OHW machine age wargames with Peter Laing miniatures

This post is a bit of a departure from the usual SciFi (40K) posts. After reading One Hour Wargaming by Neil Thomas I got to thinking about using my old Peter Laing WW1 miniatures for the Machine Age Rules from the book. I had ear-marked the old figures for another project, but I also found the other half of the WW1 figures (British and German) when doing some more unpacking leftover from moving 8 months ago. All up I had approximately 200 miniatures per army with cavalry, infantry, machine guns and some artillery. They were 80-90% painted from way back when I was 18 years.

I started rebasing the figures to play a coupe of games and created some simple scenery along the way. The painting was very simple: black undercoat, a quick one colour for the uniform, black for the gun, a dab of flesh on hands and face, and a final contrasting blob for any equipment. It was great fun and a marked departure from my usual painting style with my 40K miniatures. In no time I finished off the armies and had a game going. Very quickly I added a scratch built British tank and added some house rules (as the rules don't cover tanks). 

One of my early games

A few more games and a quick read of the period in Donald Featherstone’s  “War Games through the Ages - Vol.4 1861-1945” and I was adding a Sturmtruppen unit, AV7 German Tank and aircraft. What I’ve ended up with is two armies of approximately 15 units, which is about as many as is suitable for a 4 foot by 6 foot table, and has consumed most of my available Peter Laing WW1 miniatures. 

AN AV7 tank trundles down the road

The scenery is all really basic with felt cut into strips for rivers and roads, painted sponges for trees, books for hills with a cover throw over them, and all scratch built. The table does not look over crowed with the figures and there is room to manoeuvre units.

An aircraft strafing troops

As for the house rules - see free rule link (top right hand of page). The summary of additions are:

Movement - is variable, I took 3” off all those in Neil Thomas rules and added an average dice throw (2,3,3,4,4,5). For example infantry now move 3” plus what ever is scored with an average dice.

Assaults - some units can carry out an assault proving they are within an average dice throw on the target unit. 

Added Tanks (Heavy and Medium) and Armoured Cards which need to throw to see if they move to reflect their unreliability.

Aircraft can perform limited strafing during the game.

All the vehicles are scratch built from balsa wood strips stuck together, sanded and covered in PVC glue.

PowerPoint was used to print templates which are stuck to 3mm balsa wood strip

The balsa wood is cut out at stuck together and sanded (with lots of  PVA added after)

Play testing the rule changes

Over the last few weeks I have been playing a few games to test out the changes I made to my Grid-based SciFi rule set. They seem to be working for me with only one or two typos and cross referencing to tidy up.

Here is a battle in full flight with a space marine dreadnaught waiting to reinforcements as chaos marines advance. The lava pits are bomb craters filled with some railway model rocks I coloured red.

The last few play testing games used my Tyranid army (my favourite and first 40K army).

Now I just need to update the rules and read through them again in an attempt to minimise errors.

Updates to rules finished

Well I finally finished tinkering with my grid-based rules (see link). And have been trying them out with my new Chaos Marines an army I'm slowly adding to. The changes were in the areas of interventions, weapon types, combat, and vehicle damage. I'll carry on playing with this set for a while now before thinking about any more modifications.

A view from the Chaos Marines at the start of a game.

Space Marines advance towards their objectives.

Last week I bought One Hour Wargames by Neil Thomas which I'm now reading and will no doubt tryout some of the scenarios. Looking at the rules in the book I thinking my rules appear somewhat bloated at seven pages.

Still messing around with rules

Last week I continued to tinker with my grid-based sic-fi rule set. However, in between playing games to test rule changes I did get a chance to add to my Chaos army with a Defiler (here's a picture).

In my rule tinkering I started looking at weapon strengths which in turn led to changing how hits are determined. Hits were determined based upon experience and whether a unit has any terrain advantages. I'm now trying out not differentiating hits with experience, and letting the more experienced unit take its action first unless overruled by a terrain advantage. This has led to an increase the levels of experience to make this work. You make one change and it leads to less to other adjustments.

Over this week I'll write up my changes (if they work out).

Rules changed and reworked

After a couple of trial games I updated the activation rules and tried some other changes to the weapon types, but decided it was over complicating things and went back to what I had. While working on the rules I reworked how the rules were written. These are available for download.

A game trialling rule changes.

Having finished reading "Designing Waragmes - Introduction" by George Phillies while travelling this weekend. I picked up "Fire & Stone - The Science of Fortress Warfare 1660-1860" by Christopher Duffy.

Changing rules

Having completed a campaign using my grid-based rules, I decided to rework the approach to activation. Currently, the game is played in a series of turns as control is passed between players. When in control, a player’s units can undertake a series of actions, against which the non-controlling player’s units can react. The reaction normally taking the form of shooting at units which are being moved.

The number of actions a controlling player can perform is dependent upon their activation dice scores rolled. A player has a set number of activation dice, normally six, and can choose to roll these activation dice in batches of up to 3 dice. When rolling a batch of action dice, should none of the dice rolled achieve a 3+ score, then control is passed to the other player.

By throwing activation dice in batches, players can get a unit to carry out multiple actions in their turn. The downside, or risk, is the fewer dice thrown increases the likelihood of not rolling a 3+ and passing control to the other player.

What I found was you inevitably roll the dice in two batches of three, and only on rare occasions was a third batch thrown. A nice idea, but didn’t really work. So, I thought I’d try an approach used by other rule sets, where you roll just one dice to determine the number of units you can activate. To allow for units to make multiple moves and without one unit always being moved, activation is phased:

• In the first phase three units can carry out an action
• In the second phase two units can carry out an action
• In the third phase one unit can carry out an action
• No unit may carry out more than one action in a phase

For example, an activation dice roll of 6 could allow a unit to fire in phase one, regroup in phase two, and fire again in phase three. In my rules any combat requires a regroup action to be performed before any further actions are undertaken. Movement between zones does not require a regroup, so a unit could move three zone by moving in each phase.

An activation dice roll of 4 would allow three unit actions phase one, and in phase two either a second action by one of the units, or a fourth unit be activated.

I am now updating my rules and trying to work in the intervention rules and types of actions into this change of approach. Along with any other hooks I may have not considered which this change.

Thinking about rules again

I'm currently reading "Designing Wargames - Introduction" by George Phillies. I'm halfway through the book, and while it is about board wargaming, it has caused me to reassess some of my rules for grid based SFI wargames. As I use a grid for wargaming it could be said I'm board wargaming with miniatures, my motivation to move to a grid was I got frustrated with having to measure move distances and combat ranges.