Club Xmas Games Day

 The club put on its traditional long day gaming session over the Xmas break. I haven't been to the club for a while as we've been doing a lot of online gaming, so it was nice to get down there again.

A great feature is the buffet. This time we seemed to have catered for an army! Unfortunately there had been some sort o of cock up with the booking so we were all jammed in the small room rather than then big hall. As both the Wednesday night and Thursday night groups were there, it was quite cosy.

This didn't stop Lloyd putting on one of his huge 28mm Ancients games.

Legionaries and Auxiliaries.

Various hairy barbarians.

Good old Quartermaster General (WW2). What a great game.

There was also this large Sci-Fi ground combat game.

Due to the small room, space for the Bring and Buy was a bit restricted. Fortunately I'd not brought my stuff down to sell and Tim was away this year too. There was still a lively trade in bits and pieces.

The really big game was Steves 'Pony Wars' featuring hundreds (thousands?) of Baccus figures.

When I arrived, the chaps were trying out Fivecore Brigade Commander with Nicks beautiful 6mm stuff (also Baccus). I've played it before so quickly ran through the mechanics with them, but unfortunately the scenario was a bit small to do the rules justice (six bases vs three bases). It needs to be a bit bigger than that really. 

The Germans had a Luftwaffe battalion with a few 88s defending a town, while the British had an armoured regiment and three infantry companies to attack. Direct fire from the tanks managed to cause some of the defenders to retire in confusion while the others hunkered down. The tanks then got a bit overenthusiastic and lost a squadron to Germans armed with panzerfausts. Time to bring up the infantry. 

Some of Nicks 6mm stuff. Company bases.

The Pony Wars game also featured a bunch of lovely stuff.

Indian village.

Farmstead.

Wagons and wagon circles waiting to be deployed.

Lots and lots of US Cavalry.

The Fort.

An awful lot of Indians.

More wagons, along with herds of buffalo and cattle.

I joined in for a while as it is years since I've played Pony Wars. The players command the US Cavalry while everyone else is semi randomised through various reaction tables.

I ended up running the settlers at the Gold Mine when a very large number of hostiles came into view! That didn't end very well.

So my next job was running the settlers at the Logging Camp. Fortunately for us a small detachment of Cavalry made it through and we fortified the camp. One group of hostiles skirmished from a distance, while much larger bodies formed up behind the mesas.

Meanwhile the cavalry from the fort were busy trying to round up the settlers and get them to evacuate.

We had another turns grace to fortify the logging camp, but the odds didn't look great. A small cavalry detachment had turned up, which was very helpful.

The other cavalry column continued its leisurely advance. At least the settlers on this farm got packed up quite quickly. The detached element are Scouts, off to check out that pass for ambushes.

The massed charge came in on the logging camp. Rather like Ney at Waterloo, except we weren't in square.

Unlike the Gold Mine, this time our defensive fire was pretty good and the first three ranks of Indians went down. We took some losses too, but had inflicted enough casualties that they pulled back to think again.

Eventually my guys escaped and fled back to this sturdy mission station, which was soon besieged by Indians, but not before one of the US Cavalry columns had made it inside too. We were pretty confident of holding out here.

I left it at that and went back to watch the others.

They were playing a Print and Play game called 'Metal Quest'. Tom had done a lovely job of printing and mounting all the counters. It was pitched as a sort of Mad Max post apocalyptic road warrior type game, but to both myself and Jerry it played a lot more like a tabletop version of Fallout (a post apoc computer game). It even had some of the same monsters.

It really packed an awful lot of game into two sides of A4. The players had a wide range of options and decisions around trading, taking on missions, repairing and upgrading equipment, coupled with travelling around the tiny (3x3 zones) but extremely dangerous apocalyptic wasteland.

It thought it worked really well, and everyone seemed to get into playing it very quickly.

That was an excellent afternoon, very enjoyable and nice to see a lot of familiar faces in the flesh again. Hopefully we will get a bit more face to face gaming done this year rather than so much remote stuff.