Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" WWII Skirmish, Now Availalbe

    I wanted to let my readers know that Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" WWII card-based skirmish rules for miniatures gaming are now available for purchase at Drive Thru Cards.   I as lucky enogh to be one of the playtesters for these rules, and can say they really are a lot of fun.
Here is a quick promotional video:

 Here are some of the features of the rules:

• The Double Random Activation™ mechanism provides the unpredictability and drama of card-based activation without the drawbacks. This activation mechanism was originally developed for Battles by GASLIGHT and was refined during the development of Look, Sarge, No Charts titles.  The mechanism uses cards for activation but ensures that multiple players are acting at the same time.
• No big yellow or pink chart cards cluttering up your beautiful gaming tables.  Each player needs one or two 3″x5″ cards with the information about his units, including their weapons and equipment.   Other than those, there are no chart cards.  The back of these unit records includes the modifiers for hand-to-hand combat and terrain effects on movement.  After a game or two, players rarely need to refer to these, so two unit records can be taped back to back for even less clutter.
• Combat resolution is resolved by flipping cards.  Players read different sections of the cards in the Action Deck depending on what they are trying to do:  shooting, resolving hits, “rolling” to penetrate enemy vehicles, hand-to-hand combat, movement, and morale.  In development, I took a series of charts and then broke them apart to fit on an Action Deck of 50 cards.  Flipping a card is essentially the same as rolling a die and looking up the result on a table.  The difference is that you don’t have to do all that table look up.  Flip a card and determine whether you got a hit.  If so, flip the next card to see which target figure was hit, how severely, and whether he is protected by cover.
• Cover is represented explicitly.  Instead of cover providing a negative modifier to hit, if you get a hit, when you flip the next card in the Action Deck, you look for cover icons.  If the target figure is in the type of cover indicated on the card, instead of being wounded or incapacitate he ducks back behind cover and is stunned.  While the use of cover as a to-hit modifier and the process in Combat Patrol™ can be mathematically equivalent, there is something intuitively appealing to knowing that the window sill deflected that round that would have otherwise hit your figure.  In play tests, this explicit representation of cover has made players make better use of cover while maneuvering their squads.
• Messy “opportunity fire” rules are replaced by a simple reaction mechanism.
• Somewhat randomized movement speeds based on the Guts level of the unit or its leader.
• The G.A.M.E.R.™ engine name is an acronym for the attributes which describe figures in Combat Patrol™: Guts (morale), Accuracy (shooting), Melee (hand-to-hand combat), Endurance (how many wounds a figure can take), and Reaction.  The game master can “sculpt” a unit to fit a historical scenario.
• Playable on multiple levels of resolution.  At the lowest level, all the figures in a unit have the same attributes.  At the highest level, each figure can have different attributes.  The levels of resolution can be mixed so that the Commando unit has more detail than the installation security personnel.  The allows games that have a historical feel as well as those with a more cinematic feel.
• Rules for replacements of personnel and equipment between scenarios enable players to represent mini-campaigns.
• Ground scale is 1 inch = 5 yards, pretty close to the scale of the 28mm figures I used in play testing.
• The basic rules are just eight pages!  And that includes several pictorial examples of firing and grenade resolution that fill almost a full page themselves.

Buck has prepared a tutorial video, explaining soe of the mechanics of the rules:

The rules are free, all you need to do is buy a set of 4 decks of cards to get started!
Combat-Patrol

Another Frostgrave Cork Ruin, Two-Story This Time

   I built another cork tile ruin for Frostgrave this week. (You can see my first attempt here.)  This time I wanted to achieve a few things different than the first one; a second story to test how the cork held up to a taller structure, more debris scattered around, and a stone rather than a dirt base.

      I used a 6"x 6" cork tile for the base and inscribed a 1 inch grid on it to represent paving/foundation stones

    The wood is a mix of balsa and bass. The debris was made from cork scraps, aquarium gravel, and course sand.   I  painted it with my regular acrylic hobby paint.

      The snow is from an old bottle of DecoArt "Snow-Tex",  textured snow paint, that I've had sitting around for at least a decade.  I never had a use for it, and making these ruins inspired me to dig it out and put it to use. It goes on nice and thick and lumpy.  Once that was dry, I brushed it with some white glue and then applied Woodland Scenics snow flocking,

     I'm very pleased with how this building turned out, and I am currently considering what to build next.  I'm considering doing a wizards tower, and attempting bend a sheet of cork into a round shape using an oatmeal canister as a base.  my other thought is some sort of twin square towers that have some sort of precarious bridge between them.  I also have in the back of my mind doing some sort of frozen dock for a Frostgrave waterfront...

Quick and Easy Frostgrave Cork Ruin

  This week I knocked out a quick Frostgrave ruin made from cork sheet, as a way to test how the cork would  look as a stone building.
      I purchased a pack of these rough textured cork panels from the local Craft Store, with a 50%-off coupon, and thought they would make good rock walls from my Fostgrave ruins.

      So, I fashioned a quick rudimentary ruin by snapping off a section of a cork tile, and cutting it into  three walls. with some simple windows which I framed up with balsa. I then made some small fourth walls, with a doorway, using the window cut-outs.   I then cut out a foamcore base, and glued the ruin to it.  Next, I ran white glue around the base of the walls, and scattered onto the glue any cork scraps, some small gravel, and pieces of rough broken up wood scraps.

     I then painted the whole thing.

   When the paint was dry, I added some snow; and some icicles, which I made with hot glue.

     I'm very pleased with how this turned out, and I think the cork looks good as stone,  but I think I shouldn't have put the ruin on the big rounded "dirt" foamcore base, as it doesn't quite fit the city-scape look. I was thinking in terms of how I usually construct buildings for use in a more natural setting.  I think any future ruins I make will be on a more structured squared base, painted like stone.

Quick and Easy Frostgrave Terrain Cloth

   I recently completed a gray winter-themed terrain cloth to use for my Frostgrave games.  I wanted to give it a hint of ancient cobblestones and a frozen feel to it.
   I found a great 36" wide mottled gray felt to use as my base, and bought 4' of it.  I then purchased a round silicon trivet (for use in the kitchen) that has a hex pattern on it, and a large black ink stamp pad.

      I cut the trivet into random shapes, and laid out the cloth on one of my gaming tables.

      I then randomly stamped "cobblestones" here and there on the cloth, trying to keep the general orientation of the hex pattern all pointing in the same direction.

      After I stamped the cloth, I then sprayed it randomly with white spray paint followed by accents here and there with Tamiya Medium Blue (Navy) spray paint.

     Here's a close up of how it looks.

    And here it is with some terrain and figures set up on it.

    I'm very pleased with the results.  It gives me the effect I'm looking for at a fraction of  the cost of a commercially produced gaming mat.

BARRAGE XIX A Huge Success!

  This past Saturday, October 10th, the HAWKS hosted their annual one-day miniatures gaming convention, BARRAGE,  in Havre De Grace Maryland.  With a record attendance, and a record number of games, a good time was had by all. We wish to thank all the game-masters and gamers who made it a success! Below are some highlight photos of the event.
Next, year BARRAGE will be expanding to 2 days, 9.30.16 - 10.1.16, so mark your calendar now!

A view of the main gaming hall around mid-morning.

In the morning, I ran a game of "Bear Yourselves Valiantly" called Island of the Lizardmen, which featured an alliance of Dwarves and Lizardmen fighting off invading Elves.

A father-son team ran the Dwarf faction, and successfully defended their encampment from the Elves which were attacking it.

The Elves were successfully able to destroy one of their objectives, the Dwarves' under-construction super-weapon, at a high cost; but were unable to achieve either of their other objectives which were to destroy the Lizard village, or the Dwarves encampment.

A wide range of dealers and flea-marketers were located around the outer wall of the room. Lots of gaming goodies were to be had.

Rich Heffner's Aerodrome is always a crowd favorite at the con.

The Battle of Paoli using "Black Powder", hosted by Cliff Brunken

Ed Duffy's Search & Rescue: US vs ISIS game using his "Line of Departure" rules.

A beautiful model of the Lonely Mountain was featured in this Battle of Five Armies game using "God of War" rules, hosted by Lou and Dillon Valenti.

Zeb Cook's Dino Rustlers of the High Plains game, using "Bone Wars" rules.

Buck Surdu demo'ed his upcoming "Combat Patrol" WWII rules, in a game featuring US and German troops battling over a small French village

Eric Schlegel ran a Zombie Mall game, using GASLIGHT rules, to wrap up the evening .

Also featured at BARRAGE were a well-attended Flames of War tournament...

...and a packed L'Art De La Guerre tournament.

Frostgrave Ice Toads Conversion

   I recently came across a couple of the old collectible pre-painted Wizards of the Coast D&D "Giant Frog" figures that I had stuck away in a box to use with another project; and the idea hit me how perfect they'd be to represent the Frostgrave Ice Toads.   I could see it would take only a suitable re-paint and re-basing to convert them to use in a winter setting.

   The hardest part was removing the base, which is cast on these fellows. So, I had to remove each one with a hacksaw. After that I glued each one to a fender washer and spray primed them with flat white primer.  After that it was just a matter of painting them in winter colors.

     I'm really pleased with ow these fellows turned out.  They are shown above with a 28mm figure for scale.

Buck Surdu's "Combat Patrol" Coming Soon!

I just wanted to give you all a heads up about this exciting new set of rules by Buck Surdu.  I had a chance to take part in the playtesting for theses, and I can say that they really are fun and innovative.

After nearly three years of development, Combat Patrol™ is nearing completion.  The game features some really innovative mechanics that streamline play and reduce table cutter.  I have also play tested it in numerous convention games.  My gaming group has even begun adapting it to other historical periods.  There are many good WWII skirmish rules on the market.  So what makes this interesting and unique?

In developing Combat Patrol™ I developed the G.A.M.E.R.™ “engine.”  Key features of the engine are:

• The Double Random Activation™ mechanism provides the unpredictability and drama of card-based activation without the drawbacks. This activation mechanism was originally developed for Battles by GASLIGHT and was refined during the development of Look, Sarge, No Charts titles.  The mechanism uses cards for activation but ensures that multiple players are acting at the same time.
• No big yellow or pink chart cards cluttering up your beautiful gaming tables.  Each player needs one or two 3″x5″ cards with the information about his units, including their weapons and equipment.   Other than those, there are no chart cards.  The back of these unit records includes the modifiers for hand-to-hand combat and terrain effects on movement.  After a game or two, players rarely need to refer to these, so two unit records can be taped back to back for even less clutter.
• Combat resolution is resolved by flipping cards.  Players read different sections of the cards in the Action Deck depending on what they are trying to do:  shooting, resolving hits, “rolling” to penetrate enemy vehicles, hand-to-hand combat, movement, and morale.  In development, I took a series of charts and then broke them apart to fit on an Action Deck of 50 cards.  Flipping a card is essentially the same as rolling a die and looking up the result on a table.  The difference is that you don’t have to do all that table look up.  Flip a card and determine whether you got a hit.  If so, flip the next card to see which target figure was hit, how severely, and whether he is protected by cover.
• Cover is represented explicitly.  Instead of cover providing a negative modifier to hit, if you get a hit, when you flip the next card in the Action Deck, you look for cover icons.  If the target figure is in the type of cover indicated on the card, instead of being wounded or incapacitate he ducks back behind cover and is stunned.  While the use of cover as a to-hit modifier and the process in Combat Patrol™ can be mathematically equivalent, there is something intuitively appealing to knowing that the window sill deflected that round that would have otherwise hit your figure.  In play tests, this explicit representation of cover has made players make better use of cover while maneuvering their squads.
• Messy “opportunity fire” rules are replaced by a simple reaction mechanism.
• Somewhat randomized movement speeds based on the Guts level of the unit or its leader.
• The G.A.M.E.R.™ engine name is an acronym for the attributes which describe figures in Combat Patrol™: Guts (morale), Accuracy (shooting), Melee (hand-to-hand combat), Endurance (how many wounds a figure can take), and Reaction.  The game master can “sculpt” a unit to fit a historical scenario.
• Playable on multiple levels of resolution.  At the lowest level, all the figures in a unit have the same attributes.  At the highest level, each figure can have different attributes.  The levels of resolution can be mixed so that the Commando unit has more detail than the installation security personnel.  The allows games that have a historical feel as well as those with a more cinematic feel.
• Rules for replacements of personnel and equipment between scenarios enable players to represent mini-campaigns.
• Ground scale is 1 inch = 5 yards, pretty close to the scale of the 28mm figures I used in play testing.
• The basic rules are just eight pages!  And that includes several pictorial examples of firing and grenade resolution that fill almost a full page themselves.

Combat Patrol™ will soon be available through DriveThruCards on durable, premium stock cards.  It is helpful for each player or pair of players to have an Action Deck to speed play.  On DriveThru customers may purchase either set A or set B of the cards.  Each set includes four Action Decks (supporting four to eight players), with different colored backs to keep them separated, and an Activation Deck.  Purchasing both set A and set B will give you eight different backs, supporting eight to sixteen players for those really large games.  The basic rules and an introductory scenario will be a free .pdf download from DriveThru as well.  The advanced rules and vehicle rules will be a second download.  In this way, the rules will be available worldwide without customers having to hunt for them in retail outlets.

Because everything will be downloadable, there won’t be a glossy hard-cover book full of eye candy.  It’s just a solid set of rules that has gone through several years of development and testing.  I think, however, if people give the rules a try, they will really see how Combat Patrol™ results in a streamlined, enjoyable World War II skirmish game with all the nuances of any other set of rules but with most of the complexity removed.

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