Guardhouse for By Fire & Sword

Last building I painted up for Andreas as payment for two resin buildings, all of which will be used for By Fire & Sword. Between the two of us we now have enough buildings (and buildings of all sorts) to make a proper village if we want to.

You can't have too high a terrain density in the game since there is a lot of wheeling and moving large units, but in Skirmish games where you have fewer and much smaller units and in the occasional Division level game it could be fun to have a village to fight over. I'm going to take a picture of all our buildings set up properly on a table next time I'm down at the club.

I imagine this is a guardhouse, it has the same foundation as the stable, but the little lookout tower makes me think it could serve as some sort of garrison building or guardhouse. Just like the previous buildings this one has a removable roof so you can put miniatures inside. I think it makes more sense to keep the roof removable if you have the large open slots, otherwise I prefer to roof to be glued on and resolve the whole "unit in a building" by placing a marker by the house so you can keep track of who is inside.

Mansions of Madness first impression and thoughts

Anders at our club invited me and a couple of other guys to try out Mansions of Madness, it's a game that could best be described as a zoomed in version of Arkham Horror. I've been looking at this game since it was released a while ago but just had a weird gut feeling that something was off, or at least didn't directly appeal to me enough to buy it myself.

First of all I love Arkham Horror, however as I got more expansions for it the game became a lot better and more interesting - but also a damn chore to setup and clean up. As such perhaps Mansions of Madness should appeal to me since it is a (slightly) less component heavy game. But what made me hesitate was the limited amount of scripted scenarios, five to be exact.

Talking with Anders about this he said that there are indeed five scenarios (meaning 5 different floor plans) but that each scenario had 3 different stories which the game master could pick from, and that there were further variations within those 3 stories that could slightly alter them even further.

You could argue that once you have played 15 games you got your money's worth, but since boardgames (and especially Fantasy Flight Games titles) are so expensive I have this built in preference of being able to play a game without running into this dead end of already played through content.

You could argue that games like Descent 2 or Battles of Westeros have the exact same problem, but I would disagree, since Descent 2 at least offer character development making the amount of variants vastly increased, and Battles of Westeros is about tactics first and the "story" second. Mansions of Madness on the other hand is a very story driven and thematic game that is exciting to play when you don't know what's going to happen and it relies heavily on the "investigators" not knowing all the story elements, the tricks that the GM can pull and being able to foresee events.

By Fire & Sword: Foraging supplies 19/5/2013 AAR

Second battle played this weekend with Andreas, we decided to change things up again and rewrite the lists. I said I was going to pick the Polish Skirmish 1656-60 force, Andreas kept to the Swedish Skirmish force of the previous battle.

As I didn't know how much Andreas was going to field I was cautious and kept my force to a medium size. Andreas pulled out the exact same list. The difference in points was now Swedish 7 to Polish 10!

Andreas rolled on the scenarios again, this time picking the "Foraging supplies", which was worth "2 FSP" for the weaker player. As an additional effect Andreas rolled "Unexpected reinforcements" which meant that any unit of his that was killed, could return as reinforcements.

The lists:

Andreas ran the Swedish detachment, again on 7 FSP.
His force contained:

1 Colonel with 3 command points
6 bases of musketeers
4 bases of reiters
2 bases of veteran reiters with arquebus
1 Regimental gun
1 special model - the Peasant informer)

My Polish 1656-60 skirmish force on 10 FSP contained:

Colonel 3 command points
Rota master 1 command point
3 bases of Pancerni with spears
3 bases Elite cossack style cavalry
6 bases cossack style cavalry
6 bases of Polish dragoons

By Fire & Sword: Battle of patrols 19/5/2013 AAR

Andreas and I played two more skirmish games this weekend, the understanding of the concept and tactics for this level of the game is starting to evolve in our minds and we're having a ton of fun. This weekend we also followed the concept of hidden army lists (this is just awesome). The only thing we both knew were which of the skirmish lists we were both playing, but the level and what type of troops remained hidden until we met at the club and rolled for scenario.

Andreas ran the Swedish detachment, on a mere 7 FSP.

His army contained:

1 Colonel with 3 command points
6 bases of musketeers
4 bases of reiters
2 bases of veteran reiters with arquebus
1 Regimental gun
1 special model - the Peasant informer)

I ran the "Obuchowicz's Skirmish force" on 8 FSP.
This is a historical Lithuanian skirmish list that can be downloaded (though only currently in Polish) as a PDF from Wargamer site. The special thing about this list is that you can get a lot of dragoons but it only has cossack style cavalry and dragoons in the roster.

The historical description for this force told about how the Dragoons ran away from the approaching Muscovite troops, leaving their cossack style cavalry banners without fire support - and thus the Lithuanians were defeated. The low morale of the Dragoons is thus represented as the following two special rules:

1) The dragoons of this skirmish list may never form more than 2 squadrons.
2) One company or squadron, randomly chosen, gets the starting effect "Panic" and begins the battle disorganized. This effect is added after deployment of troops.

My army list included

1 Colonel (3 command points)
1 Rotamaster (1 command point)
5 bases of Elite cossack style cavalry
6 bases of cossack style cavalry
7 bases of Polish dragoons

Stable for By Fire & Sword

Another building painted up for Andreas, this one is stable, the roof is removable so you can put soldiers inside. Not a lot more to say, it's a nice looking model and it reminds me of the discussion the guys over at WWPD.net had in their last podcast about buying terrain over making your own. I think certain periods are probably easier to build terrain for, I don't know how difficult it would be to build houses fitting the 17th century period but I don't think it would be worth the trouble. There seem to be a good range of buildings for 15mm scale at least and I'm fairly sure you would have to put a lot of work into making them as detailed as the resin cast models I've been painting for By Fire & Sword and the whole 17th century period.

Painting these buildings isn't that hard as the houses are mainly shades of brown. The trick I suppose is to get the right tint on the wood. I wanted it to look darkened but vibrant if that makes any sense. So it's mostly a mix of Scorched Brown and Bestial Brown, in layers and washed with Devlan Mud (yep I have a whole supply of that old wash which I figured would do the trick for these houses).

This is also another building from Total Battle Miniatures if I'm correct, though only one of the buildings Andreas had me paint up had that "TBM" marking they were all cast in the same resin and the same style so I think it's safe to assume they all come from the same source.