Cohorts of the Damned

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...

I've left this one in my back pocket for something like two months now, but it warranted posting eventually, so here we are. For the conclusion of the Great Escape campaign, PH and I did what we did for the first three games and swapped sides in between. This meant I took the Germans in Game 4, and then the Allies in Game 5. In Game 4, the escapees have to try and make contact with members of the local Resistance who can help them to safety. Five of the terrain features on the table contain an objective marker placed face-down, two of which indicate Resistance members, two of which are civilians, and one of which is a dastardly collaborator. To win, the escapees need to contact both Resistance members, and at least one of the figures who did so must get away. PH brought a fairly large force, given the limited budget available, with the aim of spreading out quickly. My patrols were set up to try to cover as many of the objectives as I could. Unfortunately for me, PH got lucky with h...

Phew, it's been a while since I wrote anything here, isn't it? So, for reasons of life circumstances (i.e. graduate school) I've temporarily relocated, and my time will be split across there and home for the next few years. The combination of time commitments and complex logistics are necessarily making it a little harder to do big, ambitious projects like the Boshin War, but I've not been idle! I have some friends over here who have mostly done 28mm WW2, and so that is the direction I too am (temporarily) heading in until I have a decent pool of forces for that, and can then turn my attentions back to other periods. 02 Hundred Hours , which I first encountered at the club near my old university back in the early summer of 2022, seemed like a good way to ease into the period and get some games going. After a quick intro game earlier on, we agreed to have a go at the Escape from Stalag Luft scenarios when an opportunity became available. Said opportunities are a little c...