Saturday 13 December 2014

More piratey goodness!



So after a bit of a painting break, here's a completed pirate!


Next up, my next WIP, a goblin - he should get finished pretty quickly I reckon, not too much fiddly detail on him!


Finally, after agonising over where to find a half decent ogre pirate model (a non-gw one at that!) I stumbled across Titan Forge! They have some really awesome miniatures and amongst them, a whole slew of pirate themed ogres. I settled on ordering a set of these crewmen. Not sure I'll use all of them yet, but I certainly think they have alot going for them!


Enjoy - Ian

Saturday 15 November 2014

Swab the decks!

And the finished cap'n! Ready to bellow orders at his crew o' scrurvies!

A resurgence of pirates - Arrrgh


I've been working on a few terrain pieces! A hangman's stock/platform and a couple of little market stalls!


Also, a new delivery of Black Scorpion pirates arrived! I got these fellows in part to my love of Assassin's Creed Black Flag! You can see one of them is clearly inspired by the lead of the game, looking forward to painting him up.

I'll be aiming for a scheme close to the one below!

And finally - I'm midway through painting up this goblin who I aim to use as a captain; I placed him on a bunch of barrels to add height and make him seem more important. Here he is after his first wash.

Enjoy! Ian


Saturday 18 October 2014

A whole new... Universe!

Inspired by our recent Engage play-tests and by discovering the awesome series 'Battlestar Galactica' (seriously, I'm hooked!) I decided to work on a new board for this excellent tutorial, I set off to my local orange and black hardware store!

our space battles!  Planning to loosely follow

-Black paint - a few tester pots
-Paint rollers
-2 spray cans (green and yellow)

And bits I already had:
-A toothbrush - I actually nicked this from our bathroom
-White paint - a pot of emulsion we had knocking around from our house painting.
-2 2x4 boards - I used the flip side of my sea boards, as both are flat, it seemed like a good idea

So a brief a overview of what I did:
First off - I painted the boards black - this needed a couple of coats: you can see in this picture, that rolling the paint on left lots of lines on the first coat. I haven't pictured this (doh!) but the next stage involved using my toothbrush to 'flick' white paint off of the brush onto the table. 

Being a responsible adult, I took the boards outside in a well ventilated area to get spraying! I started with the green can. Spraying 'clouds' from different heights created the illusion of space dust! During this process, the green can decided to betray me and began spluttering sticky rubbish...groan.
 After scraping off as much sticky rubbish as I could, it was damage limitation time. The yellow clouds served to cover up the affected areas as well as highlight the green and give more overall depth. 

Now back inside, I decided that I'd gone a touch overboard with the colours, so I took some areas back to black (or at least darker) by sponging. As a final touch, I shot some new stars across the gas clouds to get back to the intended 'spaceyness'.  Above is a shot of the finished board with my fleet!

Enjoy!
Ian

Monday 13 October 2014

Naming Your Engage Ships

In my opinion, naming my ships is half the fun of creating them - it adds some character and makes it more realistic when it comes to gaming. 

Given the wealth of scifi shows and games out there, it's very easy for you to emulate the great ships from your favourite 'verse. I, myself, am particularly fond of the Halo universe, so you'll usually find my ships taking on the names of the ships from there. 

  • All under heaven
  • Constantinople 
  • Pillar of Autumn
  • Say My Name

And what's great is that the fans of most of these shows will have done most of the work for you and collected it all together in the various wikis that exist for the games/shows [example]

The alternative route is to create your own ship names, in the last game of Engage I played, Ben had names his ships in a way that reflected the ship's purpose (though i didn't realise it until too late). Some examples were the Longbow (a long range ship) and the Shotgun (for close range action). 

The naming of ships gives them a life of their own, and makes those engagements more fun when the Cruiser 'Say My Name' wipes out the enemy ship it just sounds cooler than Ship A, or Ship Beta. 

Ship Categorisations


Another way to enhance the 'life' of your ships is to use the prefixes that match the classes of ships found in the game, we tend to use the basic US Navy 'traditiona' categorisations, with some tweaks here and there. 

So here's our list for you to use;

  • S - Scout
  • K - Corvette
  • FF - Frigate
  • DD - Destroyer
  • CL - Light Cruiser
  • CE - Escort Cruiser
  • CA - Heavy Cruiser
  • CB - Battle Cruiser

There's load of information for these sorts of classifications on the web, and you can alter and edit them depending on the huge variations that are out there. You can also give them a little flair - Got three Destroyers? make one the Destroyer Leader 'DL' - though it also might make him 'Target No1', but that's half the fun!

Saturday 27 September 2014

Some more sights of Alpha City!

Just a quick update to the previous post. I had a bit of fun this afternoon creating a billboard advertising 'Wham: super soda!'. In true Alpha City style, more punks have got their hands (or should that be spray cans on it!)
As you can see, it can be used free standing or...

placed on top of Lew's!



City Slickers!

In the run up to demoing our exciting new project 'Super Justice', we've been preparing a board on which to host this meta-human mangling madness. So without further ado, here are some WIP pictures of our little corner of 'Alpha City'.


Lew's 24hr store! A little home-made project using an mdf drawer from a well known Swedish wooden wonderland!


 'Freakin' kids!' - The Dark Paladin shakes his fist at  the local youths' artwork.

 A touch of green in the form of some city planters!

We'll be continuing to populate the board as we prepare for next weekend. If you are lucky enough to be attending Blast-tastic, keep your eyes out for Alpha City and play a game of Super Justice with us!

Friday 26 September 2014

Super Justice: Super Hero Miniature Combat



There's always a lot of work behind the scenes here at RWG.It might not always appear to be that way - this blog, and the twitter etc might not be quite as active as we'd like, but we're always busy working on new games and making refinements to our existing range. 

We tend to meet up once a week, and spend the evening playing, testing and developing new rules and new games. Some go in the bin, others on the back burner (some - read "mine" - indefinitely) a few get a lot of attention and a lot of work. 


Super Justice is one of those games. 



Super Justice is a Super Hero game (if the cover didn't make that obvious) where you control your own group of supers - good or bad - and fight against others!

The system is in a late alpha, approaching beta stage at the moment, which is why we're finally making some noise about it. The game uses 28mm miniatures (well that's what we're using) currently with a host of supers whose names hopefully don't infringe IP!




We wanted this game to allow people to mix and match their favourite super heros so the powers, abilities and weapons available mean you can have a not-batman, or a not-superman character. A 'tech-tree' style advancement system determines what sort of skills, equipment and powers they can aquire as they get stronger and in game, these advancements play out in a variety of different ways. 

Characters have movement, agility, shooting, combat, defence stats (to name some of them) which can all be advance, or modified as a result of level-up enhancement. 


Mechanics?


The game itself uses an alternating activation system, with rules included for 'tag-team' actions too, however players must balance the actions they want to carry out with how many actions a character can carry out. 




Going all out one round with a character might seem like a great idea (and sometimes it really is), enabling them to run, climb a building and shoot some laser eyes at the guy on the roof opposite, but that character will need to 'recharge' some of their action points before they can do anything meaningful next round meaning they might be a sitting duck!

We'll be bringing you more information soon, as we work our way to Blastastic where we'll be demoing the game on our stall/table (Saturday 4th October - link) and going on from there! 



Monday 7 July 2014

So Say We All - An evening of Battlestar Galactica

Okay, okay.. so we're a little behind the times - given that the TV series has been over for a while now and the board game came out in 2008, but we've recently (in addition to a spot of Necromunda - see our other blog posts) gotten the board game bug.

We've always had a variety of board games that we go back to from time to time - Talisman 2nd Ed, Judge Dredd, Chaos Marauders etc etc. but as you can see from that list, they're all quite old.



So a few weeks ago we played Small World which was great easy going game, even if Ian did spend half of it winding us up with his 'Flying Skeletons' - I'd highly recommend giving it a go if you get a chance. Last week a friend of ours, Simon, brought round Eclipse and we played for a good 4+ hours and had a great time.

SO feeling quite enthused about the board game genre in general (despite spending most of the first hour or two in eclipse stuck between four ancient ship tiles) I searched for another highly rated sci-fi board game and found that I kept coming back to Battlestar, so I placed my order and it arrived soon after!




There's always politics and intrigue whenever we all play games (board or miniature) as we attempt to wind each other up and and point each other in the wrong direction - so I was most drawn in by the fact that such politics are inherent in the BSG game, and we weren't disappointed!

We took a little longer to play the game than the suggested timeframe of 2-3 hours.. almost 4 and a half by the time we were done. but that's to be expected when there's five of us playing a game we've never played before.. right? 


Characters
Me: Admiral Adama
Si: Gaius Baltar
Ian: Starbuck
Lewis: Chief
Ben: Apollo

Who's the walking toaster?


After assigning our characters, we picked our 'are you a cylon' cards - we took some advice from the D6 Generation, we each took our card and left the room to read it - as there are special instructions for cylons, we didn't want the others to see them reading something and give the game away. 



Great Lords of Kobol, just the card i was after! I didn't really want to be the reason for the end of the human race, so i was quite pleased to see that I was, in fact, not a cylon. 

Hold your horses, I hear you say, i could still turn out to be a cylon! True, i could be - but for now i'm not and i'll keep earth marching towards Kobol.

Accusations started flying as soon as started proper, who was being too good? too helpful? who wasn't being helpful enough? who was too loud, too quiet? there's more than two negative cards so they can't all be from the destiny deck, one of you put them in... i'm looking at you Simon (Gaius)


Martial Law


After a few round a martial law card was drawn, as the highest ranking military character, I was able to choose to pull the presidency away from Simon (Gaius being the highest ranking political figure in play). Suspecting him of being a Cylon, I took the presidency away from him - though that in turn made me look suspicious... I used Quorum card to make him vice-president though, that'll mollify him. 

We managed quite well up to the first half of the game! with some careful planning, we didn't lose many resources and the starbuck/apollo combo was doing well at keeping the raiders at bay.

I did pull some rather unhelpful cards from the jump deck, the first time took us distance two (towards the 4+ we needed to get halfway to Kobol) then I could only draw ones, which was frustrating to say the least, there were accusations that the Military Coup was a cylon run thing and that we were going slow on purpose. 

Fortunately for the first half, it seemed that either no one was a cylon (quite possible) or they didn't know what they were doing. either way, we soon hit the halfway mark and the remainder of the 'You are (not) a cylon' cards came back...

See part two for more..















Monday 23 June 2014

Hive Hythe Campaign - First Contact.

So on monday night, we played the first games in our campaign. We each took two campaign turns and fortunately each had a game.


Campaign Round 1



On this first round, each player took the decision to expand their territories by capturing an adjacent tile. As such in the first campaign turn there wasn't any fighting to be done.

We decided that at the end of each player's campaign turn they can put their gangers to work in their territories. This means that players who didn't fight, still get to gain income.

Three out of the four of us decided to take the first round's income and stash it away. Ben, instead decided to splash out on another ganger after achieving some successful dice rolls. A little bit of a double edged idea - on one hand, he only had four gangers, so a fifth would enable him to  make the most of farming his territories, on the flip side it pushes him into the next income category.

A worthwhile price to pay he says, only time will tell if it will pay off!

Campaign Round 2


So Lewis is up, and having previously claimed a territory that butted right up against mine, he decided to try and put the screw on me and attack. I had hoped to consolidate my position a little further first but never mind - FIGHT!

Battle one


A traditional 'Gang Fight' we set up on either ends of the board. There's some open space in the middle of the board, and I decide to use that to my advantage, Lewis is running an all shotgun gang so will have to travel if he wants to take me out. 


I decide to sit pretty and use my ranged weapons to take him out as he gets close (yeah yeah, beardy, I know)

First shot of the game ends up being a corker! one of my gangers with an autogun shoots across the board at a regular warbanger with shotgun. 6 to hit, 6 to wound, 6 on the injury table - boom, he's out of action! unfortunately, the sixes stopped there and he failed his ammo role. But still, he did his job!

Chalk one up for Stephen C. Gaul.

The next couple of turns were unfortunate for the warbangers - the lack of central terrain made it difficult to move closer to me. whilst I managed to down two more fighters whilst pinning others.

At this point, both gang leaders are within pistol distance of each other and spend the whole game failing to hit or wound each others gang leader - neither wanted to leave the cover to make the run into combat.

Third turn, the warbangers get closer and unleash a salvo at one of my guys on the first level of a tower - manstopper round to the chest - successfully wounded my guy and downs him, being close to the ledge, I fail my Initiative and he goes plummeting off the edge, taking a second st4 hit as he smacks into the floor beneath him. A second down result *phew* he remains there until the end of the game.

The main core of the battle consists of the teams on the right firing upon each other. With some incredibly lucky (and highly uncharacteristic dice rolls) the Iron Fists manage to down two more and OOA another one of the Warbangers with no return effects.

On the left hand side, two opposing 'kill teams' get close, the Iron Fists burst out of cover and attempt a grenade attack, it was appalling and went careening 8" off target. The Iron Fist flamer failed to do any damage, or set anyone on fire either, but did manage to pin the Warbanger flamer. 

Lewis failed to pick the flamer up at the start of the turn and melt me back. His shots go wide too. eventually it comes down to close combat - both sides duke it out, but the warbangers fail their dice rolls and another two go out of action. 

Despite Lewis' determination to continue suffering such pain, his men overrule him, fail the bottle role and his team flee. 

After action - lewis had five guys go OOA at the end of the battle, and rolled four 'A-Ok' results and one horrific scars meaning the guy causes fear! not the result I was hoping for!
I failed the roll for my downed guy and had to roll on the injury table. he suffered a head injury (probably from that fall) and now has to roll for stupidity/frenzy!

I'm definitely pleased with how my team fared in their first game. Lewis didn't do to great, but he isn't heavily into his wargaming. However he learns quickly and learnt a lot from this game, the next won't be so easy.

Ben and Ian are up next



Ben up next, he takes another territory and continues his spending spree and buys another juve. He now has the largest gang with 11 men. Ian comes along next and isn't content to let ben farm lots from the gambling den - he attempts to 'raize' it, which would mean ben would have to work that territory for two campaign turns to receive income from it again. 

A ballsy tactic - lets see if it payed off! 

We see the Crimson Reavers face off against the Toxic Avengers in a Gang Fight scenario. Lewis and I set up this time, and went for a very centrally compact terrain set up. And it definitely provided a very different playing field to the last match.

The game was played along the short (3') depth of the board with both teams able to get into the action very quickly. Both players had 'Vents' territories and made good use of them. 


Battle Two


The Crimson Reavers took the left hand, the Toxic Avengers on the right. The two 'twoers' in the centre of the board formed the arrival zones for the Vent Teams ben took the middle and Ian the upper tower.

Ben very much used the terrain to his advantage in this game, and set up in a way that required Ian to come to him, the dense terrain was an advantage for ian here, but the spread of Bens models across the board made it easy for ben to get a shot in somewhere. 

On Ben's second turn the Toxic Avengers were able to draw a direct LoS to the Reaver gang leader, a lucky shot and some lucky dice rolling put him out of action - not a great start for one of Ian's heavy hitters. Was it a sign of things to come?

The Avengers put the pressure on with lots of pinning, though for the next couple of turns neither side was able to truly make the most of the shooting, until Ben's heavy stubber roared into life after find a good vantage point and downed a couple of the Crimson Reavers, and then all hell broke loose.

Players were having men downed left right and centre, and Ian even managed to put a couple of Bens men OOA. even still those OOAs only served to level the playing field given Ben's purchase of a ganger and juve earlier on. 

The large building (in the bottom-ish right of the picture) housed 4/5 of ben's men including his gang leader. They put the pressure on Ians forces on the bottom left of the board before moving to threaten the top half. With some atrocious dice rolls from both players, they soon ended up dropping below the bottle test threshold. 

In the end it came down to who would fail it first, if ian passed and ben failed he would win 'by default' and end up denying those creds to the Avengers - however with his gang leader OOA, he was rolling on a 7 instead of an 8. The dice hit the deck, tumbling away - and came up as 5! 

He pushed through the turn, pinning and hiding where he could until it came to ben's bottle test - with his leader still in place, Ben had the advantage on the roll - unfortunately for Ian, the Toxic Avengers were determined and held fast. The last round ended up putting another man of Ians OOA, after which Ian voluntarily left the battlefield.

Both players had multiple rolls on the serious injury table Ian rolled a couple of recoveries and an also a head wound. Ben however was not so fortunate and lost a ganger but otherwise fared well with recovery rolls. 

Ending the evening 


I concluded the evening by taking another territory and raking in some more creds. As a result of the battles we all leveled up some of our gangers - which included some stat changes so we're now looking again at how we've kitted out our gangs. With two of us on 7 territories and two of us on 6, and some improved gangers, the next session will prove interesting!

The territories map after two campaign turns.



Green - Ben - Toxic Avengers
Blue - Ian - Crimson Reavers
Red - Craig - Iron Fists
Yellow - Lewis - Warbangers

Monday 16 June 2014

Necromunda Campaign Blog - Hive Hythe


After many years of economic stagnation brought about by too many charity shops and estate agents, Hythe was built over entirely by what was dubbed New Hythe (original ehy?) unfortunately the great councils and the various warring factions within it still couldn't get things right, and over the years, successive ‘New Hythe’s’ have been built, each one towering on top of the last with silly new names such as ‘Hithe’.
Ground zero is now a wasteland under a vast and towering structure that dominates the waterside, mutant solicitors and gangs of estate agents long lost and forgotten of their original purpose roam this dark, dank world.
That is the world you find yourself in now. Hive Hythe.

Hex based map campaign.
Regular NCE (Necromunda Community Edition) rules are in force. As usual, players start with 5 territories; The winner is the first player to accrue 10 territories. Short and sweet.
Each player will have a ‘campaign’ turn, in which they can choose to capture, raid of raze a territory. The players will then conduct a scenario (randomly chosen as per usual) using the scenario generator in the rulebook..
Capture: The player’s gang now controls that territory (and any perks that come with it)
Raid: The player doesn’t capture the territory, but instead gains 2x the cred value of the territory
Raze: The player doesn’t capture the territory, but instead the controlling player must 'work' that territory twice before it starts providing income again
Players can attempt to Capture any tile adjacent to one they already own or they may attempt to Raid or Raze a tile anywhere else on the board. If a player wishes to take control of an uncontrolled hex, then they may either take it ‘without question’, or if it is adjacent to an enemy territory then on a D6 roll of a 5+ the enemy gang gets intel that the territory is about to be captured, in which case they can ellect to try and deny the capture.
If an enemy gang attempts to defend against the capture and that 'defending' gang wins, they don't control the territory, though they may claim the territories reward.
How do we know what the territories are…?
So the map looks like this, The dark grey are the players territories, and the lighter grey is the area up for grabs - with the black marking the edge of the campaign map.

Each player’s five territories will be decided as usual, using the D66 table found in the NCE rulebook, the players need to give these territories are then given a number from 1-5. 
Players will then be randomly assigned one of the four blocks of starting territories above. The number they earlier assigned to their territories earlier on will determine what sort of territory each hex is. 
The ‘unassigned’ hexes on the map have their own numbers assigned to them too, and before the players see the campaign map, and before they are assigned to their territories, we'll be deciding what each territory is. 



Hopefully the end result is a very random campaign map, that doesn't allow any one player to create an advantage over any other - the only way that can happen is by chance during the assignment of territories. 

Do you wanna be in my gang?

So, if you hadn't guessed it so far, there are four of us taking part. we're using the Necromunda Community Edition Rules (from Yaktribe - an excellent necromunda community website with an amazing gang and campaign tracker)

The rules are based of of the underhive rules, but they clarify and iron out some of the kinks from that ruleset which should hopefully lead to a more relaxing experience when playing!

The gangs are as follows;

Iron Fists - Orlock gang - A balanced gang that with a mix of close combat and ranged support gangers (a catachan orlock gang)




The Crimson Reavers - Cawdor Gang - Looking to cause some damage early on, it includes a multi melter and gangers with bludgeons for that St4 hit. (made using the chaos cultists)




The Toxic Avengers - Orlock Gang - All out fire power with some CC support, the gang includes two Heavy Stubbers

No pictures of these guys yet, so here's some home made terrain


The Warbangers - Goliath Gang - An all (bar the heavies) shotgun gang taking a mix of manstopper and hot shot rounds. they're also very CC orientated with lots of bludgeons and swords. oh and skulls.. each ganger had to have a skull added apparently..



In the next blog post, we'll have our first after action report!

Friday 4 April 2014

So, I'm back with more pirates. This time however, I'm going for fantasy pirates in 28mm. The models I have so far are all by Black Scorpion. Excellent minis with lots of character. I'm looking to use these in an upcoming Red Wyvern skirmish game which the guys and myself are currently play testing. Anyway, here we go...

An Elf!

Alexis - A limited edition model from Salute a while back

A burly orc

Another elf...this one is incredibly grumpy

Upcoming models include a dwarf and some goblins. Also in the pipeline...a board!
Enjoy! Ian

Thursday 13 March 2014

Black Sails Ahoy!

So, a while back, we attended Salute (UK) and one of our purchases happened to be some pieces of eight ships from Peter Pig. I finally got round to painting mine as well as some terrain and various monsters. We're currently putting the polish on a set of rules we're working on, but without further ado, here are some of the ships I've been working on! I have tried to go for a more 'legendary pirates' feel more than historical accuracy. There models have been great fun to paint, a good balance between detail and simplicity!
A brigantine

Sloop

Large Merchantman - The Black Caesar 

Flute

Converted Leviathan! 

And a few of them in action on my sea boards!


Enjoy! Hopefully Ben and Craig will be able to add some shots of their ships in due course!
-Ian

Monday 10 February 2014

We have a new website!

If you go to our website today www.redwyverngames.com, you'll see that we're sporting a brand new look/feel. We had some insightful (and justified) feedback on the old website and we also generally felt it was in need of a refresh. 

We're not a big company (it's just three of us) but that doesn't mean the website has to look quite so amateur. We hope that you'll agree it looks smarter and more professional and is (hopefully) easier to use!


Our new Homepage
The layout of the new pages
You may have also noticed that our blog looks a little different too. we've refreshed the look and feel here to bring it more inline with the website - keeping it consistent. we have done something similar with the forum too. 

Why now, you might ask! well, we're really proud of what we've achieved with Red Wyvern Games - we've had lots of really positive feedback on our games [check out this review of Seasons of War by Grand Scale Wargaming blog] and we're still really eager to keep making them and providing them to the wargames community. 

What we haven't been doing recently is be very accessible or responsive - which you can see from some feedback we had on Engage on the Wargame Vault page "And no one ever responded to my post on their forum, so you're on your own." - we don't want that and we never intended that to be the case! John K. please accept our apologies. 

As well as refreshing our website, this is where we make an effort to to be a part time company that acts like a full time professional company. responding to questions, emails and anything else and producing high quality games!

Thanks being so great so far! we appreciate all the time, effort and money you guys have directed our way.
Oh, and check out the new website! www.RedWyvernGames.com

Just to finish off. here's us at one of our Monday evening sessions. we're playtesting a lighthearted card game called 'RPG shop', and the sharp eyed amongst you might notice that it's being played on a sea board ;)