An April Summary

This past April was rather light on both painting and gaming; I've been rather distracted with a number of non-gaming things. Oddly enough, my historicals this month were confined entirely to sea...

Enfilade playtest

Post-Battle

Early in the month, Andy ran us poor landlubbers through a playtest of a scenario he's working on for Enfilade - I'll say no more than that, save that was a fun experiment with a refereed double-blind game, and that it involved the Pacific Theatre.

England expects every man to... muck it up and run into his fleetmates!

Later in the month, we broke out Alyssa's enormous Sails of Glory collection and tried that game out for the first time. It's an adaptation of the flightpath system used in Wings of Glory and the X-Wing Miniatures Game, tuned to work for naval warfare in the Napoleonic era.

Three British 3rd rates face off against French counterparts

 The game - even with all the optional rules - plays very quickly. So quickly, in fact, that with six newbie players each commanding a single ship, we were able to knock out three games in the evening.

Maneuvering: Harder than it looks

 There were perhaps more ship-to-ship collisions than might have been expected, but...

See above!

...it was remarkably good fun. So much so that I went out and bought several more ships for my own collection. Looking forward to playing this again.

Historical Games Day

Saga - Scots vs Vikings, Viking win

 As usual, we had the Historical Miniatures Wargames day on the third Saturday of the month, coinciding with the Sails of Glory game evening. I demoed Sails of Glory to Gabe and saw a Saga and a Lion Rampant game go down.

Lion Rampant - Hundred Years War, IIRC

Warmachine & Hordes

I drove down to Corvallis at the beginning of the month for the little Just-A-Games Con at the Elks lodge there. This year the tourney wasn't really well attended. Only six players, and one dropped after the second round, so... I took Zaal 1/Zaal 2 theme forces for ease of packing, and found out that neither one is a good answer to Butcher 3 after I had to play against him twice, losing terribly each time. My opponents were perfectly pleasant, and the organizer did his best, but... well, the highlight of the trip was the sandwich I had for lunch at Togo's. And it was a pleasant drive, so there's that.

Of course, this was all cast deep in shade by Privateer Press' announcement this month of the next edition of Warmachine and Hordes! Mark 3, as everyone except PP is calling it, will be pre-released at Lock & Load in June, and released at retail on June 29. This has had two effects in the local group: everyone's very excited about Mark 3, and no one has much motivation to play competitive Mark 2 games. So we're seeing a lot of very oddball games lately as people try out those weird things they've been thinking about for years, before the new edition rolls out.

Painting

Painting-wise, I've been focusing on a particular commission - some Saga Pagan Rus for CGR Painters. Pictures of that to follow when I get it done in a week or two. I must say, it's a pleasure to paint Gripping Beast figures.

As for May, well... once this commission's done, I'm going to try to knock out a few Warmachine models before the new edition, and then get to work finishing my 15mm WW2 skirmish stuff. But the highlight of the month promises to be Enfilade. Really, really planning on not buying (too many) unpainted figures this year...