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...

Saxon Seas . . . Errrr . . .

I realized it's been a while since I did anything with any of my blogs and figured it's time to post SOMETHING!  Not last Saturday, but the Saturday before we played a game of Roman Seas.  We really like the rules even though there are a few glitches.  A little logic irons out the problems and it does create a fun game.  We had four large Saxon raiders up against a Roman fleet of two scout ships, three hemoilas and a Liburnian command ship.

The Saxon Fleet

The Roman Fleet

First Contact

The points for both fleets were almost identical, but the Saxons, whose crews man the oars and fight, had significantly more manpower for combat than the Romans, who have separate rowers and marines.  The Saxons would row up to a Roman ship then grapple it, using their greater manpower effectively in hand-to-hand combat.  The Saxons completed hosed the Romans (thus the title of the post), who only escaped at the end of the game with one or two ships with relatively intact crews. 

I think this was the final position, or close to it,

of the ships.

This was the second time we played the game and had a good time both times.  The first time, we used the boardgame that comes on the disc with the rules.  It uses cardboard counters for the ships rather than the miniatures.  We did use a bunch of the ships playing another set of rules, which was ok, but Roman Seas were more fun. 

The ships are mounted on foamcore board that's been spraypainted dark-ish blue.  You can get blue foamcore board but I already had some green board and some blue spraypaint and I didn't want to spend more money for the blue board.  I mounted my first set of ships on artist's mat board, but the bases all warped from the spraypaint and disfigured the ships or pulled free from them.  This seemed to work much better.  It takes me about 15 minutes to cut out a ship, and I cut out several then glue them in turn with Elmer's glue applied sparingly with a toothpick.  It dries pretty quickly that way and doesn't make the color run.  In this way, too, I can assemble four or so ships in an hour and a half to two hours.  I forgot how I had done the inboard details so only one or two ships got that, but now that I'm back up and running, the next batches will all get it.

Next time we play, I'm going to create counters for the marine units so that it's easier to keep track of who's doing what, which was rather tricky.  You can use 6mm figures with the ships, but I don't have any, can't afford them at the moment, and really don't feel like painting them right now anyway!  We'll also do a more traditional Romans vs. Carthaginians battle so both sides have more or less equal ships and crews.  All in all, though, we had a good time.