19 March 2017

March Madness

After a hellish busy week at the office, I find a package arrive for me at home today. Finally my new airbrush turned up weeks after ordering it. Ordered off Ali Express so the time factor was expected, for the whopping cost of $50, about a 1/6th of the price of buying in here locally.  So I now have a dual airbrush setup, so the weekend is looking like a painting mission for sure.


Game wise, the plan is for more Hail Caesar in the coming weeks as I try and finish off some more Greeks, and the local supplier had a sale, so of course I caved in and started another army. I've always want to do a full on Knight army. So I purchased a bunch of boxes (on sale) from Fire Forge. The Teutonic Knights. I'm trying to keep them in there boxes until I complete my Greeks. Which is a seriously challenge. So far I've almost finished one more unit of Greeks.



I've also now got the L'Art De La Guerre rules to read through as a replacement for our 15mm FOG gaming. This might be on the back burner for awhile.

Also on the photography side of things I managed to get my camera fixed after a bit of a disaster. And I've still got 3000 odd photos to sort through from a few weeks back when I went to the 80th Anniversary Air Tattoo for the New Zealand Air Force. I have put together two videos from the trip so far, which I'm rather pleased with.




12 March 2017

The Clash and Smash of Hail Caesar

The South Auckland Gaming club meet this month was back to Hail Caesar, one of my favorite games which we don't play enough. So my Hoplite Greek army made it back to the table.

Mark H. has finally got inspired and made an epic painting mission to have get his Romans all painted up for the day. So my first game was against his Republican Rome army. Mark never having played and me being rather rusty on the rules we took a bit to get into it and made platy of rule corrections along the way. Most of which did impact the game to much.

Deployment under way (First mistake of the day was not knowing the correct support formation)


 Game begins and my Greeks push forward on both flanks


Risky move for my right flank units, leaving there flank open , but it paid off as the Romans weren't able to move fast enough.

Later on in the game things got really messy with units all over the place.

 The epic battle of dice rolls begin as the game swings back and forth with both sides taking heavy damage but not many units breaking and running.


 My light troops with missile weapons get into range and concentrate fire to a good result.


 Things start getting really hairy for both sides as both armies reach breaking point.


The game runs into lunch time as we battle it out. In the end it comes down to a final battle between two units which draw the fight, but as both units are already shaken, so they both have to pass a break test, which for both side will break there respective army, giving victory to the opponent. Mark roll first and passes, I roll second and get snake eye.. epic fail and Mark wins.

A fantastic game, hard fort and close. A great indication of a good set of rules.

The second game (which I didn't take any photos of) was up against more Romans, this time with Kevin at the helm. It was a different period of Romans and a different list (cant recall which list)

This game was simple put  "Utterly brutal". Kevin gets a three move charge across the table into my light troops, and not surprising they get slaughtered. My entire division of light and skirmish units gets into a helter-skelter mission for survival.

But, having learnt from the first game, I had my supporting units in nice and close. Kevin came in charging all over the battle field to quickly find out how hard the Greeks can be if used correctly.

We then got into the grind of the heavy troops versus the heavy troops and units started popping all over the place with both of us rolling snakes eyes far to often.

With a bit of luck on the dice I finally broke the Romans wining the game with a good number of my units still on the table.

So two really great games and a long list of rules to check up on over the coming week.

While all this was going on, Brian and Arthur were playing there first game of L'Art De La Guerre, which is looking like it will be the replacement for Field of Glory (FOG) at the club. There reports all coming in good for the set of rules.