Roman Seas at Fall In!

Last weekend I went up to Gettysburg to host some Roman Seas games at Fall In! in support of Eric’s recent launch of the rule book.   Although the convention staff had a lot of “difficulties” leading up to the event, the con director did a stellar job of pulling it out of the fire.   One of my games got moved from the time slot listed in the preliminary event listr, but since I was running three games, people who wanted to try Eric’s new rules were able to get into one of the games.   I did two sessions of a convoy escort scenario and one of my 289 AD scenario.  The couple of weeks before the convention had been busy ones so I hadn’t had the time to make all of the little improvements on my ship models that I had wanted (such as adding rigging to all of the merchants) and I spent Thursday night at the convention painting bases on the marine stands.  But by the first game on Friday I was satisfied with the look of the game and judging from the many, many positive comments I received, I’d say I achieved a nice level of visual spectacle.

Skip Bombing at Wewak Harbor

Haven’t had a game report up here in a long while, not because we haven’t been playing games, but just a combination of busy, lazy, and constantly forgetting the camera.  Admittedly I could write reports without any pictures, but I like the eye candy.  However last Friday I did remember about halfway through the game, which was a Check Your 6! game based on an attack on Japanese shipping in Wewak harbor by the B-25s of the 38th Bombardment Group.

Scenario Gold!

A recent post on the forums at The Miniatures Page pointed me to the Digitized Monograph Collection held by the Donovon Research Library at the US Army’s Infantry School on Ft. Benning.  This is a great collection of personal accounts and other papers written by US Army officers.  These include WWI through the present.  I’ve so far only explored the WWII section, but that includes accounts at many levels from platoon up through corp as well as specific tactical problems, campaign synopsis, etc.  Many of the monographs I’ve quickly looked at contain maps and should provide a great resource for writing interesting wargame scenarios.

Note that I (and others from what I saw on the TMP forum) had to allow a security exemption for their browser to gain access.

More Roman Seas Ships

I finished up a few more Roman Seas ships as I gear up to be able to do some convoy escort games.   In addition to builing up the merchant fleet, I am also expanding my collection of ships to offer the players more variety of escorts and raiders than my current giant collection of liburnians allows.

Roman Seas Corbita

After the successful game at Historicon using Eric Hotz soon to be released Roman Seas rules, I’m definitely interested in playing some more games.  My collection is pretty limited at this time, since the scenario I have run before is set in 289 AD, by which time the Roman fleets were almost entirely smaller bireme Liburnians.  So I’ve embarked on a ship building program to expand the repertoire a little for future games.  One of the scenarios in the rulebook is a convoy escort and I’m doing a number of merchant vessels for that game.  The first one out of the shipyards is this Corbita, a Roman grain ship.

Gridiron mayhem

It was just Ken and I available for the usual Friday night game, so we decided to play Blood Bowl. This time out Ken decided to break in the newly painted Chaos Pact team while I took a break from playing the Dark Elves and field the Orcs

Historicon 2009 – Games Played

In addition to running a few games, I was able to play in a number of events as well.  Here are some short reports and a scad of pictures from those games

Check Your 6! at Historicon

There is little doubt that Check Your 6! has become the dominant air combat game at Historicon.  There were many CY6! games covering all kinds of actions, from fighter scrums to 60+ plane B-17 raids on Berlin to jet combat over the Fauklands.  This year I made my contribution with two games, one based in New Guinea using my Come On, Charlie! scenario and a second brand new scenario set during the Continuation War between Finland and the Soviet Union.

Roman Seas at Historicon

One of the games I had decided to do for Historicon this year was a reprise of my Rule Britannia! scenario featuring the 1/300 paper ship models from Hotz Artworks.

Historicon 2009 Photos

Historicon 2009 has come and gone and I had a really great time this year.   Fellow Knoxville gamer Andy and I rode up on Wednesday.  After making the 8-9 hour drive by myself last year I definitely appreciated having someone else along.  I ran three games (two Check Your 6! and one Romans Seas) and played in six or seven games.  I’ll detail those in upcoming posts, but thought I’d share some of my random photos and musings to get started.