Posts will get a little slow until the start of the summer holidays due to a variety of factors at work (we are going into special measures - again! - and my job is changing - again! - and the timetable is changing before the end of the year - again!) However, one bright spot is that I finally got around to starting up a wargames club at work again.

We've attracted a good spread of ages and genders. Interestingly, of all the games so far the girls have proved to be far and away the best commanders.

So far we have had a couple of games of Iron Cross which went down very well.






And then this last week we started a Wars of the Roses Lion Rampant campaign using the miniatures I put together waaaay back at the start of this blog.










Everything is going rather swimmingly; it also turns out that most the students play Bloodbowl, so it looks like we'll be getting a league up and running.

Having enjoyed thoroughly the rules for Faustus Furius, it was obvious that I would need some chariots. I had a scab around a few places - the Essex chariots looked quite nice, but the price was a little steep. Thankfully, some chaps on the Lead Adventure Forum recommended Outpost Wargames Services.

These fine chaps set me up with 4 chariots for £9.

That four lots of a chariot, a driver and four horses. For £9!



As you can see the sculpts are really nice for 15mm and certainly belie the price.

The only modelling that needed to be done was to create a yoke for the chariot shaft; I did this with some brass rod left over from the masts on the 1/1200 ships.

I recently mentioned that I'd purchased a copy of Iron Cross to use to help my Year 10 students with their GCSE History coursework. Last night I had my first test game.

So first an outline of the rules and a mini-review seem to be in order.

Iron Cross is a scale agnostic game primarily designed for Late War Western Europe based on the Orbats included in the book, though other theatres are covered by free lists from the website. The book is £12, full colour and lavishly illustrated - including hits and tips from a couple of Hollywood greats.

I ordered the £30 set that came with tokens and I'm very glad I did - the use of tokens is key to the way the game played so having easy to use ones made life much easier.

Gameplay is very simple; there are no ranges except for things such as PIATs and Panzerfausts. If you can see it, you can shoot it. This is elegant as it makes the use of terrain and movement key, exactly as it was in Western Europe. All die rolls are made on a 1d10 or 1d6 and the core mechanics are pretty simple to grasp; taking incoming fire effects your morale and when a unit's morale is depleted they bolt. Again, this is an accurate representation of the historical reality, especially when Units can fall back and attempt to regroup - in effect 'healing'; so it becomes a question for the commander of whether to press an attack or whether to try to preserve your troops. Troops have their combat effectiveness degraded as their morale suffers.

As you can see, the core of the game lies in that holy grail of game design, choice; making the player weigh up risk versus reward and Iron Cross handles this better than almost any other wargame I've played recently due to the way it handles initiative. Rather than a traditional IGOUGO mechanic, the player has a number of command tokens. Each one of these can be spent to activate a unit on your turn - you can try to activate a unit more than once, but this gets more difficult the more you ask of your units and the worse their morale is. The genius stroke is that the player whose turn it is not can spend a token to interrupt.So it goes like this:

"I'll activate these GIs and they're going to move and shoot but running across the road then shooting the grenadiers behind the barn."

"Yeah, I'm going to spend and activate my machine gun team who are going to shoot them as they cross the road."

So when it's the other player's turn you are constantly weighing up whether you want to react or not; likewise, when it's your turn you are constantly trying to weigh up how to work around the enemy. And you can't interrupt every action - because if you spend all your tokens, when the active player passes the turn over to you, you'll have no tokens left to do anything. And as the active player you're always trying to decide when the best moment to end your turn is to ensure that you have some tokens left to react to the enemy's actions.

This makes for an incredibly fluid and fast moving game with feints, probing attacks, use of terrain; it's a good simulation of mobile warfare and, more importantly, a great piece of game design.

My only concern is that some of the rules in the book are not written as clearly as I would like; for example, I'm still not sure if an infantry unit firing on tank inflicts a morale marker. I think it does but the rules don't specifically state it does; and whether it does or not makes a huge difference to how infantry deal with armour.

These things can be houseruled, of course, but it's just one of those things companies want to look at  - proofing for aspects other than errors. I think I'm right in saying that Magic: The Gathering and FFG for X-Wings have lawyers read their rules to check for clarity and reduce misunderstanding.

So how did it play?

Really well.

We set up a very simple edge of a village in Normandy with a mixture of terrain types. Three objectives - the truck was worth two as it had the Lost Ark of the Covenant in it - and two equal sides of 360 points. The US side was armour with two infantry units and the German side was infantry with two STuG III in support. The interesting twist here is that because the Germans had more units, they had more command tokens and thus the player - not me - had more options in making decisions.








The game is sound and I will be using it again for fun - and I'll definitely be using it with the students. Highly recommended.

 Stay tuned for an update tomorrow on the new fantasy project.

a couple of bits and pieces here. First off, my new WW2 rules arrived from the chaps at Great Escape Games.



Most splendidly, there was a slight problem with the order and I received the wrong set of command tokens. But those wonderful people at GEG sent me the correct ones and let me keep the originals. Fabulous customer service and a guarantee that I'll be shopping with them again. I'll do a full review of the rules after the first game.

Having now got some rules, I now needed to pull my finger out and finish the German force. First up was the armoured support, a couple of STuG by Battlefront I had kicking around. Done in the now infamous dunkelgelb, aka the most hideous colour known to man, I had to do the markings on theses by hand as well.



I also got the last few infantry detachments done, so I now have a 400 point German force for Iron Cross:



I also grabbed a simple little Zveda 1/100 kit for the princely sum of £2.50 to act as an objective. If you see any of these new little kits, by the way, grab them. I think they've set up for some odd little wargame of their own devising but they are fabulously detailed. Here it is under construction:


And the last little thing is more progress in the Memoir 44 campaign. We've now reached Sword Beach and I'm still loosing!

Got the first few teams done for the German force opposing the Shermans. 15mm are fiddly, of course, but basecoat, wash and highlight generally does the job. I think it's a mistake to get too caught up in fiddling about with them as it's the overall base of figures that is the playing piece and it's the effect of them together that gives the 15mm game its visual appeal.

Which is all by the way of saying these aren't wonderful but they were painted in about an hour which seems like a good return on investment to me.



I have to reiterate that the Plastic Soldier Company figures, although less chunky and a little flatter in detail, are significantly better to work with than the Battlefront ones which were plagued by flash and miscasts.

The rules should,be arriving next week do I'll do a quick review when they do.