Future Wars are bright -I should've worn shades!

Wed 21st Wed

             For a long time I've been looking for a good set of skirmish rules which are simple to use and also can be fit on the side of an A4 sheet of paper.Haven't come across the latter yet but Chris Peers 'Future War' rules go a long way to solving the first request.

Downtown East Lothian

                I picked up these rules at the Partizan wargames show in August and I found they seemed pretty easy to read and looked simple enough to use in a few types of games.On finding that Colin Jack also had a set of these rules we decided to try them out this evening.Finding figures,scenery and even vehicles for these games is not hard for Colin amongst his huge collection.Another good thing about these rules is that you can combine all types of scenarios,be it post apocalypse,alien invasions or even good old gang warfare as all ingredients are all combined.

Windowless houses

               Bill Gilchrist and myself headed out for Sleepy Hollow(sorry Garvald) for an evening of gaming and were introduced to a nicely set out games table although smaller than usual looked as though it was going to make for a good evening's gaming.

The McGuffin

                  Colin had conjured up a nice village with narrow alleys and roads heading towards a harbour.Moored alongside the harbour was a boat which contained some form of booty guarded by myself and some local militia.Colin and Bill's squads basically had to commandeer the boat.
                   I provided my militia and civilians and true to form because they had never been used before they followed the usual trait of not giving a good showing.

My militia with the wrong camo!

                   Bill's forces were made up regular soldiers whilst Colin's forces -surprise surprise-were made up of females albeit ones who could kick ass.

Bill's bully boys

                     I deployed my defenders with my militia facing off against Colin's femme fatales and my three civilians given the task of holding up Bill's lads.This was going to be easy-aye right.
      The thing about these rules is that in order to do something significant your figures have to be motivated and to do this you have to be within eight inches of your leader or else your figures are just swatting at flies which my civilians were doing.

The deserted streets-not for long.

                        Colin's girls hoped to use the buildings in order to manoeuvre around my militia only to find that he hadn't set up the houses to his advantage as a lot of the buildings didn't have doors and windows so therefore had to creep around the buildings right into my killing zone.

Typical women-sneaky!

                        Killing zone my arseum.Colin gained first initiative and wasted my two ambushers making me fail a morale check-three and I was off to the pub.
                           Bill's forces-no doubt socialist inclined were slowly edging up the other flank due to the vagaries of the movement rules as well as the swamp that Colin had conveniently placed in front of Bill's initial set up.My civies were taking potshots at them but due to them  being to far away from their leader  could only make them keep their heads down.

Rush hour.

                        Colin's girls finally crawled around my hapless militia with their usual womanly guile and engaged my forces from the rear doing some serious damage.My forces retaliated but even with the use of grenades couldn't make any serious headway.Once again due to the movement process which was down to the rolling of dice I couldn't move my men into better firing positions.

'Are my seams straight?'

      Bill's forces meanwhile had reached better firing positions and started to snipe away at my men guarding the loot on the boat forcing my men to cower behind cover.

'Oh look'

Harry Palmer not having a good time-not a lot of people know that.

              Colin's girls on the other flank went for broke and albeit taking a couple of casualties inflicted another morale check on my militia meaning everybody was pinned and therefore due to the fact of my men could due b****r all except paint their toenails it was game over.

A good way to rip your tights.

                         An enjoyable game and hopefully first of many as I really these types of games.Bill,the rule guru,has taking the rules away to digest hopefully making the next game more straightforward.Scottish Civil War anybody?

'Hoy,where's your orange vests'

                 Thanks to Colin for an excellent meal and Bill for a glass of fermented grapes.    Nipping to Japan for a couple of weeks(no pun intended)so I hoping to be putting some small blogs out whilst I'm there and more expanded ones when I get home.
                See you when I see you.