Mandarin's Corner

 I got tired of my old AOL Journal based blog that was hosted here, AOL pays my salary and all that, and the AOL Journal has some cool features (such as the ability to enter blog entry via a AIM chat window, and you can record a voice message on your blog, etc.) but the lack of some very basic features (i.e. categories) really irritated me. So last night I decided on the blog software that I want (movabletype seems to be a full featured blogger with everything that I wanted), so here I am!
I'll be migrating my old stuff from AOL to here gradually. Hopefully I can have new entries here in a more frequent basis... Stay tuned.

msoong0993 at 3:10:24 PM PDT Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

 

Flames of War

In the US at least this set of Warhammer 40K -esque rules for WW2 seems to be the up and coming thing, no doubt one of the biggest driver behind the 15mm WW2 boom that I mentioned above. I have purchased the rules and read through them some weeks before the con, and I finally got a chance to test drive the system this Saturday.

The demo game involved about six of us handling about 1,000 points of troops (a very small game) on both sides. It involves a local counter attack by the Soviets in the opening months of Barbarossa. All of us Russian commanders are somewhat depressed about our chances of survival, based on nothing more than the term "Russian" and "Barbarossa" in the same sentence. But I guess the point balance scheme are done well enough that we ended up with a close game.

The play is fast (despite the bucket of dice approach to combat) and deadly, with meaningful decision reached in about 3 hours game play among 6 new comers to the rules. The scenario is straight out of the book and is quite fun too: A Russian attack that must reach one of two "objectives" within a time limit in order to win, and a German defender which starts out with the same point value, but 1/2 of the forces starts off board, and must make its reinforcement die roll in order to join the battle. It's a quick and  simple system to generate some tense scenario. The hidden setup system is similar to that of 40K which involves no book keeping.

 

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Temptations

You are not a wargamer if you are not tempted by periods/figures/scales that you aren't planning on working on before the show. There aren't that many this time, but after a game of Flames of War, those 15mm Battlefront figures are looking lovely indeed. Walking around the show floor didn't help any since there are many painted WWII in 15mm sitting there tempting your wallet (I would have to say that on appearance alone, there are more WWII 15mm than any other range, Nappy might be a close second). Matter got worse since my chosen scale (N Scale) WWII didn't have much in presence to "jazz" me up. But after some lengthy soul searching, I decided that I really do not need a 4th scale in WWII (I have 10mm, 20mm, and 25mm already), so that got under control…

 

…until I noticed this new vendor by the name of Two Tin Soldiers (www.twotinsoldiers.com). Their forte is to make ranges of WW2 stuff that no-one else makes. They range that caught my eyes are the ww2 Chinese and Japanese range. Their quality are every bit as good as the majors. So now there's serious consideration to do the Pacific front in 15mm (Since there aren't much overlap in troop types between my 10mm stuff which are Eastern Front exclusively, and my 25mm project which is Western Front skirmishing). The urge was suppressed and no money changed hand. But that can all change if Flames of War ever comes out with a Japanese/Chinese expansion…

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Battlestandard Miniatures

The only 25/28mm vendor that I have never heard of has his booth right next to ours. The owner (also sculptor) Jeff is a fine fellow and we talked a bit about his company. Apparently they used to make a line of 15mm (ACW?) figures some years ago, the line went away, but now he is reviving the company with a new line of Ancients in 25/28 mm. The first range is the Persians, with the Macedonians soon to follow. The Persian Range is very complete already, and of very high quality indeed (I would call it very New-Foundry like in style, very much like Crusaders or Artizan). Since our group is close to finishing our Punic War project, Macedonians definitely seem like something we can go for.

Battle Standard also has a set of rules coming out, aiming squarely at the WAB crowd but trying to make it more historical. That should be out by Historicon as well. (www.battlestandard.com)

msoong0993 at 3:53:09 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

 

The economy

During the day I mostly hung out in the dealers area, doing booth babe duty for Little Cyber Wars. I am sharing a dealers table with Dan and Freddy, for whom selling painted figures is their main thing coming to the convention. Dan (and the rest of us by necessity)  carried a large number of boxes all the way from California to latch on to the sales frenzy. Judging from Dan's first day, business is good, and then economic slow down (at least in the tech industry) didn't seem to affect gamer's pocket book. Some of the vendors who , handles British imports are making noises about the bad exchange rate, but most are holding steady on their prices for now (so it seems to me).

msoong0993 at 3:52:37 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

 

40mm

Last summer I commented in my Historicon report that the 40mm ACW figures put out by Sash and Saber seems to be a hit. This time around there are two more 40mm vendors showing their wares: Perry brother's 40mm Nappy range, and RLBPS's new range (to me anyway) that covers the whole gamut, all the way from Romans to WWII pilots). It's good to see that all three vendors seems to be compatible size-wise and on quality as well. The RLBPS especially are a pleasant surprise to me since I've never really played with their 25mm stuff before, but their 40mm stuff seems to look much better. A new sculptor perhaps? (Since I would think that it'll be harder to do a good looking larger fig than a smaller one…)

The impulse was there to get some Nappy figures to do skirmish games, but since I need another Nappy scale like I need a hole in the head, (plus the $6 a pop pricing, with the exception of Sash & Saber whose regimental packs comes out less) the urge was quickly suppressed.

 

10mm

Going to the other extreme, Old Glory debuted their new 10mm line. It starts with ACW, Nappy, and some ancients range, with ECW to follow soon before Historicon. The per figure price comes out to be < 15 cents a piece I think, so would be a great way for me to do some "lesser" periods on the cheap. One idea was to use these figures to supplement GW figures for their excellent Warmaster rules. A quick inquiry to Old Glory indicated that they currently have no plan to do a fantasy range (drat!) but their upcoming dark age stuff can easily be used to model various human troops (Goth for Rohan type, Byzantines for Gondorians,  Huns for Southrons, and I can use some 15mm Sassanid Elephants for Mumaks, then we are in business, all I would need then are the Monster types).

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On Saturday morning the convention hit me full force. Some highlights below:

 

LOTR

LOTR is quite popular, even in a supposedly "historical" convention. Glancing through the program the only fantasy events that I see are LOTR game using the GW rules as well as the trading miniature game (No sign of WH fantasy in the program at all!) Some dealer (associated with On Military Matters I think) is actively pushing the trading miniature game, giving demos at their booths and running more than one events. I haven't given that one a try yet, but I understand that the rules are downloadable online so I'll give it a look see later. There might be ideas that I can steal for my new LOTR secret project.

 

msoong0993 at 3:51:18 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

Last summer I made y first journey to a East Coast miniature convention, and I had a real blast. My buddy Jeff and Freddy normally come out East twice a year: Historicon in the summer, and Cold War in the winter. Cold War is the smaller of the two, and normally happens around this time of the year. Since I happen to be on a once in a lifetime sabbatical this time around, I decided to come along.

 

One main reason I decided to come to Cold Wars is to demo my new "play miniatures online" program called Little Cyber Wars. I won't bore you with the details of the program here, since I have created some marketing literature on my new yahoo group which discusses the program in a lot more details. If you are interested please visit http://groups.yahoo.com/group/littlecyberwars/

.

 

We flew in at around 3:00PM, and by the time we made the 90 min car ride to Lancaster it's already dinner time. A quick stroll around the gaming area shows that nothing much is happening. The only game of note being setup is Dave Waxtel's Crimea War game, which is one of the "main event" at the con (Cold Wars and Historicon normally have "themed" games. For Cold War this time it's Wars of the later 1800's. It'll be D-Day for Historicon '04).

msoong0993 at 3:49:16 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

For about 3 years or so SL (and later ASL) was the mainstay of my gaming. I remember those friday night SL sessions when I come back to my parent's house. It brings back good memory.

My ASL buddy and I ran through every SL scenario, as well as the COI, COD, scenario 100, scenario 200. We haven't quite made it into GI when ASL was released. and then we went through about 1/2 of the Beyond Valor scenarios as well as some of the Delux ASL stuff. It all stopped when interests changed (got into miniature almost full time), and also because my SL buddy moved away.

So about 19 years later, what kind of insanity possessed me to want to try this again? I mean I had a great time with the system back then, but let's face it, that was back then, before the internet, before marriage, and before work. I guess nostalgia probably has something to do with in, but really, why did I do it?

I guess I am still in search of a playable and versatile tactical WW2 game. The search has been relentless: we tried PanzerGrenadier from Avalanche (thumb down), TCS (a bit too attritional for me). Lock and Load looks like a good system, but the WW2 component isn't out yet. So that bring me back to ASL.

After spending about two weeks going through the rules again, I guess it did not seem all that daunting. A lot of the basics stuck in my head after all these years, so re-reading it wasn't all that painful (but it did bring out how dated the system is. The inelegance of many parts of the system obviously never went through the streamlining of game rules that happened in the last 10 years.).

Chris and I tried "Gavin Takes" (you can read about his writeup in his excellent blog), a simple US Para scenario where the most complicated thing onboard is the machine gun. I lost, but had a great time. Rules-wise Chris was pretty patient in pointing out stuff to me (he's an ASL grognard), but surprisingly I remembered a fair chunk of the stuff I read in the last few weeks.

The goal now re ASL is to play some more smaller scenarios regularly to get familiar with the rest of the system, and then maybe graduate to one of the HASL module (afterall, that's one of the reason I went on this journey for the mad).. Stay tuned.

msoong0993 at 1:23:16 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own

I just picked up the new
(to me anyway) hardbound D&D Miniatures handbook, and it actually
looks pretty good.


It's aiming to be the miniature rules for those familiar to the D20
world, at the same time trying to attract the Wizkid crowd (as can be
seen from their packaged painted miniatures), as well as the warhammer
crowd (since the rules now contains mass combat rules).

The rules themselves are pretty clear and well laid out, and reads more
cleanly than the verbose conversational style of GW. There are plenty
of illustrations to help you along. The skirmish game is played on a
grid while the mass combat game is over ungridded table top. The rules
are simple, retains some favors of the D20 combat system but yet
simplified (there are also rules to convert your D20 character stats to
the miniature game stat). This could be cool (I am looking to tryout
the LOTR figures and scenarios using these rules)....

msoong0993 at 3:57:56 PM PST Permalink | Blog about this entry |  Add to del.icio.us |  digg this This entry has 0 comments: Add your own