ACW in 20mm

 Played an ACW Game this morning with Anthony, my regular opponent, using the Osprey With Hot Lead and Cold Steel rules and my 20mm collection. Enjoyable game - we had to call time but the Union were slightly ahead at that point.

We haven't played the rules in quite a while so it was slightly slow as we remembered exactly how they worked, even with the 5 page synopsis I had typed up after our last game.

We both like the rules - they had a fairly easy order system, use initiative so it isn't quite Igo-Ugo and have the ability for units to fire back if shot at and they haven't fired that turn.

The units shift down in size and abilities as they lose bases and the morale tests are fairly tough so once stuff starts to run it can be difficult to rally and it can sweep the rest of the brigade along with it.

Playing with hills

 

Spent some time today playing with hills and how I want the hex terrain to work with flowing hills rather than occasional lumps on the battlefield.   I have been cutting extra tiles to provide unpainted supports beneath the flocked surface.

I recently added some stream tiles to go on the surface.

I am quite pleased with the way it is looking.

I have enough basic hex terrain cut to cover an 8'x 5'table which was my eventual aim. I need to cut a load more "support" tiles to build the hills up and more edge supports so that the hills can start right on the table edges.  But it is coming together...

Field of Battle 3rd Edition

Played an FPW game on Tuesday morning using the Field of Battle 3 rules - I have had these quite a long time but have never got around to playing with this edition.

Field of Battle comes from the Piquet stable of rules and uses a similar style of rolling for initiative and turning and acting on cards.  But, it has ironed out a lot of things that people disliked about the original Piquet rules and provides a very interesting game.

You both roll for initiative and the difference in the rolls is the number of cards you can turn. The winner of the rolls decides whether to go first or second.  Turning a card costs an Command Point, but all units can act on a card without using any further Command points.

All the cards have the detail of how you use the card, what the opposed roll is (if any), the result of rolling even, etc

You use polyhedral dice for rolls and having an advantage moves you up a dice size (so a D8 becomes a D10) or a disadvantage moves you down a dice size (D12+1 becomes D10 if you are down 2).  This becomes pretty easy to calculate after a few turns.  D12+3 is the maximum dice and D4 is the minimum.

It makes the game move quickly and is relatively easy to follow.

We both enjoyed the game despite me getting a number of things wrong and completely forgetting the disorder rules.

The game resulted in a crushing victory for the French, mostly due to my inability roll anything but a 1 on a D12 - every time I picked it up!  Managed 4 1s in a row...

Will definitely be playing a game with these rules again soon.

Unit labels

 

I am playing a game using Field of Battle 3 rules next week - for the first time.  I've played FOB2 but not FOB3 and I decided I needed some way to mark the stats of each unit.

So I spent last night designing and a small tray which will take a label and sit under the unit.

These are 3d printed with a strip of ferro sheet on them (my bases all have magnabase on the bottom).

In Situ :

Quite pleased with how these turned out.  There is space to put a separate brigade label on one side if I decide to, but I'll probably just use simple labels for the first game.