Weird War

Club night and a real winters evening, dark, dank, wet and cold, there are a huge amount of leaves lying about on the approach to the club and I continually worry that I am going to end up on my backside with soldiers everywhere one of these evenings. I can at least rest safe in the knowledge that the money not being used to clean the pavements is being spent wisely by the Council in saving Lancashire from some horrendous eco crises. As usual I digress, the club game last night was Dystopian Wars, something I have heard about but never played, I have seen Simon's collection and it is impressive, the models are wonderful and he has painted them with care and attention. We were having a naval game, I was the Royal Navy of course as suited an old veteran and he was the Russians.

As I had not a clue about the game or rules and Simon hadn't played for at least two years we kicked off with two starter fleets, we each had one battleship, three cruisers and eight small ships in two squadrons along with an air squadron, I chose torpedo bombers, Simon took fighters. Each fleet has its own characteristics, the British have long range gunnery but the Russians have 'ablatov' armour, I could have spelt that wrong, which you have to knock out before you can hurt them, Simon assured me it was nothing but it was much better than nothing.

My fleet prepares to meet the enemy.

 For some reason Simon split his fleet on deplyoment and left his three cruisers out on a limb opposite my whole fleet. I decided therefore to go straight at them, despite being warned that the Russians were also built for ramming. Tooled up for that they may be but Simon turned his cruisers towards his battleship not my line, I opened fire and managed to sink a cruiser with some extraordinary shooting, not long after another Russian cruiser went to the bottom. By this time I had almost lost all my small ships with one lone survivor of a squadron keeping up the best traditions of the RN by bravely, but foolishly attacking his battleship at full speed. My torpedo bombers made a quick attack on a destroyer screen and sent one to the bottom before making for home but falling foul of Russian fighters on the way.

The mighty Russian battleship with strange, round, destroyers.

My own battleship, typical RN, ugly but functional.

What with the introduction to the rules we ran out of time, at the end my battleship had taken a pounding but my three cruisers were virtually untouched, on the other hand Simon was down to one cruiser and I had managed to remove the extra armour on the battleship. My hope at the end was if my battleship could get the initiative it might manage to damage the Russian enough for the cruiser squadron to sink it, which would leave his cruiser overwhelmingly outnumbered, but that's one for the pub recrimination phase, I do miss that part.

There you have it, a good game and despite being a sci-fi setting the naval warfare was pretty good and better fun than my last run out with the WWI fleets. Elsewhere there were a couple of Bloodbowl games, SAGA Cross and Crescent and a run of Blucher. I was intrigued with the pre-battle movements of Blucher and thought this a good idea, but the rest looked like a game with toy soldiers as do many systems/rules these days.

Online banter is building to a frenzy as the WAC Tournament approaches, insults are being thrown around and no one is crazy enough to throw a boast into the ring, at least not yet. Defending champion Jenny is the one to beat in the Dark Age tourney while it is up for grabs in the Classical. Dave Toone, organiser and sculptor has turned out another fine individual figure for those attending, his best yet I think.

I am on my way with the Praetorians, those spine shields were a real challenge, very 'footery' for an old guy with bad eyesight. The way the figures are made I decided for the first time to do the shields separate and then glue them on once the figure is complete, I will have to decided on the eventual colour scheme tonight. I am thinking of going with a white tunic and a red or blue cloak, the red because my Romans don't have a lot of the traditional bright red on them and maybe blue to fit in with the shields. Blue also being my favourite colour, of course it would be signalling ; trustworthy, honest, loyal, wise, sincere, reserved, quiet, reliable and responsible, who writes that muck...... mind you....