Under the Sea

After my daughter left, I had to go out of state for a while with the National Guard.  When I got back, my son came for a few days.  One of the things I wanted to do with him was a LEGO game I had devised using the deep sea exploration sets.  I had a specific idea in mind that I wanted to test with him, but - as with everything - once he got a hold of the idea, he ran with it and I lost all control! 

The concept was that there were two teams - the Good Guys and the Bad Guys.  The Good Guys were trying to recover treasure and artifacts for museums, etc., while the Bad Guys are trying to recover the same for their own greed.  In addition, that Bad Guys could take treasure from the Good Guys on a limited basis.  The seafloor was simply a piece of muslin marked off in 6" squares.  Each square had six levels - the surface, the seafloor and four levels in between, represented by clear plastic cups. 

When the seafloor in each square was "explored" (by having a bathyscaphe or diver enter it), a chit was drawn to determine whether they found nothing, a shark or octopus, treasure, or both a creature and treasure.   If there was nothing in the square, the chit was left in the square to indicate that it had already been explored.  The creatures also moved each turn along with the bathyscaphes and divers.  The creatures couldn't do anything against a bathyscaphe, but if they ended up at the same level and same square as a diver, the diver got eaten.  That happened a couple of times. 

The Good Guys had the recovery ship and the Bad Guys had a Zodiac.  The recovery ship and the Zodiac could move as well.  I think Junior threw in the police boat at some time as well, but I wasn't sure if that would be too much for the Bad Guys since the game seemed to favor the Good Guys.  Of course, he also gave the Bad Guys the underwater lab, so they had a separate base of operations as well.  I foresaw the lab and some of the other features of the sets as separate games rather than throwing everything into one giant game.  The basic concept worked, but was rather muddied by A adding so much stuff to the game that I hadn't intended.   

 

The recovery ship hovers over two divers (one with a dive sled),

a bathyscaphe, and a treasure site.   

The main treasure, being explored by a bathyscaphe. 

A diver being eaten by a shark, with other divers in the background watching,

no doubt, in horror.

A also likes to play games with my friends, so Perry obligingly came over one night for a game of Seafarers of Cataan.  When Adam was younger - even until the last couple of years - his main strategy was to build a village or two as opportunity presented, but to rely on pick-a-cards for his points.  He'd usually come up with 6 or 7 points at the end of a game that way while the rest of us were within a point or two of winning ourselves.  As a result, neither Perry nor I were particularly concerned about him, seeing each other as our principle rival.  In the end, A won with 13 points!  That's him in the blue on the lower left.  I think I had 10 and Perry had 7 or 8.  J was astounded that he had won, but happily concluded that she would finally have some worthy competition from him!  (She first beat her mom and I when she was about 7, in only her second or third game - and has continued to win fairly regularly since then!) 

Roborallying

Haven't posted in a while, and haven't even kept up with posts that I have.  In part of June and July, my girlie, now 13 was here.  She isn't into the wargames so much, though she has played a couple with me and my friends.  There are even several of my family games she doesn't like, including Roborally and Formula De.  But when she was here, she asked if we could play Roborally so she could get good at it.  We played three or four games during the course of which she got progressively better. 

This was a close point in our second or so game.

 

 

The close finish came in our last game.  The following pics were taken at various points in that game.  You can see it was close through most of the game, but the last four pictures were taken in the last four turns of the game.  Wow!  She did a great job - coming *THAT* close to beating me!  (I was blue; she was green.)

 

Of course, it didn't work out so well when one of my friends came over to play it with us, but she still did great! 

Sci Fi Week

Last week I spent most of the week visiting the kids.  A (who's now 9, 10 in a little over a month) called me a month or so ago and asked me if I had any sci fi figs.  I rattled off what I had painted and raw lead and asked him why.  He told me about a video he had watched on YouTube by a Warhammer gamer about making your own buildings.  He was stoked and proceeded to cut up some a plastic bottle and glue a straw and bottle cap to it to make a storage tank.  Well, he never got around to making the building out of foam-core board, but I showed him an even easier way to 15mm sci fi buildings - spray painting some plastic electrical boxes.  We got a piece of tan foam-core board and lightly over-sprayed it with green spots.  We got some fake aquarium plants at Walmart and had an instant game board.  I painted up some Rebel Minis Earth Force figures and brought them with, along with some Scourge and some Khurasan Huntarrs, for us to play around with.  Unfortunately, I didn't get a good picture of the Scourge.  We got in three games.  He beat me each time.  The first game was very close, but when he understood the concept of creating rules, he just couldn't stop! 



Initially, the rules were very simple.  Turn order was Move, Conduct lightning strikes, Shoot.  Figures could move 6", 3" if climbing on the "mountain" or moving through/up/down inside buildings.  Range to shoot was 12" and you had to roll 8+ to hit, with a -2 if the target was in cover, and a +1 at less than 3" range.  All shooting was simultaneous.  Figures were figured to be in cover if they were partially behind something from the shooter's perspective.  Initially, I didn't intend for figures to be able to shoot multiple times, but it quickly devolved to that, with no additional modifiers. 

So, yes, this planet has a problem with electrical storms.  On a 5+, lightning struck the board.  We divided the board up into 36 equal areas, each 3-1/3" high by 5" wide (the board was 6 areas wide by 6 areas high - roll a die for each axis to determine which area was struck).  If a figure was in an area struck by lightning, it rolled for a hit, just like shooting.  On an 8+ it was dead.  The nails sitting on the board are lightning rods.  If the figure was within 2" of the longer nails or 1" of the shorter screws when lightning struck the area, the figure was safe.  (The lightning strikes were A's idea, needless to say!)  We didn't have any figures die from lightning strikes, but there were a few close calls where it struck an area adjacent to the figures or struck an area where figures were near a lightning rod. 

We had a lot of fun shooting each other up and moving figures around on the board.  With eight figures a side, games were short and bloody. 

The upended figure at left is dead from opposing fire.

A private and corporal (from left) rounding a building.

Enemies square off on a roof top.

A Huntarr (you know what this really is).  We used them in a

game but the rules we used didn't work too well.  The boy

wanted two hits to kill the good guys and three to kill

the Huntar, but the Huntarr had to be visible to attack or

 shoot, and could only shoot 6".  He died faster than he

could kill his opponents.

A pair of soldiers looking for the Huntarr and sticking close

to a lightning rod, just in case.

The mastermind himself, along with one of

the board set-ups we used. 

 

 

We had a grand time, but I have to paint up some new figures now as I left the ones I painted with him to play around with.  We also got in a game of Settlers with sister J.  I won that one.  And we played our first game of Flash Point, a cooperative fire fighting/victim rescuing game.  We used the basic rules to get a feeling for the game, and it was close.  J was pretty lucky for most of the game and there wasn't much fire on her edge of the board.  A and I kept running into more and more fire and at the end of the game, most of the house was on fire with the exception of J's corner where it was still mostly under control.  We did lose three victims, though, so getting the seventh out safely was a necessity.  Fortunately, nothing bad happened and we were able to rescue her.  A and I also watched The Empire Strikes Back.  All in all we had a great time.  Next week, J comes to stay with me for three weeks.  Wondering what we'll get into then!



Lost in Space

I bought X-Wing a few months ago and it's been sitting in my dining room awaiting an opportunity to play.  I brought it with me, along with the Millennium Falcon, when I visited my kids in Idaho, knowing that my son at least would like the game.  We played our first game on Friday.  Actually we played our first four or five games on Friday.  The first game was a standard two Tie fighters versus the X-Wing.  I gave the two Ties to my son thinking that it would give him a bit of an advantage.  It was a very close game, but I ended up winning that one although the X-Wing was down to 1 or 2 damage points remaining.

The master plotting his move. 

The final dice roll.

 

 

The second game was the Millennium Falcon against the two Ties.  This time, the boy was the Falcon and I had the Ties.  The Falcon was down to just a couple of damage points remaining when he blasted my second Tie.  

 

 

 

The third game, I think, he insisted on playing with two Ties against an X-Wing and a Y-Wing with some asteroids scattered around.  I warned him that it was unbalanced in favor of the Rebel players, but he wanted to do it anyway.  In the end, I think the Y-Wing had lost a couple of shields and maybe a point or two of damage when the second Tie bit the dust.

 

 

Felt like we were playing the game all day.  It was a lot of fun, though.  We tried the advanced rules but they didn't really stick with him so we didn't really get the full effect. 

 

He got sidetracked part-way through playing by the Nerf guns that I had sent earlier in the week so we could chase each other around the house when cabin fever set in.  We spent a lot of time having Nerf wars in addition to X-Wing.  Productive weekend, all-in-all.











Snap Shot: a Blast from the Past

Last week the boy asked if we could play a game.  "Sure," I said, "what do you want to play?"  He goes up to my room and brings down Snap Shot.  I tried to explain to him that it's a pretty complex game for a 7-year-old, but he would not be deterred.  So through the week we set up the characters and the animals (we played the introductory scenario, where the animals escape from their cages on the scout ship).  This morning, we finally had time to play it.  He decided he wanted to be the animals, so I was the four crewmen.  Since their starting positions are set by the scenario, there really wasn't a lot of choices to make, but I did make sure that the three crew with heavier weapons were in the forward part of the ship, while the guy who only had the snub pistol was in the drive room, since he was likely to either be attacked first, or get locked in the drive room when the iris valves were shut from the bridge. 

The boy didn't have a bad strategy and I was able to lock one animal in a stateroom, although they had full control of the Common Area.  One also got trapped in the Air/Raft Berth by the closing of the iris valves.  Once my crew had weapons, I opened the stateroom to work on taking out the beast in there only to realize that I was too close to effectively hit him with the weapon that I had.  Same thing happened when I opened the iris to the Common Area and started fighting the animals in there. 

A little later in the game, you can see the guy in the Drive Room and the beastie in the Air/Raft Berth are still whole, while there has been a lot of action in the corridor between the staterooms and into the Common Area.  The counters that are upside down show the unconscious animals and crew members.  I think, crewman C had escaped the corridor and closed the iris valve, unfortunately sacrificing one of the two crewmen in the corridor. 

In the end, I had one crewman dead, one unconscious, one wounded and one unwounded, while he had two animals dead outright and four unconscious, which I was able to finish off at my leisure.  It was a fun little game and the boy enjoyed it.  His first question after the game was, "Now can we play Traveller?"  I am afraid that will have to wait for another day, but I'm thinking of ways to cut it down to a 7- and 10-year-old's level so the kids will enjoy it and want to play it over time, growing with the game so to speak.  I'm sure he will keep bugging me about it until we do play it.

More Family Time

So, as you know, I've been a couple of weeks late in reporting my gaming.  Something that I have finally been able to remedy this week.  First of all, here is the reason that I was unable to report at least one of the games earlier:

This is me (in the BCGs) and two of my guys on top of the 'hill' that took us two and a half hours to climb.  This was when we were about to descend it after a 28-hour mission (that unbeknownst to us was about to turn into a 36-hour mission and which followed a 24-hour mission with a 2 hour 'break' in between) - thus the joyful looks on our faces. 

I do have to admit that we at least had some nice scenery to enjoy while feeling like a rewarmed pile of miserable doggie doo-doo. 

And the week did start with a 20-minute 'insertion' by Black Hawk. 

Funnily enough, I was not told we were being 'inserted' prior to the flight so it came as something of a surprise when I was told to determine my location and call in the 8-digit grid for a pickup.  Instead we just told them we were at the village and ready to be picked up, but then got lucky when a passing motorist on a different mission gave us a ride back to base. 

The week after that, I traveled across the country to attend a class then returned home.  The class was held on a joint Army-Air Guard post and I never bothered to venture onto the Air side of it, but passing the Air side on the outside, there is a B-29 sitting near the gate.  Next time I'm there, I'll have to take a pic to add to my collection.  So that was part of my big adventure and why I was unable to post at least of my game reports on time.  But enough of that.  The real reason I was posting here today was to tell about some more family gaming. 

The day after I got back (late Friday night - so on Saturday), my 6-year-old wanted to play a game.  When I asked him what he wanted to play, he said, "Robo Rally!"  Really?  We had tried playing it once before and decided it was beyond both the 6- and the 9-year-old (perhaps a year or so younger at the time), but my wife and I both love it.  Well, I thought, we'll see how long this goes on.  I pulled out the game and set up a simple 3-point race covering  two boards.  I also modified it so that instead of laying out all five segments (a difficult concept for a 6-year-old brain to keep track of) I let him play his cards one at a time, based on the results of his previous move.  The result?  The little bugger almost beat me!  I got to the final flag one segment ahead of him!  He was then enamored with the game and spent the next two days laying out impossibly difficult courses.  We tried to actually play one of them and several hours later we still weren't done.  He eventually put the game away on his own initiative admitting that he needed the table space for a game of Milton Bradley's The Lost World: Jurassic Park with the daytime kid-sitter. 

So, as pleasant as that turned out, even more heart-warming was my 9-year-old daughter asking me that same evening if she could go to game night with me.  You see, she had had a sleepover spa party with several of her friends the night I got home (it was actually for her birthday, which isn't until August, but one of her bestest friends is moving tomorrow and she wanted to make sure the girl was included) and was so wiped out, she spent most of Saturday afternoon asleep.  When bedtime rolled around she was wide awake.  I recognized this dilemma and consented to taking her to game night with me. 

At game night, there were only five of us, including her, and we ended up playing Risk - one of two choices that were decided upon prior to us arriving.  This was her first experience playing Risk.  She had decided a few weeks previously that she didn't want to play it with her brother and me.  She ended up doing all right and holding her own for most of the game.  Unfortunately, she was strongest in North America (which wouldn't have been a bad choice for a base) and Asia (which, as everyone knows, is almost impossible to hold early in the game).  She tried to reinforce everything evenly across the board and ended up thrown out of North America (by a sixty-something-year-old man who found it appropriate to taunt a 9-year-old girl when he beat her by the luck of the dice).  She and I were peaceably cohabitating in Asia for the moment so I built up my forces and quietly trashed North America via Alaska.  The boob sat there dumbfounded as his superiority failed him and he lost all but one possession.  Doug, bless his soul, knocked out the last possession in his turn immediately following mine. 

Anyway, we ended up calling the game a few turns later as we were playing on the porch and she was both chilly and finally feeling the effects of tiredness.  Looking at the board, we proclaimed Perry victor (his base was Africa and he had just taken South America from Doug, had a solid presence in Europe and was holding firm to the Middle East; while I held Australia and roughly half of Asia, Doug having thrown me out of North America in turn).  Fortunately she enjoyed the game time with daddy and his friends (the second or third time she's played with us). 

So, the point is two new gaming experiences resulted in positive results for the kids and a lot of fun.  It won't be long before they are both gaming more hard-core games.  Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of either of the games described above, but I assure you they were as described.  I don't know when I'll have another battle report - I'm training for a new job and they're working me nearly 60 hours a week for the next couple of weeks and at the same time, I'm supposed to start some extensive on-line military training.  At any rate, Happy Gaming and I'll see you around the table.

A New Generation Meets an Old Game

I frequently peruse the local Goodwill stores.  You wouldn't believe some of the books I've come across in them and at .50 to $1.50 or so per, it's a good deal for me.  I'm a book junkie and have actually read most of the hundreds of books that I own.  I never stopped to count, but I would guess in my life I've owned well over a thousand books, but have paired the collection down to pretty much just military history and the stuff I was studying in grad school.  My wife says I should get rid of them once I've read them, but I frequently go back to books looking for scenario ideas, details of battles or things of technical interest mentioned in them so I hang on to them.  But I digress.

On my last few trips, I noticed a Stratego game in good condition on the shelf, but passed it up despite fond memories of playing it against my older brothers as a kid.  I finally decided to go ahead and get it, and fortunately it turned out to be complete.  When I got home, I just left it on the piano bench in plain sight.  The kids saw it sitting there but didn't show much interest in it for a day or two until my 6-year-old asked me about it.  I took it out, explained the pieces to him and we set up and played.  I have to admit I slaughtered him, which wasn't too difficult, but each game got a little better and a little more difficult as I explained different strategies to him and he started to put them into play.  This was the final location of all the remaining pieces on our third game.  The little bugger almost got me!

I was blue; he was red.  As you can see, it wouldn't have taken much for him to win.  You can also see, he didn't quite get the idea of 'surrounding your flag with bombs'.  After seeing us play, his 9-year-old sister decided she wanted to play too, so they set up a game and played three straight with him winning each one.  A day or two later he won another one, but she beat him in the fifth game using his own strategy.  She complained loudly that he was putting his best pieces in the front line and killing her with them, because she put her weak ones in front.  I explained to her that rather than trying to make him change how he was playing to suit her, she needed to adapt her set-up and play to challenge him.  Obviously she put that advice to work for her. 

I guess some people would question my parenting, slaughtering my kids in games like that, but when I was a kid we were taught to play the game, then you played it to the best of your ability win or lose.  My parents never threw a game for our benefit and we had to fight long and hard to start to win games, which also carried over to playing against my brothers, seven and nine years older than me.  You learned to be a modest winner and not to be a sore loser.  I played my father in chess for five years before I finally beat him at age 12.  It was another two or three years before I could beat him fairly regularly, but no game meant as much to me as that one when I finally won.  I don't remember the placement of the pieces on the board, or the winning move, but I remember how good I felt. 

On the other hand, my daughter loves Settlers.  As a family, we have been playing it for a couple of years now and she has won a few games against the rest of us in it.  I think she even beat one of the guys in my game group when he came over to play with us one evening.  That is a source of pride for her.  The little guy regularly gets to 5 or 6 points by the end of the game and typically all he does is build a road in a circle around a tile with two or three settlements on it, then spends all his resources buying pick-a-cards.  He regularly has to or three victory points from that, and sometimes gets the Largest Army card out of it.

I'm getting ready to start teaching the girl some actual war games.  She played a game of Check Your 6! Jet Age with our game group, but it was her first game and she didn't really understand it.  I'm going to start her on the Blue Sky series (actually a World War I on-line variant of Blue Sky, then move on to Blue Sky WWII proper because the WWI planes are slower - I think that might help her learn to judge maneuvers against another moving plane) and work her up to CY6! and then JA.  Although the movement charts are right there in front of you in CY6!, I think it's a little more difficult to maneuver than in Blue Sky and the other rules aren't as intuitive unless you're a little more experienced and familiar with the game.  I also want to teach her Action Stations (mainly because I'm itching to do battle with my 1/1250 Figurehead ships and CAP Aero planes that I've worked so hard to paint). 

I have another post I'll put up later this week on the Old West game we played Saturday night.  Until then, happy gaming!

A Snowball Fight...

I know I haven't posted much lately on here.  Between the military and my computer screen going and forgetting my camera when we do play one of my games (we played a Check Your 6! Jet Age game of Jordan vs. Israel a couple of weeks ago and I forgot my camera - Perry brought his, but he didn't really take any close-ups so I didn't see the point in posting) I haven't had much to post for a while.  But now I have a sort of a wargame to report on.

Well before Christmas I purchased David Okum's Snowball Wars from Wargame Vault.  I figured since I'd be home with the kids over Christmas break, it would make for a nice diversion.  For a variety of reasons, I didn't get it printed out and put together until today so tonight for Family Home Evening, we played our first game.  It took everyone a couple of turns to get the idea of how to move and throw snowballs, but it didn't take long for the mayhem and carnage to start.  Mommy got the first kill, hitting Adam with a snowball right off the bat.

 

The game is actually a neat little game for what it is.  Players start the game by taking turns placing "terrain" (pine trees, snowmen, snow forts and fences).  Then they start the game.  Each turn each player rolls a die for activation points, which they can then spend moving or throwing snowballs.  There are a couple of special rules which allow players to dodge snowballs or do other things that don't cost activation points, but we kept it simple tonight, giving the kids (and Mommy) a chance to figure out how the game worked.  It went pretty quickly - about 1/2 hour or maybe 45 minutes from start to finish.  Adam was the first guy out of the fight followed by Julia.  Mom and Dad faced off in the end with me hiding behind a tree while she hid behind a fence.

 

 

There wasn't much we could do, though.  It came down to us giong face to face as though we were in the Old West.  After three turns of facing off against each other, Mom got the magic die roll and finished off Dad with a snowball to the face.

 

 

The only shortfall I found to the game was that there was no explanation of how to use the terrain for cover.  because of the nature of the game, we went with a simple line of sight.  If the los crossed the terrain, you couldn't see them (unless it was a snow fort of short fence, for which we gave a bonus to teh defender).  If you want to pick up the game, you can find it here Snowball Wars for $5, and for another $1 you can find the expansion pack here Elf Help .  Can't beat the price.  We would have played more but it's a school night so maybe this weekend...