry! Like me, they also had a full house and seemed to have a blast teaching new players about this fun game.

Thanks to the fine organizers of C3 GameCon for giving us space to host a fun afternoon of gaming! We’ll definitely be back next year.

Nightwatch: Mystery at Heerselt Manor

Posted by Comrade on June 14, 2022

Posted in: Posts. Tagged: 28mm, campaign, fantasy, game night, narrative, nightwatch, wargames. Leave a comment

Earlier this month the crew mustered at the War Room (John’s garage workshop / game area) for a new campaign of Nightwatch.

Nightwatch is a fantastic, rules-lite skirmish game focused on low fantasy monster hunting. Think the Witcher, or Conan. Each player controls a powerful hunter who specializes in some sort of monster-hunting task. The game is intended to be played as a multi-part campaign, where your hunter attracts thugs and hirelings along the way as they battle ever more ferocious monsters, culiminating in what can only be described as a boss battle. The monsters are controlled by a simple yet satisfying AI system, which also supports solo play.

We were excited to try out this campaign, as we love skirmish games with low model counts that are focused like a laser on achieving a singular tabletop vision. Nightwatch (written by P. Todoroff, the same guy who wrote Zona Alfa) fit the bill perfectly.

We set the game in Heerselt, a border hamlet north of the dwarven empire of Miravec in our homebrew fantasy setting. The hunters were summoned to investigate some mysterious goings-on in the village. Heerselt is in the northwest corner of this map of a portion of our setting.

The scenario called for the players to explore four bent, twisted trees located on the four corners of the play area. Scenarios and objectives vary from game to game, but in this case, most of the game focused on the edges & corners of the game, which meant that the center of the board, with its gruesome trophy outside the ruined manor, didn’t see much action.

Seeing as how this was game 1 of our campaign, each player controlled just their own hunter, with no backup or lackeys. They’d have to do all the dirty work themselves…

Vincent’s alchemist and Jim’s swordsman took the left flank, creeping around the perimeter of the village to get to the twisted trees. Unfortunately, the bad guy deployment zones were also located on the perimeter of the battlefield, and each turn two of the four spots were selected at random. Foul vermin and hordes of evil poured forth!

As it happened, the majority of the monsters that arrived in our game randomly spawned near Vincent and Jim’s characters. They quickly found themselves scrambling to the high ground while fighting off an ever-growing horde of desert raiders and beastmen!

Over on the other side of the battlefield, Paul’s elf archer and Daniel’s wizard had a much better go of it. The elf archer loped across the board and secured both trees, though it took a little time – you have to make a successful dice roll to secure the objective, which the elf failed repeatedly to do, leading to many, many jokes about how the elf just can’t figure out these trees, etc.

And Daniel’s wizard almost certainly won the team player award. He crossed the entire battlefield, flinging lightning bolts left and right, and ultimately helped the party secure the final objective and win this particular scenario.

Towards the end of the game, there were some real questions whether or not the players would be able to win the scenario and escape alive. Nightwatch intentionally ratchets up the danger by deploying more dangerous monsters in the later turns. So while the game started as a cakewalk, with the players easily dispatching the vermin that emerged in the early turns, they were scrambling by the final turns and absolutely needed every last trick that each of the four characters could muster to secure the victory.

Here’s a peek at the action as they reached the final tree and closed out this game…

Nightwatch gave us a smashingly fun game for our first outing. Our adventures will take us deeper into the badlands known as the Hattendorf Border Marches. I’m particularly excited to see some hirelings show up … this game starts with a very low model count, but I was jonesing to get more toys on the table! Thankfully, the players were already scheming about how to spend their hard-earned silver pieces.

The Hunt continues … stay tuned for more!

Age of Fantasy Skirmish at C3 Game Con

Posted by Comrade on June 3, 2022

Posted in: Posts. Tagged: convention, game night, majestic gamers, real life, scenarios, wargames. 6 Comments

Back in February I volunteered to run a game at C3 Game Con, a brand new local game convention in Corvallis, Oregon. As it was the first year for this event, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Corvallis is home to Oregon State University, so I knew we had a captive audience of students and young adults who were likely to check out an event like this.

The convention was heavy on anime, cosplay, RPGs, and board games. Age of Fantasy: Skirmish seemed like the perfect way to to give them a little visual spectacle and maybe rope in some new gamers.

I set up a basic four-player scenario centered on Bayard’s Holdfast, the nifty little dwarf fortress I painted up last year. Two players would command the dwarf garrison tasked with defending the holdfast. The other two players were in charge of undead raiding parties tasked with smashing through the defenses and sacking the charred remains of the fort.

As you can see, I had a round tabletop, which actually helped the scenario – I was able to plop Bayard’s Holdfast into the exact center of the table and then arrange the attackers and defenders around the perimeter.

My players were fairly new to miniature wargaming. Only Parker had dabbled in painting & gaming before sitting down at the table. I selected Age of Fantasy: Skirmish because it is a simple, easy to understand ruleset for people who are fairly new to this sort of gaming. I whipped together some unit cards for each player’s warband, and of course they got their own copy of the rules to look over before the game.

The game started with a general advance by the undead players. They had to occupy the courtyard in the fortress and outnumber the defenders by the end of the game to secure a win. They could also gain a minor victory by slaying the dwarf artillery crew, which started the game in an outbuilding far from the tower and had to hustle to safety.

The dwarven defenders quickly understood their role in the scenario, and they mustered a stout defense that saw their elite troops meeting the undead near the crumbling stone walls on the perimeter of the fort’s territory. Fearsome blows were exchanged as the undead forces gradually pushed the dwarves back.

But! The dwarves had an ace in the hole! If they could get their artillery crew back to the fortress in one piece, they could load & fire the mortar mounted on the parapets. Thankfully, they were able to achieve this goal by the closing turns of the game, and they rained thunderous devastation down on the undead that were swarming around the walls of the holdfast.

By the end of the game, the undead legions had reached the walls (in fact, the ghoul king shown here was actually able to breach the defenses and begin rampaging through the courtyard). However, the stout dwarven defenders had succeeded in waylaying or defeating the bulk of the undead warbands, which meant that the defenders had secured the victory. The surviving undead warriors retreated in good order back to their nefarious swamp hideout.

Age of Fantasy: Skirmish is a great game to try out with new players in a convention setting. It requires some prep work – I don’t think the game would have been nearly as successful if I hadn’t put in some hours making the unit cards and handouts. But the ruleset is solid and it definitely ticks the boxes in terms of what a new player will expect from a wargame experience.

And I’m pleased to report that C3 Game Con was a wild success! We had more than 500 attendees over two days, which was way above our expectations and suggested there’s a big demand for this sort of event in Corvallis. I’ll be signing up to run some games next year for sure!

Age of Fantasy: The Ravening Hordes

Posted by Comrade on November 16, 2021

Posted in: Posts. Tagged: 28mm, army, battle report, chaos, fantasy, game night, wargames, warhammer. 10 Comments

Earlier this month we gathered in John’s garage war room to cross swords with Age of Fantasy, the rules-lite iteration of classic fantasy wargaming from One Page Rules.

Given how much we enjoyed last month’s outing with Grimdark Future: Firefight last month, it seemed like a logical progression to explore Age of Fantasy. As the name implies, Age of Fantasy is a slimmed-down ruleset that supports Warhammer-lite gameplay, with nifty army lists approximating all the major races and factions from the classic tabletop game. As a bonus, it also includes rules and army lists for most of the newer factions from Age of Sigmar, if that’s your cup o’ tea.

For our game, we set up a 2-vs-1 match whereupon John and Vince combined their human and dwarven forces to take on my bloodthirsty chaos army. This was my first time getting my entire chaos army on the table since I began piecing it together a year or two ago, and I was really chomping at the bit to lay it all out there on the table and bask in the blood-soaked glory.

Please indulge, if you will, these photos of my seething chaos battle line as it took to the field.

John’s human forces and Vincent’s dwarven milita were similarly arrayed, though I noted a concerning lack of skulls and spikes on their side of the board, as well as 100% more pegasus knights and bear riders.

We set up 5 objectives per the standard scenario in the rulebook. I wrote “rulebook” but One Page Rules is not joking about its name; the core rules for Age of Fantasy occupy less than two letter-sized pages, with the full rulebook encompassing scarcely more than a dozen.

The rules are spare, but they do a great job capturing the flavor and tone of a typical game of Warhammer. You’re still rolling dice and counting bonuses and removing casualties and cursing the gods when things go terribly awry, but Age of Fantasy seems to strip away a lot of the bloat that plagued most modern editions of Warhammer.

And so, amid the clatter of spears and the scrape of boiled leather, our game got underway. We opted to use the “Ebb and Flow” rules for the turn sequence, meaning we put a number of colored poker chits equal to the number of units in our armies into a sack, then took turns drawing a chit to determine unit activation order each turn. It was great fun, but it also set up some high stakes moments, because when one side sees several of their chits come up in a row, they know that means the opposing player will have a series of unopposed activations coming later in the turn.

With bloodlust in my eyes, I sent my forces surging forward.

Did I mention I had zero ranged combat in my army? It was all melee, so the only direction to go was forward.

On the right flank, a unit of Putrid Blightkings plodded through the muck, churning the soil beneath their steel-shod feet/hooves. They seized the first objective: a recently abandoned campsite with a roast pheasant still sizzling on the spit. This hapless game hen would become the focal point of absolutely insane butchery as the game unfolded.

With a little help from my chaos sorceress, I managed to goad my unit of Centigors into charging a unit of crossbowmen that had just finished unleashing their arrows into the flanks of my chaos knights. The Centigors thundered in amid a storm of hooves and spears, laying waste to the crossbowmen …

…before finding themselves on the receiving end of a devastating counter-charge from John’s winged pegasus knights!

Nothing like a good ol’ charge/counter-charge bloodbath.

As these maneuvers were playing out, we again remarked on how Age of Fantasy captured the spirit and general gameplay mechanics of classic Warhammer. Sure, we weren’t flipping through army books and cross-referencing arcane rule interactions, but the general spirit of the game definitely emerged as block of troops wheeled and charged and fell back.

By this point, we were about two turns into the game, and the chaos cavalry was advancing up the left flank to menace the dwarf handgunners. The center of the battlefield was dominated by several units of Vince’s heavily armored dwarves, backed up by a fearsome artillery piece.

Over at Waypoint Pheasant (the campfire objective marker featuring the oversized chicken tenders), John was making a determined defense with his block of 20 spearmen, led by the inimitable Grand Marshal Bartholomieu Begovic (standing tall on his ubiquitous supply crate).

The spearmen had a special ability that allowed them to inflict fierce casualties whenever they receive a charge, which really had me scratching my head about how to crack this particular nut.

Ultimately, I had to commit three units to the fight in order to pry John’s spearmen off this particular objective. The final sledgehammer came in the form of a devastating charge by my chariot, which circled around and took the hedgehog on its flank. (Age of Fantasy doesn’t have unit facings, so flank charges exist only in my imagination, but it seemed fitting here.)

The arrival of the chariot tipped things in my favor. A series of spectacularly poor morale rolls from John resulted in Marshal Begovic fleeing the field with the surviving spearmen! Discretion was the better part of valor, it seems, and our dear Marshal didn’t wish the get bloodstains on his pantaloons.

The Ebb and Flow activation rules we were using for this game continued to present unexpected and extremely fun decision points. Both sides had the opportunity to pull off “combo activations” to push the advantage. By the end of the second turn, repeated ativations by the chaos army had finally seized the initiative, culminating in this devastating charge by the chaos knights against the surviving members of a dwarf handgunner brigade.

The demise of the handgunners meant that there wasn’t much to stop the knights from rolling into the dwarves’ backfield, slaughtering the artillery crew and disrupting the reserves that were waiting to plug the gap in the main battleline.

We concluded that the game was in the bag for me, and the two allied players wisely decided to quit the field and retreat to their strongholds.

Age of Fantasy provided a great game worthy of the history books (for me, anyway, since I was the victor). It is a very playable, rules-lite game which seems like it can easily accommodate some very large armies without a lot of complexity or rulebook flipping.

The Ebb & Flow activation rules (optional in the Age of Fantasy rulebook) were absolutely electrifying. I understand they also form the core mechanics for games like Bolt Action and Warlords of Erehwon.

By the end of the game, we were already sketching out ideas for larger games featuring more gloriously painted miniatures from our collections. Stay tuned for more!

Saga: Age of Magic Game Day

Posted by Comrade on March 14, 2020

Posted in: Posts. Tagged: 28mm, army, club, fantasy, game night, saga, wargames. 5 Comments

The stars aligned last month, and our game group was able to come together for a Saga: Age of Magic game day. We had six players and managed to play five games over the course of about five hours. Not bad at all!

This game day provided a great opportunity to get some armies onto the battlefield, many of which haven’t yet seen action in their current incarnation. I wasn’t able to get play-by-play photos of the games themselves, so here’s a look at some of the matchups as they unfolded throughout the day.

Lawrence’s Otherworld Daemons vs. Vincent’s Great Kingdoms

Lawrence loves big centerpiece models and it shows in this Nurgle daemon army! He played against Vince’s Great Kingdoms army in the first pairing. Here’s a look at their clash.

See below: There’s nothing like a wedge of knights charging into a knot of foul daemons. Did they win the day or did they get wiped out in a flurry of hooves and lances? I honestly can’t remember. Maybe Vince or Lawrence will chime in with a comment and fill in the blanks.

Lawrence’s Daemons vs. Pat’s Undead

This second game was more like half a game, against my undead. We were pressed for time so we played a few turns and called it a draw. It was a beautiful game featuring several newly completed pieces of terrain — that autumn forest piece from me and the big Ophidian Archway from Lawrence! Here are a few photos.

Hmmm…12 foot tall dragon ogres appearing behind your archers is not where you want them to be. Lawrence was playing the Otherworld army list, and he made great use of the teleport ability to move his units around the battlefield.

The photo below shows the proper arrangement, with the targets in front of the archers.

This was yet another game session where I misused my Black Knight (the special lieutenant character for the Undead army list). He just looks so badass! Who wouldn’t want to send that grim reaper charging into a unit of warriors? Turns out, that’s not a very good tactic. Oh well, live and learn (or not, if you’re undead).

Paul’s Beastmen

I confess I only got one photo of Paul’s nascent Beastmen army. He had been working diligently on it over the last couple of months and brought a batch of nifty beastmen and minotaurs to the table. I think Paul has finally discovered the pure, unadulterated joy that comes with painting BROWN. I say this as a Skaven player who has literally dozens of shades of browns in my paint collection.

Anyway, we added some units of basic fighter-types from various collections to bulk out the army to fit the games. I’m really excited to watch this army develop!

John’s Great Kingdoms vs. Mark’s Lords of the Wild

John’s GHA (Generic Human Army) has come into focus over the last few months. The army was developed specifically for use with Saga and Dragon Rampant, using miniatures from a variety of manufacturers. He’s tied it closely to the homebrew fantasy setting we developed a couple years ago using Microsope.

These photos show John’s Great Kingdoms battling Mark’s Lords of the Wild. I’ll have more photos from Mark’s army in a moment; he and I got in a game vs. my undead as well.

John also debuted a few new units, including this batch of crossbowmen and a cool new trebuchet catapult thingy. His army is really loaded for bear! It will give me no pleasure to swarm his defensive positions with tides of foul ratmen and monstrous abominations from the pits. No pleasure at all.

Mark’s Lords of the Wild vs. Pat’s Undead

I ended up with several photos from this game because, well, it featured my army, and I was standing nearby for most of the game.

Alas, it was not my best showing. The Lords of the Wild list is a real tough nut to crack, particularly for my slow-moving undead. Mark made great use of his creatures to outflank and destroy my key units that generated Saga dice, leaving me with few resources as the game reached its later turns.

His army was led by this brutal giant gorilla who, as you can clearly see, is wearing a T. Rex as a headdress. That should have been my first tip-off that Mark would be pulling no punches this game.

Actually, I had a decent opportunity to take out his warlord, during a turn when I was able to pile on enough to fatigue to exhaust him for a turn. Alas, my dice rolls betrayed me in spectacular fashion, allowing his leader to retreat to the rear and rest up to remove some fatigue. I can definitely chalk up this defeat to statistically poor dice results — c’est la vie!

Anyway, T. Rex showed up shortly thereafter and ate everyone. The end.

This session solidified the ascent of Saga: Age of Magic as our group’s default choice for “big skirmish” scale fantasy gaming. It is a fantastic and flexible system that provides a lot of strategic and tactical depth in both gameplay and list-building.

The “use whatever you want” philosophy for building armies also suits our group very well. We have some players like Lawrence and Paul, who have armies drawn from Age of Sigmar, and other players like me and Vincent and John, who have cobbled-together armies featuring a miniatures from many different sources, and players like Mark, who custom-printed quite a few miniatures for his army.

Saga: Age of Magic welcomes all!

Comrade's Wargames

Painting toy soldiers in Oregon