Double Header! Gaming nights 14th & 21st Sept

I had planned to post last weeks gaming report last week but the world conspired to strip internet away from my computer and halt any attempt to do so.

It has become a little bit of a tradition to cook steaks before the gaming begins and I might have gone a little overboard this time around...  As per usual now it rained rather heavily (it seems Kingston has been transplanted into England by our rather poor weather), so cooking on the BBQ was a pain in the rear.

My attempt at homemade "Steak Frite".

On the 14th we had to play indoors as the heavens opened up and hammered Kingston with thunderstorms and heavy rains.  Not a huge deal as we had decided upon playing some spaceships, but space was limited and a bit uncomfortable to work around.  This game saw Federation vs Federation in an alternate storyline civil war to Star Trek.  One side was using more advanced ships, but only four of them while their opponents had 14, but lower quality.  In the end I made a silly mistake and this cost us the game.  Having rather brittle, but powerful ships give little to no wiggle room.

Shoddy pictures are due to the horrible lighting in the living room... we could have set up some spot lights, but toughed through it instead.

The weather report for the 21st was just as grim as on the 14th so our glorious host Mike Hoyt decided to sign out a MOD Tent from supply and we set it up prior to the arrival of our gaming buddies.  In the end... the stopped raining just as we finished setting the tent up and the weather was rather nice for the rest of the night... go figure...

We learned our lesson from the gaming night of the 7th and made sure to have spot lights so that we could see what we were doing when the sun set.  The bonus of these 500W lights are they heat up a space pretty well, which means we might not need a space heater when the snow starts falling and we set up a more permanent tent.

The game on the 21st was a continuation of the storyline from our first BattleTech game.  The goal is to slowly introduce new elements to each game, preventing the newer players from getting swamped with new and increasingly complicated rules.  This time around we added in infantry and IFVs.

On my end, I quit smoking and have been on the patch + gum for a bit over a week now, but I was instructed by the Military Health Care worker that I need to treat myself once a week to something, just as a "good job" sort of thing, so this week was a small cigar.  I did little to no wargaming for the first hour and a half of the game, content with sitting in a fantastically comfortable chair, listing to some golden age jazz, slowly enjoying my cigar and top shelf VQA wine.  After about 3 glasses of Burning Kiln wine (absolutely smashing beverage) it became a little difficult to take a steady picture....

Wargaming how it should be

With my now former wargaming club in a death spiral since the executive committee stepped down, the former president and best friend Mike Hoyt and I decided it was time to start up something new.  At the beginning of the summer he moved into a new apartment with a quite lovely back yard that was just finishing a complete renovation.  We built two of four planned 6" x 4" tables to use and recruited most of the remaining members of the old club.

With access to a BBQ, good beer and good company, thus was born a new club.  The name has not been set yet, but hopefully something witty and smart will pop into our collective minds at some point in the near future.  When the Canadian winter inevitably hits, we will move into the house or maybe even set up some sort of tent with a space heater so we can continue playing in the outdoors.

Another aspect of the club that we have planned is to host a podcast after the gaming is finished.  We usually start around 5:30PM and if we end at 10PM, we all still have a lot of time to host a one hour podcast.

The inaugural game for our new club was our first attempt at playing Classic BattleTech.  Most of the club members had not played a game yet, so it was a slow process getting everybody up to speed with the rules.

One of the nice things about BattleTech is that it is scaled in 6mm, which happens to be the chief gaming scale of Mike, thus all the terrain was already available.

Feel free to ignore the unpainted figures, BattleTech has been on the back-buners for me over the last couple of months as I concentrated on my ImagiNation project.

This scenario pitted a Private Mercenary group of four Mechs and four tanks vs a hodge-podge group of 10 Mechs Militia.

As the drinking and gaming progressed, we all realized that the one thing forgotten was a viable light source.  For this coming week we will have a couple of spotlights so that we can continue gaming into the night.

Games that intrigue me (Episode 1; The Return of the Mechs)

Hopefully this will be the first of a couple of entries of games that interest me, but I might not be ready or willing to jump into right away.

And unsurprisingly I will break the mould of what these entries are all supposed to be about right from the start.  I had this article written quite a few months ago, but for some strange reason, I never published it.  Here we are, a couple months later and the game I had originally written about has gone from something that intrigued me, to a minor side project.

Without further adieu, on to the actual game!

A couple days ago I ventured to Kingston's FLGS with my good friend Mike, author of the never updated blog A Mere Matter of Painting and I decided to take the opportunity of fantastic weather to make a trip into town from the University.  With no real plans in mind or a shopping list, we browsed the ever increasing selection of non-Games Workscrap products available.  While lamenting that it has now been almost two full years since we have joined forces to do a joint-project, we stumbled upon the starter box set for BattleTech.  Now, I had never played the game before, but it has aways been just under the radar of my "next big thing" project list.  Mike on the other hand had extensively gamed the system back when all of the intellectual properties were owned by FASA, but has not painted or played BattleTech for over half a decade now. (The BattleTech intellectual property is now owned by Catalyst Game Labs and the miniatures are produced by Iron Wind Metals)

Splitting the cost of the starter box, we excitedly returned to campus and the wargaming club to open it up and feast upon classic wargaming goodness.

The box set minus shrink wrap (lasted all of 10 seconds after opening the doors to the club...

Big pile o'plastic.  The two boxes above the pile each contain a "premium model".  Multi-part and made of plastic, these are rather nice and easy to assemble.  Very crisp and clean details.  Sadly, this cannot be said about the rest of the models.  They are not in the same scale as the "premium" Loki and Thor BattleMechs, but rather halfway between that of the BattleForce game (think 1 model = 1 lance and are in about 3-4mm scale) and the actual 6mm scale that BattleTech is played in.  The casting on the models is quite pathetic really and not even a fantastic paint job can really save them.  In any case, Mike and I have decided that we are not going to bother even painting them, instead using them to serve a dual purpose of allowing us to get a hang of the rules before we pick up proper metal Mechs and once they have been superseded, we can use them along with the included hex boards as a board game when we really really don't feel like taking out loads of terrain.

Speaking of hex boards, here is the fully contents of the box!  The major upside of the starter box is its value for money, considering Mike and I split on it.

The hex mats themselves were the pleasant surprise of the whole box.  Made out of nice and heavy cardstock, they feel very nice and the printing quality is very good.  Being double sided, the two mats included in the box give the gamers a good amount of versatility in "terrain".

Mike trying to remember how BattleTech is played.  We got a good four games in that day and now have a hang of the basic elements to the rules.  Unfortunately, the ruleset included in the box is more of a introductory type book and does not cover all of the elements of the game (especially with equipment).  No matter, I picked up the 3rd Edition of the rulebook while on a "me time" trip into town.

Being rather bored of painting ImagiNation models non-stop for the last two months, I decided to switch gears per-say and built and painted my "premium model" from the starter box:

I present to you Loki.  This mech is not the greatest designed mech in the game as I quickly found out in a game.  While its armed with silly amounts of high power weapons frontlined by two Enhanced Range Particle Projection Cannons, if it were to fire all of its weapons in one turn, it would almost max out its total heat capabilities (EVEN with 22 points of heatsink...).  In other words, it will be most effective sitting in a river or lake and blasting away with its considerable firepower.

Not exactly the best painting job I have done over the last year or so, but to be honest, I wanted to sit down and paint a model from start to finish in one sitting.  This also happens to be the first non-organic model that I have painted up in a LONG time.  Interestingly, Mike noted that even my Spaceship project was organic.