Weekender XLBS: Which Battle Would You Re-Create On The Tabletop?
February 3, 2019 by lloyd
For some website features, you will need a FREE account and for some others, you will need to join the Cult of Games.
Or if you have already joined the Cult of Games Log in now
What difference will having a FREE account make?
Setting up a Free account with OnTableTop unlocks a load of additional features and content (see below). You can then get involved with our Tabletop Gaming community, we are very helpful and keen to hear what you have to say. So Join Us Now!
Free Account Includes
- Creating your own project blogs.
- Rating and reviewing games using our innovative system.
- Commenting and ability to upvote.
- Posting in the forums.
- Unlocking of Achivments and collectin hobby xp
- Ability to add places like clubs and stores to our gaming database.
- Follow games, recommend games, use wishlist and mark what games you own.
- You will be able to add friends to your account.
What's the Cult of Games?
Once you have made a free account you can support the community by joing the Cult of Games. Joining the Cult allows you to use even more parts of the site and access to extra content. Check out some of the extra features below.
Cult of Games Membership Includes
- Reduced ads, for a better browsing experience (feature can be turned on or off in your profile).
- Access to The Cult of Games XLBS Sunday Show.
- Extra hobby videos about painting, terrain building etc.
- Exclusive interviews with the best game designers etc.
- Behind the scenes studio VLogs.
- Access to our live stream archives.
- Early access to our event tickets.
- Access to the CoG Greenroom.
- Access to the CoG Chamber of Commerce.
- Access the CoG Bazarr Trading Forum.
- Create and Edit Records for Games, Companies and Professionals.
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Emu war – totally legit i’m afraid…
lol I told him 😉
Happy Sunday
@warzan ,It did ring a bell, didnt realise casualties were so high, must admit though your delivery was enough to leave Justin totally confused. Funnily enough I do have a home brew set of rules that would cover it, originally written to do the movie ‘Them’the old 50’s b movie on Giant Ants. No re-written for all big bugs , would not be difficult to work out Stats for Emus, Army and civilian human already written. Thunking about it would need to an adaption for Rabbits as in the film ‘Night of the Lepars’ once saw it after a night… Read more »
Happy sunday from the land downunder.
Happy Sunday mate!
and I would like to join my countrymen in wishing a happy Sunday to you all .
…but the Emu Wars … big faux pas there mate … we don’t mention the Emu Wars, it is considered impolite … most of the time we pretend it didn’t happen … la la la la
… seriously though +1 to Gerry Legend suggestion, I would love to see the seige of Dros Delnoch )with each wall with it’s own special rules and conditions … damn it would be awesome. Well played Mr Gerry … well played
Sorry mate it wasn’t my intention to dig up painful national memories 😉
The more I think about it, the more I feel using counters would work better, if you’re a fan of the book you’ll know how much of a heroic fantasy novel is given over to the dull world of logistics and supply, down to doctors and bakers. Having your forces and choosing the method for running the Dros as you play would be a whole other level…
At the same time I do love the idea of six walls across 3 boards… I may have to go and reread the book Laddie 😉
I re-read the thing about every 18 months or so , It is not his best written book but there is something compelling about the whole story, that I find strangely comforting.
Happy Sunday!!
Good morning all, and Happy Sunday. Hmm … which battle would I recreate? Um … For five years on this site, and through 138 articles totaling over 300,000 words, from Hoth to Hubbardton, I’ve done little else. Perhaps my favorite was the 2015 World Wide D-Day Challenge, where we organized 30 players in nine countries to play a series of June 6 2015 wargames recreating the whole opening 24 hours of Operation Overlord. At the moment, I’m posting battle reports of the 1956 Israeli assault on Kuessiema, part of the the IDF’s initial assault on the Um Katef / Abu… Read more »
Jim you beat me to this one, Keep up the great work with the Historical series.
Higgy
Thanks, @higgy . I’ll certainly do my best regarding “The Ops Center.” It’s had great support so far here and YouTube. Not so much on Twitch, but again we’re just getting started there, so we’ll see how it goes.
https://www.twitch.tv/videos/372725109
The Battle of 1812 in north america, or the “Fenian” Raiders
Any ideas on how you might do them?
It would be small battle/skirmish game as were talk about Irish Militia vs the British Army at the time.
I would have to look more into the tactics of the time that the Fenians were using but would be a black powder game where attempt to seize territory is more the game
I would probably use 28mm due to the size of the forces being use and it would be asymmetrical as the Canadian forces out number the Fenian even if they were getting support form the American Army
the Fenian Raiders always interested me from the time I first read about them in a Wargames Illustrated many moons ago.
The idea that the Irish, albeit via the US military, invaded Canada just tickles my fancy. One of the absurdities of war I suspect
The American government were still a tad bitter from having to climb down after the Trent Affair a couple of years earlier. Turning a blind eye to the Fenians let them take a swipe at the British without much risk of it escalating – besides, would you really want these people settling into civilian life in Chicago? Disgruntled, revolutionary tendencies, lots of guns… Far better sending them north to get a bloody nose before settling down somewhere.
I remember that series of Articles Gerry if I remember rightly he used Airfix figures, Civil War confederates for the Fenians and converted WW1 Germans for the Canadians.
Funnily enough up to a few years back I’d still got the copy of it.
If you had a subscription to the mag you probably could find the back issue.
it similar to the war of 1812 in north America as people in North America don’t think about the Napoleon as much as the war here
The interesting thing about the Fenian raids is how they are connected distantly with what was happening in Ireland at the time
15:55 – “Now when it comes to historical gamers, fun doesn’t come into it … ** ha ha ha ** It’s all about accuracy, man. ** ha ha ha ** …”
Okay, I mean, I know you’re kidding around here … but …
No… accuracy is the thing 😉
@warzan you play Thermopolye as a competitive game of Spartans vs Spartans where you compete to kill the most Persians before you die. The Persians would just be an AI force and you are just trying to kill as many as possible before you slowly get hacked to death by the minor wounds the Persians keep doing to you. You could also make it a team competition or semi-cooperative where you can assist another player with kills but you share kill points. @warzan, I was typing my ideas for the Raid on St Nazaire when you started taking about it.… Read more »
Interesting take on Thermopylae basically setting it up as a meat grinder.
My gaming tastes must be changing though because perhaps 10ish years ago I’d have been all over that, but I sit here now wondering if it might be quite a dull experience?
I wonder if there is off table actions to bring more strategy to the game? 🙂
Could run it as a tower defense game. Maybe make it cooperative.
Thermopylae, The Alamo and Dien Bien Phu are all amazing stories with one inevitable end. As conventional wargames those battles become a “Can you do better?” proposition.
Maybe for Thermopylae the focus for the Spartans would be to honor the gods by achieving certain goals with the goals varying by god or goddess.
the Great Crusade would be interesting, it doesn’t really matter on the ruleset used as you can map your own aliens using Imperial Guard as your baseline for an average. But if you used something like Rogue Trader there are more comprehensive rules in there where you can stat up everything from Gods to Robots. Because of the rules the games would be smaller though, although the bonus of that is you’re not having to building huge armies for everything. Possibly drop down to 6mm run it in Epic for a grand scale feel and even use Gothic for the… Read more »
Cruel seas to fight out the engagement in the estuary and then Bolt Action to re-create the commando teams attacking the docks?
I suggested that, it was the arrival of Cruel Seas in the office with the St Nazaire parts in the book that reminded us of this shelved concept.
yep @avernos was talking about that, but I really want it to be a coop game rather than a head to head game 🙂
@warzan Think ‘I ain’t been shot Mum’ from your old mate Richard Clarke from Two Fat Lardies would be a better fit for the land side of St Naziare, works on company level, as there were around 265 commandos and 346 naval personnel, if you semi ignore the latter your talking appox 3 companies of Brits, for the Germans possibly about 4 but with them being re-cycled the way Gerry does them in Rorkes Drift.
Just what i was thinking.
Hmm, you know, the Battle of Scariff from Rogue 1 has a very Raid on St Naizire feel to it.
I like the idea of ‘Battle of Scariff’ and think we could be close this year to making it happen if they give us Shore TRooper to go with the rebel and Imperial boxes from Rogue One.
That’s a big one!
Battle of Scariff for anyone wondering is basically the end of rogue one where they steal the death star plans (if I’m not mistaken)
correct
I would give good money to see the orignal cut of the Scariff mission, given they re-shot a lot of it and the original material (from what we saw in the trailers) indicates that Jyn & Caassian re-join the squad to make a run with the data….
Its not like you dont already have a lot of the stuff,including the island terrain.
Battle of Scariff from Rogue 1 has a St. Nazaire feel to it.
A Star Wars version of St. Nazaire might go something like this … Just before the beginning of Episode V: ESB . . . Kuat Drive Yards are building a massive new orbital facility at the “Nazaar” system, deep in the galaxy’s Outer Rim. This starship docking and repair facility will be the only one in the Outer Rim large enough to facilitate the Executor, super star destroyer flagship of Vader’s “Death Squadron” – tasked with hunting down the Rebel Alliance in the wake of the Battle of Yavin. If the Empire can get this base operational, the Imperial Navy’s… Read more »
Ok, Thermopylae, here goes… Gaming system – reasonably irrelevant. You could shoehorn it into pretty much any game system you wanted but Lion Rampant or something similarly streamlined might be an easy enough starting point. Set the game up with a limited frontage where the opposing forces can fight (obviously…) with the choke points and Greek forces deployed closer to one edge so that the Persian forces have control of most of the board, maybe about a 1/3 vs 2/3 split. For the Greeks, as @avernos suggested fatigue will be key, so Greek forces will need to track fatigue and… Read more »
I love this idea matey. The only other way I could think of running it as a more regular style of game would be to make it part of a campaign. Add the Athenian fleet and some ship battles and do the invasion whole cloth.
But I’m really interested in fleshing your version out and giving it a try…. too many things and not enough time
@Gerry know the feeling!
Excellent post mate love it! 🙂
For the Waterloo map it would be cheaper going to a company that prints vinyl advertising banners to get the map done
Trying to take a boardgame and bring it a little more towards the wargame feel with terrain and topology etc
But yup a vinyl print would definately be cheaper 🙂
But the Kallistra hexes are so lovely 🙂
I did some checking and at a ground scale of 1mm to 1 yard for 28mm we only need 23 feet x 12 feet of tiles…
lol
We gonna need a bigger boat!
you can use 6 mm up to 10 mm you can get 4 20 mm x 40 mm bases into a hex of 10 mm roughly 32 figures infantry 12 to 16 cavalry 2 bases of 1 canon each on a 30 x 40 base you can then take half stands away for damaged units on 6 mm you can use the baccus figures and bases where you can have 60 x 30 our 60 x 60 you can put the stats on the back of these bases i would also get some 7mm dice frames and put a dice… Read more »
@gerry Brought 3 boxes of Kallistra plain hexes that I desert flocked myself, best buy ever, still using thme regularly 14 years later, thought they would need re-flocking but so far ok.
We actualy right home grown rules using hex movement rather than measurments, saves a lot of phaffing.If I’d go space I’d buy the same in blue.
The more I see Ben in the basement, the more unsettling it is. I keep thinking he’s got a woman in a well behind him. “It puts the lotion on the miniature or it gets the hose.”
lmao
“Would you paint me? I’d paint me”
*Ben Dances*
lol
Well played, @brennon – with the 1066 Fulford research and battle game ideas! @Lloyd – the questions you ask at 35:00 regarding armies facing each other across a river, why attack across the river, why not march off and choose another battlefield … These are excellent questions, and choice of the battlefield is always the first winning (or losing) decision generals make. From Gettysburg to Waterloo, battlefield choice is always critical. The problem is, as @brennon points out, there are often other considerations “off table” that constrain the general’s options. He might have to defend a road or open a… Read more »
like British Rail, we may be slow but we get there in the end 😉
I imagine Commodore Rob will choke on his cornflakes when he hears the wrong ship type being used 😀
To the layman they are all battleships 🙂
Same way tanks are all tanks to the layman 🙂
I dont think @commodorerob will worry too much about it lol
I’ll make sure and get a game of battle ships with him and just to wind him up a bit I’ll actually remove the couple of ships that actually are battle ships lol 😉
@gerry don’t like cornflakes…?
@warzan totally agree to the uninitiated all warships are battleships. I have not played battleships since I was a about 8years old…?
Technically they are ships and they fight Battles, so…….
Apologies, @avernos and @warzan – I wasn’t trying to be pedantic. It just really is a colossal difference. Like a x30 difference. A good generic term is warship. That covers everything from a trireme to a Ford-class supercarrier.
And please don’t mention the boardgame “Battleship.” I’m still trying to recover from seeing a copy of “Stratego” in @brennon‘s basement. 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀 😀
Ju-u-u-u-ust kidding, as always. 😀
@oriskany is also right here, as in the one you might get one on an 1/300th game table, the other would be the table in a lot of case.
Thanks, @bobcockayne – Yeah I have a fleet of WW2 ships in 1:1800, and even at that scale they are several inches long. People often lose all sight of scaling or spatial interrelationships when it comes to naval warfare. I think this is a big reason Cruel Seas has made the correct the decision to stock with PT boats and the like. In the long-ago Desert War series, we talked about the light cruiser … light cruiser USS Savannah … this is a SMALL naval warship … only four times the size of Campbelltown … shelling the Vichy French in… Read more »
@oriskany a friend is doing HMS Exeter in 1/350th , which he got as part of multi model deal workth less than above on its own, be interesting to see how big it is his Z class is nearly 15″ long.
@bobcockayne – Exeter? River Plate Exeter? That’s a heavy cruiser, so yeah, even at 1:350 that’s gonna be a big model. 20″ or so.
Yup thats the one, he’s dreading trying to waterline it.
@bobcockayne – I just did that on a 1:72 / 20mm Spec Ops assault boat (about 9 inches long). definitely waited until I was at my Dad’s shop and did it using his larger tools. Waterlining a ship model is indeed NOT easy and you can only try it once … Best of luck to your friend!
The good news is you can use wake effects in the water to hide any small goofs in your cut. God knows I had to. 😀
@orikany that was a pretty good guess on Cambletown , displacement quoted as 1.260 long tons but not sure if thats empy, loaded your probably spot on.
Epic, @bobcockayne . Thanks! 😀 I do my best.
hummmm…….oh the possibilities that could be played out if one wanted to go for it. The battle of ‘Little Big Horn’ I have studied George Armstrong Custer’s career, (having grown up in Kansas and great plains area of America), and spent several vacations traveling around to the sites of the different forts from that era. I’ve walked the locations of troop camps and battlefields and have studied Custer’s career enough to look at him and the circumstances a bit differently then the general population of the world has been lead to believe about his abilities. It is a fact that… Read more »
I’ve often thought of doing something in this period myself, but it’s probably due to my unending love of They Died With Their Boots On.
In many respects the set up is closer to the British at Isandlwana, with the US forces, if I remember correctly, split into three columns unable to support each other and one of them running into the main body of the opposition and being wiped out. If my memory is close to correct that is almost identical to the British invasion of Zululand with the same result to one of the columns.
@Gerry never thought of comparison but, well acutually there isnt a but.
Custers Last Stand would be fascinating. I’m sure there are a ton of ‘odd’ aspects to that battle that are not well known that could make interesting twists in a game of it!
If you use the Twilight Zone series as a factual base there was a Sherman tank crew at Custer’s last stand
@Torros You dont have a link for that one by any chance
This is the best I can do https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0734627/ it might be on you tube
Blimey a very young Warren Oates is int it.
Custer actually had a reasonable chance of winning based on prior engagements. What turned it was the ferocity of the defenders. Normally the Native Americans didn’t attempt pitched battles, the more typical fight was a quick raid and a withdrawal. Unfortunately for Custer, he attacked a huge settlement filled with families so the tribal warriors had little choice but to fight to the end. There’s been an awful lot of research done on the battlefield but it wasn’t until some new scientific tests came along that that we learned a fair amount of what we knew was wrong. For instance… Read more »
@warzan can you do the bloke who might have escaped, from the documentary I remember , he was wounded, his horse got hit, and legged it with him half conscious on the back, it went down one of the little valleys that brake up the terrain and nobody spotted him or they thought hew was dead. Was found by a bunch of Gold Miners and took him months to recover, Cut off from the world he had no idea of the massacre and when he got back to civilisation thought he would be done for cowardice/desertion so kept his gob… Read more »
For St Nazaire would it not be better to take it as read that the Campbelltown had already rammed the lock gates and start the game from there because if the ship doesn’t make it the mission would most likely been called off. I think maybe 10mm might be a better scale given how few troops the Allies would have
The scale is more dictated by the larger area of operation, And if I do the 280 odd commandoes and say 500 of the axis thafs still a hell of a lot of minis. 🙂 In my mind the first phase of the game is not about if the campbelltown makes it, but rather it sets up variations of the starting points that the raid begins from. (differing levels of pressure for the men coming on shore, even different numbers if we have MLs being destroyed on the way in. To me atleast it gives lots of nice variation options… Read more »
if the Campbelltown is train tracked it’s always going to arrive it would just determine how soon the alarm is sounded. Either way works but I do like the idea of trying to stave off the inevitable alarm for as long as possible.
I won’t give away too much of what was actually done back in 2017 when we originally started this project. But preliminary gameboard graphics were produced that offered HMS Campbelltown a series of tracks, allowing the British player a range of choices balancing speed of approach vs. safety and stealth. What started the break the game down a little (at least for me as a designer) was the idea that the game seemed to “start off” with a decision of whether or not the Campbelltown hit the doors of the Normandie dock. If yes = German defeat is basically assured.… Read more »
@oriskany wondered on the size of the table on this one, even at 6mm(or is it 5) for 1/300th itr owuld be 27ft.
Yeah, @bobcockayne – again … I tried to design the game with the team back in 2017 but I think we had different ideas about how it could be best presented. I still say Valor & Victory would be the best way to do it. It’s a free system everyone has access to, you can scale it any way you want, custom counters would be easy to build, it would be a BIG game even in Valor & Victory (about 100 counters just in squads and fireteams, + ships, heavy weapons, leaders, call it 150 for safety) … but MAN… Read more »
Happy Sunday!
Still thinking about which encounter – apart from another vote for Thermopylae using some kind of “storm the castle”/”waves of zombie hordes” defence rules… or whatever Gerry’s using for Rorkes Drift 😉
The Men Who Would be Kings, by Dan Mersey 😉
I really love @evilstu‘s idea above.
Like the Zulus, you wouldn’t need to paint20,000 emus as they’d arrive in waves. Anyhow I reckon that apart from numbers I reckon you could dip anf flock about 1,000 termagants in a couple of hours…
I’d worry about cheapening the historical importance of the battle to use somthing like a termagaunt in place of a mighty and terrifying emu.
We need a sculptor!
http://wargameterrain.blogspot.com/2014/02/forlorn-hope-games-new-28mm-cavalcade.html
They’re already out there matey
@dignity right… over to you mate 😉
Go for Giant ants rather than emu and you pick up bags of about 30 for halloween costumes for a couple of quid.
The battle I’ve always wanted to recreate is the battle for Arrakis from Dune. I was even seriously thinking of doing it until it was announced that Gale Force 9 and Modiohius picked up the licence. Rules wise it would be based on 40k. The rules would work well but mainly the reason is that 40k is clearly heavily influenced by Dune so I think there’s a wonderful symmetry in using 40k rules for a Dune game. I’d even thought through what psychic powers could be written to represent the Bene Gesserit powers and your command points would be “Sapho… Read more »
@avernos . No matter the scale you played the legend siege at Druss would always be a 28mm figure
You mean like this?
https://www.hfminis.co.uk/shop?product=ferrus~hfh057&category=fantasy-%26steampunk~fantasy-humans
I have him ?
Happy Sunday! +1 for Gerry’s Legend suggestion. Legend has got to be my favourite book, I cannot count how many times I have read it since I picked up my first copy in a motorway service station on the way to the Lake District back in 1984 (yeah it’s the first edition paperback that Gemmell himself hated the cover for!) Although that copy is still readable I have worn out 3 other copies! What other battles would I like to do? The list is huge, most of the First Age Battles from The Silmarillion. I started the Army of Gondolin… Read more »
was that the black cover with the man on it in leather kilt, full helm and holding the sword two handed in a Qui-Gon Ginn like pose?
If so that was the first one I picked up and read and the cover was the reason of doing so.
Ah resources and as we know from Jasaray the most precious resource is time, for it is irreplaceable
I think the cover on mine was reddish brown. It’s years since I read it but isn’t there a part of it where the 30 start to burn themselves out with using their power too much?.
ah no I found 1st ed cover, I can see why he hated it. Mine was 2nd
There was one of the Thirty, Serbitar who pushed too far and bounced off into the mists and almost killed himself,
Hasslefree will always have my eternal appreciation for producing a quite superb mini of Druss himself. not offical of course bu c’mon, who else could this be? Look at that axe!
https://www.hfminis.co.uk/shop?product=ferrus~hfh057&category=fantasy-%26steampunk~fantasy-humans
The blades of no return
@warzan St Nazaire is a fascinating operation, and one that really doesn’t get enough attention. I (vaguely) remember seeing a black & white film dramatising the raid, and old motor-mouth himself, Jeremy Clarkson, fronted a surprisingly thoughtful rumination on the mission as part of his Clarkson’s War Stories series (I say series, it only had 2 eps). A lot of Clarkies worst tendencies are restrained but his passion for the subject really comes through. It does make you wonder how the hells this mission ever succeeded (I think that might be the documentary that Gerry mentions interviewing the surviving commandos)….… Read more »
Yeah I keep rewatching Clarkson’s doc on the raid.
It is probably without doubt my favourite WW2 ‘thing’.
Just an incredible (as I’m almost unbelieveable) story that has so many aspects to it.
Yeah, there are so many points where that mission SHOULD have failed but just didn’t.
yes mate, it was indeed that documentary, he has two others one on the VC and the arctic convoy and like you say his worst tendencies never surface making them fantastic veiwing.
I’m a big fan of David’s entire work, always a great read.
That VC one is really interesting, and I didn’t know there was one in the series on the arctic convoys. Might have to track that one down….
(I still can’t bring myself to read Gemmell’s last book, ditto Pratchett’s. I may be having issues letting go…)
It’s online I watched it recently if you Google for it you’ll find it.
Weirdly I’ve done the same with gemmell.
Terry’s last book I did read on release as I didn’t want to run into a spoiler. I will say I did cry at the end, I couldn’t think of a more fitting book to be the final chapter of the disc
I think a new start is a good place for a story to end.
exactly
Clone Wars… So if your not a fan of the prequels you may need to forget about the film’s for this one but specifically for the crew there and the amazing lighting setup that you guys have I think I themed day of clone wars would be amazing! Throughout the day you have the amazing score of John Williams in the background whilst the light make it more intense again. You can break down table by table different mini games that effect each other just as Ben described Helms Deep (great shout btw @brennon). As it’s an IP that most… Read more »
With Legion doing Clone Wars this year that might not be as crazy as it sounds.
Avalon Hill did a solo boardgame of the raid many moons ago which I remember being good
Oooh I would love to get that, do you know what it was called @torros?
Just Raid on St Nazaire https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1425/raid-st-nazaire. I think it was released a few years back as an ASL module
Holy crap it is expensive!!
It’s over 30 years old now
Update; I have found it on Tabletop Simulator on Steam if anyone is interested:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1161482296&searchtext=raid+on+st+nazaire
Tabletop Simulator is only £15 and there appear to be several AH games there including Squad Leader and the ASL starter kits 😉
Would do the rescue of Mussolini from the fortress in Italy in 28 mm using the reich buster troop generation for the allies and have German Heroes buffing troops on the rescue side much like the idea tha @warzan had for Saint Marie
Would need a fair few house rules for stat/ troop composition and would have to lean heavily on games like flames of war and bolt action some Osprey book as well…..those guys do so much background investigation!
The only problem with that is the same problem a lot of Colonial Games have. No one died. The rescue of Mussolini was an utter success and not a shot was fired which would make for a pretty boring game or Reichbusters. It would be impossible to replicate and the best you could do is an “Inspired By” type of game which is fine, taking inspiration from history and making my own scenario’s is 90% of what I do. Or things like Blood River where Boers fought the Zulu (1836) and lost only 3 men wounded compared to hundreds dead,… Read more »
My first introduction to war games was via Avalon Hill and their sublime Squad Leader so for me I would love to do the scenarios from the game with miniatures rather than cardboard chits. I would think that this would be relatively easy with Flames of War.