Cohorts of the Damned

Skipping rapidly ahead to the mid-19th century, last Friday saw James and Timmy of the Hong Kong Society of Wargamers come over for a go at Sharp Practice. The HKSW has picked up Sharp Practice recently (at my recommendation, as it turns out), but mainly for the Napoleonic Wars, to which the Boshin War offers a rather different setting, with its longer-ranged, and in some cases faster-firing weapons. Although I've been toying with some house rules (the ideas for which mostly originate with others), the aim for this game was to build more familiarity with the rules as written, so that's what we did. I set up the table with a stream running down the middle and buildings either side, with woods sprinkled liberally about. The idea was to avoid giving either side a wide, uninterrupted field of fire. Each of the six buildings concealed a playing card, one of which (the Joker) represented a spy whom the Shogunate force had to make off with. 10 Task points were needed to search each bu...

At long last, reunited with my Japan collection, I decided it was high time to get the old Test of Honour engine fired up again. Gareth (whom you may recall from reports such as for  this game last year ) and I have agreed to do an intermittent ToH campaign during the summer months, but we decided it would be best to try and really get the mechanics under our belt again. The most straightforward option seemed to be to try to play through the first half of the six-game introductory campaign, using standard forces. Game 1 was set up as laid out in the book: each side would have one armoured samurai, a group of three ashigaru spearmen, one archer, and one musketeer; whoever cut down the other's Hero would win. Not wanting to beat around the bush, I decided to move swiftly and aggressively. In retrospect, deciding to attack up the stairs of the shrine may have been injurious to my commander's health... Despite some valiant efforts, Gareth's samurai struck down mine with nary a ...

While this blog has been mostly focussed on 1860s, and to a lesser extent feudal Japan, a couple of recent life changes have meant that I've been pulled into a decidedly WW2 orbit in the last year to match the gaming preferences of my new neighbours. To dip my toes in, I decided to start with 02 Hundred Hours by Grey for Now Games, having had a good time with Test of Honour. And then I thought, 'let's get some of those expansions', and the rest of the story should be fairly obvious. Here we are, not only 9 months on from when I started, but also 107 men (and six dogs): A temporary storage solution In the blue corner we have the Allies. The starter box is focussed on the SAS, of whom I ended up doing 7 with definitively identifiable headgear. I later grabbed the Operation Torchlight box which adds five character figures and two extra sprues, plus four heads specifically for the Royal Marines. In all, that's 24 customisable plastic figures and five metal character pie...