God and His Saints are Asleep

DBA Feudal Wargame Campaign set in the Angevin Empire

The story begins...

Stay tuned for more information and battle action in the opening moves of the campaign.

Secondhand Lion's Halloween Themed Bone Bash

The Undead army made it's table debut in the Lion's Den last Thursday.  We had the faithful four tableside for some bone bashing Hordes of the Things action.

Jon and Terry fielded the Empire army.  We were at nearly 4 armies in points, I don't recall the exact figure count but it was an epic big battle.

A lot of these were painted by Nick W.  He wasn't able to make the game but his figures fought valiantly on in his absence.

The ghouls lumber forward as a horde.

The skeleton warband in fine fighting form.

A repurposed Heroscape dragon made an appearance.

'Scape on 'scape action two aerial elements clash on the right flank.

Nice close up of the warband.

Phone pic of the full table.

The Undead army won.  The Empire overlord went impetuous and thought to capitalize on a flank attack on the dead dragon.  The risk was that he was caught behind enemy lines and killed.

Carl L. fought as my flank commander and lead the zombies into some pretty surprising action against mounted knights.  No one expected them to fare as well as they did but the dice were on the zombie side.

After action fight with the fall of the Empire commander.  The fight took place top left near the large bone dragon and blade unit.

The zombies assault through wood and valley.  Some unpainted minis were needed to balance the huge skeleton army.  We were playing at the very bursting seams of the collection.

The corps cart served as the undead camp.  It was immobile and would cause our loss if it were captured.  It seemed about mid game the the aerials of the empire side were making a foray into that very tactic but the leader died too soon.

Sic 'em boys.

Thanks for looking in on the blog.  Leave a comment for the encouragement of others.

Dead Deader Deadest

The undead army suffered from the new unit curse. Bringing to the table my new army of undead painted figures in 28 millimeter for Hordes of the Things rules set, this Halloween project met with little battlefield success on it's first outing.

The army looked great but my dice rolls let them down. All that paint job went for naught.  My Zombie ally Ted C. fared much better with the warband army and hero. 

 Even the corpse cart was a great big disappointment. I classified this unit as a behemoth and it went into battle and got kicked.  My opponent on my half of the battlefield fielded a Battlemasters standard Empire based army with blades and a hero general a smattering of bow and a mighty cannon.

Mike had put together a nice army that he called the northern barbarians. Had a really cool flying hero.

I will look forward to commanding these again in the future in a better showing. 

The corpse cart.

A fun quick game to celebrate the season.

Late in the battle from behind my lines.

Pay attention to the base flocking how as the cart passes everything dies.

And the Dead Shall Rise

Had a wild hair and decided to acquire an undead army as a Halloween project.  There is this neat little wargame collective that sells their cast offs on Facebook.  So browsing this web site the other day I saw some bags of skeletons for cheap.  Real cheap.  A few contact messages with the owner and a clandestine meeting in the back room of a local game shop and I was the owner of a Mantic Games collection of miniatures featuring skeletons, ghouls, wolves, heroes, necromancers, and demon spawn...

So I tumpt them out on the game table and based them Battlemaster style on 70x90 mm cardstock bases.  Our wargame group plays Hordes of the Things using old BattleMaster sets and proxies.

These were very nearly spray and play.  Do not come here dear reader for a painting lesson on zombies or un-dead minis.  This is quick and dirty work to get them table ready in 5 days time.

That is a mess o zombies.  I hate zombies.

My blade unit three stands strong

Click on the images to get gagged on drybrush technique.

Spear unit looking pretty tough.

A hero stand and his retinue of bards and hangers-on.

The croaking of the chanters can practically be heard wailing away.

"And you get some dead, and you get some dead, dead for everyone wails the Necromancer."

Not sure what these are called officially but I refer to them as deamons or hell spawn.

Dead dogs.

Thanks for looking in.  I will battle report on these in my next post as they are going table-side to kick ass on some human knights and men-at-arms.

Oktoberfest at Castle Conn and Escape from Colditz

I got to play this game last night at a friends house with our regular gaming group.  We had six in attendance so the room was full and the game had enough players to fill all of the positions.

This is a unique theme for a game in that a lot of people wouldn't find it "entertaining" to pretend to be prisoners of war attempting an escape from a maximum security Nazi prison camp.

But hey, we are wargamers and didn't give that a second thought.  The co-workers I told in advance of the game night looked at me with raised eyebrows and said, "seems kind of deep.  I'm not sure I would like that."

It is a fascinating puzzle and social interaction experiment in that the players are all cooperative versus one player that is the German commander of the prison and is in opposition to all of the players.

The game components are pretty neat in the recreation of actual prisoner artifacts and text objects that would have been experienced by the people of that time period.

the prison yard during the game.  This layout of the castle includes a pretty intricate and detailed version of the location.  The color coded pawns represent different nationalities that were imprisoned.  I got to play Dutch and was given the orange pawns.  The game has mechanics that allow beneficial and unique participation game play that I had a hard time acquiring.  

The table early on.  I had very little luck rolling a 3, 7, 11, to get opportunity cards.  I was really a back seat prisoner until helped out by the Polish inmates that assisted me in getting my escape kit.

I think only one Polish prisoner escaped but as the game mocked me in all aspect of mechanics I managed to get two of my lads into a tunnel near the end of our time limit.  We had set 11:00 PM as our stop time and the game really heated up nearing this time limit.  I was very near escaping with two men when the German player drew the "Tunnel discovered" card and put my men in solitary.

Not going to make it orange boys!  Up outa that tunnel and into the cells with you!

The game is a roll and move math puzzle that requires a high level of interaction with the other players.  The opportunity cards and the ability to cooperate on schemes is really deserving of another play but man is it a hard puzzle to figure out.

Thanks Ted for the game.  Blog as promised.  Now I am attempting to escape the Braunschweiger cloud in my classroom.

ESCAPE from Braunschweiger

By Farter Brothers Games