Today we started to experiment with WW2 rules to decide which ones will suit us best. We have Rapid Fire, Bolt Action, Battlegroup and for today's game Iron Cross. We may even try Flames of War at some point. At aprox 460 points a side this is a small game with a simple aim of capturing the cross roads in the small town mid table. Dice decided that Phil and I took the role of the British against Ian as the Germans, somewhere in Normandy.
The rules were a little confusing to begin with as there seems to be no rules covering indirect fire (unless we missed them), no Forward Observation officers. Bit by bit the game speeded up as we got used to the implied simplification and started to understand the abstracted bits.
Here is the table set up for turn 1.
First major 'kill' of the game, my Sherman destroys Ian PzIV
But it was Phil who proved to be on deadly form destroying two PzIV's, a Puma armoured car, a Pak38, a SDKFZ 251 half track and a Stug 111. The orange explosion markers denote some of Phil's kills. The nearest PzIV took Ian's force over their breakpoint giving the British victory.
Man of the Match was Phil's 25pdr which did much of the damage with some very impressive dice throwing.
(We used green markers to denote British activations, blue for the Germans).
Overall we enjoyed our game and are quite pleased with the rules. When we return to WW2 we will give Rapid Fire a go and see how we feel about them. The Iron Cross rules are intentionally quite simple in their approach to WW2 gaming; we felt that we may need a little more depth, but certainly no more complexity.
Finally, my 28mm dwarf building is coming along quite nicely...
Here the flannel/towelling has been added to the roof to hopefully create a thatched effect.
I also added a dragon head design from the bits box to the roof to help create a Norse Dwarf feel.
Brown undercoat applied all over.
Here the house has been painted in it's base colours, ready for a wash then dry-brushing. You can also see me starting to play with idea's for the base. I am not too sure about my thatching just yet? Doesn't seem rough enough?
On the Vikings TV series when Bjorn Iron-side dies he is buried in a tomb surrounded by a ring of stones. I have made a couple of stones from xps to see how it looks. The idea being to place stones of roughly this size all around the house, maybe even paint runes on some of them. I will also add a spare barrel, sack of flour and wheel etc... as extra detail.
Sounds like another fun game. Was it designed to focus more on the mechanised side rather than infantry?
ReplyDeleteNice dwarf progress. XPS is great for adding detail, it carves and textures really easily.
The Iron Cross game was kept small to be manageable but with a good variety of troop types. Plus, harking back to a 1970's me building airfix kits in my bedroom, I wanted tanks on the table.
ReplyDeleteThat house is coming along nicely. WW2 wargaming sounds like fun, I only played one demo game of Bolt Action once (it was quite fun although I learned the hard way not to step in front of a tank with an anti tank weapon and miss). To my shame I never realized there were more current games than Flames of War and Bolt Action. Is there a lot of difference between the games?
ReplyDeleteThe various sets of rules all work in differing ways to achieve the same end result. What we are looking for is a fast play set that allows us to get a good number of infantry and vehicles on the table. Bolt Action is a very enjoyable game but is perhaps aimed at smaller games?
ReplyDelete