First playtest of Perilous Tales - Episode 101: Dad's Army and the Crazy Nun

Perilous Tales is a solo or cooperative skirmish wargame of thrilling tabletop adventures.  Beta versions of the rules are available for playtesting at the Planet Smasher website.  The rules really appealed to me with hidden markers and programmed actions for the enemies, like a simple figures version of Ambush!, and I was keen to try them.

The essential mechanism in the game is the Skill Check.  A difficulty dice is rolled - two if the figure has Advantage or Disadvantage, and then the lower or higher respectively is taken as the difficulty target.  Then a number of dice equal to the figure's skill are rolled and success is every die equal or greater to the difficulty target.  A few twists on this: ones always fail, zeros (10) is a double success and sometimes there is a minimum difficulty target.

There is a similar threat check that takes place between the heroes and villains' turns which increases the threat level and can result in threat marker movement or additional villains spawning.

The rules are designed around the pulp fiction and horror genres, and only require a handful of figures for each side.  I thought they might work well with Dad's Army and ran up some cards using Nandeck with special abilities for each character that reflected their personality in the TV series.

I made cards for Walker and Frazer too but just used these five for this episode.

The idea for the enemy was that the main villain was a nun turned against England by the broadcasts of Lord Haw-Haw.  With a mad scientist, she had re-animated skeletons from Saint Aldhelm's graveyard in Walmington-on-Sea and was disrupting the plans of the local defence volunteers.

The Home Guard didn't know any of this of course.  They had simply received orders from Colonel Pritchard to investigate why the searchlight had failed.  This also included three specific Objectives from the thirteen offered in the rules.

I adapted the Voodoo Cult from the official Villain List to create my Crazed Nun list:

All Perilous Tales games are played on a 2x2 feet square area which was easy to set up on my workbench since I was playing solo.

I printed out the markers included in the rules.  Eight are numbered for the five enemy figures and three location-related events, others represent the switches, radio and other devices not used in this episode:

The playing area with markers in Aggressive formation and initial deployment of the heroes looked like this:

Here's how it played out:

1. After initial moves, Pike triggered the first skeleton on the right, which attacked him but missed.
2. Jones joined Pike to give them Advantage in their attacks and they killed the skeleton.  The threat check resulted in Creeping Horror and Bats! events in front of the church, the latter wounding Wilson.
3. As Jones and Pike pressed forward, the rest of the platoon moved up to the fence line on the left and Wilson climbed over, discovering another skeleton.
4. Mainwaring kills the skeleton whilst Jones discovers the Crazed Nun near the searchlight who wounds him.
5. In classic George Mainwaring style, the Captain then falls into an open grave taking significant damage.  Godfrey heals Wilson, whilst Jones and Pike slug it out with the Nun, and the Mad Scientist makes his first appearance, lurking around the gravestones.
6. Around the back of the church, Mainwaring and Wilson flick the first two of the three switches revealing a further skeleton and an extra skeleton spawns next to Godfrey.
7. Mainwaring and Wilson kill the skeleton near them and the former shoots the Scientist with his Officer's Pistol.  Jones finishes off the Nun but is then surprised by another skeleton.
8. Godfrey and Jones kill the skeletons they are engaged with.
9. Pike interacts with the third switch, making this the final round.

The heroes earned the following victory points: +3VP for killing the Crazed Nun, +3VP for interacting with the three switches, none for radio as that wasn't activated, +1VP for the Leader (Mainwaring) surviving, and +1VP for not losing a single teammate.  A final score of 8 victory points is ranked B - "a tale fit for the telling".  And now I've told it.

I enjoyed playing this game and look forward to playing it with others when we can share the heroes out and take on some new villains.  The rules seemed robust and the game flowed well.

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.