Japanese Pagoda

I kept it until last as my reward for painting all the Japanese figures but I've now finished the pagoda that Andy bought me a while back.

This is another excellent MDF and card kit from Sarissa Precision with the optional additional storey and the extra height will really make the model dominate the table and the proportions look better.

This is the biggest kit I've made with 13 and a half A4 pieces:

The additional storey:

After pressing everything out, there were dozens of pieces:

I then did a test fit:

Before priming each separate part of the structure:

After priming (with our apple blossom in the background):

Lots of fiddly red paint to apply and I also added washes around the edges of each white panel to age them and give them some depth:

The cardboard roofs were spray painted and rolled slightly to fit to the curved roof supports:

The kit has the steps sticking out from the base so to protect them I based the whole thing again, adding grass, flowers and some lanterns on the corners.  The finished item:

The pagoda comes apart into five pieces - the top roof and the four storeys - so that figures can fight in and around each of the rooms:

The final elements of the Japan project were some accessories from TTCombat and a Sake temple offering from Oshiro to be used with the shrine and pagoda.

I was particularly pleased with the Sake barrels and the Buddha statue, aged with turquoise washes as used by Adrian with the Samurai DBA armies:

So after almost exactly five years, all the Japanese figures, buildings and accessories are now finished.  I have designed a set of figure stat cards for the Ronin ruleset and will get them professionally printed when my chosen printer re-opens for business post-lockdown.

And then, one day, hopefully soon, we will get them out on a table and play together again.

 雨降って地固まる (ame futte chi katamaru)
Literally: after the rain, earth hardens
Meaning: Adversity builds character / After a storm, things will stand on more solid ground than they did before.

The Duke on the John

I haven't bought any Wild West figures for years (I am not short of them!) but I couldn't resist one at Warfare last year.  Produced by Colonel Bill's, it's a single figure called "True Grit - the Duke on the John", and I painted it up yesterday and "installed" it today:

It's a pretty good likeness to the actual character played by Marion Morrison but he's not painted as an exact match so that Andy wouldn't think I was being disrespectful to Duke.

D-Day Dice

D-Day Dice is a 1-4 player game where (unsurprisingly) you roll dice and storm the beaches of Normandy.  I had downloaded the free print-at-home version of this years ago but never got round to setting it up.  It had a successful kickstarter and a few subsequent expansions, and I thought it was about time I tried it - especially as the seller on Board Game Geek's "Geek Market" was also selling another game I was interested in (to be revealed at a later date) and offered me a good deal.  I also thought that in the circumstances it was a good time to buy another solitaire game.

It's a strong theme with a good mechanism.  Each player has six dice (2 each of 3 colours) with six different symbols and has three consecutive rolls to build up a set that are exchanged for more men, courage to proceed, specialists or tools, with additional bonuses for getting Red, White and Blue on the same symbol.  So there's actually quite a lot to it, with regular and unique specialists, regular and special tools, and eight different beaches to attack.

It's fun and pretty quick.  I played the three learning scenarios on the Exercise Tiger board last weekend and then tried Omaha Beach today.  Each mission was a success but I suspect it will get more challenging with later boards.  And with more players, the Allies only win if everyone makes it to the final bunker and so players must cooperate by trading men and items as they proceed up the beach.  Looking forward to trying it when we can get around a real table together again.

Virtual Games Night - 1 April 2020

After our successful test session last week, we had a full-on international games night this week using Zoom to chat whilst we played.  David, Kieron and James started with the quick and fun push-your-luck dice game Can't Stop, which dates back to 1980.  When Stuart and Adrian joined us we had a couple of games of 7 Wonders - which plays even more quickly when the implementation is highlighting which cards you can build for free, or which require spending and from whom.  And we finished with a game of Puerto Rico - which we have played about once every three years over the last decade or so, but I suspect we will play a bit more often now.  The plan for next week is to try Roll for the Galaxy.

We're learning how to use the Board Game Arena website - we had to expel non-Rival players who had joined before we reduced the numbers, and Kieron accidentally ended up playing Can't Stop (very slowly) with a completely different group at one point.  But apart with some oddities that David and James encountered playing Caylus at the weekend, the implementation of the games is extremely good, with lots of additional help provided.  It is inevitably a very busy site and took a while to log in, and we had some delays but nothing that messed up anyone's turn or the game itself.  Three of the Rivals are now Premium members (~£4 a month) which unlocks a wider range of games and guarantees you can log in even when the site is busy.

Japanese figures finally finished!

I finished the mounted Samurai yesterday - a present from Adrian some time ago...

I painted them up to match the six armoured Samurai I have so that those characters each have a mounted and foot version.

I had painted a few more figures that hadn't made it to the blog so for completeness, here's the rest. 

Tokugawa Ieyasu and his loyal retainers

Taiko with drummer and conch player

Villagers

Unarmoured Samurai

And here's all the figures for this project in their box:

It's only taken five years to get to this point!  My reward is to build the Pagoda that Andy got me last year.  And perhaps we'll get a game when we're out of isolation...

Ambush! Mission 3: A Cold Morning in Belgium

Just David and James this week, so a return to the classic Avalon Hill map-and-counters solitaire game Ambush!  After October's disastrous Mission 4, we agreed to treat that as an "exercise" particularly as we should have been playing Mission 3 anyway.

Your squad, on garrison duty in a quiet sector of the front, is bivouacked in a small village just east of a running river.  On this misty, snowy morning, your men have been ordered to patrol nearby bombed out buildings to check for German scouts.

 We deployed in three buildings on the eastern edge of the town (I think the mission designers expected us to deploy someone in the church building in the west - it was the highest point but with the mist limiting visibility to six hexes, we thought it was better to cluster together).

This mission doesn't have activation checks and the mission proceeds by random events and paragraph checks.  After a single artillery strike near us, we then heard some rumbling as we explored the bombed out buildings, and a Panzer IV arrived in the north-east of the map, along with a group of three Panzergrenadiers, three Volksgrenadiers in the east, and three veteran infantry in the south-west.

David's half of the squad had limited cover crouching in the bush and Private E was killed by the full force of the Panzer's bow machine gun.  The rest of the men ran to the same hex as the Volksgrenadiers to engage them at close quarters with the significant side benefit of preventing the Panzer on firing on them, as the Germans will not fire into a hex containing their own men.

The Panzer trundled on, blew up our parked Jeep and eventually trundled off the map.  The game was slow to play with so many Germans activated at the same time but we steadily reduced their numbers.  Eventually a US runner appeared to tell us the obvious - Germans were still in the area and we should get out.  But this at least then gave us a way to attain all the Victory Points needed for a victory - successfully leave the map by the northern edge, and blow the road and rail bridges as you go.

Having taken out all the Germans, another group were activated on the eastern edge of the map, so we decided (also looking at the clock approaching midnight!) to ignore them and the bridges, and just exfil.

We acquired 7 VPs for searching the bombed out buildings, 12 for activated Germans (acquired regardless of whether you incapacitate or merely evade them), 1 for capturing a veteran NCO, 16 for exiting our 7 surviving squad members and the runner, and -2 for the loss of Private E.  A grand total of 34 points, comfortably exceeding the 25 needed despite our ignoring the bridge objectives.

With 32 combat points received for successfully completing the mission, we can hopefully improve some of the squad's stats and improve their chances of completing Mission 4 for real next time.

 

Hit Z Road - 5 February 2020

One of James' new games... and it's a corker.  The artwork is next level - the conceit of the game is that it has been devised by a child who survived the zombie apocalypse and they've had to adapt what is to hand to make the game.  So the box is amended and tatty, the resource counters are bottle tops, player markers are things found in wallets (e.g. credit card, loyalty card) and the cards are mostl playing cards.  And best of all, some of the cards and counters are adapted from real world games, most of which we own, like 7 Wonders, Splendour, Ticket To Ride and Dixit.

And fortunately, the gameplay lives up to the production values (so finally, a zombie game that even Kieron might play...?).  There's a bidding mechanism so players interact to choose the best routes as they travel from coast to coast with the zombies in hot pursuit.  And there's dice rolling as your survivors battle it out with the groups of zombies who they regularly encounter.  Which brings the double joy of managing to survive for another round by some lucky rolls, and sniggering whilst your competitors group of survivors are unexpectedly decimated.

There was a bit of an issue with the resource runaway leader - if you've got most resources, it's easier to win the bidding, and then take the route that gives you the most resources back.  It would be interesting to see how much that is the case next play, now we have a feel for the distribution of resources and zombies throughout the game rounds.  But we also found a good variant on BGG where the second of the two cards in each route is hidden - which rather fits the theme well: you might be able to see down the road but not round the corner.

James was first to run light on resources and despite a fiery death for a horde from his molotov cocktail, his last survivor succumbed in the sixth (of eight) rounds.  Andy and David were both taken out in the seventh round - giving the Stuart the automatic win without needing to count the victory points we had attained.  Stuart did a lot of fleeing rather than fighting so actually had a lower number of victory points.  But he survived, which is more to the point.  Looking forward to playing this again.