25 Jul 2015

L'Art de la Guerre - 5 games, and some serious thoughts about the UK Ancients scene

Back in June I took part in the 2nd L'Art de la Guerre "proper" competition at the BHGS Challenge in Oxford, using a Feudal German army in a Feudal themed period event. I've ended up writing in this preamble something of an essay on ADLG and the UK competition scene, but the reports are still here if you want to skip it !

The German army was pretty simple, reducing my opportunities to mess things up by trying to execute any sort of over complicated plan, and the end result was fairly successful as well - as you can see in these 5 match reports, complete with rules hints and the usual captions and expert analysis from Hannibal.


The Essay starts here... 

This was my first serious session of ADLG, battle-testing the rules in a proper competition setting and I'm delighted to report that - probably unsurprisingly given their long pedigree in France - they emerged pretty much fully unscathed, with the QR sheet barely needed by the end of the weekend.

The other good news was that by the middle of the event I was starting to "play the game" (and enjoy it) rather than "playing the rules" - a quick leaning curve towards enjoying shoving ancients figures around once again.



The reason is probably because at the end of the day ADLG is mechanically extremely similar to DBx games, with pip dice and opposed combat rolls as the core mechanics, and so those familiar tactical problems about finding you have an over complex plan and too few pips to execute it, or that you have suffered a 6-1 combat result that has knocked a hole in you line and you need to shore it up quickly (or that the opposite has happened, and you need to work out how to exploit it!).

With the low base combat factors in ADLG it did initially feel that the role (or roll) of the dice was playing a bigger part in the outcome of the game that I was used to, but a bit of number crunching to reality-check this, and more importantly getting comfortable enough with the rules and mechanics so that I could start to concentrate on the proper tactical decisions and doing things to try and beat my opponent in the actual games rather than being 100% focused on the rules themselves was a hurdle that once I had crossed it, I was totally comfortable with. Playing at 300 points also helped a lot too as a couple of poorly timed 1-6 results make much less of a dent in a 34 unit army than a 22 unit one!



Ultimately ADLG is a well put together fun game, which has the huge advantages of being also fully battle-tested, competition-ready ruleset that is now being extremely widely played in France, Spain, and the US, making the possibility of proper international competitions once again something which I can look forward to attending.

It's also still a "new" set in the UK, so everyone playing is still on the bottom of the same learning curve and can test out new armies and tactics to try and find ways to use those long-ignored figures and units (looks longingly at large Avar army that got painted just as I lost the will to live with FoGAM..), and it also has a viable "short-form" game at 200 points as well as the FoGAM/DBx equivalent "long form" game at 300, so ADLG all in all should really be bang on trend for what people seem to be looking for in a game today.

Will it end up being so - I hope so, but that still needs some more takeup. My experience of the the UK Ancients scene has been to be part of it at an incredibly fortunate, or even spoilt maybe, period of time over the past 20 or so years, and to have benefited from being part of a community that embraced what was at the time a radical and wildly innovative, yet very simple (mechanically) modern ruleset in the shape of DBM, which came bursting onto the scene after several decades of rather tired, iterative updates 1st-through-7th sets (and derivatives thereof).

DBM however, because of it's success, became "played-out" for a lot (but not all) of the community, with most all jumping on the bandwagon of FoGAM - more I suspect on the basis that it allowed the community to stay together, socialising, drinking and pushing toy soldiers around together, but with a different set of intellectual challenges to underpin it after the challenges and puzzles inherent in DBM had all been all but overcome.

But, in the shift away from DBM, neither FoGAM (nor DBMM) ever seemed to quite capture the mass imagination of the community in the same way as the WRG to DBM transition did, and neither has proved to be the sweep-all-in-its-path behemoth that DBM was, nor have they developed the longevity, nor the enduring multi-national international appeal that DBM did in it's heyday either.  

Looking back, I'm not sure this is the "fault" of either ruleset - it may just be a historical accident that we all happened to be shoving pikemen and legionaries around when the first "modern" ruleset - that focused on command and control, not kit, that graded troops by their effect rather than their weapons, and which understood that simplicity of design was absolutely something worth sacrificing whole mountains of details in the pursuit of when it came to game design and philosophy.

My sense is that the UK scene is still, maybe subconsciously, waiting for another WRG-DBM transition Eureka! moment, when a radical new ruleset that tears up the past with a raft of game-changing innovations will once again be able to have a bloody good go at uniting the world wide community of Ancients gamers ... and until that time comes, every ruleset that doesn't fill those enormous boots will be judged, and rejected in favour of marking time with the familiarity of the status quo.

The underlying problem however, I suspect, is that we have already had the our Eureka! moment we will ever see - unlike the late 90's there are now just too many games in too many other periods where almost all possible innovations have already been released into he wild - and so that elusive new "innovative" system for Ancients that everyone is subconsciously waiting for has already become familiar.

Is ADLG that mythical system?

Emphatically not - it has huge nods to DBx, huge nods to FoG in its mechanics and design, and to be fair it makes no real claim to be innovative either. It has it's quirks, most notably that it is arguably a little more dice-dependent than FoGAM or DBx - but this is no accident, it's something that has been deliberately designed-in, and as long as you embrace it, it simply serves to add flavour, memorable moments and narrative colour to the ebb and flow of the game ... and most importantly of all, it helps prevent what is after all just a highly abstracted game played with toy soldiers being taken too seriously

Irrespective of what ADLG might lack in Eureka! innovations, it most certainly is an already-bomb-proof system that allows almost all types and flavours of armies to be played competitively. It uses slightly fewer figures than FoGAM or DBX, doesn't (really) need re-basing and most importantly it is already widely played in Europe, and is picking up steam in the US amongst the same crowd who used to be such keen participants in international DBM events.



If the UK Ancients crowd all could somehow get together, forget the trench-warfare of FoGAM vs DBMM, and take a collective decision that it would be better for all concerned to move en-mass to ADLG, in much the same was as seemed to happen with WRG-FoGAM, and then (almost) with DBM-FoGAM (and DBM-DBMM) then that international community that used to be such a cool thing to be a part of would suddenly be back, and the whole UK scene would be rolling dice, drinking beer and learning a brand new ruleset together once again.

The only two differences would be that this time, ADLG already has had almost all of the kinks beaten out of it by the French circuit so won't need near-term revisions, and that - for the first time - ADLG s a set that "hasn't been been invented here".

Only time will tell if these prove to be insurmountable obstacles....

OK, enough of the (unplanned) essay, and on with the reports! 

5 Jul 2015

Renaissance (ish) Chinese Musketeers for FoGR

This painting project has been hanging around since - I suspect - late 2012 when I think I bought some Lamcashire Games Arab and Chinese musket-armed figures at Warfare. Some of the Arabs were done in time to appear as Maratha infantry at Clevedon 2013 but the Chinese have languished in the painting pile .... until now!

You can click on these images to get a bigger picture:







They are from Lancashire Games Boxer Rebellion range (what with me never being one to go for the obvious morph) and have the twin advantages of being a/ cheap, and b/ definitely not obviously belonging to any actual Renaissance Chinese historical era, which is my excuse for using them as generic musketeers or arquebusiers for any sort of Vietnamese, Chinese, Indonesian or other army from that FoGR army list book.

In an even more shameless morphing plan, they were painted to match a front rank of Essex Han-era Chinese spearmen, who you can see in the last picture. The Lancashire figures are stylistically very different, and a lot taller... but at wargaming ranges the difference is not too ridiculous. Sort of.

And given that they will only surface sporadically, getting 10 bases of interesting-looking infantry for under £7 is a pretty decent deal in anyone's book.

The real upside would be if someone comes out with a set of rules covering the Boxer Rebellion using DBX basing conventions. When that happens I'll be halfway to starting another period too!

18 Jun 2015

Look! I built a Town!

Picking ridiculous projects and then almost finishing them is a classic wargamers curse, and the process of building a whole Malifaux faux-gothic-steampunk town almost from scratch instead of just coughing up for some pre-built buildings is a pretty good way of ticking that particular "curse" box, as I can now demonstrate with the following series of photos and construction hints and tips.





Learn how this came to pass here on my website

14 Jun 2015

Ironsides crew for Malifaux

Toni Ironsides is the penultimate Arcanist Master to be added to my collection, and the crew box arrived on Saturday and was painted by Sunday lunchtime - you gotta love games where you have a small figure count!

The competed crew can be seen here, with some rather neat "magical aura" effects as well



13 Jun 2015

Reviewing the new "Painting War" series of magazines

One of the nice things about producing a website such as this one is that occasionally nice people send you nice stuff - and this is exactly what happened when Quino Ruiz contacted me via the Madaxeman.com Facebook Page to see if I wanted to road-test a couple of editions of their new magazine (more of that later...) Painting War.


Read what I thought about the first three issues in my comprehensive review

7 Jun 2015

Totentanz Miniatures - 15mm Renaissance comparison shots

I've just finished painting up 2 units of TYW miniatures, from Spanish manufacturer Totentanz.


Aside from the now-obligatory use of flowers on the bases, I actually think that they have come out pretty well - more a reflection of the figures rather than my painting!

As this is a new manufacturer I have also posted a load of comparison photos so you can compare height and stature against around a dozen different manufacturers.


(Testudo by Khurasan vs Totentanz)

3 Jun 2015

Dead Man's Hand - Cowboy Name Generator

Yes, you heard it right - over a quarter of a million randomly generated Cowboy names are ready for you on this site, simply at the click of a button....


That also means you can generate over 11 million (!!) Wild West short stories (well, one sentence each ... so pretty dammed short)!


Just follow this link to the Cowboy Name Generator !


30 May 2015

The English Civil War - 3 FoGR Match Reports

The plain-as-bread Parliamentarian army take on three opponents in a 1-day competition in the heart of the Kings Country - Oxford.


See how Renaissance Hannibal and Oliver Cromwell square up in the post-match reviews, and scratch your head as to how many Youtube videos that do not feature members of the Sealed Knot can be shoehorned into the three reports of some of the most vanilla armies every to take the field.


And, potatoes on bases... Say no more!

4 May 2015

Rasputina and Kaeris

Two more sets of eBay purchases, one of which was (mostly) painted and the other of which I did myself.... see Kaeris and Raspy added to my 3 existing Arcanist Crews for Malifaux!

Lots of photos of the painted models, with details of how I painted them;








27 Apr 2015

Review of Salute! 2015

Yes, a comprehensive review of the stuff I saw at Salute! 2015, with loads of photos and some actual analysis and commentary on industry trends and stuff as well...

Feel free to share this review on your chosen web forum  and chew over my thoughts ...






19 Apr 2015

Spring Showdown - Malifaux match reports

4 more almost incomprehensible Malifaux battle reports, with a big pink flying baby with a bad case of piles, hot chicks in leather with big swords, re-animating snipers in a childs playroom and a cast of thousands of mechanical spiders all creating confusion in deepest Essex.



The only thing you will probably recognise and understand is the crushing incompetence, the bitter taste of defeat and the withering analysis from Steampunk Hannibal


5 Apr 2015

Some Saga Warbands - being sold off on eBay

I've recently listed 4 Saga Warbands on eBay - they are figures I was selling for a friend, so you probably won't recognise the figures from previous disastrous match reports!

The eBay listing included 2 Norman/Christian armies, one Viking-type Warband and an Arab Warband that can be most any of the Arab factions. As they have now departed my possession I thought it worth sharing the photos here.

All I have done is re-base them, and also photographed them with my new model-railway-inspired backdrop - which I think adds a surprising amount to the pictures.


























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