Gaming Mats

Continuing my lockdown policy of Pay Now, Play Later...

In recent years, more and more companies have been producing gaming mats with very detailed images printed on vinyl, cloth and (best of all I think) mousemat.  I keep coming back to them and had been looking recently at Deep Cut Studios.

They provide a custom service where you can provide the images for them to print.  I was interested in a set of 2x2 feet gaming mats for DBA, Perilous Tales and other 28mm skirmish games.  They aren't cheap but then I had a cunning idea.  How about ordering a double-sided 6x4 feet mat and cutting it up myself?

I bought 12 very high resolution gameboard images from DriveThruRPG and then stitched them together using an open source graphics package into two images with 6 maps each.

This was uploaded to Deep Cut and in just over a week my double-sided mat had been printed in Lithuania and delivered to the UK.

Inevitably (and in fairness, as warned by Deep Cut) the two images didn't precisely line up so when the mats were cut (by my expert resident fabric wrangler) there was a little bit of wastage - but to all intents and purposes, I now have a set of twelve 2x2 feet mats for a range of scenarios.

I have (left to right, top then bottom) Lonely Road, Badlands, Snow Field, Wasteland, Desert Outcrop and River Valley.

Plus Borderlands, Ice Wastes, Cobblestones, Deep Desert, Lowland Plain and Highlands.

I'm really pleased with the quality of the printing and definition of the images (the photos above don't really do them justice) and this approach was less than half the price of ordering them as pre-cut 2x2 mats.

Abominable!

I painted up a few more of the figures that Adrian got me for my birthday.  The first are some fantastic Yetis from Copplestone Castings.

They are a cheeky pair...

They are also my first snow bases.  Having looked at lots of the products online, I also found a few recommendations for a simple home-made version.  The snow is a mixture of PVA, white paint and baking soda - with some more soda sprinkled on as the mixture was drying for extra texture.  I'm pleased with how it turned out.

The other figures, also designed by Mark Copplestone, are "The Accursed" - a splendid pair of werewolves.  More great additions for games of Perilous Tales.

Buntai for Ronin battles

I had generally bought Japanese miniatures that I liked without a lot of thought for the constraints of the Buntai army lists in the Ronin rulebook.  Fortunately, I've been able to form five different Buntai following the rules for the different types.  They all have roughly 180 points and the same number of Combat Points, but are different sizes and comprise different troop types.

The first is a small, tough Bushi - five armoured Samuari plus a hired Ronin and Ninja.

The next two are nine-strong Bushi with 2 Samurai, 3 Ashigaru with yumi (bow) and 2 with teppo (gun), a banner bearer and a hired Ninja.

They differ in the armour of their leader as well as different Attributes of the key characters.

Next up is a group of 7 Sohei warrior monks.

Lastly, a group of ten rebellious Ikko-Ikki - a Samurai leading 7 Monto plus a hired Ronin and Ninja.

Samurai and Elephants

 Andy and I had a Ronin skirmish game at the beginning of the week.

A simple scenario with two Buntai staging an exhibition fight for the Hatamoto.

James took a Samurai onto the bridge over the koi pond for a dramatic Kurasawa-style duel...

...which Andy declined, instead ganging up on the rest of James' Samurai with the advantage of an extra man.  A short and bloody battle ensued, and James could never recover from the initial loss.

We learned a few things: 

• Andy doesn't care for the code of honour that all Samurai follow ;-) 
• Once you're a man down, you need extraordinary lucky dice rolls to turn it around
• Especially when the figures all have the same stats

So the key thing for next time is to create Buntai with more variety in their Combat Points, adding ranged weapons, and to explore the addition of Ronin skills.  I've recently discovered a Facebook group for the Ronin ruleset so I hope to get a flavour of how others are putting their Buntai together for next time.

We also had a swift game of DBA - James as Alexander vs Andy's Indians.

There was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing to start with but the tide turned when I did a sequence of attacks not realising that the drifting apart wing of Andy's mounted troops were supposed to be still aligned.  This resulted in a loss from outflanking, which Andy punched through and turned onto the side of the pikes, with inevitably deathly consequences for Alexander's army.

Samurai pond

I made a koi pond for my Japanese Samurai project.  I started with a kit from wonkyhead3dprinting.

The kit had so many elements, it seemed a shame not too use them all with the small pond provided.  So I cut the pond up to make a larger one by placing edges on a thin piece of plasticard and adding some Tetrion.

I painted up the pond and placed the koi, turtles and stepping stones.

The dents mark the position of the MDF bridge I planned to use instead of the small one that came with the kit, which was too narrow for the bases I use with my figures.

Next step was my first foray with mixing and pouring resin.  I did a trial run in a plastic lid first and then poured the pond the following day.

I then decorated the pond with moss, flowers, reeds and grass, and added the lanterns and lilypads that came with the kit.

Spot the mistake!

 

No, it's not that Andy deployed his Achaemenid Persian mounted troops (left of picture) in a bog.  But that James misread the Assyrian army list and deployed a 14 element-strong army!  And neither of us noticed.  And it also made not the slightest difference.

Whilst James raced across the playing area with a succession of sixes on his PIP dice, Andy struggled to extricate himself from the bog with PIP rolls of 1 and 2.

But when it counted, Andy's combat rolls of 5s and 6s crushed James' 1s and 2s.

The Assyrians, distracted by the supposedly easy-to-kill Scythed Chariot (without realising it didn't count towards the break point), were soon minced to pieces, including James' general.  Final score 5-1 to Andy.

Episode 107 - Ye cannae change the laws of physics!

 First outing for the Grey Aliens from Copplestone Castings that Adrian bought me for my birthday.

Another Perilous Tales game with the original series Star Trek crew.  This episode's mission:

The teleporter was being serviced so Sulu flew them down to the planet's surface in the cardboard Galileo shuttle I'd started making the same morning (and not quite finished - it will hopefully have some nacelles fitted before the next game!).

The ruleset allows for random generation of the three objectives but I prefer to choose them to best suit the scenario, so we had Recover Equipment (i.e. dilithium crystals), Leave No Stone Unturned (i.e. explore the whole area and reveal all threat markers) and Escape!

Andy and I took control of three and two figures each, the first time we've tried two guiding minds controlling the Heroes - although of course they had communicators so could make plans together.

The Villains were Grey Aliens, one with a heat raygun, one with an extremely long finger, and three minions.

The playing area was set up with rocks and crystals:

...and the three perils for the location were:

McCoy took an uncharacteristically aggressive approach, killing the first alien that Uhura had wounded.  The Leader then appeared severely injuring McCoy.  The good doctor then spent most of the rest of the game unsuccessfully attempting to heal himself before failing several threat checks.

Fortunately, the rest of the crew did much better, picking off the aliens as they appeared and Uhura, Spock and Kirk each recovering an element of dilithium crystal.

Unfortunately, Spock did spend a couple of turns waddling around the board after his encounter with Big Digit.

Ultimately, the crew of the Enterprise crushed the objectives and lost no-one (the benefit of having no Redshirt extras in the away team perhaps).  Splitting the Heroes across two players worked well although I think I should have given the aliens the capacity for more wounds - none of them survived a turn which doesn't feel right, no point having the Pack Hunter characteristic without a pack actually forming.  So I'll try this again and increase the wounds to 10 for the Leader and Big Digit and 7 for the remaining three.

That said, the away team only just escaped intact.  Uhura was unharmed (keeping her distance and using the crack shot trait) but the rest had all lost most of their wounds, so it was perhaps closer than it looked.  Anyway, another fun game of Perilous Tales.