Play the game as written

I have been a gamer for decades and have never found a gaming system that has completely satisfied me, but I have refrained (for a long while) from changing rules to suit my purposes. I used to do it all the time and over the years I learned why you shouldn't 'house rule'; read make shit up.

When you change something, you never know how that is going to affect the game down the road. It may have no effect, or at least no immediate effect, but for the most part, the rules are all interconnected.

Last night Martin and I played a 1000 point Flames of War battle and I slaughtered him. I won convincingly, mostly because we made up our own scenario on the fly, rather than following the approved ones from the rule book. The scenario we played, forced Martin to move forward while I waited in cover from which I could hammer him at my leisure.

It was still good fun though. My highlight was my command Stug IV being hit by three Sherman tanks and 2 PIATs and not even being scratched.

Total defeat

Martin and I played another small game of Flames of War to complete our rules familiarity process. It was a success in that we are now comfortable with the rules after three small games, but from my point of view (as a player) there was only failure. In exactly 20 years of wargaming, I have never come out of a game not having inflicted a single casualty on the enemy; until tonight.

To be fair to myself, the scenario made it tough for me, as I was the attacker and I really didn't have a mobile enough force. Had I been the defender, I probably would have done a lot better.

So here is the only game play shot I am going to post. It shows my Grenadiers moving toward the British line in front of the houses. I needed to get past the houses to take the fuel and/or ammunition dump that lay just to the North.



I failed miserably.

After the game, we set up the terrain again so that we could show off our newly painted miniatures. Here is a shot from each side:

Martin's commandos


My Grenadiers


Having suffered the worst defeat ever, I came away wanting to play again even more. I really enjoyed the game and playing against Martin means that losing is not a problem; there are players out there that I really don't enjoy losing to.

Flames of War: What did we learn?

After the hardcore match on Saturday, Martin and I played Flames of War. He tried out the Brits this time and I stayed with the Germans. Over all I think we learned two things.

One: House to house fighting is tough and brutal.
Two: Mortars are fantastic, except when they are in the open and can be seen by a heavy machine gun.

After seeing off the Insel Affen, we moved to the North side of the village to make sure they didn't come back.

Here is the machine gun crew that shot the enemy mortar team.

Daunted by those Flames of War

The guy from my FLGS (Mage Store) gave my number to another guy, by the name of Andreas, so that we could meet for a game of FoW and he could teach me to play properly. It was a good idea and I found that we were interpreting the rules quite well, with only a few things that we had omitted.

As an introductory game though, there were a few pros and cons:

Pros first
1. Andreas is a polite and courteous player.
2. He explained things well even though English is his second language.
3. His miniatures are superbly painted.
4. He let me make some tactical mistakes so that I could learn from them.

Now the Con
1. We played almost 1900 points. It looked very impressive with all the tanks and infantry lined up and waiting to go, but as a beginner, I was a little daunted by the thought of a 600 point game, let alone more than three times what I was expecting.

Anyway, i am playing again on Saturday (600 points) and will take this new knowledge with me to knock Martin over the head and finally win a game of FoW.

In other news I am coming along nicely with my own miniature painting, with 10 stands of infantry almost complete.

In other other news, I am also playing in Mike's sci fi game on Sunday. Yay!

Flames of War

In the old days I would have been seriously turned off a game where I rolled such bad dice and was then appropriately annihilated. Possibly I have matured over the last few years because while winning is fun, having fun is more important. Martin and I played our intro game to Flames of War tonight and his Soviet forces rolled right over the top of me. I'm sure we made plenty of mistakes and I had (possibly) the worst dice rolls ever, but none of that mattered, it was just a good fun game.

We are going to play again next week and he is now seriously considering which force to play and consequently buy. The front runners at the moment are the British and Soviets. I don't care which he buys. I am equally happy to play Festung Europa or Stalingrad.

Here is a pic of my PaK 38 guys that I have finished.

Flames of War

I am playing my first game of Flames of War tonight and I am a bit over excited about it. Martin (my opponent) has also never played before, but with the years of experience we have with all manner of other games, I'm sure it won't be too difficult.

I picked up a Grenadier Kompanie box set during the week and Martin has indicated he would like to try the Soviets; so Stalingrad it is! Painting the little (15mm) buggers is something I had not tried before and it is vastly different to the 28mm I have become accustomed. I imagined it would be much more difficult to paint the smaller soldiers, but the lower amount of detail means that I am turning them out quite quickly.