Irregular Wars Wargaming

After quite a hiatus, I managed to get in a couple of games of  Irregular Wars  just before the year's end. Lee has been working on a French army for the New World - starting with Coureur des Bois with the intention of being able to morph it into French Adventurers in due course.  In out first game I commanded some doughty Hollanders, and in the second, a rabble of rag-tag Spanish colonials. I'm afraid that the light wasn't great for my shaky hands, and the sandy coloured battlefield caused havoc with the contrast settings on my phone, but I still wanted to give some sort of account for the games. After recruiting our forces, my Hollanders (bottom of the photo) had more companies present - but then the Disease and Mishaps rolling saw two of my companies - some crossbowmen and a unit of halberdiers - bought off completely. Lee found that one of his coureur companies was late deploying to their designated location, while another was led by an overly enthusiastic cap...

A few more photos of play testing Palaeo Diet: Pulp .  Here, our intrepid adventurers find themselves in a deserted village square, desiccated mummies shuffling just out of view. Aiming to release the expansion in the first half of next year, we're hesitant about giving too much away before the game is in the final form. What I can hint strongly at, however, is that there are three broad pulp genres that the expansion will provide rules for: lost world dinosaur hunting, curse of the mummy, and cultists and gangsters. Injured by the mummified priestess, Captain Jean Claude 'Foreign Johnny' van Damme is overcome by a swarm of scarab beetles. The adventurers attempt to seize eggs from dinosaur nests - all the time trying to avoid the mummy-dinos and their big teeth. Omar tries to leave a raptor nest with an egg, but makes too much noise as he exits the thicket. A special forces fire-team lands on the outskirts of town and deploy to retrieve an importan...

Produced and released through  Kickstarter  earlier in the year,  Age of Civilizations   is a neat little worker placement, resource management game from Canadian company Ice Makes Games. It arrived a couple of months ago, not long after the company's estimated release date. Despite the fact that the title is (ironically and, admittedly, arguably) spelt using a barbarised dialect of English, this a most enjoyable 1-4 player game charting the rise and evolution of civilisations and empires over time. I've re-posted a how-to-play video from the KS website below, so I won't repeat the basics here. However, after six games (a mix of multiplayer and solo games), I'm left wanting to play more of this wee box-set. The game play is pretty straightforward - at least in its basic form. There are a number of variants that can be added to change game play, and a scenario booklet to spice up solo games.    Furthermore, the production value is top notch. I c...

Well, Christmas is upon us once more and as the year comes to a close, I wanted to leave you with a very important image: I saw this poster hanging on the wall in the gents of a restaurant I was at with my family recently. It takes a lot to convince me to take out my phone and take a picture in a public toilet, but with my recent testing of Palaeo Diet: Pulp , I made an allowance this time and took the picture. 😁 And with that, allow me to say merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

The monstrous children of Loki, the Mischief-Maker, strain against their bonds, and writhe and twist and plot to end the rule of the gods. Ragnarök, the destruction of the gods and all of the Nine Realms is coming. It is merely a question of when, and for how long it can be held off. Based on the highly acclaimed  Four Against Darkness  series of RPG-lite dungeon delving adventures by Andrea Sfiligoi, this is a standalone solitaire or co-operative pen-and-paper game for 1 to 4 players. You don’t need any other books. No GM is needed! All you need is a pencil, two regular dice, this book, and the luck of the gods! Available now, just in time for Yule and the festive season! You can find it at Lulu in book form as a  hardback  or  softback , or as a  digital pdf download . It is also available as a pdf direct from  Ganesha Games , or on the Ganesha  Gumroad  store. Soon to be available on Wargames Vault and Amazon too! ...

JB, Lee and I put Palaeo Diet's pulp-inspired expansion through it's paces this week with a few scenarios exploring the three broad themes in the game. As usual in our playtesting sessions, my carefully crafted draft rules were torn into like a kebab after a night out, but then put back together like a... I don't know, I don't have a good analogy. Anyway, they are better now than they were before we started the testing. Much more polishing to do, but we feel like we're on the right track. Harry Ford didn't enjoy his first encounter with a t-rex... Captain 'Foreign Johnny' van Damme faces off against a flock of velociraptors.  Omar's tommy gun jams as he opens fire on the mummy.  Miss Blunt lands a closing shot with her pistol, but is cursed and gets the feeling her time is up.   I don't yet have in-period goons, so we had two rival space pirate gangs attempt to steal the droid from Imperial storm-goons.  JB's ...

Gearing up for the playtesting of Palaeo Diet: Pulp  (the dino-hunting, mummy-wrangling, Nazi-punching expansion for Palaeo Diet: Eat or Be Eaten ), I've gone and painted up some dinosaurs. A 10mm scale pentaceratops from Magister Militum. A 10mm scale tyrannosaurs rex from Magister Militum.   A clutch of 10mm scale velociraptors from Magister Militum. A group shot comparing the scales of the 10mm dinos with the 15mm adventurer Harry Ford. I'm quite happy with the scaling. The t-rex might be a little small, but all the others are pretty much true to scale. My wee cat - sculpted from green stuff, modeled on my actual wee cat, Milly. Milly in the round.  Milly, as a 15mm scale cat next to Captain van Damme to show the scale. ... and lastly, a work-in-progress 15mm tiki mask for my forthcoming witch-doctor. As always (though it is seldom voiced), thanks for looking. ✊

As the nights draw in, the temperatures fall and decorations appear in every window, it must be time for more  10mm Greeks. Hippokontistai and hoplite allies for my Macedonians. All are from Magister Militum. I now have a neat little collection of 10mm Macedonians - 16 units in total, 40 points worth of troops for Dux Bellorum: Hoplomachia - or just over 100 points for l'Art de la Guerre or 400 points should they ever see use in Hail Caesar .

Hmmmm, slightly out of focus, but here are the two 15mm mummies available through Ral Partha Europe. The one on the left is wearing a nemes crown and looks a bit pharaonic. The mummy on the right is carrying an unfurled scroll and a ball of flame, and with long hair, I figured it looked more like a priestess. You can see that Omar and Miss Emily are not too happy to see them! The three bases of green stuff scarab swarms turned out alright as well. I particularly like the one pushing the dung ball. 

We played another couple of games of Dux Bellorum: Hoplomachia this week, including a run through of the 'Hold the pass' scenario we have been working on. I led an invading force of 5th century Macedonians, while Lee blocked my path with a much smaller force of city-state Greeks. The Macedonians had overwhelming numbers and a flanking force off-table, with a neat mechanic used to determine when they would make it through the mountain passes to emerge behind the Greek lines. The Greeks had better quality soldiers, but in fewer numbers. They had the advantage of a geographic choke point where there was the potential for quality to successfully rebuff quantity. The Macedonian approach was to send their Illyrian mercenaries through the rough and wooded lower slopes of the mountain to take the Greek line in the flank. Meanwhile, the Macedonian skirmishers would attempt to disorder the hoplites opposite while the fairly mediocre Macedonian infantry slowly made their way forw...