Weird Wars

Like the rest of you I have been chilling and enjoying the lovely weather, although I believe it is not quite as nice in other parts of the country or Europe, but that is a welcome change for us here in the Northwest. I have dabbled in the garden, twice now, cleaned the outhouse of primer dust, washed the car and sat in the shade with a cold drink to hand, today we are heading off to Kendal as the missus wants to go shopping. Fair enough as there is an excellent fish shop in Kendal and I want a paint pallet, I might even have a look at some books although I don't really need any at the moment.

The club, Simon volunteered to bring his Dystopian War stuff on Tuesday, he must have almost everything for this game but he settled on another naval action, we have done one before. I of course was British being an Imperialist and he was the Russians, the British have longer range guns but the Russians have a special armour which you have to get rid of before you can damage them, this is a big advantage. My force was a mix of large ships, cruisers and destroyers with a couple of squadrons of 'tiny flyers' I love that phrase, Simon had two big ships and six slightly less bigger ships with some attendant destroyers which looked like UFO's.

The Dystopian universe as you might expect has some fantastic design for all manners of things and Simon has complemented these with some conversion work of his own, the carrier is one example.

The carrier.

Simon split his forces into two groups so I decided to feint against the left hand one and then make a run for the other, I advanced slowly as I outranged his guns but it didn't really make much difference as the nearer you are obviously the more effective (or the more dice you have) your shooting is. This actually made no difference for me as I only managed one really good salvo all night. I threw a squadron of destroyers and a group of tiny flyers against the left squadron and they were very successful and their torpedo salvoes took the special armour off one of his big cruisers but as so often happens, I could not actually sink it. On the other side I closed the range and threw everything including the kitchen sink at the Russkies but failed miserably to inflict any damage. Meanwhile I lost a squadron of destroyers and several cruisers along with damage to my carrier.

British battleship and destroyers.

At this point I hoisted the signal to flee, it was every ship for itself, those that were left that is. When you get down to it the game is a pretty good naval action despite the weird looking vessels and there is a great depth to the mechanics which will take time to learn, we played a fairly basic version as I am a beginner. The game can be very involved as you can also bring in land and air forces.

Boo, hiss, Russians.

My feint is over and we head for the right hand group.

 My Bolt Action forces are only literally a couple of figures off being complete, a Bren gun team in fact. I want to get a little mini campaign up and running, a series of linked battles which give a point to each encounter. To this end I bought the Chain of Command campaign booklet and a campaign aptly named 'The Scottish Corridor' for my Normandy forces, I have given the former a quick look and there are some really good ideas for this type of mini campaign in there. However, and here's the snag, my opponent in the first such game will probably be Simon and he has Russians, I have pulled back from the brink of buying Eastern Front buildings and suitable terrain and covering everything in all the new snow products. I will therefore do an 'Into the Reich' set of games with the Russians bulldozing their way through Germany in late '44 or early '45, my poor British will have to wait their turn, hopefully my son will join me in Normandy.

So I have given myself quite a bit to do in the near future, I have all those troops to reflock, a couple of kits to assemble, new buildings to build and the others to 'tart up' and a campaign to sort out. I am also thinking aloud about the end of the year and this possible Byzantine or Pyrrhic army.